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"I wrote many novels which … contained the element of the projected collective unconscious, which made them simply incomprehensible to anyone who read them, because they required the reader to accept my premise that each of us lives in a unique world."
- Philip K. Dick

Spark Plug (Systematician)  
  A person who draws information from diverse areas of knowledge.  

"Adjani is our Spark Plug - and the best in the business."

Spence looked at the slim Adjani with new respect. A Spark Plug , as they were called, was a member of an elite group of men and women so gifted as to be completely expert in numerous fields of study - as many as five or six. Whereas most scientists and theoreticians were specialists, training their professional vision to ever narrower bands of the scientific spectrum, those like Adjani - and there were very few of them - worked in reverse, enlarging the scope of their knowledge wider and wider...

Most often they were employed as systematicians - men who could view the overall course of a project and draw valuable information from other areas of study and bring it to bear upon a particular problem. They acted as catalysts of creativity - spark plugs - providing those quick, dynamic bursts of creative insight for projects that had grown too complex to rely on the accidental cross-pollinization of ideas from other disciplines.

Technovelgy from Dream Thief, by Stephen Lawhead.
Published by Not known in 1983
Additional resources -

See also these specialists:

  • House Records Archivist
    A specialist who correlated information within the House Records of the Bene Gesserit.
    (From Heretics of Dune [1984] by Frank  Herbert)
  • Mnemonic Service
    Dedicated humans who collected bits of data in hopes of catching key correlations between fields of study.
    (From Sucker Bait [1954] by Isaac  Asimov)
  • Synthesist
    A person who did nothing but make cross-references between one field and another.
    (From Stand on Zanzibar [1968] by John  Brunner)
  • Nexialist
    A person with a coordinative knowledge across a variety of sciences.
    (From Voyage of the Space Beagle [1950] by A.E.  van Vogt)

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Additional resources:
  More Ideas and Technology from Dream Thief
  More Ideas and Technology by Stephen Lawhead
  Tech news articles related to Dream Thief
  Tech news articles related to works by Stephen Lawhead

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