Heroes Not Zombies

When in Tokyo I always pay a visit to my favourite bookstore – Maruzen in Oaza at Maranouchi near Tokyo Central Station. I love the top floor with its interesting English language section and always find some book there that breaks new ground for me. This time it was Smart World by Richard Ogle (ISBN 978-0462099217). Unfortunately books can be very expensive in Japan and even if you can afford them luggage soon gets unmanageable when you stuff your bags with too many of them! So I decided to have a speed-read of this book at one of the reading tables by the window.

I don’t know if you ever speed-read a book but with non-fiction books its quite easy. Most well written books have good summaries at the end of each chapter so what I read was the introduction, then the summaries of all the chapters.

I read enough to be thoroughly fascinated by it. The author focuses on the new science of networks to create what he calls the nine laws of the science of creativity, his thesis being that creativity is an emergent process of the function of networks. He draws heavily on the ideas of Varela and others about the concept of the embodied mind – the idea that we cannot understand the mind if we attempt to contain it to what happens inside a skull but rather have to understand it as inextricably woven into the environments in which it exists. It’s a small step from here to the idea of the extended mind – a mind that stretches out to network with other minds. From here he develops the notion of “idea spaces” where we see hubs or “hotspots” develop in the network. In other language these are like the “attractors” of complex systems, or like the websites which attract huge numbers of visitors and links. Out of these hotspots, tipping points occur (you’ll have come across this term as the title of Malcolm Gladwell’s book. Again in the language of complex systems these are “bifurcators” where the system undergoes a “phase transition” into a totally new and changed state.

He links these ideas to the human facility of imagination and makes the point that if we progress solely on the basis of existing knowledge then we can improve incrementally but we never achieve the big, significant, creative leaps. These latter require us to imagine what doesn’t exist and what might well not succeed, but we leap, and when it works, the world has changed.

He gives numerous examples of this but the one that caught my eye was the ipod. The ipod has changed the music world considerably but for it to be created a number of elements had to fall into place – Napster and its success in spreading the habit of downloading music, the MP3 file as a small enough sized music file to allow easy downloading, the minaturisation of hard disc drives, and Steve Jobs move from Pixar where he had gained the respect and confidence of media companies which allowed for their licensing of their music catalogues to Apple, and Steve and his team themselves for their imagination, design flair and ability to create a product unlike any other the world had seen before – one that looked good, was SO simple to use and just worked.

I like these ideas and I think its interesting to read an author who uses the analogy of networks and network science to advance them. They are entirely consistent with what we learn from the science of complex systems.

Oh, I’ve ordered a copy of the book from Amazon Marketplace and hopefully it’ll arrive shortly after I return home. Then I’ll take a bit more time with it and see what other thoughts it provokes!