Where Good Ideas Come From Quotes

“Science does not yet have a solid explanation for the brain’s chaos states, but Thatcher and other researchers believe that the electric noise of the chaos mode allows the brain to experiment with new links between neurons that would otherwise fail to connect in more orderly settings.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Thatcher’s study suggests a counterintuitive notion: the more disorganized your brain is, the smarter you are. It’s counterintuitive in part because we tend to attribute the growing intelligence of the technology world with increasingly precise electromechanical choreography”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The waking brain, too, has an appetite for the generative chaos that rules in the dream state. Neurons share information by passing chemicals across the synaptic gap that connects them, but they also communicate via a more indirect channel: they synchronize their firing rates. For reasons that are not entirely understood, large clusters of neurons will regularly fire at the exact same frequency. (Imagine a discordant jazz band, each member following a different time signature and tempo, that suddenly snaps into a waltz at precisely 120 beats per minute.) This is what neuroscientists call phase-locking. There is a kind of beautiful synchrony to phase-locking—millions of neurons pulsing in perfect rhythm. But the brain also seems to require the opposite: regular periods of electrical chaos, where neurons are completely out of sync with each other. If you follow the various frequencies of brain-wave activity with an EEG, the effect is not unlike turning the dial on an AM radio: periods of structured, rhythmic patterns, interrupted by static and noise. The brain’s systems are “tuned” for noise, but only in controlled bursts.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The tradition of the commonplace book contains a central tension between order and chaos, between the desire for methodical arrangement, and the desire for surprising new links of association.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Darwin’s notebooks lie at the tail end of a long and fruitful tradition that peaked in Enlightenment-era Europe, particularly in England: the practice of maintaining a “commonplace” book. Scholars, amateur scientists, aspiring men of letters—just about anyone with intellectual ambition in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was likely to keep a commonplace book. The great minds of the period—Milton, Bacon, Locke—were zealous believers in the memory-enhancing powers of the commonplace book.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“As he reads through his observations, a new thought begins to take shape in his mind, which provokes a whole new set of notes that will only make complete sense to Darwin two years later, after the Malthus episode.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“But standing in the atrium of Building 99, it’s impossible not to think that this space was designed to conjure up a different kind of flow: the collective flow of energized minds forming liquid networks in their mixing spaces and situation rooms. Building 99—like Building 20 before it—is a space that sees information spillover as a feature, not a flaw. It is designed to leak. In this, it shares some core values with the liquid networks of dense cities.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Flow is not the singular intensity of focusing “like a laser,” as we often say. And it is not the miraculous illumination of a sudden brainstorm. Rather, it is more the feeling of drifting along a stream, being carried in a clear direction, but still tossed in surprising ways by the eddies and whirls of moving water.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Because they are fixed physical structures, most offices have a natural tendency to disrupt liquid networks of information. They themselves are, quite literally, made out of solids, and they often map out the conceptual solid of a formal org chart, with its neatly defined departments and hierarchies.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Dunbar’s generative conference room meetings remind us that the physical architecture of our work environments can have a transformative effect on the quality of our ideas. The quickest way to freeze a liquid network is to stuff people into private offices behind closed doors, which is one reason so many Web-era companies have designed their work environments around common spaces where casual mingling and interdepartmental chatter happens without any formal planning.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Dunbar’s research suggests one vaguely reassuring thought: even with all the advanced technology of a leading molecular biology lab, the most productive tool for generating good ideas remains a circle of humans at a table, talking shop. The lab meeting creates an environment where new combinations can occur, where information can spill over from one project to another. When you work alone in an office, peering into a microscope, your ideas can get trapped in place, stuck in your own initial biases. The social flow of the group conversation turns that private solid state into a liquid network.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“If you looked at the map of idea formation that Dunbar created, the ground zero of innovation was not the microscope. It was the conference table.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“people tend to condense the origin stories of their best ideas into tidy narratives, forgetting the messy, convoluted routes to inspiration that they actually followed.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“When the first market towns emerged in Italy, they didn’t magically create some higher-level group consciousness. 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.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Cities and markets recruit more minds into the collective project of exploring the adjacent possible. As long as there is spillover between those minds, useful innovations will be more likely to appear and spread through the population at large.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“It is not a coincidence that Northern Italy was the most urbanized region in all of Europe during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. But, in a crucial sense, the pattern of Renaissance innovation differs from that of the first cities: Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, and da Vinci were emerging from a medieval culture that suffered from too much order. If dispersed tribes of hunter-gatherers are the cultural equivalent of a chaotic, gaseous state, a culture where the information is largely passed down by monastic scribes stands at the opposite extreme. A cloister is a solid. By breaking up those information bonds and allowing ideas to circulate more freely through a wider, connected population, the great Italian innovators brought new life to the European mind.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“high-density liquid networks make it easier for innovation to happen, but they also serve the essential function of storing those innovations. Before writing, before books, before Wikipedia, the liquid network of cities preserved the accumulated wisdom of human culture.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“No doubt some ingenious hunter-gatherer stumbled across the cleansing properties of ashes mixed with animal fat, or dreamed of building aqueducts in those long eons before the rise of cities, and we simply have no record of his epiphany. But the lack of a record is exactly the point. In a low-density, chaotic network, ideas come and go. In the dense networks of the first cities, good ideas have a natural propensity to get into circulation. They spill over, and through that spilling they are preserved for future generations.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“somewhere within a thousand years of the first cities emerging, human beings invented a whole new way of inventing.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“When you share a common civic culture with thousands of other people, good ideas have a tendency to flow from mind to mind, even when their creators try to keep them secret. “Spillover” is the right word; it captures the essential liquidity of information in dense settlements.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“With that increase in population came a crucial increase in the number of possible connections that could be formed within the group. Good ideas could more readily find their way into other brains and take root there. New forms of collaboration became possible.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“There is a prediction (albeit retroactive) lurking in this idea of the liquid network, as well as in the premise that innovative environments share signature patterns at different scales. The prediction is that whenever human beings first organized themselves into settlements that resembled liquid networks, a great flowering of innovation would have immediately followed. For ages, early humans lived in the cultural equivalent of gaseous networks: small packs of hunter-gatherers bouncing around the landscape, with almost no contact between groups. But the rise of agriculture changed all that. For the first time, humans began forming groups that numbered in the thousands, or tens of thousands.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“when we look back to the original innovation engine on earth, we find two essential properties. First, a capacity to make new connections with as many other elements as possible. And, second, a “randomizing” environment that encourages collisions between all the elements in the system.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The combination of water’s fluidity and solubility makes it marvelously adept at creating new networks of elements, as they churn through the ever-shifting medium, colliding with each other in unpredictable ways. At the same time, the strength of the hydrogen bonds means that new combinations with some stability to them—many of them anchored around carbon atoms—can endure and seek out additional connections in the soup.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“the unique property of the carbon atom: its combinatorial power. Carbon is a connector.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“Why are we so confident about carbon’s essential role in creating living things? The answer has to do with the core properties of the carbon atom itself. Carbon has four valence electrons residing in the outermost shell of the atom, which, for complicated reasons, makes it uniquely talented at forming connections with other atoms, particularly with hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur—and, crucially, with other carbon atoms. These six atoms make up 99 percent of the dry weight of all living organisms on earth. Those four valence bonds give carbon a strong propensity for forming elaborate chains and rings of polymers: everything from the genetic information stored in nucleic acids, to the building blocks of proteins, to the energy storage of carbohydrates and fats.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“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.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“It turns out that good ideas have certain signature patterns in the networks that make them. The creating brain behaves differently from the brain that is performing a repetitive task.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“The second precondition is that the network be plastic, capable of adopting new configurations. A dense network incapable of forming new patterns is, by definition, incapable of change, incapable of probing at the edges of the adjacent possible. When a new idea pops into your head, the sense of novelty that makes the experience so magical has a direct correlate in the cells of your brain: a brand-new assemblage of neurons has come together to make the thought possible.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From