This one I actually have not been thinking about constantly since it came up, but it's a nice psychology theory drawn from a model in policy theory. I am not sure if my professor, with whom I had the source conversation for this, was thinking exactly on these lines, but he probably was. Also there is probably a multidisciplinary networks literature that looks at large scale networks and limits to functionality with increased complexity, whether it has been explicitly linked back to human psychology or not.
A model that seems to have pretty good explanatory power for cognition is the neural net. My old cognitive psychology textbook is a bit disparaging of this theory, but as at least an abstract model it seems pretty decent. The idea is that your brain stores each component of experience separately, so for my cat I'd have separate neurons or groups of neurons for fuzzy, orange, white feet, cat, pet ownership, purring, .... My brain links these together, plus all the visual and auditory patterns that are all reinforced together when I think of Roland, or see him. If I am considering another cat, for instance my friend's orange cat Fluffy, some of these same neuronal components link together with new ones that together create a mental conception of his cat.
This same pattern of linkages and networks exists in human groups, which can form policy networks. The same person can be involved in campaigning against uranium mining in Colorado, volunteer with the Red Cross blood bank, and work in a bank dealing with corporate financing options, for instance, just as the same neuron, "orange fur" could be linked to my concept networks for Roland, Fluffy, and my old guinea pigs Gus and Max.
The conversation today with my professor was about that experience of sitting down to write a paper on one topic, and having a whole bunch of other ideas pop up in your head to distract you from the one you are actually writing. We postulated that perhaps this is due to the fact that one's network of ideas gets overly complex and expansive after a while. As students gather more information in their heads, and make lots of connections between concepts, they reach a sort of maximal utility for outputting these connections easily in prose, sometime before their late 30's or 40's. After this, there are so many connections and so many concepts that it becomes harder to put together coherent, straightforward, linear prose expositions of your ideas. This, we suggested, is why in just about all intellectual fields people tend to do their best work in their first few decades, in their 20's and 30's. Given the nice parallel between neural nets and policy networks conceptually, I'm thinking that there may be some useful insights to be gleaned from the policy networks literature to get a different perspective on why people's concept networks might inhibit productivity in academia.
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