A recurring theme in this blog is about connecting the unconnected. But how do you know when unconnected things can be connected? As with lateral thinking, sometimes it helps to change your perspective. Here are a few mental devices that can help you do just that.
I want to introduce something I call the Rewind Machine, as in, “to rewind the hands of time.” In the real world, birds can’t fly backward, toothpaste can’t refill itself into the tube, and bullets can’t travel back into their chambers. In the real world, events unfold sequentially from A to B to C. But that doesn’t mean your mind has to be limited to the same sequential laws. Your mind can use the Rewind Machine to understand how things may have been in the past. You can use this machine to understand the recent past or even the distant past.
The ultimate product of the Rewind Machine is the Big Bang Theory, which proposes the cosmos began some 13.8 billion years ago from an extremely hot, dense singularity that contained literally everything. Why do scientists believe this? After all, no-one was there to provide expert witness. They believe this because they fed a bunch of scientific research into the Rewind Machine.
Observations in the 1920s showed that distant galaxies are moving away from one another, suggesting that space itself is stretching. Theoretical work based on Einstein’s equations supported this idea, pointing to an initial singular beginning. The discovery of cosmic microwave background radiation in the 1960s provided strong confirmation, as it matched predictions of leftover heat from the universe’s early stages. Further evidence, including the observed amounts of hydrogen and helium and patterns in cosmic radiation, continues to reinforce the Big Bang as the leading explanation for how the universe began and evolved. Scientists used the Rewind Machine, and so can you.
There’s a counterpart to the Rewind Machine, and that is the Fast-Forward Machine. You can use the Fast-Forward Machine to understand how things may become in the future. Sticking with our cosmic examples, the Fast-Forward Machine produced The Big Crunch Theory, which says the universe will eventually stop expanding, begin contracting, and eventually crunch back into an infinitely hot, dense singularity.
Back on planet earth, these machines are good for developing perspectives on how things got to the state they are in currently, and the direction they are heading. Remember David Ingvar’s term, memory of the future, which is about anticipating potential outcomes by bridging your past experiences with a new observation. The Fast-Forward Machine takes your past experiences, applies them to a new subject, and creates a vision of how that subject will change in the future.
Think about exponential growth or exponential decay. If you wanted to graph the growth of the human population over 100,000 years, from roughly 98,000 BC to 2,000 AD, the line would look more or less flat as you moved from left to right, and then you would see what looks like a sudden spike upward near the end. For the first 99,600 years, the human population had grown at a relatively slow pace, reaching an estimated 550 million people in 1,600. The line showing that growth would look more or less flat. Then over the subsequent 200 years, the population doubled to around one billion. By the time the next 200 years had elapsed, the human population had skyrocketed to a whopping 7 billion.
In what would be considered a blink of the planetary eye, humans leapt from insignificant to highly significant. The Rewind Machine can show you that.
You could use the Rewind Machine to imagine what the earth looked like from outer space over that period of time. It would show you a planet that was pitch black at night for a long long time. It would be a very boring movie, that movie showing how the world changed over the millennia, even if you sped up the replay. However, eventually, just a moment after your movie showed some faint flickers of light in the areas of New York, London, and Paris around the late 19th century, the time-lapse-movie earth would suddenly light up like the giant incandescent bulb it is today.
The Rewind Machine would demonstrate the shocking power of exponential change. Exponential change exists in the world all around. Think of epidemiology, bacterial colonies, technological advancements, compound interest, social networks or, in the case of exponential decay, radioactive decay and carbon dating.
Exponential change doesn’t come at you like a freight train; it sneaks up on you like a cat, then pounces. For ages, nothing much seems to happen. Then — bam! — everything happens. This is a challenging perspective to recognize when looking at your subject in its current state. But the Rewind Machine can help you see how it got to its current state, and the Fast-Forward Machine can show you how it may look in the future if it continues on its current track.
Think about when you get sick with a bacterial infection. At first, you feel fine, maybe a little off, but nothing serious. Then, all of a sudden you feel terrible, achy, sweating and miserable. That’s exponential growth. And then, when the antibiotics kick in, your health improves exponentially.
Here’s the point: your subject in its current state may look nothing like your subject as it will become in its future state. If you have ever seen a baby crocodile, you know it looks like an adorable, harmless little lizard. But if you domesticate it in your backyard, that cute little reptile may one day eat you for lunch. It’s the Fast-Forward Machine that lets you make that link. This machine and the Rewind Machine help you to link past state, present state, and future state, and are handy devices for changing your perspective.
Another pair of helpful devices are the Speed-Up Machine and Slow-Down Machine. Speeding up your subject helps you to witness a long evolution in a single sitting. Slowing it down lets you see minuscule changes that may be lost when viewing your subject in real time. Think of the Slow-Down Machine as a way to freeze-frame your subject in motion. Once you freeze it in motion, you can really study its attributes.
Bruce Lee used the Slow-Down Machine to analyze his combat techniques in detail. He would mentally slow each movement to study how his body generated power and how his opponent reacted. By examining every instant before, during, and after impact, Lee could see exactly how to produce the sharp “snap” in his punches, a burst of speed that peaks at the moment of contact. This careful breakdown of motion helped him refine each strike for maximum efficiency and effect.
Think of the Slow-Down Machine in the context of the Zapruder film, the 8mm movie footage that captured the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Slowing down the movie frame-by-frame shows the sequence of events in grizzly detail: the number of shots, the timing of the shots, the trajectory of the bullets, and other details that have been intensely studied and debated ever since.
In math, calculus provides a great example of the Slow-Down Machine. While it’s easy to calculate the average speed of something travelling over a distance, like a train or a baseball, it’s not so easy to calculate the specific speed of that object at one precise moment along its journey. Calculus employs the Slow-Down Machine to essentially do this using a clever mathematical concept called the limit. To find that specific speed, calculus starts with the average speed formula and then uses the limit to imagine the time interval shrinking closer and closer to an instantaneous moment. It never quite reaches a time interval of zero, but it does get infinitesimally close, which is good enough for all practical purposes. This slowing-to-an-instant process yields the derivative, which tells you the speed at any moment along the way. Calculus uses the Slow-Down Machine to reduce movement to something approaching still life.
These machines are especially helpful when the subject of your perspective is yourself. The Slow-Down Machine lets you answer the question, “What should I do right now at this very moment?” The Speed-Up Machine lets you visualize how your project will play out if you continue your current trajectory.
Another handy mental device is the Zoom-In Machine, which lets you see your subject with a microscopic view, as well as its counterpart, the Zoom-Out Machine, which shows your subject in its macroscopic context. Sometimes it’s useful to see the granular composition of your subject. You may need to understand it better by deconstructing it, taking it apart, seeing how the parts interact, and gazing at the minuscule characteristics of its structure. Claude Shannon applied this device to the subject of communication, breaking it down to bits and bytes.
The Zoom-In Machine is to special relationships as the Slow-Down Machine is to time: something approaching the smallest increment. Zooming in sometimes reveals unexpected realizations. For instance, atoms are mostly empty space. Zooming in also sometimes reveals unexpected patterns, as in the study of fractals.
Interesting, since fractals are not scale-dependent, you can discover their structure by either zooming in or zooming out. If you look at the microscopic finger of a snowflake and then zoom out, you see the same basic shape repeated in the whole crystal. Look at the structure of a leaf. Its tiny veins form a miniature version of the larger network of limbs and branches that shape the entire tree. The same principle appears in the airways of the lungs, in tributaries feeding into larger rivers, and in countless other natural forms.
Chuck Close and Georges Seurat used the Zoom-Out Machine to create delightful images from dots and dabs. In a way, Geoffrey West also used the Zoom-Out Machine by observing truisms on one field (biology) and then zooming out to see where else those truisms might apply (city planning, corporate planning, and other man-made structures).
Of course, these devices will not allow you to see things if you aren’t actively looking for them. They have to be used with the mindset of making discoveries. Ask yourself, “How can I change my perspective to see things in new and meaningful ways?” Be open and receptive to allow a new understanding of your subject to be seen. Changing perspectives can let you visualize how unconnected things may deliver new meaning when you link them together.
Each of these mental devices provides a structured way to think differently about information, events, and relationships. The Rewind and Fast-Forward Machines allow you to position your subject along the axis of time, revealing how present conditions are shaped by prior states and how future outcomes may logically follow from current trends. The Speed-Up and Slow-Down Machines alter the tempo of observation, letting you compress long processes into manageable insight or stretch fleeting moments into analyzable detail. The Zoom-In and Zoom-Out Machines adjust scale, uncovering how patterns persist or transform across different levels of magnitude.
Used together, these devices form a toolkit for structured curiosity. They impose discipline on imagination by defining clear ways to manipulate variables like time, scale, and proximity. Instead of relying on intuition alone, they let you conduct mental experiments. You can ask, for example, “What would this look like slowed down to a standstill?” or “What would happen if I viewed this process from ten thousand feet?” By shifting frames of reference systematically, you can find ways to uncover relationships that would otherwise remain hidden in plain sight.
The practical benefit of using such machines is not mystical or abstract. The practical benefit is to create a wider cognitive range. When you can view a problem backward and forward in time, zoom in and out of its structure, slow down its processes, and reveal its hidden features, you expand the number of plausible links you can investigate, test, and validate. These devices help you reason across dimensions and formulate different perspectives on a fixed subject. That expanded capacity, rotating a problem mentally until new alignments appear, is what enables meaningful innovation and deeper understanding of how unconnected elements can, in fact, be connected.
