You may have identified some occasions where your thoughts underwent rapid change, like this:
A long time ago, some men were sitting around a fire at night. It was a fire that was near their home, and they always built the fire in the same place. They got around the fire every evening before going to bed. They discussed the usual things that men do when they sit together around a fire. They were expressing conventional thoughts about the meaning of life, fire, bodily functions, things that they had to do each day, their families and so on.
All completely conventional stuff.
One of the conventional ideas that they had was that an unattended fire was bad – it could burn out of control and destroy their homes.
Each night they doused the fire with water.
One night they found that they had drunk all the water. One of the men had an idea. This idea was what engineers call ‘sweet’, it solved two problems simultaneously. He peed on the fire. It doused the fire and took care of a bathroom break before retiring.
One simple idea caught on. Every night the men would pee on the fire to put it out before going to bed.
One night, they got all the makings together and as they lit the fire, it exploded.
They had discovered explosives.
Now their first thoughts were probably not “I can take this, confine it in a small space and ignite it to propel heavy chunks of metal that will make neat little holes (or big messy ones) in people I don’t like”, that came later. You can imagine the astonishment on their singed faces, and whatever they were thinking, I’ll bet dollars to doughnuts that they were not thinking in conventional terms about urine and fire any more.
They were thinking differently.
(I don’t know if it actually worked like this. This is a little scenario that I made up nearly 30 years ago. As a student, I found myself with some spare time on my hands in the chemistry lab of Ashford Grammar School in Kent. Out of idle curiosity, I started leafing through old textbooks. Lo and Behold, they had instructions for making all sorts of neat things – explosives and pyrophorics being one (White Phosphorous is nasty, but Nitrogen Tri-Iodide is nice - pretty purple smoke. (They were probably less enlightened times). One of the descriptions involved an elaborate process (that I won’t go into here, this is not a blog about explosives), but it basically boiled down to ‘Burn these things together and pee on the ashes’.)
Peter Yarrow 2005
