Quotes About Insight

Her research suggests a paradoxical truth about innovation: good ideas are more likely to emerge in environments that contain a certain amount of noise and error.

Like every big idea, Birdseye's breakthrough was not a single insight, but a network of other ideas, packaged together in a new configuration. What made Birdseye's idea so powerful was not simply his individual genius, but the diversity of places and forms of expertise that he brought together.

It is simply hard to pinpoint exactly when Darwin had the idea, because the idea didn't arrive in a flash; it drifted into his consciousness over time, in waves. In the months before the Malthus reading, we could probably say that Darwin had the idea of natural selection in his head, but at the same time was incapable of fully thinking it. This is how slow hunches often mature: by stealth, in small steps. They fade into view.

We conventionally associate dream inspiration with the creative arts, but the canon of scientific breakthroughs contains many revolutionary ideas that originated in dreams.

He drew maps in his head, looking for patterns, looking for clues.

Hunches that don't connect are doomed to stay hunches.

Even though we don't teach this particular skill in school, and we barely have a vocabulary to describe it, our mindreading abilities play a key role in our work and relationship successes, our sense of humor, our social ease.

Steven Johnson

If you're trying to "transform reality" you need to give your ideas the time they need to mature; don't just look for sudden epiphanies. Cultivate your hunches.

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

anti-"lightbulb moment," the idea that comes into focus over decades, not seconds.

The error is needed to set off the truth, much as a dark background is required for exhibiting the brightness of a picture.

That is often how new ideas come into the world: someone perceives a signal where others would instinctively perceive noise.

CALCULUS (1684, 1693)

What looks inevitable in hindsight is often invisible with foresight.

The road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom,"24 William Blake

Correct predictions result in understanding. Incorrect predictions result in confusion and prompt you to pay attention.

While we've painted the guardians of the pale in a somewhat reactionary light, let's give the gatekeepers their due. What lies beyond the pale isn't always safe and secure. Outside the fence of state-sanctioned consciousness, there are, to be sure, peaks of profound insight and inspiration. But there are also the swamps of addiction, superstition, and groupthink, where the unprepared can get stuck.

The Greeks called that sudden understanding anamnesis. Literally, "the forgetting of the forgetting.

Just a few months before his fateful train trip, Theo had sent a grateful note to the first critic who dared to praise his brother's work: "You have read these pictures, and by doing so you very clearly saw the man.

Richard Feynman once wrote, "If you ever hear yourself saying, 'I think I understand this,' that means you don't.

The task of evolutionary psychology is not to weigh in on human nature, a task better left to others. It is to add the satisfying kind of insight that only science can provide: to connect what we know about human nature with the rest of our knowledge of how the world works, and to explain the largest number of facts with the smallest number of assumptions.

Reading is a technology for perspective-taking. When someone else's thoughts are in your head, you are observing the world from that person's vantage point. Not only are you taking in sights and sounds that you could not experience firsthand, but you have stepped inside that person's mind and are temporarily sharing his or her attitudes and reactions.

Keep in mind a bit of wisdom from the linguist Ann Farmer: 'It isn't about being right. It's about getting it right.