Collecting anomalies and oddities

Lateral Saturdays: Cabinets of curiosities, nature journals, and V.S. Ramachandran

Have you ever kept a nature journal?

There’s something to the aesthetic of an amateur natural philosopher that’s deeply appealing.

Picture it: you’ve clipped and pressed some blossoms and leaves.

You’ve got some sketches of froggies and lily pads.

You’re collecting bits and pieces, logging them for your own personal intellectual nourishment.

Back in the day, circa the Enlightenment era, the intelligentsia had what they called “Cabinets of Curiosities.”

These included exotic trinkets and remains of odd wild animals, among other things.

This would be the curio cabinet (its etymological descendent, so it seems) full of conversation starters.

There’s a modern implementation to this, though.

Whether it’s a Notion page or Google doc full of links, or a little notebook where you write down ideas that come to you, you’ve got what you need to begin to lay out a latticework of ideas.

Look for the oddities — those are where the innovations and outlying truths are.

Neuroscientist V.S. Ramachandran famously studies phantom limb syndrome.

It’s the oddities of science like these that have told him so much about the brain.

“If you have the intuition to lead you to the right (anomalies), it can lead you to a gold mine,” Ramachandran told KPBS.

This principles extends to other realms as well.

The exception clarifies the rules.

It’s the inconsistencies that give us a look at the broadness of the picture.

If you’re staring right at the particulars in the mosaic, you can’t see the art clearly.

When you find something that sparks a tingly feeling in the back of your mind, get that in your notebook.

You might have just found a beautiful path of discovery.

-Clayton