Free Prisoner of Trebekistan: A Decade in Jeopardy! by Bob Harris Page B

bands, which I also heard once as slang for the fan belt on a car.
Rubber stamps, which are also a metaphor for automatic approval.
Rubber cement.
The slab called a pitcher’s rubber in baseball.
The rubber arm a durable pitcher is said to have.
Rubbernecking at a car wreck.
Rubber checks that bounce.
Rubber tires.
Peeling rubber with a sports car. You can also burn this kind of rubber.
There’s the birth-control prophylactic meaning.
Rubber rooms for the insane.
Rubber gloves, as used in electrical work or in surgery.
The rubber man in a circus.
Rubber galoshes, which we called just “rubbers” when I was growing up.
Rubber balls.
“Rubber baby buggy bumpers,” a phrase that made me laugh as a kid.
Rubber chickens, like the kind you find in gag gift stores.
The “rubber game” which decides a series of baseball games.
Rubber rafts.
Rubber erasers—what pencil erasers are called in some countries.
Rubber-tree plants, the kind upon which ants reportedly base high hopes.
     
     
     
    Good enough. That’s twenty-one. Now let’s strip away the rubber bits, and gaze at the incredibly diverse stuff we’ve just conjured:

Elastic bands
Bank checks
Shoes
    Car parts
    Bouncing
    Balls
    Approval
    Sporting events
    Baby talk
    Stamps
    Tires
    Chickens
    Cement
    Peeling
    Gag gifts
    Slabs
    Burning
    Decisions
    Durability
    Sex
    Rafts
    Arms
    Gloves
    Erasers
    Gawking faces
    Contortionists
    Trees

    If someone had asked you yesterday how to connect “chicken” with “cement,” you’d probably have given them a blank stare. But it was already in your head.
    This little game of Six Degrees of Your Own Skull shows that nothing exists in your head by itself. In fact, it’s hard to find anything that isn’t connected in a hop or two.
    Just for style points, let’s look back at the list and pick the three most unrelated words we can find, and see how they also connect in completely non-rubber ways. A few jump right out:
     
     
     
“Cement” + “trees”: there are trees in cement planters near the coffee shop where I usually write.

“Trees” + “shoes”: you can find a shoe tree in any department store.

“Shoes” + “cement”: OK, that’s just an episode of The Sopranos.
     
     
     
    This is no coincidence; it’s a direct result of the structure of the human brain. Visualize it this way: imagine the word rubber floating around in the center of the room you’re in. Now mentally attach all the connected words, arranged so that they’re evenly spaced, floating around the center, flying like kites in all directions. Now try to picture all of these other words as the centers of their own little kite-spheres, all at the same time, with dozens of their own connections floating around them. And all of these, of course, are centers of their own connection-spheres.
    The room gets full pretty damn fast, doesn’t it?
    It’s impossible to imagine how dense all the connections really are. Your brain isn’t arranged like a book or even a hard drive, but like the Internet, with millions of interlinking entries and perhaps the same percentage of dirty pictures. You could probably spend a lifetime finding new connections and ideas, just by playing around with what you already have.
    Happily, the more you goof around in there, the more connections you’ll have, and the faster they’ll work. If you’ve ever wondered how Jeopardy! players can find their way to some wildly obscure answers, this is a big part. I’ll give some examples from my own games a little later.
    And so we reach another step on the Eightfold Path:
     
     
     
1. Obvious things may be worth noticing.
2. Remember the basics: the basics are what you remember.
3. Put your head where you can use it later.
4. Doing nothing is better than doing something really stupid.
5. Admit you don’t know squat as often as possible.
6. Everything connects to everything else.
     
     
     
    This is handy. When we combine this with the knowledge that visceral,