The Lost Art of Connecting Dots

Remember those dot games? Like the one just below this paragraph? Where you would spend hours going through a book of numbered dots, connecting them with a line starting at a dot numbered “1” and continuing until an image of something revealed itself? Some of these things I remember as being really complex. And some of them were so complex you really couldn’t tell what the hell the image was until you diligently connected every dot. And then, voila! A lion, a goat, or a car would appear. Nothing was clear until the dots were connected. One by one.

Sometimes it was easy to tell what the final image was going to be—like the one above. But, until we got a little older, the image was a mystery, and you wanted to see what it was, so you got busy with your pencil, and connected the dots.

The sequence was obvious—1, 2, 3, 4, and so on. Connecting the dots in real life, in order to see something more clearly, or understand it more thoroughly, is a bit more difficult. Sometimes you don’t know the sequence (like you would with sequential numbers), but if you think a little bit, most things are usually not that difficult to figure out. I think most of us graduated from the dot game to Nancy Drew or Hardy Boy mysteries, then Columbo then the personal missing keys mystery (or missing cell phone). Solve the riddle, solve the crime, and solve the mystery. Connect the dots, the clues, the patterns and correlations, whatever it might be. It is a human trait to reason: deductive, inductive or abductive, until we figure things out.

Not anymore—at least not for a large portion of us. The art of connecting dots is lost. A shame.