Six Second Summary
Stimulus Booklet:
Text One (Non-Fiction Extract) - The Eureka Hunt (Jonah Lehrer)
Why do good ideas come to us when they do?
The summer of 1949 was long and dry in Montana. On the afternoon of August 5th—the hottest day ever recorded in the state—a lightning fire was spotted in a remote area of pine forest. A parachute brigade of fifteen firefighters known as smoke jumpers was dispatched to put out the blaze; the man in charge was named Wag Dodge. When the jumpers left Missoula, in a C-47 cargo plane, they were told that the fire was small, just a few burning acres in the Mann Gulch.
Mann Gulch, nearly three miles long, is a site of geological transition, where the Great Plains meet the Rocky Mountains, pine trees give way to tall grasses, and steep cliffs loom over the steppes of the Midwest. The fire began in the trees on one side of the gulch. By the time the firefighters arrived, the blaze was already out of control. Dodge moved his men along the other side of the gulch and told them to head downhill, toward the water.
When the smoke jumpers started down the gulch, a breeze was blowing the flames away from them. Suddenly, the wind reversed, and Dodge watched the fire leap across the gulch and spark the grass on his side. He and his men were only a quarter mile uphill. An updraft began, and fierce winds howled through the canyon as the fire sucked in the surrounding air. Dodge was suddenly staring at a wall of flame fifty feet tall and three hundred feet deep. In a matter of seconds, the fire began to devour the grass, hurtling toward the smoke jumpers at seven hundred feet a minute.
Dodge screamed at his men to retreat. They dropped their gear and started running up the steep canyon walls, trying to reach the top of the ridge. After a few minutes, Dodge glanced over his shoulder and saw that the fire was less than fifty yards away. He realized that the blaze couldn’t be outrun; the gulch was too steep, the flames too fast.
So Dodge stopped running. The decision wasn’t as suicidal as it appeared: in a moment of desperate insight, he had devised an escape plan. He lit a match and ignited the ground in front of him, the flames quickly moving up the grassy slope. Then Dodge stepped into the shadow of his fire, so that he was surrounded by a buffer of burned land. He wet his handkerchief with water from his canteen, clutched the cloth to his mouth, and lay down on the smoldering embers. He closed his eyes and tried to inhale the thin layer of oxygen clinging to the ground. Then he waited for the fire to pass over him.
Thirteen smoke jumpers died in the Mann Gulch fire. White crosses below the ridge still mark the spots where the men died. But after several terrifying minutes Dodge emerged from the ashes, virtually unscathed.
There is something inherently mysterious about moments of insight. Wag Dodge, for instance, could never explain where his idea for the escape fire came from. (“It just seemed the logical thing to do” was all he could muster.) His improbable survival has become one of those legendary stories of insight, like Archimedes shouting “Eureka!” when he saw his bathwater rise, or Isaac Newton watching an apple fall from a tree and then formulating his theory of gravity. Such tales all share a few essential features, which psychologists and neuroscientists use to define “the insight experience.” The first of these is the impasse: before there can be a breakthrough, there has to be a mental block. Wag Dodge spent minutes running from the fire, although he was convinced that doing so was futile. Then, when the insight arrived, Dodge immediately realized that the problem was solved. This is another key feature of insight: the feeling of certainty that accompanies the idea. Dodge didn’t have time to think about whether his plan would work. He simply knew that it would.
Mark Jung-Beeman, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University, has spent the past fifteen years trying to figure out what happens inside the brain when people have an insight. “It’s one of those defining features of the human mind, and yet we have no idea how or why it happens,” he told me. Insights have often been attributed to divine intervention, but, by mapping the epiphany as a journey between cortical circuits, Jung-Beeman wants to purge the insight experience of its mystery. Jung-Beeman has a tense smile, a receding hairline, and the wiry build of a long-distance runner. He qualified for the 1988 and 1992 Olympic trials in the fifteen hundred metres, although he gave up competitive running after, as he puts it, “everything below the hips started to fall apart.” He now subsists on long walks and manic foot tapping. When Jung-Beeman gets excited about an idea—be it the cellular properties of pyramidal neurons or his new treadmill—his speech accelerates, and he starts to draw pictures on whatever paper is nearby. It’s as if his mind were sprinting ahead of his mouth.
Jung-Beeman became interested in the nature of insight in the early nineteen-nineties, while researching the right hemisphere of the brain. At the time, he was studying patients who had peculiar patterns of brain damage. “We had a number of patients with impaired right hemispheres,” he said. “And the doctors would always say, ‘Wow, you’re lucky—it got the right hemisphere. That’s the minor hemisphere. It doesn’t do much, and it doesn’t do anything with language.’ ” But it gradually became clear to Jung-Beeman that these patients did have serious cognitive problems after all, particularly with understanding linguistic nuance, and he began to suspect that the talents of the right hemisphere had been overlooked. If the left hemisphere excelled at denotation—storing the primary meaning of a word—Jung-Beeman suspected that the right hemisphere dealt with connotation, everything that gets left out of a dictionary definition, such as the emotional charge in a sentence or a metaphor. “Language is so complex that the brain has to process it in two different ways at the same time,” he said. “It needs to see the forest and the trees. The right hemisphere is what helps you see the forest.”
Text Two (Poem) - Brief Thoughts on a Test Tube (Miroslav Holub)
You take a bit of fire, a bit of water,a bit of rabbit or tree,or any little piece of man,you mix it, shake well, cork it up,put it in a warm place, in darkness, in light, in frost,leave it alone for a while - though things don’t leave you alone –and that’s the whole point.
And then you have a look - and it grows,a little sea, a little volcano,a little tree, a little heart, a little brain,so small you don’t hear its pleadsto be let out, and that’s the whole point, not to hear.
Then you goand record it, all the minuses orall the plusses, some with an exclamation mark,all the zeros, or all the numbers, some with an exclamation-mark,and the point is that the test-tubeis an instrument for changing questions - into exclamation marks,
And the point isthat for the moment you forgetyou yourselves areIn the test-tube.
Text Three (Prose Poem) - Before the Storm (John Foulcher)
This afternoon there is a soft knocking at the door, it is the sound
that leaves make when they brush against glass. A man is staring
at me through the flyscreen. He has the manner of a flight
attendant, or a nurse. The sunlight is mussing up his hair, which
is grey and thinning but was once a deep black, one imagines.
He is sewn over his bones. He knows my name and says it like
a prayer that it repeated every morning, upon waking. I reach
my hand into the black, damp past and feel about in it, among
sightless things that glide on the ocean floor. Dad? I ask, but
this is not a question. It has been fifty years since I called a man
my father. On the windy surface of memory, my mother is
tangled in her bed sheets, and the long cry of loss. He reaches
his arms towards me, like a man who is fumbling in the dark.
Oh my boy, he says, my boy. We are standing at a threshold,
where there are lives to be known, and time lost. The afternoon
has tired of itself, collects streetlights. Dusk is shuffling through
the undergrowth of houses. A storm is coming over.
Text Four (Script Extract) - Good Will Hunting (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck)
Will: So what’s this, a taster’s choice moment between guys? This is really nice. You got a thing for swans? Is this like a fetish, is something like we need to devote some time to?
Sean: Thought about what you said to me the other day. About my painting. Stayed up half the night thinking about it. Something occurred to me. I fell into a deep, peaceful sleep, and I haven’t thought about you since. You know what occurred to me?
Will: No.
Sean: You’re just a kid. You don’t have the faintest idea what you’re talking about.
Will: Why, thank you.
Sean: It’s alright. You’ve never been out of Boston.
Will: Nope.
Sean: If I asked you about art, you’d probably give me the skinny on about every art book ever written. Michelangelo. You know a lot about him. Life’s work. Political aspirations. Him and the Pope. Sexual orientation. The whole works, right?
But I bet you can’t tell me what it smells like in the Sistine Chapel.
You’ve never actually stood there and looked up at that beautiful ceiling.
Seen that.
If I ask you about women, you’d probably give me a syllabus of your personal favorites.
You may have even been laid a few times.
But you can’t tell me what it feels like to wake up next to a woman and feel truly happy.
You’re a tough kid.
If I ask you about war, you’d probably throw Shakespeare at me, right?
“Once more into the breach, dear friends.”
But you’ve never been near one. You’ve never held your best friend’s head in your lap and watch him gasp his last breath, looking to you for help.
If I ask you about love, you’d probably quote me a sonnet.
But you’ve never looked at a woman and been totally vulnerable.
Known someone who can level you with her eyes.
Feeling like God put an angel on earth just for you. Who could rescue you from the depths of Hell. And you wouldn’t know what it’s like to be her angel.
To have that love for her be there forever. Through anything. Through cancer.
And you wouldn’t know about sleeping, sitting up in a hospital room for two months, holding her hand because the doctors could see in your eyes that the terms visiting hours don’t apply to you.
You don’t know about real loss. Because that only occurs when you love something more than you love yourself.
I doubt you’ve ever dared to love anybody that much.
I look at you, I don’t see an intelligent, confident man.
I see a cocky, scared-shitless kid.
But you’re a genius, Will. No one denies that. No one could possibly understand the depths of you. But you presume to know everything about me because you saw a painting of mine, you ripped my f***ing life apart.
You’re an orphan, right?
Do you think I’d know the first thing about how hard your life has been, how you feel, who you are because I read Oliver Twist? Does that encapsulate you?
Personally, I don’t give a shit about all that, because you know what? I can’t learn anything from you that I can’t read in some f***ing book. Unless you want to talk about you. Who you are. And I’m fascinated. I’m in. But you don’t want to do that, do you, sport?
You’re terrified of what you might say.
Your move, chief.
Questions:
Text One - Non-fiction (4 marks)
How does the extract explain the anomalies of the human experience?
Text Two - Poem (4 marks)
How does the poem use metaphor to shape meaning?
Text Three - Prose Poem (5 marks)
How does the text represent a difficult human experience?
Texts One, Two, Three and Four (7 marks)
How do TEXT FOUR and ONE OTHER TEXT invite the reader to see the world differently?
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