I find it surprisingly easy to whistle a new tune. It will sound like songs I’ve heard before, but never the same. And yet it is desperately indebted to music I’ve heard before.

Our memory is conveniently inaccurate. When we remember something, we don’t retrieve it from storage, but redraw it by tracing points scattered around our brain. (Here I am, trying to recollect descriptions faithfully from Antonio Damasio’s Descartes’ Error.)

Exposing yourself to new ideas and images is crucial for the development of your creative vocabulary. Quite easily the tokens you pocket on your detours offer themselves as embellishments or examples for your work back home. And sometimes you encounter something greater – a new way of thinking that pierces like an axis into a new dimension.