My horrorscope advises me to "think out[side] of the box". No shit. Last week I was trying to remember the first time I had heard the phrase. Tom mentioned first hearing it in a movie (which one again ?) from two years back. Now it's every where. Can any one else help pin this down ?
ken kesey mid 60's
The Michael Douglas character asks DEA agents to "think outside the box" in Traffic(2000). It's one of those corporate/bureaucratic instant cliches that makes the rounds, like "happy camper."
Yeah it's been around for some years as a corporate-training industry buzzword. Kesey (not to mention Surrealism, etc.) had similar notions about getting around preconceptions, but I don't think he used this term. Not sure where it actually comes from.
ken had this box he got into and made sound--saw him at many dead shows and i know he was "thinking outside the box"
primal room ?
I can't remember when I first heard it but I'm certain it has it's roots in the Large Group Awareness Trainings (LGAT) of the early-mid 70's such as EST, Lifespring, Silva Mind Control, Mind Dynamics etc. (never mind that I'm steeped in the subject presently) The business culture is largely where such trainings settled in the early 90's. Most certainly it comes from Werner Erhard's and John Handley's insistance that LGAT participants "get out of your heads" The notion being that thought is a distraction from experience. One get's "stuck" in one's thoughts and beliefs. Only through "experience" = "feeling" are solutions to problems found.
short leap from cults to business training seminars.
You might find the origin of phrase somewhere in here.
Disjointed thoughts ahead:
I found lots of references through google to this page which (sort of) says that the phrase has its origins in the nine dot puzzle. Plausible, I guess, but not too convincing.
Steve may well be right, but I'll bet this phrase has an earlier, more scientific heritage that the EST people (being sort of scientists themselves) latched onto. But I can't prove this.
My guess is that the origin may have a connection to Maxwell's Demon which is a thought experiment involving a demon and a box. Here's a summary from an interesting page: James Clerk Maxwell once theorized that a demon could sit within a two chamber box and sort the molecules by their relative heat. If the demon could control the opening and closing of a door in the box, then all the hot molecules could be put within one chamber. If each chamber had a piston attached, then the piston in the hot chamber would rise, and energy would be created without the expenditure of thermodynamic work. If the demon did exist, the action of decreasing thermodynamic entropy would also result in a gain in information about the position of the molecules. Yet Maxwell's Demon is a rare case where thermodynamic entropy and informational entropy decrease together. We can pull Kesey in at this point because he published a collection of short stories titled Demon Box. The last story (IIRC) is itself titled Demon Box and it concerns a young girl who provides the answer to an older man much concerned with the problems (or negative outcome) associated with the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) of which Maxwell is the orginator. She "solves" the entropy problem by merely noting that entropy is only an issue in a closed system. Only inside the box. In other words, it's only a problem because or science operates on some base assumptions that may well not be true - like the universe is a zero sum energy game. In other words a closed box. If this isn't true, than the eventual heat death of the universe due to entropy may not be a problem. Thus, the problem is gotten around, literally, by thinking outside the box.
I wonder if that could possibly make sense. I mean something like the "box" is a scientific metaphore for the closed system of the universe upon which most calculations are based. This is like in school when you do physics equations and are told to "assume a frictionless surface..." which of course is never really the case, but we need to do this to do the math. Similarly, science thinking often calls for "boxes" "black boxes" and such to bound the problem in a way that will make thinking about it possible. But like the "frictionless plane" the idea of the "box" is just a convenient framework. Thus, breakthroughs - or surprise solutions like that to the nine dot problem - will have to come by thinking all the way back to challenge the original assumptions that framed the problem. And these assumptions often involve some sort of hypothetical "magic" box that seperates the problem in question from the rest of the messy always interconnected universe. Thus the meaning we all intuit for the phrase "thinking outside the box" - namely, that of somehow getting into a totally different frame of mind in relation to the problem - could come very literally from the language of physics which often employs all sorts of boxes (Maxwell's demon box being one, but there are countless, like the one schrodinger's cat is inside of, etc...) which frame the question. But the solution is often found by exposing the too simple framework of the question, and thus thinking outside the box.
Pynchon (probably more notably than Kesey) also wrote a lot about Maxwell's Demon box. See here for some details.
Just more fuel for the fire. I think this phrase is probably very old in scientific circles.
i'm bringing one of these to my next meeting.
Everything I could find cites the 9 dot puzzle, but I like Jim's thinking.
There's got to be a joke somewhere in here about those poor Taliban prisoners in the containers, but I'm not going to make it.
Outside the box & clocking ducats are phrases of considerable tenure in the American penal argot.
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- bill 12-11-2001 2:14 pm
ken kesey mid 60's
- Skinny 12-11-2001 2:56 pm [add a comment]
could you be more specific ?
- bill 12-11-2001 6:18 pm [add a comment]
google news group search locates mentions of the box going back to '95 and '96 but none prior.
- bill 12-11-2001 7:59 pm [add a comment]
The Michael Douglas character asks DEA agents to "think outside the box" in Traffic(2000). It's one of those corporate/bureaucratic instant cliches that makes the rounds, like "happy camper."
- tom moody 12-11-2001 5:02 pm [add a comment]
I think it was Safire who called that biz[z] buzz.
- bill 12-11-2001 8:10 pm [add a comment]
i knew safire was a sophist but a closet sapphist as well? maybe i should just have a drink or get gemstoned.
- dave 12-11-2001 9:32 pm [add a comment]
Yeah it's been around for some years as a corporate-training industry buzzword. Kesey (not to mention Surrealism, etc.) had similar notions about getting around preconceptions, but I don't think he used this term. Not sure where it actually comes from.
- alex 12-11-2001 5:45 pm [add a comment]
ken had this box he got into and made sound--saw him at many dead shows and i know he was "thinking outside the box"
- Skinny 12-11-2001 6:13 pm [add a comment]
primal room ?
- bill 12-11-2001 6:23 pm [add a comment]
I can't remember when I first heard it but I'm certain it has it's roots in the Large Group Awareness Trainings (LGAT) of the early-mid 70's such as EST, Lifespring, Silva Mind Control, Mind Dynamics etc. (never mind that I'm steeped in the subject presently) The business culture is largely where such trainings settled in the early 90's. Most certainly it comes from Werner Erhard's and John Handley's insistance that LGAT participants "get out of your heads" The notion being that thought is a distraction from experience. One get's "stuck" in one's thoughts and beliefs. Only through "experience" = "feeling" are solutions to problems found.
- steve 12-11-2001 6:31 pm [add a comment]
short leap from cults to business training seminars.
- dave 12-11-2001 6:39 pm [add a comment]
Landmark, EST in the busines world.
- steve 12-11-2001 9:53 pm [add a comment]
You might find the origin of phrase somewhere in here.
- steve 12-11-2001 6:56 pm [add a comment]
Disjointed thoughts ahead:
We can pull Kesey in at this point because he published a collection of short stories titled Demon Box. The last story (IIRC) is itself titled Demon Box and it concerns a young girl who provides the answer to an older man much concerned with the problems (or negative outcome) associated with the second law of thermodynamics (entropy) of which Maxwell is the orginator. She "solves" the entropy problem by merely noting that entropy is only an issue in a closed system. Only inside the box. In other words, it's only a problem because or science operates on some base assumptions that may well not be true - like the universe is a zero sum energy game. In other words a closed box. If this isn't true, than the eventual heat death of the universe due to entropy may not be a problem. Thus, the problem is gotten around, literally, by thinking outside the box.I found lots of references through google to this page which (sort of) says that the phrase has its origins in the nine dot puzzle. Plausible, I guess, but not too convincing.
Steve may well be right, but I'll bet this phrase has an earlier, more scientific heritage that the EST people (being sort of scientists themselves) latched onto. But I can't prove this.
My guess is that the origin may have a connection to Maxwell's Demon which is a thought experiment involving a demon and a box. Here's a summary from an interesting page:
I wonder if that could possibly make sense. I mean something like the "box" is a scientific metaphore for the closed system of the universe upon which most calculations are based. This is like in school when you do physics equations and are told to "assume a frictionless surface..." which of course is never really the case, but we need to do this to do the math. Similarly, science thinking often calls for "boxes" "black boxes" and such to bound the problem in a way that will make thinking about it possible. But like the "frictionless plane" the idea of the "box" is just a convenient framework. Thus, breakthroughs - or surprise solutions like that to the nine dot problem - will have to come by thinking all the way back to challenge the original assumptions that framed the problem. And these assumptions often involve some sort of hypothetical "magic" box that seperates the problem in question from the rest of the messy always interconnected universe. Thus the meaning we all intuit for the phrase "thinking outside the box" - namely, that of somehow getting into a totally different frame of mind in relation to the problem - could come very literally from the language of physics which often employs all sorts of boxes (Maxwell's demon box being one, but there are countless, like the one schrodinger's cat is inside of, etc...) which frame the question. But the solution is often found by exposing the too simple framework of the question, and thus thinking outside the box.
Pynchon (probably more notably than Kesey) also wrote a lot about Maxwell's Demon box. See here for some details.
Just more fuel for the fire. I think this phrase is probably very old in scientific circles.
- jim 12-11-2001 7:37 pm [add a comment]
i'm bringing one of these to my next meeting.
- linda 12-11-2001 7:51 pm [add a comment]
Everything I could find cites the 9 dot puzzle, but I like Jim's thinking.
There's got to be a joke somewhere in here about those poor Taliban prisoners in the containers, but I'm not going to make it.
- alex 12-11-2001 9:34 pm [add a comment]
Outside the box & clocking ducats are phrases of considerable tenure in the American penal argot.
- Frank the Unlinkable (guest) 12-12-2001 3:16 pm [add a comment]
go on...
- bill 12-12-2001 7:09 pm [add a comment]