Authoring a PhD

randomly
dropping some elements
from the forefront of our attention. Hence if you think of a lot
of ideas 
without
jotting them down, you may appropriately be
anxious that you will forget them.
The best way to get a good idea is to get a lot of
ideas.
Linus Pauling
25
There is no such thing as a logical method of
having new ideas or a logical reconstruction 
of this process.
Karl Popper
26
One way we normally counter this fear of forgetting is to
keep recycling the same seven (or five or nine) things in the
forefront of our attention, the repetitions serving to reassure us
that the original notions are still there, still retrievable. The
more stressed we get (often without noticing it) the more we
may repeat this operation, squeezing out having any new ideas.
To get new ideas you need to break out of this cycle of anxiety
E N V I S I O N I N G T H E T H E S I S A S A W H O L E
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3 5

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and recycling. Jotting things down as notes in a regularly
maintained or filed notebook, or in a well-saved and cumula-
tive file on your PC, is a key step. It creates what Montaigne
called a ‘paper memory’, which normally helps enormously to
give you the psychological security to move on and think of
additional ideas, secure in the knowledge that you will not
forget what was value-added or worthwhile in today’s session.
27
Chance gives rise to thoughts, and chance removes
them; no art can keep or acquire them.
A thought has escaped me. I wanted to write it
down. I write instead, that it has escaped me.
Blaise Pascale
28
Creative research is a problem-generating activity.
Problem discovery cannot be a scheduled 
activity. It can happen at any time.
Lewis Minkin
29
Jotting everything down also means keeping a notebook of
problems or questions or possible ideas for development with
you constantly – for use in seminars, during conversations with
friends and colleagues, when you are out and about, and even
perhaps by your bed at night. It is best to have a system for your
jottings that allows you to keep your records safely, but also
allows you to extract sheets for refiling in appropriate folders or
files. Using a PDA (personal digital assistant) may also let you
transfer ideas or jottings directly onto a PC-based filing system.
You cannot afford to have these materials floating around on
whatever scraps of paper are to hand, for then they may still get
lost again, undermining the psychological security you need to
stop recycling what you already have and to instead think of
new ideas. You can also use this notebook (or a PDA linkable to
the bibliography file on your PC) for securely capturing refer-
ences to potentially relevant literature (see the second part of
Chapter 5).
If you assiduously jot things down you can also take full
advantage of the well-documented tendency for people satu-
rated in a field of study to get creative ideas or breakthrough
insights by chance associations, almost when they are not
3 6
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A U T H O R I N G A P H D

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looking for it. This pattern may reflect your subconscious
helping out by processing difficult issues in the background
over long periods. It may also reflect the fact that as your
knowledge of an area builds up, so your anxieties about forget-
ting or not understanding tend to ease, as you gain the confi-
dence and psychological security to think about things afresh
rather than relying on other people’s insights.
In the field of observation, fortune favours only
the prepared mind.