Steve Johnson: Where Good Ideas Come From
Kliebers law proves that as life gets bigger, energy slows down. But Geoffrey West's model demonstrated one crucial way in which human-built cities broke from patterns of biological life: as cities get bigger, they generate ideas at a faster rate.
This is what we call "superlinear scaling": if creativity scaled with size in a straight, linear fashion, you would of course find more patents and inventions in a larger city, but the number of patents and inventions per capita would remain constant.
West's power laws suggest that the average resident of a metropolis with a population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the average resident of a town of a hundred thousand.
Something about the environment of a big city was causing the rate of residents' innovation to exponentially increase by a rate of 1/4. But what was it?
Good ideas are works of bricolage; they're built out of the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition.
We take the ideas we've inherited or stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.
The adjacent possible is a kind of shadow future, hovering at the edges of the present state if things, a map of all the ways the present can reinvent itself. Yet it is not an infinite space, or a totally open playing field. The number of potential first-order reactions is vast, but not infinite.
Innovative environments are better at helping their inhabitants explore the adjacent possible, because they expose a wide and diverse sample of spare parts - mechanical or conceptual - and they encourage novel ways of recombining those parts.
The social flow of group conversation turns the private state of experimentation into a liquid network. After hours searching for an idea, your perspective can become confined and stuck in your own initial biases. A meeting creates an environment where new combinations can occur, where information has a possibility of spreading from one project to another.
Long, slow hunches take time to ebb in and out of your consciousness, worked on repeatedly by your brain, until one day, in the distant future, when it will collide with another idea or hunch and form with clarity into a breakthrough.
How do we cultivate these hunches and be sure to not let them permanently dip out of our memory? Write everything down.
Darwin was so successful in developing his theories because he frequently let his ideas loose on a page, letting them roam and then forgetting about them. He would return later and reread, discovering new implications and new ways to organize his findings.
A common place for discoveries lies in long showers and long walks, which encourage serendipity and force your mind to wander.
Exaptation - hijacking a trait or invention optimized for a specific use and using it for a completely new endeavor. Like Gutenburg borrowed the wine press and transformed it into the first movable press.
If mutation and error and serendipity unlock new doors in the biosphere's adjacent possible, exaptations help us explore the new possibilities that lurk behind those doors. A match you light to illuminate a darkened room turns out to have a completely different use when you open a doorway and discover a room with a pile of logs and a fireplace in it. A tool that once helped you see has now been exapted to help keep you warm.