Thinking in Webs: An Author’s Model for Understanding Why People Do What We Do
People are like spiders; we think in webs.
Lately, I’ve been thinking about webs a lot. The spidery kind, rings upon rings of silver netting expanding in circumferences from the center. Turns out, webs have a lot in common with how people grow.
People think, learn, change, sense, and act in accordance with their personal networks of webbing.
We’re like spiders in that we start from the center and build outward. But we are not like spiders because we are perpetually locked in the center of our web — when we move, our entire web moves with us.
I’ll spend the rest of this article addressing how I imagine the mind works in the context of webs, fishing hooks, and Tooth Fairies. Buckle in. This is about to get weird.
Mental Web: How it works
Imagine you are at the center of a grand, sparkling, silvery web. The web stretches along a flat plane. At the center of the web is your awareness. When you close your eyes and open them, it is from this center point that your awareness branches, shooting from thread to thread, making connections. That which is nearest the center of your web is closest to you mentally, easy to grasp.
The center
The center webbing is some of the densest. It’s really a lot. One reason for that is it’s easy for you to make connections between people, places, and things closest to you mentally. You probably think about them a lot — more than you think about other people, places, and things. Every time you make a new connection, another thread appears, thickening the web.
Threads near the center of your net probably touch upon fundamental things like family, loved ones, home, pets, keepsakes, identities, and all that which feel inseparable from the person you are today. Some surprising things might be tied up in there, including your cell phone (never leave without it), your first love (the one who got away), or a childhood bully. For better or for worse, they link with many other threads, building your web and influencing your perspective of how things work and why things are.
Further out
But what about further out? Your web is much more expansive than that knot around the center. It literally stretches as far as you can imagine (and not an inch further). The further from your center, the thinner the web grows, and the greater the gaps between webbing. What does this mean?
Thinner threads are a sign of weak or fading connections between subjects. You travel down them infrequently, and it’s possible that some connections are never re-discovered. The thinner the thread, the less likely you are to rediscover it by chance.
Thicker threads are connections you probably make regularly. These typically branch off into other threads as you make more connections by the mere act of revisiting old threads.
Gaps between
Gaps between threads are placeholders for all that you don’t know. There will always be gaps in your understanding of how the world works and why things are. In some locations, these gaps are larger than others. The further from your center, the larger these gaps tend to be. Indeed, the web is not a perfectly-even spiraling of circles. In some parts, it is thick, and in others, it is ragged, held together by the thinnest of connective tissues.
Can these gaps ever be completely filled? Who, if anyone, is capable of answering such a question? Even in topics people “make up,” such as finance or soccer, there is no One Person in the history of the universe whom everyone has pointed to and said, “They know all there is to know about subject X; and if they claim otherwise, they are a liar.” (Except, maybe, for supposedly-omniscient figures like Jesus Christ, who knew everything there was to know about anything. Rather than a web, he lived in a solid marble with no clearly defined border — just a solid, infinitely large sphere of implacable this is how things work and this is why things are.)
But gaps must be fillable, you insist. After all, you can tell at a glance the spiderweb is fillable. Just take a silver crayon and get to filling. But you are mistaken — you have trusted me, the unreliable narrator, and now I have led you astray. The mental web is not 2D, as initially supposed. It is as multidimensional as you or I, and potentially more so.
Knowledge is finite, truth is not
Say there is a dot, the beginning of a person’s web. From that dot, in all directions, threads shoot out until it appears you’re looking at a stem-less dandelion, hair poofed out every which way.
This is a person’s web once it has grown a bit. Now zoom in. Between those dandelion hairs that poke outward, more threads criss-cross horizontally and diagonally. It’s very complicated and mixed up and dense, but all the gaps between dandelion hairs look pretty similar-sized.
Now zoom in even further, so the hairs are as big as tree trunks. Immediately, you can tell that some gaps are bigger than others. Between some trunks, you’d have to suck in your belly to squeeze through. Between others, a desert stretches, space wide and open.
Now zoom in even further on a single thread. Look at it — really look at it.
See that, there? It’s a gap. A crack, an opening in a thread. A flaw. That flaw, you understand, indicates a gap in this person’s understanding of a thing. The more you zoom in, the greater this flaw seems, until the formerly single trunk splits into two trunks, and these trunks split into even more trunks, and so on and so forth. The more you zoom, the more gaps you find. As you zoom in with seemingly no end, you wonder if there really is such a thing as a 100% cohesive, unified understanding of anything.
Maybe there is, maybe there isn’t. I don’t know, and I’d love to have a word with anyone who claims they do understand a thing perfectly. Though knowledge may be finite — there is only so much any one person can know — the truth of things seems limitless. There’s always deeper to dig.
You might ask, then, what is the point of the so-called web? Why bother understanding anything at all, if understanding is always flawed?
Why it matters
The web is a crude albeit useful model of grasping how people think, learn, change, sense, and act. (More on usefulness in another post.)
You can shatter or simplify understanding by zooming in or out on this model. As in all things, cohesion/unity is a matter of scope. The further away you are from a thing, the more unified it appears.
Step close, and that illusion shatters. This truth is evident in just about everything, from apparent skin quality to mathematical models to scientific results to molecular structures to human identities. They look nice and neat and perfect from a certain distance, but the real, lived experience of those nearest them has people saying things like it’s not all it’s cracked up to be or if only you knew or it’s complicated.
This is illustrated nicely by the Dunning-Kruger Effect.
Consider the “Slope of Enlightenment,” which only appears after a person has braved the “Valley of Despair” and gotten close enough to their subject of study to understand they know hardly anything about it at all. They have “zoomed in” on their target, and in doing so, begun to understand how messy, broken, and limited is the subject of their desired expertise. I’ve seen this in everything from adulthood to finance: up close, these topics are much less simple/cohesive than they appear.
How unsatisfying!
But we are humans, and we must form models of things, no matter how imperfect. We find patterns, and if they don’t exist, we make them up. In this way, our webs expand, we feel we understand more, and we are able to act upon the world at large with degrees of confidence. In practice, models make us better at predicting the consequences of our actions and the actions of others. This is the practical side of existence, the living day-to-day. We make decisions. We learn. We model. Repeat. We grow in a million small, unremarked ways.
How inspiration works
But what about the big ways? What about those magical things people call inspiration, those erureka! moments? The outliers.
I think inspiration has to do with how we humans are capable of making connections between vastly disparate things.
Return to the web. A new one. It is thick in some places and thin in others, and that’s all you really need to know to understand the following. Imagine two clumps on the opposite side of the web. These clumps indicate two topics that Bill, the web’s owner, feels he understands quite well.
Fishing Clump: Bill enjoys fishing, and so he has formed a dense understanding of it. Bill recalls fishing facts easily, and he has even developed a theory that blue-tailed trout are the world’s most perfect type of animal. Something to do with the scales, he thinks, but Bill struggles to understand why he thinks this way, and it doesn’t really matter for the purpose of this section. Just know that he does and that such thoughts are the result of Bill forming a great many connections between the Fishing Clump and other topics.
Hat-Selling Clump: On the other side of Bill’s web is another, wholly disconnected clump. It has to do with business, specifically the business of selling hats to tourists. Turns out, Bill works as a cashier for a small business that sells knick-knacks to passing tourists who like to fish in the area. Bill knows quite a bit about which items sell when, and how to get customers to buy them. For whatever reason, he is particularly proud of his ability to sell hats.
What matters is, up until now, no threads have stretched from the gigantic Fishing Clump to the equally huge Hat-Selling Clump. For years, the two clumps have grown thicker, denser, and larger. Until one warm, summer evening, while Bill is selling a broad-rimmed straw hat to a middle-aged woman in a tutu, the woman’s son makes an offhand remark. It’s something along the lines of Too bad there aren’t any fishing hooks for sale, I could really use a new one. At that moment, a shining thread snaps into place between the Fishing Clump and the Hat-Selling Clump. To Bill, this manifests as a thought: I could sell these people fishing hooks.
This is, for the man, a eureka! moment. Bill numbly sells the remainder of the store’s inventory to passing tourists, who pay no attention to him. To them, it’s a normal day. But to Bill, something magical has happened. Two huge, totally disconnected parts of his life have neatly and unexpectedly collided. His skin crawls. It’s as if Bill has been watching a rom-com, only for Ted Bundy to barge onto the scene and knife the main character. It is jarring and intruiging.
Unsurprisingly, Bill can’t stop thinking about it. As the weeks pass, he revisits this thought again and again. And in doing so, Bill sprouts entirely new threads from that initial, silver strand. They manifest as thoughts like I could sell fish hooks here or How many people buy fish hooks anyway? or even (and this is a big one) I could start my own fish-hook-selling business. The threads also manifest as feelings: anticipation (something is about to change), excitement (I will change), or fear (change is scary).
Maybe Bill will start his own hook-selling business. Maybe not. Regardless, Bill’s world has rapidly and unexpectedly gained a measure of depth and breadth. His web has thickened, and new, dense clumps form rapidly. Bill is growing, and he is growing fast.
This is what happens when a person makes connections between two things of which they possess deep and broad understanding — they rapidly form connections and grow their understanding of how things work and why things are. They are able to make better-informed decisions and come up with novel ideas that others wouldn’t even begin to consider. They are inspired in ways unique to them.
Practically speaking, this is valuable. People will pay top dollar for one-of-a-kind things, or even somewhat novel things. These can be stories, ideas, businesses, or relationships. This is the magic of forming connections between seemingly unrelated things you understand relatively well.
But might these connections ever disappear?
How changing one’s mind works
Up until this point, I’ve only addressed growth. And for good reason. As people live, they pattern, and their webs grow. Threads may be forgotten, go unused for years and years — but are they truly gone? Sometimes, it only takes a single familiar scent to bring a person back to a childhood scene a person thinks they have forgotten. If it is possible to forget things utterly, then I am incapable of confirming it. I don’t know enough about how the brain works. But I do know that people’s understanding of the world changes; it changes all the time.
Tooth Fairies: When I was little, I believed magical fairies swapped teeth for spare change. Upon discovery of the truth, my understanding of the world changed abruptly. I quickly came to understand that grown-ups sometimes lie and that magical sparkly things on TV probably don’t exist. Those realizations, obvious as they seem now, came as a bit of a shock to my younger self. Can you imagine the decisions I might’ve made up until this point, had my understanding of how and why not changed to include lying adults and disclude fairy tale creatures? I can’t. The ramifications would be all-encompassing. I might attempt to bribe invisible creatures with my life savings, or believe robed strangers when they claim I can tithe my way to Heaven. The point is, people change. I changed.
How do people change? It would be a mistake to assume that in order to change, people need to sever sections of their web, destroying them utterly. But that’s not true, is it? After all, I still vividly remember believing in the Tooth Fairy. I even remember why I believed in the Tooth Fairy— my parents told me the Tooth Fairy existed, and they secretly swapped dozens of teeth for quarters to prove it. The foundation upon which I built my Tooth Fairy fantasies still exists… but I no longer believe that the Tooth Fairy is real. Why? How is this possible? It seems paradoxical.
Once again, we return to the matter of scope. Concentrate on the web. Zoom out a bit. Stop. There. You see those gleaming threads branching from the tiny Tooth Fairy Clump to the larger Lying Adults Exist Clump? Right. Well, turns out, once I understood lying adults existed, it became possible to reason that my parents might be lying about the Tooth Fairy. That connection between seemingly unrelated clumps was all it took to radically shift my understanding of the how and why the world works.
Any number of connections could have triggered this change. Let’s say I never realized that adults lie. Instead, a totally different part of my web touches the Tooth Fairy Clump: the Invisible-Critters-Don’t-Exist Clump, or the Samantha-the-Know-It-All-Said-So Clump, or the I’m-Too-Old-For-Fairies Clump. Any one of these things could push me into the “Tooth Fairies Don’t Exist” camp by simply connecting. Maybe it’s a combination of all these connections converging that does it. Who knows? Everybody’s web probably looks very different. What is obvious to one person is unthinkable or mysterious to another.
What we do know is it’s possible to change a person’s mind without outright severing connections in a person’s web — without erasing a person’s understanding of how the world works. The more one’s web grows, the more connections form, and the more a person changes.
I believe that people grow their mental “webs” until the day they die. We can’t help it. It’s in our nature. We pattern things the moment we try to make sense of them, and we are always trying to make sense of things. If you’re curious about anything at all, you are growing, like it or not.
Why this piece
Why have I written this piece? Why this obsession with metaphorical webbing? I’m unsure. I think some hidden part of my own webbing is responsible. I’ve been doing a lot of worldbuilding for a fantasy novel that has yet to manifest; building it, I become frustrated with how little about the world I really know, and this frustration — at straining at the limits of what I actually know about how things work— may be partly responsible for this weird web thing.
If I’m being honest, I think — and this is going to sound really dumb, but I’m being totally honest — this article might have a little to do with my persistent fear of giant spiders, which I imagine crawling around invisible rafters like that horrible, untouchable monstrosity in Stranger Things (until it rips through space and kills you).
For reasons I don’t want to get into, I think about giant, invisible spiders daily. It’s possible that this has contributed to my interest in webs and led me to discover how webs are a fantastic model on which to graft how people think, learn, change, sense, and act.
The mind connects in strange and mysterious ways.
On that note, I’m going to listen to a calming ASMR episode and try to forget the three paragraphs preceding this one ever happened. (Chuckles nervously.) Goodbye.
