Nodal points: Points of high interest in an information field.
In William Gibson’s Idoru, Colin Laney has the innate ability to see nodal points by immersing himself in a flow of information. In this case, fiction follows reality.
The most obvious realm that this ability applies to is that of coders and hackers. They immerse themselves in the internal workings of some immense project and try to hold the entire functionality in their mind at once; it makes coding easier when you know exactly what each part of the program can do and where its code is located. When I am in ‘hack-mode,’ sometimes there comes a moment when I recognize that the code base is no longer a beautiful thing; and that by realigning my perspective I can remedy it. I feel like these flashes of correctable elegance come to me due to recognizing nodal points while immersed in the program’s entrails.
Another time this feeling has hit me, was during my studying for the Sophomore CORE. I had to ingest the entirety of my first two college physics textbooks covering such a wide span of topics as: kinematics, thermodynamics, waves & oscillations, light & optics, charges, gravitation, torque, models of the atom, relativity, quantum mechanics, circuits, and magnetic induction. By the end of my studying, everything I had ever learned in my first four college physics classes was occupying my short-term memory. I think the real purpose of the CORE is twofold. Firstly, it is to insure that you know enough about the physics that you were taught to at least tread water in the higher-level classes. Secondly, it’s meant to make you notice patterns that you might not have noticed before: visions of concepts linking themselves together into new hierarchies, forming rudimentary nodal points.
There are more examples of this nodal point concept, but I’ll skip the details and just list a few more:
- Overnight problem-solving.
- Macgyvering: split-second engineering skill.
- The ability to pick up a new language from immersion-teaching.
- A musician’s ability to hear a song and extract its ‘essence’ to use in reimplementation or variation.
I think this entry has been long enough. I might revisit this topic at a later time, after I’ve had time to process my ideas a bit more.
Hehe, I love that! “macgyvering”
Very interesting topic… You know that I don’t know that much about the specifics of many physics topics, but that I have a general feeling for and interest in most of them. However, I would like to hear about some of these patterns you observed in physics.
It appears that the terms cognitive dissonance and diligent indolence are coming into vogue as valid paradigms to be exploited, but all effective solutions are objective and parochial.
As a physics student, computer enthusiast, and rabid Gibson fan, it was only a matter of time before Google brought me here by some means or another. I really identified with your points, which I actually believe to be another part of this concept. As I immerse yourself in some topic or idea, it begins to hit me that this entity I’m exploring must be important because there are totaly strangers out there somewhere thinking the very same thing.