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"One of our most innovative, popular thinkers takes on-in exhilarating style-one of our key questions: Where do good ideas come from? With Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson pairs the insight of his bestselling Everything Bad Is Good for You and the dazzling erudition of The Ghost Map and The Invention of Air to address an urgent and universal question: What sparks the flash of brilliance? How does groundbreaking innovation happen? Answering in his infectious, culturally omnivorous style, using his fluency in fields from neurobiology to popular culture, Johnson provides the complete, exciting, and encouraging story of how we generate the ideas that push our careers, our lives, our society, and our culture forward. Beginning with Charles Darwin's first encounter with the teeming ecosystem of the coral reef and drawing connections to the intellectual hyperproductivity of modern megacities and to the instant success of YouTube, Johnson shows us that the question we need to ask is, What kind of environment fosters the development of good ideas? His answers are never less than revelatory, convincing, and inspiring as Johnson identifies the seven key principles to the genesis of such ideas, and traces them across time and disciplines. Most exhilarating is Johnson's conclusion that with today's tools and environment, radical innovation is extraordinarily accessible to those who know how to cultivate it. Where Good Ideas Come From is essential reading for anyone who wants to know how to come up with tomorrow's great ideas."

"The only constant is change. It's the most basic fact of human existence. Nothing lasts, nothing stays the same. We feel it with each breath. From birth to the unknown moment of our passing, we ride a river of change. And yet, in spite of all evidence to the contrary, we exhaust ourselves in an endless search for solidity. We hunger for something that lasts, some idea or principle that rises above time and change. We hunger for certainty. That is a big problem. It might even be THE problem. Religions are often built around this heartache for certainty. In the face of sickness, loss and grief, a thousand dogmas with a thousand names have risen. Many profess that if only the faithful hold fast to the "rules," the "precepts" or the "doctrine" then certainty can be obtained. Fate and future can be fixed through promises of freedom from immediate suffering, divine favor or everlasting salvation. Scriptures are transformed into unwavering blueprints for an unchanging order. These documents must live beyond question lest the certainty they provide crumble. When human spiritual endeavor devolves into these white-knuckle forms of clinging they become monuments to the fear of change and uncertainty. It would be symmetrical if I could point to science as the pure antidote to the rigid rejection of uncertainty. Science, in the purest forms of its expression as a practice, holds to no doctrine other than that the world might be known. In the ceaseless pursuit of its own questioning path, science asks us to allow for ceaseless change in our ideas, beliefs and opinions. It's this aspect of science that I value more than any other. But science does not exist alone as practice. It's also a constellation of ideas that exist within culture and those ideas can gain value, in and of themselves, without connection to actual practice. In this way science becomes something more and less. For some people the idea of Science offers a trumped up certainty that yields its own false de

"Miller eloquently encapsulates the combinatorial nature of creativity and the constant borrowing and repurposing that takes place as we build upon what came before and recombine existing bits of knowledge and ideas to create what we call "our" ideas. And your way, is it really your way? […] What, moreover, can you call your own? The house you live in, the food you swallow, the clothes you wear - you neither built the house nor raised the food nor made the clothes. […] The same goes for your ideas. You moved into them ready-made."

"Female physicists, astronomers and mathematicians are up against more than 2,000 years of convention that has long portrayed these fields as inherently male. Though women are no longer barred from university laboratories and scientific societies, the idea that they are innately less suited to mathematical science is deeply ingrained in our cultural genes. The problem goes back to the ancient Greeks, particularly to Pythagoras, the philosophical giant who dreamed the dream that became modern physics. Pythagoras almost certainly learned his famous theorem about right-angled triangles from the Babylonians, but we owe to him a far greater idea: "All is number," he declared, becoming the first person to say that the physical world could be described by the language of mathematics. Pythagoras also gave us the idea of the "music of the spheres," a set of mathematical relationships that would describe the structure of the universe itself. His vision would eventually give rise to the scientific revolution led by Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo and Newton. The search for a theory of everything today is the latest version of the ancient Pythagorean quest for divine "cosmic harmonies.""

""The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism." The combinatorial nature of creativity is something I think about a great deal, so this 1903 letter Mark Twain wrote to his friend Helen Keller, found in Mark Twain's Letters, Vol. 2 of 2, makes me nod with the manic indefatigability of a dashboard bobble-head dog. In this excerpt, Twain addresses some plagiarism charges that had been made against Keller some 11 years prior, when her short story "The Frost King" was found to be strikingly similar to Margaret Canby's "Frost Fairies." Heller was acquitted after an investigation, but the incident stuck with Twain and prompted him to pen the following passionate words more than a decade later, which articulate just about everything I believe to be true of combinatorial creativity and the myth of originality: Oh, dear me, how unspeakably funny and owlishly idiotic and grotesque was that 'plagiarism' farce! As if there was much of anything in any human utterance, oral or written, except plagiarism! The kernel, the soul - let us go further and say the substance, the bulk, the actual and valuable material of all human utterances - is plagiarism. For substantially all ideas are second-hand, consciously and unconsciously drawn from a million outside sources, and daily use by the garnerer with a pride and satisfaction born of the superstition that he originated them; whereas there is not a rag of originality about them anywhere except the little discoloration they get from his mental and moral calibre and his temperament, and which is revealed in characteristics of phrasing. When a great orator makes a great speech you are listening to ten centuries and ten thousand men - but we call it his speech, and really some exceedingly small portion of it is his. But not enough to signify. It is merely a Waterloo. It is Wellington's battle, in some de

The idea that your mother tongue shapes your experience of the world may be true after all.

"Charles Darwin has had a remarkable record over the past century, not only in the affirmation of evolution by natural selection, but in the number of his more specific ideas that have been proved correct. He may, however, have been wrong about invasive species, at least where amphibians are concerned. Darwin believed that when an invasive species entered a region where a closely related species already existed, it would most likely be unsuccessful because of a competition for resources. "Instead, we found the opposite pattern with amphibians," said Reid Tingley, a biologist at the University of Sydney. "When frogs and toads and salamanders invade an area where a similar species exists, they are more, not less, likely to establish themselves." "

So, sometimes even Darwin's predictions turn out to be wrong!

"A long-standing idea that human languages share universal features that are dictated by human brain structure has been cast into doubt. A study reported in Nature has borrowed methods from evolutionary biology to trace the development of grammar in several language families. The results suggest that features shared across language families evolved independently in each lineage. The authors say cultural evolution, not the brain, drives language development. At the heart of both studies is a method based on what are known as phylogenetic studies."

"One of the best aspects of science has always been its readiness to admit when it got something wrong. Theories are constantly being refigured, and new research frequently renders old ideas outdated or incomplete. But this hasn't stopped some discoveries from being hailed as important, game-changing accomplishments a bit prematurely. Even in a field as rigorous and detail-oriented as science, theories get busted, mistakes are made, and hoaxes are perpetrated. The following are ten of the most groundbreaking of these scientific discoveries that turned out to be resting on some questionable data. It is worth noting that most of these concepts are not necessarily "wrong" in the traditional sense; rather, they have been replaced by other theories that are more complete and reliable."

"FOR a brief, heady period in the history of autism spectrum diagnosis, in the late '90s, I had Asperger syndrome. There's an educational video from that time, called "Understanding Asperger's," in which I appear. I am the affected 20-year-old in the wannabe-hipster vintage polo shirt talking about how keen his understanding of literature is and how misunderstood he was in fifth grade. The film was a research project directed by my mother, a psychology professor and Asperger specialist, and another expert in her department. It presents me as a young man living a full, meaningful life, despite his mental abnormality. "Understanding Asperger's" was no act of fraud. Both my mother and her colleague believed I met the diagnostic criteria laid out in the American Psychiatric Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition. The manual, still the authoritative text for American therapists, hospitals and insurers, listed the symptoms exhibited by people with Asperger disorder, and, when I was 17, I was judged to fit the bill. I exhibited a "qualified impairment in social interaction," specifically "failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level" (I had few friends) and a "lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people" (I spent a lot of time by myself in my room reading novels and listening to music, and when I did hang out with other kids I often tried to speak like an E. M. Forster narrator, annoying them). I exhibited an "encompassing preoccupation with one or more stereotyped and restricted patterns of interest that is abnormal either in intensity or focus" (I memorized poems and spent a lot of time playing the guitar and writing terrible poems and novels). The general idea with a psychological diagnosis is that it applies when the tendencies involved inhibit a person's ability to experience a happy, normal life. And in my c

Part 1 of a 4-part series examining what happens when science is used for marketing (using brain-training software as the central example). Almost all of the programs that tout their ability to train your brain are limited in scope. Most train your ability to perform simple cognitive tasks by having you perform them repeatedly, often adapting the difficulty of the task over time to keep it challenging. Some determine which tasks you perform well and which need improvement and adjust the tasks based on your ongoing performance. The simplest ones, though, simply track how much you improve and inform you that such improvements have made increased the fitness of your brain. Such task-specific training effects can be really useful-if you want to enhance your ability to do Sudoku, by all means practice doing Sudoku. But what pitches for those programs regularly imply is that playing their videogame or using their training will enhance your ability to do other tasks that weren't specifically trained. For example, this advertisement for Nintendo's Brain Age implies that by using their game, you will be better able to remember your friend's name when you meet him on the street. The idea that playing games can improve your brain is pervasive, and it taps what Chris Chabris and I have called the "illusion of potential." A common myth of the mind is that we have vast pools of untapped mental resources that can be released with relatively minimal effort. This common intuitive belief underlies the pervasive myth that we only use 10% of our brains, that listening to Mozart can increase our IQ [pdf], and even the belief that some people have "discovered" psychic abilities. We devote the last main chapter of The Invisible Gorilla to this belief and its ramifications, and we recently wrote a column for the NY Times discussing how popular self-help books like The Secret and The Power capitalize on this mistaken belief. The marketing for some brain training programs

"Incensed by what it sees as a virtual pandemic of verbal vulgarity issuing from the diverse likes of Howard Stern, Bono of U2 and Robert Novak, the United States Senate is poised to consider a bill that would sharply increase the penalty for obscenity on the air. By raising the fines that would be levied against offending broadcasters some fifteenfold, to a fee of about $500,000 per crudity broadcast, and by threatening to revoke the licenses of repeat polluters, the Senate seeks to return to the public square the gentler tenor of yesteryear, when seldom were heard any scurrilous words, and famous guys were not foul mouthed all day. Yet researchers who study the evolution of language and the psychology of swearing say that they have no idea what mystic model of linguistic gentility the critics might have in mind. Cursing, they say, is a human universal. Every language, dialect or patois ever studied, living or dead, spoken by millions or by a small tribe, turns out to have its share of forbidden speech, some variant on comedian George Carlin's famous list of the seven dirty words that are not supposed to be uttered on radio or television. "

"Professor Greene is lecturing. Down the hall, her arch-rival, Professor Browne, is also lecturing. Professor Greene is holding forth at length about how absurd Professor Browne's ideas are. She believes Professor Browne to be lecturing in Room 33. So to emphasize her point, she writes on the blackboard the single sentence: Everything written on the board in Room 33 is false. But Professor Greene has made a mistake. She, herself, is in Room 33. So is what she has written on the board true or false? If it's true, then since it itself is written on the board, it's false. If it's false, then since it is the only thing written on the board, it's true. Either way, it's both true and false. Philosophers and logicians love paradoxes, and this is one - one of the many versions of what is usually called the Liar Paradox, discovered by the ancient Greek philosopher Eubulides (4th century B.C.). Paradoxes are apparently good arguments that lead to conclusions that are beyond belief (Greek: "para" = beyond, "doxa" = belief). And when you meet a paradox, you've got only two choices. One is to accept that the conclusion, implausible as it may seem, is actually true; the other is to reject the conclusion, and explain what has gone wrong in the argument."

Like it or not - and I don't - the Obama-McConnell tax-cut deal, with its mixture of very bad stuff and sort-of-kind-of good stuff, is likely to pass Congress. Then what? The deal will, without question, give the economy a short-term boost. The prevailing view, as far as I can tell - and that includes within the Obama administration - is that this short-term boost is all we need. The deal, we're told, will jump-start the economy; it will give a fragile recovery time to strengthen. I say, block those metaphors. America's economy isn't a stalled car, nor is it an invalid who will soon return to health if he gets a bit more rest. Our problems are longer-term than either metaphor implies. And bad metaphors make for bad policy. The idea that the economic engine is going to catch or the patient rise from his sickbed any day now encourages policy makers to settle for sloppy, short-term measures when the economy really needs well-designed, sustained support.

Think we all have dif­fer­ent tastes where beauty is con­cerned? Well, cog­ni­tive psy­chol­ogy shows us that an aver­age face (made from sev­eral other faces) is almost always judged as more attrac­tive than its con­stituent faces… Why? It may be for the sim­ple rea­son that an aver­age face is closer to the men­tal idea we have of a pro­to­typ­i­cal face and thus eas­ier for the brain to process. Want to expe­ri­ence it? Fol­low this link to the the Face Research Lab and cre­ate your own aver­age faces. Enjoy.

"In the annals of denial, it doesn't get much more extreme than the Seekers. They lost their jobs, the press mocked them, and there were efforts to keep them away from impressionable young minds. But while Martin's space cult might lie at on the far end of the spectrum of human self-delusion, there's plenty to go around. And since Festinger's day, an array of new discoveries in psychology and neuroscience has further demonstrated how our preexisting beliefs, far more than any new facts, can skew our thoughts and even color what we consider our most dispassionate and logical conclusions. This tendency toward so-called "motivated reasoning" helps explain why we find groups so polarized over matters where the evidence is so unequivocal: climate change, vaccines, "death panels," the birthplace and religion of the president (PDF), and much else. It would seem that expecting people to be convinced by the facts flies in the face of, you know, the facts. The theory of motivated reasoning builds on a key insight of modern neuroscience (PDF): Reasoning is actually suffused with emotion (or what researchers often call "affect"). Not only are the two inseparable, but our positive or negative feelings about people, things, and ideas arise much more rapidly than our conscious thoughts, in a matter of milliseconds-fast enough to detect with an EEG device, but long before we're aware of it. That shouldn't be surprising: Evolution required us to react very quickly to stimuli in our environment. It's a "basic human survival skill," explains political scientist Arthur Lupia of the University of Michigan. We push threatening information away; we pull friendly information close. We apply fight-or-flight reflexes not only to predators, but to data itself."

"You'd think that with all their Googling to find the Spark Notes of the novels they didn't read, today's students would understand how the search engine works. Wrong: They are completely clueless! In a detailed study of 30 college students by anthropologists at Illinois Wesleyan, only seven were able to do a "reasonably well-executed search." According to Inside Higher Ed: They were basically clueless about the logic underlying how the search engine organizes and displays its results. Consequently, the students did not know how to build a search that would return good sources. (For instance, limiting a search to news articles, or querying specific databases such as Google Book Search or Google Scholar.) Duke and Asher said they were surprised by "the extent to which students appeared to lack even some of the most basic information literacy skills that we assumed they would have mastered in high school." Even students who were high achievers in high school suffered from these deficiencies, Asher told Inside Higher Ed in an interview."

"Guy Deutscher is that rare beast, an academic who talks good sense about linguistics, his chosen field. In his new book, Through the Language Glass (Heinemann), he fearlessly contradicts the fashionable consensus, espoused by the likes of Steven Pinker, that language is wholly a product of nature, that it does not take colour and value from culture and society. Deutscher argues, in a playful and provocative way, that our mother tongue does indeed affect how we think and, just as important, how we perceive the world. An honorary research fellow at the University of Manchester, the 40-year-old linguist draws on a range of sources in the book to show language reflecting the society in which it is spoken. In the process, he explains why Russian water (a "she") becomes a "he" once you have dipped a teabag into her, and why, in German, a young lady has no sex, though a turnip has."

"RESEARCHERS say they have solved a conundrum about human perception that has stumped philosophers and scientists alike for three centuries. Irish politician William Molyneux first posed the question in a letter to the great British thinker John Locke written 323 years ago. Imagine, Molyneux wrote, that a man blind from birth who has learned to identify objects - a sphere and a cube, for example - only through his sense of touch is suddenly able to see. The puzzle, he continued, is: "Whether he Could, by his Sight, and before he touch them, know which is the Globe and which the Cube?" For philosophers of the time, answering "Molyneux's question", as it became known, would resolve a fundamental uncertainty about the human mind. Empiricists believed that we are born blank slates, and become the sum total of our accumulated experience. So-called "nativists" countered that our minds are, from the outset, pre-stocked with ideas waiting to be activated by sight, sound and touch. If a blind man who miraculously recovered his sight could instantly distinguish the cube from the globe it would mean the knowledge was somehow innate, they argued. More recently, this "nurture vs. nature" debate has found its counterpart in modern neuroscience."