Mental Harbor
Incubation, as mentioned before, is an underrated and underestimated factor in cognitive processing. It is remarkable and paradoxical how important it is to rest once in a while and give our physical and mental systems a break, since, the many striking parallels between our bodies and the mechanical parts of a car notwithstanding, our bodies probably have a much lower functional threshold than machines. I have also stressed before the crucial distinctions between Active and Passive Knowledge, the latter of which takes place in the form of fact-finding activities (‘Active’ research) while the former consists of mental digestion, reflection and analysis (‘Passive’ reflection). Both are essential and indispensable to research and neither can exist without the other, since while data collection feeds into intellectual analysis, mental reflection also informs fact-finding missions. As an academic researcher, these procedures dominate my professional life, but there is one particular non-academic experience of mine that I would like to share in this blogpost. In 2000, I was a child at school where I was obsessively reading a famous Chinese novel 倚天屠龍記 written by my beloved JinYong (金庸) RIP. I fell in love with it and came up with ideas on its composition, thematic intricacies and historical background, some of which I have expressed in my blogposts. Years went by and I did not give much thought to it, and my life changed as I went to study at a boarding school abroad in England, after which I went to study at Oxford university and got on with my life. In 2007, I had completed two years as an undergraduate and I was chatting with a friend from Oxford where that novel as well as another literary masterpiece by JinYong, 天龍八部, came up in our dinner conversation, and, unbeknownst to me at the time, she was so impressed by my literary ideas that she decided to publish them, which came out in a local newspaper. I was very pleasantly surprised to see my name and ideas published and mentioned in the newspaper, which I believe was the first time I had made it into public media. In fact, I was very humbled by her flattering remarks, since I did not believe that there was anything fancy about my literary analysis. My ideas were mostly childhood reminiscence on a book which I used to love as a boy, but my childhood impressions and ideas stuck with me for all those years, and when I was able to reproduce them as a young adult, not to mention with a literature focus at Oxford where I studied Classics and Modern Languages, those ideas may have matured somewhat and taken a different form. There was nothing intentional in my literary analysis as I never deliberately or forcefully tried to come up with an in-depth analysis of those two novels, though it must said that my ideas initially formed in my childhood recreational reading did stick with me through all those formative years of my life and kept ticking at the back of my head. It seems that my impressions of those two novels developed into publishable material through years of unintentional incubation and natural mental processing, which is very paradoxical indeed, but also quite remarkable from my point of view, since this is an example where some of my best ideas were formed not by studious and laborious effort but by natural and unintentional background mental processing. Let’s not underappreciate the value of rest and the importance of taking regular breaks in our busy and frantic lives.
Originally published at http://keithtselinguist.wordpress.com on August 8, 2021.
