O Content, Where Art Thou?

So, there you are staring blankly at the profanity etched walls of the bathroom stall, hunkered over with your hands folded and elbows braced upon your legs. The inane scrawlings of lesser humans fails to hold your interest. Your body seems to be handling the task at hand with virtually no aid from your conscious mind. Before you know it, your mind is clear and you reach a zen-like state… Then, like a meteor fragment arcing down from the heavens, it strikes you – IDEA!

Instantly, your conscious mind returns as is if from a bountiful fishing trip. Like beautiful, shimmering fish, the details of your magnificent idea just keep pouring forth from your imagination and you chuckle quietly and commend yourself on your brilliance.

With a delighted smile, you hasten to finish the job that you’d originally set forth to do. You flush, thrust open the door, admire the face of genius in the mirror as you wash your hands, and finally pass your hands several times before the faulty sensor on the paper towel dispenser before it finally complies with your demands to issue paper.

You smile and nod at a coworker as they push desperately though the doorway into the bathroom. You deftly slip through the doorway before it closes – with the resounding force of an exploding star. You immediately realize what has just occurred and you stand in the silent hallway, blinking, with your mouth agape.

That’s right. The idea died, right there in the hallway. It was there one moment and gone the next.

“Where could it have possibly gone?!” You mutter in disbelief.

Try as you may, you simply cannot resurrect the idea; and with a sigh of frustration, you return to your duties.

Sad and shameful, eh? Yep. But most all of us have done it at some point. Whether driving home from work, walking home from school, or hurling yourself from an airplane, inspiration has struck us unexpectedly and was gone before we had time to put it into action.

It can be very disheartening, but there are things that we can do to help prevent such disastrous loss.

Carry a notepad and pencil.

If you carry a notepad and pencil with you, you can capture the idea with these primitive writing implements while it is still fresh in your mind. It’s almost like miraculously pressing save on an office document only moments before a catastrophic power failure sucks your hard work into binary oblivion.

Say the idea out loud, to yourself.

This can actually be a very effective means of committing information to memory. Your idea spawns in one part of your brain, but when you speak aloud you employ your thalamus which is forced to process the auditory data and store it elsewhere in your brain before your brain can dismiss the idea as mere white noise and banish it eternally to a dark, scary place from whence it may never return.

The more times that you say it the more important your brain will think the information is and it will be more likely to store it to long term memory.

I successfully employed this technique on the school bus when I was a child. To this day I remember my friend’s phone number, though unfortunately the data is now irrelevant.

Carry a dictaphone.

This is perhaps the best means by which to recall information about the idea and it can be a far more efficient means of recording the details of your idea – especially for those of us who are extremely out of practice with primitive writing implements. This gives us the benefit of fresh details at the press of a button as well as the added bonus of having said the idea out loud to ourselves, though it can be a bit awkward if done in a busy restroom.

Don’t allow your precious idea to die tragically. Be prepared to welcome it into this world like a brand new baby, fresh and glistening with cerebral goo, so that those who depend upon your literary progeny for mental stimulation or entertainment will not go unfed and disappointed.

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