Pattern Matching for Ideas

We've been through a bunch of metacognition episodes, and then one on steamrolling. Part of all of this involves ideas, and thinking about your thinking and performance. So, part of that process has meant I've been thinking a lot about where ideas actually come from, and I think (ha! groan) we improvisers look in the wrong place for them.

In watching a lot of improv livestreams, I observed that the improvisers who come up with an interesting initiation are usually responding to something they noticed, that just made them go "huh" from on or around the stage somewhere and seem to do something with that particular thing.. In other words, the idea came from something external, and their brain filled in the rest (using, say, "flash memory" in improv). So the start, that trigger, was initially an external element from outside their own brain.

This actually makes sense when you look at how your brain works, or perhaps when you compare your early improv experiences or mode-of-operation with what you end up doing later on in the improv journey. Your brain is some kind of pattern-matching system that takes in what you're seeing and feeling right now, and then automatically generates associations from everything you've ever experienced (like, using that flash memory). You don't have to manufacture or force that process because it's already there. The only thing you need to do is give it input (reading stuff, consuming stuff in general) and then let go enough in the scene to notice what your brain offers you back on auto-pilot.

The problem is that your conscious attention can only handle one effortful thing at a time. Cognitive psychologists call this the serial processing bottleneck, and researchers have replicated it in studies going back decades. You get one channel, basically, and if you're using that channel to internally search for an idea ("what should I say, what character should I be" or whatever), you're occupying the same bandwidth you'd need to actually observe your environment, and you can't do both simultaneously.

So if you think something like "I can't think of anything," or your mind is "blank" in the moment the issue is usually that you're thinking too hard. You're in your head, running an internal search through all that data, when you could be pointing your attention outward to that external thing first. Which is where the ideas actually come from or start, things that can become the initiation, or whatever else you need in the scene.

The tricky part (especially if you tend toward analysis or pre-planning, which, oh I dunno, many of us tend to do) is trusting what arrives in that moment for the scene. Trusting in yourself... because those associations that come from your external observation you might think is too simple or obvious-seeming... or basic. So you reject it and go back to searching that noggin for something else that's more fantastic or complex (which might be too much).

And if you're someone who tends to blurt or leap before you've fully processed something, consider that the impulse might actually be pretty useful, and you might not want to suppress it (if you are suppressing that blurt). So, the skill for many of us is learning to trust this process and trust your improv brain.

Your brain has your entire life experience to pull from, every relationship you've had and every weird interaction at a grocery store, and all the books you've read and movies you've watched... all of it is in there somewhere. When you give it specific input (that what you see right now part, above), it gives you specific output you can use in the scene that incorporates those two. And that output is almost always more grounded and more playable than whatever you would have manufactured from scratch, because it's connected to something real. And we need a whole lotta more real these days, I think, even if it comes in the form of make-em-ups.

Take it easy,

Jen.

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