Electric Company.

The first brain surgery took place about 3,500 years ago, about 1,500 years before Christ was allegedly born. Well before that, almost since the very beginnings of homo erectus--or when humans became bi-pedal if the word erectus is too jd vance couch-fucky for you, our species has been thinking about the brain.

Until about 500 years ago, no one really knew what the brain was for. Humans had figured out eyes were for seeing, noses for smelling, hearts and lungs for breathing, but the brain was terra incognito. 

Most of the storied Greek philosophers thought the heart was the seat of emotions and thoughts. That's why we say we 'learn something by heart' or our heart's broken, or something is
heartfelt. The greatest doctor of long ago was a Greek (from today's Turkey) called Galen. Though he practiced about 2,000 years ago, much of medical dogma, at least until the "enlightenment" which started around 500 years ago, had been codified by him.

Around 1500 or so, philosophers and medical men (it was all men) started thinking about the brain. Gradually they came to accept it was the seat of thought. But no one could figure out how thinking about something in your brain could convey that thought to say your hand in an instant. 500 years ago, the metaphors we used to try to understand were mechanical. Like gears and pulleys. They didn't convey speed. 

So people thought thoughts had to be conveyed by things they understood, like fluids. And no fluid can move as fast as the speed of thought. It wasn't long before they brought god in to answer the unanswerable. It was the special gift of god that allowed thoughts to travel and all that. That gift was evidence that we were created in god's image and god loved us. 

(There's a lot of god still explaining the bits of science we can't understand, but that's not today's point.)

Eventually, people in Europe discovered something called the torpedo fish. They found that the torpedo fish could deliver a strong electric shock. Eventually, they wondered if our thoughts were somehow transported by electricity and at the speed of light. So, reductio ad absurdum, human thought is all about electricity, energy, fast-twitch.

All this brings me to the obtuse point of today's post.

For the last forty years or so, I've been getting briefed, creating work, showing work and working with people from various different agency disciplines. Under today's benighted rule of human-resources, we're supposed to accept and welcome all sorts of neuro-divergence and all sorts of different work styles. That's demanded of us by the people who try to run our work lives though they produce no work themselves.

For all the years I've been working with others, i.e. for my entire life, there's one quality that marks all successful people: electricity. 

That is, they're not passive. They're thinking. They're listening. They're offering. They're learning, gleaning, reading, taking in information. They crackle with enthusiasm and caring.

They have electricity running through their veins.

Too often we present to people who are about as enthusiastic and additive as a 1950s department of motor-vehicles technocrat. They have an answer for everything and it's always no. No, it's too expensive. No, they're not right. No, they're a white male. No, they've been canceled. No, that uses vowels and the client hates vowels. No Chiat did something like that in 1981. No, no, no, no.

They not only don't have electricity themselves, they act like circuit breakers. They're cosmic wet blankets. They have a problem for every solution.

Brains run on electricity.

Electricity runs on energy.

Energy runs on work.

Too many people don't do the work to create the energy and the electricity that powers brains. The people who are successful in the world, regardless of age, regardless of discipline, regardless of race, creed, color, education or what they had for lunch, have electricity running through their brains.

I often say to people, "you're a noticing machine." Or "you see things other people don't." Or "you connect things."

I've kept, for instance, a 29-page document (and growing) of urls of sites and designers I like. I am not naturally a visual person, but I work in a visual field. This list helps spur me and helps give me visual ideas when I need them.

Also, keeping the list is a commitment. Just as a coin-collector will work to notice coins, a cool-collector, if she's committed to the task, will work to notice cool.

If you have a list of cool, when someone says X, you can say, "that reminds me of Y," and show them a link. You build and build and build from there.

It's exciting.
It's fruitful.
It's about the most-human interchange there is.

That's what I mean by electricity.