Tom's Outermind

[tomsoutermind-blog]

Book: Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, Chapter: Serendipity

“In a sense, dreams are the mind’s primordial soup: the medium that facilitates the serendipitous collisions of creative insight.” (p.102 / 114)

“Thatcher’s study suggests a counter-sensitive notion: the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are.” (p.105 / 117)

“Asexual reproduction is faster and more energy efficient than the sexual variety: you don’t need to go to the trouble of finding a partner in order to create the next generation.” (p.106 / 118)

“What we gave up in speed and simplicity, we made up for in creativity.” (p.107 / 119)

“You can immerse yourself in a single author’s perspective, but then it’s harder to create serendipitous collisions between the ideas of multiple authors. One way around this limitation is to carve out dedicated periods where you read a large and varied collection of books and essays in a condensed amount of time.” (p.112 / 124)

“Think about the library. Do people browse anymore? We have become much a directed people. We can target what we want, thanks to the Internet ... It’s efficient, but dull.” (p.117 / 129)

“Everything we need to know comes filtered and vetted. We are discovering what everyone else is learning, and usually from people have selected because they share our interests.” (p.118 / 130)

“You weren’t looking for a story about diamond mines, but it was exactly what you needed.” (p.119 / 131)

[tomsoutermind-blog]

Book: Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, Chapter: The Slow Hunch

"... because most great ideas come into the world half-baked, more hunch than revelation." (p.75 / 87)

"Hunches that don't connect are doomed to stay hunches." (p.76 / 88)

"... the gut instinct, the "emotional brain" flash assessment of a situation that defies the slower calculations of logic ..." (p.76 / 88)

"They start with a vague, hard-to-describe sense that there's an interesting solution to a problem that hasn't yet been proposed, and they linger in the shadows of the mind, sometimes for decades, assembling new connections and gaining strength." (p.77 / 89)

"... they are fragile creatures, easily lost to the more pressing needs of day-to-day issues." (p.77 / 89)

"... the slow hunch is the rule, not the exception." (p.78 / 90)

"[They] fade into view." (p.81 / 93)

"So part of the secret of hunch cultivation is simple: write everything down." (p.83 / 95)

"... let his mind roam on the page." (p.83 / 95)

"... the practice of maintaining a "commonplace" book ... transcribing interesting or inspirational passages from one's readings, assembling a personalized encyclopedia of quotations." (p.84 / 96)

"... and by keeping an account of your readings, you make a book of your own, one stamped with your personality." (p.87 / 99)

[tomsoutermind-blog]

Book: Where Good Ideas Come From by Steven Johnson, Chapter: Liquid Networks

"The question is to push your brain toward those more creative networks. The answer, as it happens, is delightfully fractal: to make your mind more innovative, you have to place it inside environments that share that same network signature: networks of ideas or people that mimic the neural networks of a mind exploring the boundaries of the adjacent possible." [p.47 (book)/ 59 (document)] "But the lack of a record is exactly the point. In a low density, chaotic network, ideas come and go." (p.54 / 66) "Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, and da Vinci were emerging from a medieval culture that suffered from from too much order." (p.56 / 68) "What makes the history of double-entry so fascinating is the simple fact that no one seems to have claimed ownership of the technique, despite its immense value to capitalist enterprise." (p.57 / 69) "They simply widened the pool of minds that could come up with and share good ideas. This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It's not that the network itself is smart; it's that the individuals get smarter because they're connected to the network." (p.58 / 70) "... as questions from colleagues forced researchers to think about their experiments on a different scale or level." (p.61 / 73) "The social flow of the group conversation turns that private solid state into a liquid network." (p.62 / 74) "The idea, of course, is to strike the right balance of order and chaos." (p.62 / 74) "Most walls are write-on/wipe-off, so if inspiration hits on the way to the restroom, you can quickly sketch out an idea for your colleagues to see ... In a sense, Clarkson built the watercoolers first, and then designed an office building around them." (p.64 / 76)