Mind - How Nonsense Sharpens the Intellect - NYTimes.com
This is exactly how science works. Experiments often don’t make sense, and many of the biggest breakthroughs came from nonsensical experimental results (that doesn’t mean that everything that doesn’t makes sense leads to a breakthrough). Seeing patterns where no one did before, synthesizing things known from all kinds of fields in order to begin to explain what we see in front of us is what scientists are supposed to do. It’s interesting that it took another non-intuitive experiment to figure out that this may be intimately tied to how the brain works in general.
Of course, this also means that we have to be careful. In our search for meaning, sometimes we can find patters that aren’t there or our explanations that seem to fit the pattern don’t always hold up. When we stumble onto nonsense again, when the data in front of us don’t support the explanation that used to explain a pattern, we have to keep an open mind and remember that this all happened before.
