The Philippine Online Chronicles

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My editor defines an Aha! moment as a sudden awakening and realization.  Well, I had one early this morning, only it was a rude awakening. I had cramps on my right leg and can’t move it without the pain. And then I realized, Aha! -- this thing happens when one is getting old, or old already, which I am.

“Aha! moment” is actually a noun, “a sudden understanding, recognition or resolution (to further my editor’s definition) and its origin dated back sometime in 1939 (but don’t ask me how or who coined the word).

It’s also termed as “Aha! reaction,” as when getting home unexpectedly, Aha! --  one finds a stranger on the bed.

For years scientists have been cracking their skulls figuring out how “Aha! moments” come about. There were these “word problem” solving (wherein one word is needed to form a compound word with, as examples, “sauce,” “pine” and “crab” and the solving word is “apple” to form “apple sauce,” “pineapple” and “crab apple.”) and the zero-stick problem (which I can’t figure out myself) conducted by Bhavin Sheth of the University of Houston.

Of course, in all other experiments conducted by Joydeep Bhattacharya of Goldsmiths College, London; Simone Sandkuhler of the Medical College of Vienna, Mark Jung –Beeman of Northwestern University, the brain played a starring role. But all their talks of gamma and delta waves, insight and non-insight solutions, computational mechanism, temporal lobe functions, etc., are beyond me.

The mere mortal that I am can only grasp the “findings” that “ those who successfully solved the puzzles (or problems)… seemed to let their thoughts run free, rather than overthinking either the problem or their own thought processes.” Thinking too hard, they say, so the “first thing to do is to relax, mentally.”

Accident and chance as well as experiments that went awfully wrong, rather than gut-wrenching, sleepless nights and days of experiments, have produced some of the world’s greatest and whackiest inventions and discoveries, like when two rival business men, one selling ice cream and the other selling a wafer-thin waffle conspired during a slow-moving day to “invent” ice cream cones; when an annoyed Saratoga chef whose fries were not thin enough for the finicky Cornelius Vanderbilt, sliced the fries even thinner which pleased the railway magnate and his friends that soon, the thin fried potato chips became the Saratoga Chips; when German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Rontgen, working on cathode rays, accidentally found out the rays could penetrate solids (when unintentionally placing his hand in front of the rays, he saw the bones on his hands projected onto the wall.) Thus was “discovered” X-Rays, a “standard medical tool” today.

Viagra, that blue pill men with a li’l problem down there swear is heaven-sent, was also an “accidental” discovery. Scientists and researchers in a town in Wales in 1992, did some clinical trial runs on a drug they hoped would treat hypertension but failed; in fact the bp of those who participated in the tests even went up, but Eureka of all Eurekas, their you-know-what also went up, stiff and hard!

I must be living through a life of such “ordinariness” that the only Aha! moment I remember – well and am thankful of - was when on a particularly hot summer afternoon I suddenly noticed there were these creatures known as girls (and this girl with long ponytails and softly-sculpted face who kept looking at me) and they were more fun and exciting than swimming with the neighborhood kids at the creek near our house, playing slam-bang basketball on a tad of a court strewn with jagged pebbles and shards of broken glasses, or competing in street games improvised to while away the long summer months.

Can’t tell when this Aha! moment happened but certain people (read that politicians) whose knees can’t hack it anymore suddenly realized they could have their wives and mistresses, husbands and mama’s boys, sons and daughters, and relatives (knowing their constituents are easy marks) to take their places as kings and queens of the hill. This Aha! idea clicked, caught fire and shouts of Eureka! have been reverberating throughout the archipelago ever since.

Even a mere name heard and read all the time is all what one needs to be elected the Boss.

Things do not turn out as brandished about sometimes so that what is heard after the Aha! is not Eureka! but OMG and that does not read Oh My God! but Oh My Grrr!!

 

Photo: “Shine a light” by Paddy and Dushi, c/o Flickr. Some Rights Reserved