Where Good Ideas Come From

by Steven Johnson

DEVONthink features a clever algorithm that detects subtle semantic connections between distinct passages of text. These tools are smart enough to get around the classic search-engine failing of excessive specificity: searching for “dog” and missing all the articles that only have the word “canine” in them. Modern indexing software like DEVONthink’s learns associations between individual words by tracking the frequency with which words appear near each other. This can create almost lyrical connections between ideas. Several years ago, I was working on a book about cholera in London and queried DEVONthink for information about Victorian sewage systems. Because the software had detected that the word “waste” is often used alongside “sewage,” it directed me to a quote that explained the way bones evolved in vertebrate bodies: namely, by repurposing the calcium waste products created by the metabolism of cells. At first glance that might seem like an errant result, but it sent me off on a long and fruitful tangent into the way complex systems—whether cities or bodies—find productive uses for the waste they create. That idea became a central organizing theme for one of the chapters in the cholera book. (It will, in fact, reappear in this book in a different guise.)