nEo.psy blossomed out of rEYE.vErt. I was looking at the vertical stacks of EYES OPEN and noticed that if the E's dropped to the bottom, the remaining letters could rearrange themselves to spell NEO and PSY. New mind. I liked it, and decided to flank the rEYE.vErt graphic with a left and a right brain hemisphere. At first it was sketchy greyscale, but then I iterated and made it gold, to represent the AUthenticity it takes to rewire our brains. I also liked how the gold popped on the garments. There's a little video that reveals the hidden message on our Instagram page.

All of this was inspired by an article in the New Yorker called "The Eureka Hunt," which I found so fascinating that over the years I've read and reread it four times.
It inspired me so much that I mashed it up with the song "Microphone Fiend" by Eric B. & Rakim to coin a name for a person who always has their mind's eye open and receptive to aha moments. A eurEka fiEnd.

Anyway, the article opens with a story that took place in Montana in August of 1949. Sixteen men were on a fire in Mann Gulch, most of them smokejumpers. The fire was climbing out of the valley, fed by waist-high grass, when the wind turned and came ripping toward them. They ran for the hill behind them. The fire moved faster than any of them could climb.

As the foreman, Wag Dodge, ran for his life, a strange idea popped into his mind. Something no firefighter had ever done. He stopped and yelled at his crew to drop their tools. Then he struck a match and lit the grass in front of him, burning a patch of ground down to bare dirt. He wet a rag over his mouth, lay face down in the ashes, and pulled his jacket over himself. The fire had no fuel where he lay, so it split and moved around him. He lived. His men ran right past him up the slope, because a man lying down in the path of a wildfire looked like a lunatic, not a plan. Of the sixteen, only three survived: Dodge and two who reached a crevice at the top of the ridge.

When Dodge was later asked how he came up with something so unorthodox and so brilliant, he said he had no idea. He thought he was going to die, and then out of nowhere, the idea was just there.

Fifty years later, once neuroscience could monitor and record brain activity, scientists watched moments like Wag's happen in real time. They found that the flash of insight we credit to our conscious mind isn't the mind pushing harder. It's the opposite. It tends to arrive when the conscious mind is at ease, often right when we wake up, or in a warm shower. The left brain runs short, task-specific pathways. The right brain runs long ones that connect regions handling different kinds of thought, which lets it search through strange combinations of abstract ideas. When it finds the answer and the left brain verifies it, the whole thing gets pulled up to consciousness, fully formed.

Dodge got his in the fire, not the shower. But it came from the same place. Years of feeding his mind, marinating without knowing it, and the answer surfacing the instant he needed it.

Because that's the thing. We can't force the process. We can only feed the mind and let those nuggets marinate. Which is the whole point of a wandering mind. Curiosity isn't a detour from the work. It is the work. Every strange thing we look at, every random fact we read, every question we ask with no use for the answer, every hour we spend making something for no reason. It all goes into thE vAUlt deep in our mind. Then at some point, seemingly out of nowhere, often as the fire is bearing down on us, a goldEn kEy unlocks the door, and we find something nobody ever taught us.

Keep the child's mind active. EmergE. EngagE. EvolvE. Let your thoughts wander. Feed your imagination.
Mix up the letters. Allow yourself to find a new mind, again and again.

Stay you[ng]. Stay curious.