Quotes from Steven Johnson

two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network: you can't have an epiphany with only three neurons firing.

today. By the end of 1882, Edison's company is powering electric light for the entire Pearl Street district in Lower Manhattan.

Had Hurley, Chen, and Karim tried to execute the exact same idea for YouTube ten years earlier, in 1995, it would have been a spectacular flop, because a site for sharing video was not within the adjacent possible of the early Web.

All of us live inside our own private versions of the adjacent possible. In our work lives, in our creative pursuits, in the organizations that employ us, in the communities we inhabit—in all these different environments, we are surrounded by potential new configurations, new ways of breaking out of our standard routines.

Most hotbeds of innovation have similar physical spaces associated with them: the Homebrew Computing Club in Silicon Valley; Freud's Wednesday salon at 19 Berggasse; the eighteenth-century English coffeehouse. All these spaces were, in their own smaller-scale fashion, emergent platforms.

Those early spectacles were called roidi da ogli, meaning "disks for the eyes." Thanks to their resemblance to lentil beans—lentes in Latin—the disks themselves came to be called "lenses.

The trick is to figure out ways to explore the edges of possibility that surround you.

shaking ourselves free of this common misconception: an idea is not a single thing. It is more like a swarm.

endangered joy of serendipity

When you think about ideas in their native state of neural networks, two key preconditions become clear. First, the sheer size of the network: you can't have an epiphany with only three neurons firing. The network needs to be densely populated.

La cuestión es inventarse formas de explorar los límites posibles de lo que te rodea. Esto puede ser tan sencillo como cambiar el entorno físico en el trabajo, o cultivar un tipo específico de red social, o mantener ciertos hábitos en la forma de buscar y archivar la información.

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.

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.

Conventionally, a developer will create a piece of software, and once it's finished, expose a small part of its functionality to outside developers via the API. The Twitter team took the exact opposite approach. They built the API first, and exposed all the data that was crucial to the service, and then they built Twitter.com on top of the API.

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.

Up to now, the philosophers of emergence have struggled to interpret the world. But they are now starting to change it.

the unique property of the carbon atom: its combinatorial power. Carbon is a connector.

Radios, vacuum tubes, transistors, televisions, solar cells, coaxial cables, laser beams, microprocessors, computers, cell phones, fiber optics—all these essential tools of modern life descend from ideas originally generated at Bell Labs.

The first electrical battery was invented separately by Dean Von Kleist and Cuneus of Leyden in 1745 and 1746. Joseph Priestley and Carl Wilhelm Scheele independently isolated oxygen between 1772 and 1774.

John Locke first began maintaining a commonplace book in 1652, during

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.

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

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.

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.