Capturing lightning is hard

When the brain is in a creative state it resembles a thunderstorm:

• difficult to predict where or when lightning will strike
• a huge — but unpredictable — amount of energy potential in each ‘bolt’
• nigh impossible to capture any substantial portion of that potential
• a lightning strike is incredibly brief (10 microseconds, or 1/100,000th of a second)

For these reasons we should be ready to receive whatever arrives. Even if we’re deeply focused on… intercontinental frog migrations we should be open to having a salient and spontaneous thought about how language reflects culture and some cultures may therefore be better equipped to tackle certain problems. Or indeed anything else of interest.

While other ‘environmental’ issues can lower our altitude (the likelihood of lightning striking), inefficiencies in our Tools for thought can neuter our ability to capture any useful portion of its energy.

a single lightning strike, while fast and bright, contains very little energy by the time it gets down to earth.
— Martin A. Uman, co-director of the Lightning Research Laboratory at the University of Florida

One of the difficulties of capturing lightning is the variable and unpredictable amount of energy that arrives with each strike. When it comes to capturing our thoughts, if we set our focus squarely on trying to capture the big ideas when they strike, we are bound to miss the smaller ideas (lower energy) that in aggregate may deliver a larger proportion of the energy in a storm.

“the energy in a thunderstorm is comparable to that of an atomic bomb, but trying to harvest the energy of lightning from the ground is hopeless”

So rather than simply, and unreliably, trying to capture the odd flash of lightning that reaches the ground – less than 20% of lightning strikes reach the ground (citation needed) – we should try and get into the storm itself.

The (strained) metaphor:

• We want to capture early, high in the atmosphere, when the strike has the most energy still
• We want to be able to scale our system of capture to suit large and small strikes
• Our system needs to support storing the energy we have captured in order to turn it into useful work
• Our system needs to be highly efficient (fast) so that start up energy never stands in the way of capture