#ThinkfullyHabit: Spot the strange
Spotting what seems a little strange can be important. We are far better at spotting patterns than we are at spotting the little things that don’t fit the patterns. We can struggle to recognise the importance of inconsistencies, outliers and anomalies.
Yet, it’s often the unexpected that we should tune in to. It’s when we should turn up our attention and remember to get curious. Any time our expectations are violated or we spot something that doesn’t quite fit should be a helpful signal for us to take notice and look again. It tells us that a pattern is being disrupted.
“Anomaly detection helps us to spot inconsistencies in our diagnosis of a problem, and therefore to escape from fixation…It helps us adapt to changing conditions, perhaps triggering our ‘Spidey sense’ that something doesn’t feel right.”
WHY?
Our expertise and experiences allow us to form expectations. In theory, the more experience we have, the better we should be at tuning into what seems a little strange. However, ironically, the very opposite may happen. We can get so caught up in expecting to see the patterns we always see, that inconsistencies can easily be explained away. We dismiss what may be a vital signal of change, early signs of problems arising or something new.
It was by spotting something a little strange that led to one of the greatest astronomical discoveries of the twentieth century. Jocelyn Bell Burnell, an astrophysicist, started monitoring quasars (extremely bright objects in the galaxy) through the squiggly lines they generated across paper read outs. She analysed the data to distinguish between squiggles caused by quasars and those caused by radio interference. After hours and hours looking at the data, on August 6, 1967, in a stretch of data taking up less than a quarter of an inch, she spotted a tiny bit of squiggle that didn’t fit the patterns produced by quasars. At first she noted it with a question mark. Even though it was only a tiny anomaly it stayed with her. She went on to spot the same tiny squiggle a few more times and over the course of a month or two, she realised she had discovered a new type of signal. She was the very first person to discover pulsars - the leftovers of supernova explosions. It is with pulsars that scientists can now test some of the most fundamental theories in physics, detect gravitational waves and navigate through the cosmic ocean.
To follow anomalies we need to stay curious and tune in to inconsistencies. Asking some specific questions can help us do this:
- What’s surprising?
- What didn’t I expect to see?
- What doesn’t fit?
Our brains love patterns and pattern spotting. However, it means we need to help it spot when things don’t fit the patterns. By asking these questions we can keep ourselves tuned into the discrepancies that may reveal that something important is shifting or needs reassessing. It helps us stay alert to when things don’t fit the patterns we expect to see. Questions can put us in the right mindset to be alert to things we may not expect. As Oscar Wilde once wrote “To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect.”
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