Your brain has roughly 100 billion neurons, an impressive enough number, but all those neurons would be useless for creating ideas (as well as all the other achievements of the human brain) if they weren’t capable of making such elaborate connections with each other. The average neuron connects to a thousand other neurons scattered across the brain, which means that the adult human brain contains 100 trillion distinct neuronal connections,
On an individual level, facilitating such serendipitous connections is simply a matter of simultaneously introducing ideas from different disciplines into your consciousness. Innovators like Benjamin Franklin and Charles Darwin favored working on multiple projects simultaneously, in a kind of slow multitasking mode. One project would take center stage for days at a time, but linger at the back of the mind afterwards too, so connections between projects could be drawn.
