Steven Johnson keeps popping up for me lately. I heard a great interview by Ira Flatow on Science Friday. And, this interview (link below) here is also great, going deeper into the Johnson-sphere. Furthermore, this interview points to my poison, what I call 'cognections – cognitive connections'. It's my greatest weakness to want to traverse these connections
Link [via Andrew]: Powells.com Interviews – Steven Johnson
Johnson: It's the one place where there's actually a connection between Everything Bad and Ghost Map. It was basically making the Consilience argument: that one of the most powerful ways of thinking about the world is being able to move across scales of experience. Basically, moving across disciplines. For instance, from the scale of the bacterium to the scale of the human body, to the brain, to society or the city, and to not be focused on any one of those levels but to jump in a consilient way between them and make connections and talk about how behavior on one level predicts or creates behavior on another.
EO Wilson, of ant society and ecology fame, wrote a great book called Consilience, which called out to me as I got deeper and deeper into my own science specialty. Being overly curious, I've always hopped around different scientific domains, finding bits and pieces from each that, when put side to side, led to a wider understanding of the world (kinda how I ended up here).
In the same vein, there are the books by James Burke (one is called The Pinball Effect). He starts with a topic and keeps following connections to related topics until he's taken you on an engaging tour of time and space and knowledge (true cognections), often back to where you started. Burke's books are highly recommended.
In another connections (ha!), Will Wright, of 'The Sims' fame, is coming out with Spore, a game that basically traverses life from single-cellular organism all the way to star-faring civilizations. Awesome.
BTW, when I write stuff like this here, it's to set you off on a cognitive exploration, too. 🙂
