Close your eyes and think of a Lego brick, any brick. What colour is it? What size and shape is it? For me it is a red four by two, not a green one or a yellow one or a blue one, not a three by two, or a two by two or an eight by two. It isn’t an odd colour like orange or white and it isn’t an odd shape like a roof section or a base plate. It is a red four by two. Of all the bricks that I could have chosen this is the one that pops into my head when I hear the word Lego. What is it for you?
Of course you know about all of the other bricks. You’ve seen them on the television, you’ve seen them on the web and in the shops and you may even have seen them on a trip to Legoland. You know about the Star Wars products and the Harry Potter collection and you are probably familiar with the Duplo and Technics ranges. If you have had children you will have bought some and no doubt you will have played with them many times, building towers, houses, cars and all sorts of other interesting things. Like me, at some time you will have stood on some in your bare feet or knelt on a piece and will have let out an expletive or two .
Lego, Lego, Lego, all the bricks, a vast product suite and you think of one brick, a red four by two perhaps?
Pick up the dictionary and open it at any page. Run your finger down the words until you come across a noun. Shut your eyes and what do you see? Collins English Dictionary, page 543 and the word is exhibition. I shut my eyes and I see an image of the (former) Military Vehicle Museum in Exhibition Park just north of Newcastle with its russet domed roof and concrete neo-classical pillars. I see its fading grandeur but I see it from the Great North Road as I drive by heading south into the city. I don’t see another image. The word exhibition is this dilapidated building to me. What word did you pick and what did you see?
Every word we come across has an immediate association for us. We cannot help it as it is how our brain works by linking what we see and what we hear with an image or a thought. It is an instant process and is how we avoid danger and how we spot an opportunity. It is a positive force that has helped us to evolve and lead to our undoubted success but there is a downside too.
Every word, every thought, every sound and every image is pregnant with meaning to us, pre-set in our minds only to be unlocked once the key is turned. We can never start from nothing, we can never have an original thought and we can never consider a concept without some sort of starting bias.
Our blank sheet of paper is always marked, our blue sky thinking always has a small cloud and we always take a little bit of the box with us when we try to think outside of it. Our thoughts can never be truly independent from our experiences.
Thoughts from a Guerrilla Worker 