The Perks of Moving Through Boxes, Not Just Thinking Outside Them
Or, the perks of knowing a little about a lot of things
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Q: Why should we build multidisciplinary wisdom?
In the mid-1400s, the Rhineland region of Germany, which historically had been hostile to viticulture for climate reasons, was festooned with vine trellises. Steady tinkering of screw presses had greatly improved the model, thereby optimising it for mass production of wines.
Fuelled by its increased efficiency, German vineyards reached their peak in 1500, covering roughly four times as much land as they do now. It was hard work producing drinkable wine in a region that far north, but the mechanical efficiency of the screw press made it financially irresistible.
Sometime around the year 1440, a young Rhineland entrepreneur began tinkering with the design of the wine press. He was fresh from a disastrous business venture manufacturing small mirrors with supposedly magical healing powers.
The failure of the trinket business proved fortuitous, however, as it sent the entrepreneur down a much more ambitious path. He had immersed himself in the technology of Rhineland vintners, but Johannes Gutenberg was not interested in wine. He was interested in words.
Gutenberg’s printing press was a classic combinatorial innovation — more bricolage than breakthrough. Each of the key elements that made it such a transformative machine — the movable type, the ink, the paper, and the press itself — had been developed separately well before Gutenberg printed his first Bible.
Movable type, for instance, had been independently conceived in China four centuries before. But the Chinese and, subsequently, the Koreans failed to adapt the technology for the mass production of texts, in large part because they imprinted the letterforms on the page by hand rubbing, which made the process only slightly more efficient than an average medieval scribe.
But thanks to his training as a goldsmith, Gutenberg made some brilliant modifications to the metallurgy behind the movable type system, but without the press itself, his meticulous lead fonts would have been useless for creating mass-produced Bibles.
An important part of Gutenberg’s genius lay not in conceiving an entirely new technology from scratch, but instead from borrowing a mature technology from an entirely different field, and putting it to work to solve an unrelated problem.
Gutenberg had no formal experience pressing grapes. His radical breakthrough relied, instead, on the ubiquity of the screw press in Rhineland wine-making culture, and on his ability to reach out beyond his specific field of expertise and concoct new uses for an older technology.
Gutenberg took a machine designed to get people drunk and turned it into an engine for mass communication.
Today, let’s talk about creativity. More precisely, let’s talk about the importance of having a connected mind — one that knows a little bit about a lot of (seemingly unrelated) things — and how it can help us achieve creative breakthroughs.
In their influential 1971 essay, evolutionary biologists Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba observed that sometimes an organism develops a trait optimised for a specific use, but then the trait gets hijacked for a completely different function.
The classic example is bird feathers, which initially evolved for temperature regulation, helping nonflying dinosaurs from the Cretaceous period insulate themselves against cold weather.
But when some of their descendants, including a creature we now call Archaeopteryx, began experimenting with flight, feathers turned out to be useful for controlling the airflow over the surface of the wing, allowing those first birds to glide.
Stephen Jay Gould and Elisabeth Vrba coined a term for this phenomenon: exaptation.
If mutation and error and serendipity unlock new doors, 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 helps you see in one context ends up helping you keep warm in another. That’s the essence of exaptation.
Interestingly, the history of the World Wide Web is, in a sense, a story of continuous exaptation. Tim Berners-Lee designed the original protocols with a specifically academic environment in mind, creating a platform for sharing research in a hypertext format.
But when the first Web pages crawled out of that scholarly primordial soup and began to engage with ordinary consumers, Berners-Lee’s invention turned out to possess a remarkable number of unanticipated qualities.
A platform adapted for scholarship was exapted for shopping, and sharing photos, and watching porn — along with a thousand other uses that would have astounded Berners-Lee when he created his first HTML-based directories in the early nineties.
When Sergey Brin and Larry Page decided to use links between Web pages as digital votes endorsing the content of those pages, they were exapting Berners-Lee’s original design: they took a trait adapted for navigation — the hypertext link — and used it as a vehicle for assessing quality. The result was PageRank, the original algorithm that made Google into the behemoth that it is today.
All decisive events in the history of scientific thought can be described in terms of mental cross-fertilisation between different disciplines. The history of scientific and technological innovation abounds exaptation.
Concepts from one domain migrate to another as a kind of structuring metaphor, thereby unlocking some secret door that had long been hidden from view.
In his memoirs, Francis Crick reports that he first hit upon the complementary replication system of DNA — each base A matched with a T, and each C with a G — by thinking of the way a work of sculpture can be reproduced by making an impression in plaster, and then using that impression, when dry, as a mould to create copies.
Johannes Kepler credited his laws of planetary motion to a generative metaphor imported from religion. He imagined the sun, stars, and the dark space between them as the celestial equivalents of the Father, Son, and Holy Ghost.
When computer science pioneers Doug Engelbart and Alan Kay invented the graphical interface, they imported a metaphor from the real-world environment of offices. Instead of organising information on the screen as a series of command-line inputs, the way a programmer would, they borrowed the iconography of a desktop with pieces of paper stacked on it.
The legendary organic chemist August Kekulé didn’t think the benzene molecule was literally a snake from Greek mythology, but his knowledge of that ancient symbol helped him solve one of the essential problems of organic chemistry.
In the early 1970s, a Berkeley sociologist named Claude Fischer began investigating the social effects of living in dense urban centres. Fischer set out to determine what social patterns were truly precipitated by the environment of large cities. His research led him to one overwhelming conclusion: big cities nurture subcultures much more effectively than suburbs or small towns.
Lifestyles or interests that deviate from the mainstream need critical mass to survive. They atrophy in smaller communities not because those communities are more repressive, but rather because the odds of finding like-minded people are much lower with a smaller pool of individuals.
If one-tenth of one percent of the population are passionately interested in, say, beetle collecting or improv theatre, there might only be a dozen such individuals in a midsized town. But in a big city there might be thousands. As Fischer noted, that clustering creates a positive feedback loop, as the more unconventional residents of the suburbs or rural areas migrate to the city in search of fellow travellers.
The theory explains the ‘evil’ and ‘good’ of cities simultaneously. Criminal unconventionality and innovative unconventionality are both nourished by vibrant subcultures. Poetry collectives and street gangs might seem miles apart on the surface, but they each depend on the city’s capacity for nurturing subcultures.
Cities, therefore, are environments that are ripe for exaptation, because they cultivate specialised skills and interests, and they create a liquid network where information can leak out of those subcultures, and influence their neighbours in surprising ways. This is one explanation for superlinear scaling in urban creativity.
The cultural diversity those subcultures create is valuable not just because it makes urban life less boring. The value also lies in the unlikely migrations that happen between the different clusters. A world where a diverse mix of distinct professions and passions overlap is a world where exaptations thrive.
Those shared environments often take the form of a real-world public space, what the sociologist Ray Oldenburg famously called the third place — a connective environment distinct from the more insular world of home or office, such as, a coffeehouse.
The eighteenth-century English coffeehouse fertilised countless Enlightenment-era innovations; everything from the science of electricity, to the insurance industry, to democracy itself.
Freud maintained a celebrated salon Wednesday nights at 19 Berggasse in Vienna, where physicians, philosophers, and scientists gathered to help shape the emerging field of psychoanalysis.
Think, too, of the Paris cafés where so much of modernism was born. Or the legendary Homebrew Computer Club in the 1970s, where a ragtag assemblage of amateur hobbyists, teenagers, digital entrepreneurs, and academic scientists managed to spark the personal computer revolution.
Participants flock to these spaces partly for the camaraderie of others who share their passions, and no doubt that support network increases the engagement and productivity of the group.
But encouragement does not necessarily lead to creativity. Instead, collisions do. The collisions that happen when different fields of expertise converge in some shared physical or intellectual space. That’s where the true sparks fly.
It is an oft-told story that Darwin delayed publishing his theory of evolution because he feared the controversy it would unleash, particularly after the death of his beloved daughter Annie traumatised his religious wife, Emma.
But Darwin also had an immense number of side interests to distract him from his opus: he studied coral reefs, bred pigeons, performed elaborate taxonomical studies of beetles and barnacles, wrote important papers on the geology of South America, spent years researching the impact of earthworms on the soil.
None of these passions were central to the argument that would eventually be published as On the Origin of Species, but each contributed useful links of association and expertise to the problem of evolution.
The same eclectic pattern appears in countless other biographies. One such example is the English physician John Snow — who is considered one of the founders of modern epidemiology, in part because of his work in tracing the source of a cholera outbreak in Soho, London, in 1854.
While Snow was solving the mystery of cholera in the streets of London in the 1850s, he was also inventing state-of-the-art technology for the administration of ether, publishing research on lead poisoning and the resuscitation of stillborn children, yet all the while tending to his patients as a general practitioner.
Legendary innovators like Snow and Darwin all possess some common intellectual qualities — a certain quickness of mind, unbounded curiosity — but they also share one other defining attribute. They have a lot of hobbies.
For John Snow, there were fundamentally different modes of intellectual activity involved in his many projects: building mechanical contraptions to control the temperature of chloroform required different skills and a different mind-set from tending to patients or writing papers for The Lancet.
While one project takes centre stage for a series of hours or days, another projects linger in the margins of consciousness throughout. This cognitive overlap is the key. This allows for the current project to exapt ideas from the projects at the margins, thereby making new connections.
It is not so much a question of thinking outside the box, as it is allowing the mind to move through multiple boxes.
That movement from box to box forces the mind to approach intellectual roadblocks from new angles, or to borrow tools from one discipline to solve problems in another.
The standard story about Snow is that he solved the mystery of cholera’s waterborne transmission by doing shoe-leather epidemiological detective work during the 1854 Soho outbreak, but the truth is he had built a convincing rendition of the waterborne theory well before 1854.
One reason he was able to see around the biases of the reigning “miasma” theory of the day — which maintained that cholera was caused by the inhalation of noxious vapours — is that his work with anaesthesia had given him a hands-on knowledge of the way that gases diffused through the atmosphere.
Snow reasoned that a disease transmitted by poisonous gas would leave a distinct pattern in the geographic spread of mortality: massive death in the immediate proximity of the bad smells, tapering off very quickly as one moved away from the original source.
By the same token, Snow’s training as a physician helped him shed the miasma blinders as well: from tending to patients ill with cholera, Snow observed that the effects of the disease on the human body indicated that the agent had been ingested, not inhaled, given that it did almost all of its direct damage in the digestive system and left the lungs largely unaffected.
In a real sense, for Snow to make his great breakthrough in understanding cholera, he had to think like a molecular chemist and like a physician. As a man with multiple hobbies and multidisciplinary wisdom, he had those interpretative systems readily available to him when his focus turned to the mystery of cholera.
As with the feathers of Archaeopteryx, Snow couldn’t have anticipated that his mechanical tinkering with chloroform inhalers would prove useful in ridding the modern world of a deadly bacterium, but that is the unpredictable power of exaptations. Chance favours the connected mind. And like evolution, the perks of having multiple hobbies makes sense only in retrospect.
Today I Learned
Think of the last time someone handed you a red, juicy apple. You reached out for it, took a bite, and experienced the tart flavour. During those moments, neurons were firing in the sensory and motor regions of your brain.
Motor neurons fired to produce your movements, and sensory neurons fired to process your sensations of the apple, like its red colour with a blush of green; its smoothness against your hand; its crisp, floral scent; the audible crunch when you bit into it; and its tangy taste with a hint of sweetness.
Other neurons made your mouth water to release enzymes and begin digestion, released cortisol to prepare your body to metabolise the sugars in the apple, and perhaps made your stomach churn a bit.
But here’s the cool thing: just now, when you read the word “apple,” your brain responded to a certain extent as if an apple were actually present.
Your brain combined bits and pieces of knowledge of previous apples you’ve seen and tasted, and tweaked the firing of neurons in your sensory and motor regions to construct a mental instance of the concept “Apple.” It all happened as quickly and automatically as a heartbeat.
This little magic trick of the brain is so common and normal that psychologists discovered it time and time again before they understood how it worked. Let’s call it simulation.
Simulation can be visual, or involve any of your other senses. Ever have a song playing in your head that you can’t get rid of ? That audio hallucination is also a simulation.
Your past experiences — from direct encounters, from photos, from movies and books — give meaning to your present sensations. Additionally, the entire process of construction is invisible to you. No matter how hard you try, you cannot observe yourself or experience yourself constructing the image.
If you take mashed food — potatoes, lentils, eggs, and so on — and artfully smear it on a diaper and present it to others, so it looked exactly like baby poo, even though they may know that the smears are food, they would still gag from the “simulated” smell.
Simulations are your brain’s guesses of what’s happening in the world. In every waking moment, you’re faced with ambiguous, noisy information from your eyes, ears, nose, and other sensory organs. Your brain uses your past experiences to construct a hypothesis — the simulation — and compares it to the cacophony arriving from your senses.
In this manner, simulation lets your brain impose meaning on the noise, selecting what’s relevant and ignoring the rest.
Timeless Insight
Children find studies boring because they don’t have skin in the game. They split light beams in the lab only to confirm an already proven experiment, not to try to question it, or study the conditions when an experiment fails. They do maths only to find a known answer, not to discover better ways to solve a problem.
But children love playing cricket because there’s risk and uncertainty. Unlike studies and school exams, there are no pre-set rules to follow that would ensure a win. Instead, there are strategies to tinker with. There are popular ideas to tweak and modify. No two games are ever alike. Unlike school studies, there’s plenty of experimentation involved in cricket. No wonder they are perpetually bored in schools.
What I’m Reading
Scientific method seeks to understand things as they are, while alchemy seeks to bring about a desired state of affairs. To put it another way, the primary objective of science is truth, — that of alchemy, operational success.
— George Soros, The Alchemy of Finance
Tiny Thought
Mental upside comes from the thrill of anticipation. In comparison, the actual experience always tends to fall flat.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋