So, sometimes when someone asks me a question, I feel like I’m rotating through a number of possible solutions/solution types, like rotating through different options in a leather punch. https://www.google.com/search?tbm=isch&q=leather+punch

I first noticed this in a conversation with Garland Marshall, one of my favourite profs. at WashU: https://biochem.wustl.edu/faculty/faculty/garland-marshall. He’d asked me a question about how one would determine the structure of a binding site of a molecule too difficult to crystallize, too large to NMR, and impossible to get a structure with a bound ligand.

How do you come up with the structure of the binding site? I remember rotating through a number of different options, mostly focused on polling the ligand in various ways.

– Does this happen to other people?
– Is there a neuronal definition/description of this?
– What does this mean?
– Other types of analogies?

On the ‘neuronal pathway’ front, it could be something like activating different pathways in sequence, doing it manually, rather than letting your brain activate all of them at the same time, then aggressively pruning them (to save energy). So, you would actively control your thoughts, to try out each channel independently, and submit them to more rigorous logic, to make sure you hadn’t left anything out. Somewhat like taking the ‘mental shackles off’, asking an audience ‘what ideas would your most creative and silly friend have about what to do with a brick?’, rather than ‘what ideas would you have about what to do with a brick*?’

*This seems to have been adapted from the Torrance Tests of Creative Thinking https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torrance_Tests_of_Creative_Thinking