Some we love, some we hate, some we eat by Hal Herzog

Some we love, some we hate, some we eat by Hal Herzog
Why it’s so hard to think straight about animals

[Book is looking into all aspects of the human-animal relations, provides reasonable reasons; though did not provide any scientific evidence for such relationships; it is more complicated topic.]

Do people really look like their dogs? The researchers came up with two possible reasons why people might look like their dogs - convergence and selection. The convergence theory is that owner and pet acutely grow to look more alike over the years. On the surface, the idea seems nutty. However there is evidence that couples who have been married for a long time, do in fact converge in the way their faces look. Plus, obese people tend to have overweight dogs. The selection theory in contrast holds that we unconsciously seek animals that look like us when picking a pet.

Do dog people and cat people have different personalities? Psychologists have been arguing about the nature of human personality for a hundred years. One issue they fight about is how many personality traits there are. While there are few holdouts, most psychologists agree that we can get a good description of a person’s personality by measuring five basic traits (technically it is referred as five factor model). They are

Openness versus close to experience
Conscientiousness versus impulsiveness
Extroversion vs. Introversion
Agreeableness vs. Antagonism
Neuroticism vs. Emotional Stability.

A small survey (2099 dog people & 527 cat people) reveals the following
Dog people are more extroverted, agreeable, conscientious
Cat people are more neurotic, more open to new experiences.

Why so many Americans afraid of snake? After all, you are more likely to be killed by a dog than a snake. Is ophidophobia a relic of Bronze age myths featuring serpents, naked women and apples? Scientists have been arguing for 200 hundred years about the relative importance of nature and nurture in development of snake fears. Susan Mineka argues that in monkey, fear of snake is learned. She found that Rheus monkeys captured in the wild were terrified of snakes but that monkeys born in captivity showed no fear of them. However many of the animals were absolutely terrified of the snakes even though they had never seen one before. Nature plays a role in snake fears. Some part of the world (Africa,) they are not afraid of snakes. The idea that both genes and environment influence our attitudes towards animals,

Is pet love in our genes?

On the question of ‘why pets’ anthrozoologists have offered a wide variety of explanations for the human-animal bond.

Pet teach kindness and responsibility to children
Pet provide ‘ontological security’ in postmodern age in which traditional values and social networks have broken down
Like ornamental gardens, pets are expression of the human need to dominate nature
Pets allow the middle class to pretend they are rich
Pets substitute for human friends.
Pets and people are autonomous beings who gain mutual comfort and enjoyment from their interactions

The human being is the only animal that keeps members of other species for extended periods of time purely for enjoyment.

Why is the list of animals so long, yet by comparison, the number of creatures whose flesh we regularly eat so short (mostly beef, pork, chicken and lamp). One reason is availability. Personal experience also comes into play. Like rats, humans have evolved a special ability to associate the taste of food with nausea and vomiting. The most important influence on whether we find a food delicious or disgusting is culture. Chinese and Koreans eat dogs, but not the rest of the world. In classical Hinduism, dogs were the outcasts of the animal world. They were despised because they were said to have sex with their own family members, and eat vomit, feces and corpses. Most interpretation of Islamic law also regard dogs as unclean. Americans and Europeans don’t consume dog flesh because they are considered as family members and hence eating them is tantamount to cannibalism.

With the new science of anthrozoology reveals is that our attitudes, behaviors and relationships with the animals in our lives - the ones we love, ones we hate, and the one we eat - are, likewise more complicated than we thought.

Merchant King - by Stephen R Bown

Merchant King - by Stephen R Bown
When companies ruled the world from 1600 -1900

[It is quite intriguing to know that companies where controlling vast number of countries outside Europe. The book covers each of these six companies chieftain’s impact in the world]

From the early 1600 to the late 1800s, monopoly trading companies were the unofficial agents of European expansion, controlling vast numbers of people and huge tracts of land and taking on governmental and military functions. They managed their territories as business interests, treating their subjects as employees, customers or competitors. The leaders of these trading enterprises exercised virtually unaccountable dictatorial political power over millions of people.

The merchant kings of the age of heroic commerce were a rogue's gallery of larger than life men who for a couple of hundred years, expanded their flag-flung commercial enterprises over a sizable portion of the world. They include Jan Pieterszoon Coen, the violent and autocratic pioneer of the Dutch East India company; Peter Stuyvesant, the one-legged Governor of the Dutch West India Company whose narrow-minded approach lost Manhattan to the British; Robert Clive who rose from company clerk to become head of the British east India company and one of the wealthiest men in Britain. Alexander Baranov of the Russian American Company: Cecil Rhodes, founder of De Beers and Rhodesia and George Simpson, the Little Emperor of the Hudson Bay Company who was chauffeured about his vast fur domain in a giant canoe, exhorting his voyageurs to paddle harder so he could set speed records.

Merchant Kings looks at the rise and fall of company rule in the centuries before colonialism, when nations belatedly assumed responsibility for their commercial enterprises.

“Whosoever commands the trade of the world, commands the riches of the world and consequently the world itself” Sir Walter Raleigh,1600.

Jan Pieterszoon Coen was the ruthless pioneer of the Dutch East India Company, a trading enterprise that within its first two decades was in conflict with nearly every maritime nation in the world. During his reign, the company became the foundation for the wealth of the Netherlands's golden age by supplying most of Europe with exotic spices. His famous line: “Your Honors should know by experience that trade in Asia must be driven and maintained under the protection and favor of Your Honors’ own weapons and that the weapons must be paid for by the profits from the trade, so that we cannot carry on trade without war, nor war without trade”

The one-legged Pieter Stuyvesant was the autocratic governor of the Dutch West India Company’s colony at Manhattan. For decades he resisted all attempted by the increasing numbers of non-employee citizens of the expanding colony to provide responsible government. He ultimately placed his company’s interest ahead of those his country, an approach that resulted in the loss of entire territory of New Netherlands to a foreign power (Britain), surrendered without firing a shot. His famous line: “We derive our authority from God and the West India Company, not from the pleasure of a few ignorant subjects.”

The English trader Rober Clive rose who despite having no formal training, was a military genius who transformed the company’s fortune’s with a series of astonishing military victories, using company troops, over French East India Company and various local rulers in India during the dying days of the Mughal Empire. When in 1772, he was questioned by Parliament about his possible corruption and the source of his wealth, he indignantly proclaimed: “I stand astonished at my own moderation”. His famous line: “Consider the situation in which the victory of Plassey placed me. A great prince was dependent on my pleasure; an opulent city lay at my mercy; its richest bankers bid against each other for my smiles; I walked through vaults which were thrown open to me open, piled on either hand with gold and jewels. Mr. Charmin, at this moment, I stand astonished at my own moderation.”

Aggressive and efficient, Aleksadr Andreyevich Barnov was an itinerant Russian merchant and trader who first migrated east of Siberia then to Alaska. In 1779 he assumed command of the Russian American Company, a semi-official monopoly colonial trading company chartered by Czar Paul I. He solidified his country’s territorial claims on the frontier and extracting vast quantities of sea otter furs for the company’s shareholders and directors in St. Peters-burg. his famous line: “Since my life is in constant danger not only form the hostility of wild tribes but from men often unwilling to submit to discipline, since my strength is exhausted and my health dissipated battling the hardships I have had to endure, I feel that natural time, the hour of my death, is for me more uncertain than for most men, and therefore I make my will.”

George Simpson was the financial and structural genius who steered the Hudson’s Bay Company to its greatest financial success and territorial domination in the early 19th century. Responsible for shipping hundreds of thousands of beaver furs to London every year. After he died in 1860, most of Simpson’s domain passed from the Hudson’s Bay Company’s power and became part of the new nation of Canada. His famous line:” I consider it quite unnecessary to indent for Sauces and Pickles on public account... I never use fish sauce in the country and never saw anyone use it or pickles either. From the quantity of Mustard indented for, one would suppose it is now issued as an article of trade with the Indians.”

Cecil John Rhodes, the British born South African mining magnate, politician businessman and racist promoter of British colonialism was the founder of the diamond company De Beers. In 1899 he secured British government support for the creation of the British south Africa company to operate in Rhodesia , a territory he created and ‘allowed’ to be named after himself. his famous line:” Great Britain is a very small island. Great Britain's position depends on her trade, and if we do not open up the dependencies of the world which are at present devoted to barbarism, we shall shut out the world’s trade. It must be brought home to you that your trade is the world, and your life is the world, not England. That is why you must deal with these questions of expansion and retention of the world.”

They were vested with enormous powers by both their companies and their countries, yet there was a clear conflict of interest between advancing the business interests of companies and acting as civil authorities. By making far reaching decision according to their conflicted consciousness, the merchant kings had a profound influence. Companies are not generally known for having sweeping political control, but trying to balance interests of their companies with the interests of their countries, the merchant kings changed history as significantly as the most celebrated military generals, political leaders and technological innovators did.

The seven deadly sins: pride, greed, sloth, lust, envy, wrath, and gluttony.
The seven virtues: humility, charity, diligence, chastity, kindness, patience and temperance.

Among the merchant kings, the seven deadly sins might seem overrepresented, but there was goodness in most of them too.

The secret of Chanel No. 5 by Tilar J. Mazzeo

The secret of Chanel No. 5 by Tilar J. Mazzeo
The intimate history of the world’s most famous perfume.

[Whoever wants to know the science behind famous perfumes, this is a good starter.]

Coco Before Chanel No. 5

Gabrielle Chanel(Coco Chanel) has a peasant's roots went deep into the earth of provincial southwestern France. Mother died when Coco Chanel was just 12 years old and her father soon, left her along with her two sisters at an orphanage Aubazine. During their time at the orphanage, Coco Chanel and other girls were assigned to read and reread the story of St. Etienne‘s story of exemplary life and unrelenting dullness of his good deeds is crushing. The saintly Etienne however had a keen sense of aesthetics at a moment when Western culture’s ideas about beauty and proportion were in radical transition.

For the children who lived there, it was a youth of hard work and strict discipline and fortunately for the future prospects of the young Gabrielle, much of it focused on clothing. There was nothing luxurious about it, however Days were spent washing laundry and mending and it was here that she learned to sew. However it was a desperately unhappy childhood; Aubazine was a word throughout her life that Coco Chanel would never speak. She surrounded it in silence and mystery and it remained a guarded and shameful secret.

Coco Chanel once later said that fashion was architecture and the architecture she meant was based on this convent home with its brutally clean lines and the stark beauty of simple contrasts. It was at the heart of Coco Chanel’s aesthetics - her obsession with purity and minimalism. It would shape the dresses she designed and the way she lived. it would shape Chanel No. 5 her great olfactory creation, no less profoundly.

Standing amid the scene of Coco Chanel’s childhood, the power of Aubazine is obvious. It possesses a striking and silent kind of beauty. Everywhere in the world of Aubazine, there were scents and symbols and reminders of the importance of perfume. St. Bernard of Clairvaux who founded the Cistercian movement, made a point of encouraging his monks to give perfume and anointment a central role in prayer and in rituals of purification. Someone got the idea that this contemplation would be even more effective if it were combined with time spent simultaneously sniffing the aromas of the local jasmine, lavender and roses.

Etienne has made a mission of planting richly scented flower everywhere in the empty ravines and wastes around his abbeys. They were the bracing scents of order and severity. Everywhere at Aubazine was the aroma of sheets boiled in copper pots sweetened with dried roots of iris and the aromas of ironing. There was the scent from linen cupboards lined with pungent rosewood and verbena. There was the smell of raw tallow soap on children’s skin and ruthlessly scoured little bodies. It was the scent of everything that was clean. Aubazine was a secret code of smell and in the years to come it would be at the heart of everything she would find beautiful.

The number five at Aubazine, though was always considered special. It was the number of an essentially human kind of destiny. Or, that, at least was the idea of the monks who funded Coco Chanle’s childhood abbey and they built its entire structure on the power of this special number. For Cistercian architecture that flourished in Europe during Crusades, the number five was central. Cistercian cathedrals, churches and abbeys are built on measures... which equal more or less the golden ration of Pythagoras. It is the ration of both the five-pointed star and the human form.

Coco Chanel understood the power of this number long before the nuns introduced the children to the esoteric symbolism of the abbey’s architecture and its spiritual meaning in their lessons. The number five, she believed profoundly in its magic and its beauty. Those Cistercian nuns had raised their orphan charges to revere the power of symbols and spirit. In this ancient branch of the Catholic faith, it was a special number. - the number of quintessence: the pure and perfect embodiment of a thing’s essence. It was also, in a material universe of earth, water, wind, and fire, that other thing - ether, spirit - something mysteriously and untouchably beautiful. She also already knew that the number five was about women in particular. From the beginning, the number five and its perfect proportions were tangled up with the secret sensuality of their allure - and with symbolism of flowers.

An education in the senses

Roses and jasmine were scents that told two very different olfactory stories about the women who wore them. The traditional scents for women’s perfume roses were discreetly and quietly lovely. Respectful women could wear them without hesitation, and until the second decade of the twentieth century, floral perfumes came in just one style, the style known today as soliflores. These soliflores were perfumes that captured aroma of a single flower and they were meant to be representational.

It wasn’t until 1912 that the perfume house of Houbigant launched the first true multiflore fragrance, a scent known simply as Quelques Fleurs. It was the scent of an invented and imagined and lovely floral creation. It becomes an instant sensation and the idea behind it -the idea of the essential abstraction - was one that Coco Chanel found utterly fascinating.

As Coco Chanel quickly learned, the essentials of appreciating a fine fragrance begin with this art of blending aromas. Those who make perfumes talk about those scents in terms of accords and scent families and this language is key to gaining a connoisseur's appreciation for the art of perfume. Accords are a group of scents that blend naturally and provocatively together and in blending transform each other. They are fragrance within a fragrance, the building block of a complex perfume and these accords are how experts define the different fragrance families.

When Cleopatra famously set sail to meet Mark Anthony, the perfumed herself with sandalwood and filled the air with an incense of cinnamon, myrrh and frankincense. At the end of the 19th century perfumers added to the warn, spicy aroma of those oriental ambers - another set of fragrance notes, another accord, based around animal muck and orchid scents of vanilla.

At the time when Coco Chanel was learning about perfume, Aime Guerlain’s ‘ferociously modern’ scent Jicky was considered the ultimate oriental. In fact, for many admires it still is. Invented in 1899, Jicky was the first fragrance to use the then -exotic scent of patchouli, to which Guerlain added the aroma of vanilla (combine natural and synthetic essences). According to folklore, the classic oriental perfume Shalimar - Jicky’s only rival as an oriental ‘reference’ perfume- was invented in the 1920 when Jacques Guerlain wondered what the perfume would smell like if he added an even larger dose of vanilla. The result was pure magic. On the market today, familiar mass-market oriental perfumes include CK’s Obsession, & YSL’s Opium. Oriental perfume meant to capture the scent of the East.

The perfumes known as leathers were also a modern innovation in perfume-making. the scent in fact have no leather in them, and they depend on the late 19th century discovery of the scent materials known as quinolines. It was the smell of the rare leathers used at the imperial courts to wrap precious jewels. Familiar staples today include perfumes such as Dior’s Fahrenheit and Lancome’s Cuir.

Then there is the scent of chypre - history’s first international bestseller, the only rival in the long history of perfume-making to compare with Chanel No.5. The world’s oldest perfume family and Aphrodite’s scent sensation, it was popular until the mid-18th century when it mysteriously fell out of fashion. There are still the essential notes of the family of fragrance known to perfumers as a chypre. Today, the family includes fragrance such as Esteee Lauder's Knowing and Dior's Miss Dior.

After all, like the scent of fougere fragrances, Quelques Fleurs and these new multi-flowers that followed in the course of the next decade were wonderfully conceptual. In order to create these effects - transforming the real emotive perfumery - they turned to something else completely modern: the science of scent creation. The perfumer behind the Quelques Fleurs was Robert Bienaime who was a revolutionary and used largely unknown material known as aldehydes. The combination allowed for the artistic creation of a scent that was powerfully original.

Coco Chanel wanted to create a signature perfume. She said, “The perfume many women use is not mysterious. Women are not flowers. Why should they want to smell like flowers? I want to give women an artificial perfume and should smell like a woman and not like a flower”. Smell was always the keenest of her senses and to explain the intensity of how she lived with the scent, she would claim, “In the lily of the valley they sell on the 1st of May, I can smell the hands of the kid who picked it”.


The Prince and the perfumer

For Coco Chanel, precision was a religion. When she decided on something, she followed her idea to the end. In order to bring it off, and succeed she brought everything into play. Once she began to be interested in perfumery, she wanted to learn everything about them - their formula, fabrication, and so forth. Naturally she sought the best advice.

After the first world, the south of France in 1920 was known as crazy years. Women sunbathed on the beaches wearing ropes of pearls, and the Bohemian rich staggered tipsy from extravagant party. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote of those times, ‘it was a whole race going hedonistic, deciding on pleasure”.

Throughout France in the years that followed, refugee princesses worked as seamstresses and the handful of royal men lucky enough to have been at that moment in history somewhere far from St.Petersburg now took the job as salesmen. Coco Chanel took one of the exiled princes as her new lover. His name was Dmitri Pavlovich and he was among the grand dukes of Russia and a cousin to the last czar, Nicholas II - who has been murdered along with nearly all Dmitri’s family in the revolution. Like Coco, Dmitri had been raised an orphan.

Due to incidents happened in czar family; Dmitri might someday inherit the imperial throne. All that talk of inheriting an empire ended in 1916 when Dmirti was 25. Horrified by the power of the ‘mad monk’ - Grigori Rasputin - over the czarina and by the whispered talk of a palace revolt. The prince (Dmitri) and the duke were horrified and they resolved to take action. First they poisoned Rasputin with wine dosed with massive quantities of Cyanide. When he failed to die, the prince shot him. According to the gruesome legend, Rasputin survived another three gunshots in the back and when the bullets too seemed eerily ineffective, the young men finally drowned him beneath the ice of the city’s frozen river. When Dmitri’s role in the murder was discovered, the enraged czarina exiled him out of Russia. This resulted in, Dmirit not being killed by the Bolsheviks during the Russian revolution in which revolutionist killed all czar and czarina , princess and princesses.

The past Dmitri remembered was filled with every imaginable luxury and always with the richness of perfume. There was one perfume, Dmitri remembered piercingly: an eau de cologne with the rich notes of rose and jasmine. Made in Moscow by the firm of A. Rallet and Company and it was known as Rallet O-De-Kolon No.1 Vesovoi or simply Rallet No. 1 perfume. It had been royal favorite and the czarian cherished it especially.

Coco Chanel told him of the smells and all those sensations that she wanted a scent to capture. In return, he told her of that scent he above all remembered, the Rallet No. 1 and connected her with the royal perfumer -Ernet Beaux - who also forced to flee due to the effect of the revolution. Coco Chanel had asked Ernest Beaux that summer to create for her the signature perfume she was imagining and she wanted a sultry freshness, which he accepted with reluctance.

Ernest Beaux had joined the firm’s of Rallet as a young man in Moscow in 1898. he possessed a dazzling talent, Erner’s first blockbuster fragrance, a men’s cologne called le Bouquet de Napoleon - Napoleon’s Bouquet - hit the international market in 1912. Encouraged by the popularity of the perfume, company urged him to create a new women’s perfume in time for the celebration of the three-hundred-year anniversary of the Romanov dynasty in 1913. le Bouquet de Catherine was a perfume that he invented and it became simply Rallet No. 1

Based upon the Rallet No. 1, Ernest Beaux created 10 perfumes for Coco Chanel to select from. Each of these small glass vials containing 10 samples of the perfume a new fragrance innovation based on the core scents of May Rose, jasmine and those daring new fragrance molecules known as aldehydes. According to legend, in one of the vials a careless laboratory assistant had accidentally added a massive overdose of this last and still largely undiscovered ingredient, confusing a 10 percent dilution for the pure, full-strength material. Coco Chanel picked this vials and named it as Chanel No. 5 where five was her mystic number from her Aubazine days. And the day she select to announce new perfumes, are usually on the 5th day of the 5th month of the year.

Generally speaking, there are three kinds of materials that are used to make perfume - scents inspired by flowers; scents inspired by other parts of plants, such as their roots, barks, and resins; and the scents inspired by the smells of animals. Chanel No. 5 - one of history’s most famously sexy perfume - uses them all in generous doses.

Scents inspired by flowers
Roses and jasmines may not seem likely to smell like sweat and bodies, but to think otherwise would be wrong. As scientists who study the sexiness of perform explains, “Many classical ingredients of natural origins reminiscent of human body orders”. Among most inherently sensual have always been the scents of jasmine, orange blossom, honeysuckle, tuberose, and ylang-ylang, flowers that chemically speaking, have particularly high propositions of the scent molecule known as an indole. These indoles are the smell of something sweet and fleshy and just a little bit dirty.

Scents inspired by plants:
The same is true of those delicious plant resins: “several ingredients of incense resembles scents of the human body”, one expert reminds us. When the perfumer Paul Jellinek was writing the standard text book on the science of fragrance chemistry; he testing on traditional incenses showed that myrrh and frankincense had identifiable notes of armpit odor; a common plat source known as storax was the scent of skin; and the coveted resinous gum known as labdanum has ‘the smell of head hair’. When any of them were added to a simple, fruity eau de cologne, people consistently rated the perfume as more sexy. With its fragrant central notes of labdanum and storax, Aphrodite’s perfume was an erotic bestseller for a reason.

Scents inspired by animal:
The perfume materials that have the most direct connection to the smell of sex, however are the traditional musks. Smelled on their own, the scent is often overpowering and even revolting. Yet used in small proportions and blended with other fragrance, these materials, with their strange and unsavory origins, have been among the most prized ingredients in perfume industry. They come primarily from the private parts of some very unlucky fellow creatures whose glands and sexual excretions have been harvested. Natural musk - musk proper - comes from the male musk deer, an animal native to China and Southeast Asia and the fluid stored in a small sac in his nether regions during the rutting season has been the object of a lucrative international trade for centuries. The word musk comes from the Sanskrit word, ‘muska’ which translates simply as testicle.

But aldehyde is just a part of what makes Chanel No.5 special, despite the importance given to them in the legend. Long after they have faded - because aldehyde fades quickly - there is a rich depth of musks and florals in the perfume that is strikingly sensual.

To balance the severity in Chanel No. 5, Ernest added even greater amounts of the exquisite jasmine from the perfume capital of Grasse, opulent and honeyed enough to leave the senses swimming. He warned Coco Chanel that a perfume with this much jasmine, would be fabulously expensive. She simply told him that, in that case, he should add even more. She wanted the most extravagant perfume in the world.

The basic structure of the human brain means that scent and sensuality are hopelessly and wonderfully caught up together in a network of desire. This was at the heart of Coco Chanel’s relationship to No. 5 perfume.

Today, a pound of jasmine absolute sells for more than $30,000. It was already fabulously expensive in the 1930s. Nearly 350 pounds of jasmine - over a half-million flowers - go into a pound of jasmine concrete and in each small , thirty-milliliter bottle of Chanel No. 5 perfume, is the essence of more than a thousand jasmine flowers and the bouquet of a dozen roses.

Where good ideas come from by Steven Johnson.

Where good ideas come from by Steven Johnson.
The natural history of innovation.

[This book stresses the importance of the network. Completely different outlook from ‘wisdom of the crowds and says, it is the wisdom of the person in the crowd makes it big rather than the wisdom of the crowd itself. I did prove it in my series of projects (me vs. groups) where the group’s output comes down to the average of everyone in the group’s performance. Secondly, the author compared coral reef to big cities for creating an ‘ecosystem’ for generating new ideas]

Scientists and animal lovers observed that as life gets bigger, it slows down the heart rate. Flies live for hours or days; elephants live for half-centuries (Female elephants give birth at intervals of about every 5 years, with a gestation period of 2 years; can bear up to 6 babies in a lifetime). A horse might be five hundred times slower than the rabbits, yet its pulse certainly wasn’t five hundred times slower than the rabbits. Swiss scientist Max Kleiber and his peers analyzed the clearer the equation: metabolism scales to mass to the negative quarter power. The math is simple enough. you take the square root of 1000 which is approx. 31 and take square root of 31 which is approx. 5.5. This means, that a cow which is roughly 1000 times heavier than a woodchuck, will on average live 5.5 times longer and have a heart rate that is 5.5 time slower than woodchuck.

Over the ensuing decades, Kleiber’s law was extended down to the microscopic scale of bacteria and cell metabolism; even plants were found to obey negative quarter-power scaling in their patters of growth. Several years ago, the theoretical physicist Geoffrey West decided to investigate whether Klieber’s law applied to human build cities. Did the ‘metabolism’ of urban life slow down as cities grew in size? The result was, ‘A city that was ten times larger than its neighbor wasn’t ten times more innovative, but 17 times more innovative. A metropolis fifty times bigger than a town was 130 times more innovative. the average resident of a metropolis with a population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the average resident of a town of hundred thousand.

When we look back to the original innovation engine on earth, we find two essential properties. First, a capacity to make new connections with as many other elements possible. And second, a ‘randomizing’ environment that encourages collisions between all the elements in the system. On earth, the story of life’s creativity begins with a liquid, high-density network: connection-hungry carbon atoms colliding with other elements in the primordial soup. The molecules they formed mark the point at which chemistry and physics gave way to biology.

Why are we so confident about carbon’s essential role in creating living things? The answer has to do with the core properties of the carbon atom itself. Carbon has four valance electrons residing in the outermost shell of the atom which for complicated reason makes it uniquely talented at forming connections with other atoms, particularly with Hydrogen, nitrogen, oxygen, phosphorus, sulfur - and crucially with other carbon atoms. These six atoms make up 99 percent of the dry weight of all living organisms in earth. Those four valance bonds give carbon a strong propensity for forming elaborate chains and rings of polymers.

Computer scientist Christopher Langton sometimes use the metaphor of different phases of matter - gas, liquid and solid - to describe innovative systems. In a gas, chaos rules; new configurations are possible, but they are constantly being disrupted and torn apart by the volatile nature of the environment. In a solid, the opposite happens; the patterns have stability, but they are incapable of change. But a liquid network creates a more promising environment for the system to explore the adjacent possible. New configurations can emerge through random connections formed between molecules.

When the first market towns emerged in Italy, they did not magically create some higher-level group consciousness. They simply widened the pool of minds that could come up with and share good ideas. This is not the wisdom of the crowd, but the wisdom of someone in the crowd. It is not the network itself is smart, it is the individual get smarter because they are connected to the network.

The waking brain has an appetite for the generative chaos that rules in the dream state. Neurons share info by passing chemicals across the synaptic gap that connects then, but they also communicate via a more indirect channel.: they sync their firing rates. For a reason that are not entirely understood, large clusters of neurons will regularly fire at the exact same frequency (imagine a discordant jazz band, each member following a different time signature and tempo, that suddenly snaps into a waltz at precisely 120 beats per min). This is what neuroscientists call phase-locking. There is a kind of beautiful synchrony to phase-locking - millions of neurons pulsing in perfect rhythm, But brain also seems to require the opposite: regular periods of electrical chaos, where neurons are completely out of sync with each other (noise period). Robert Thatcher a brain scientist decided to study the vacillation between phase-lock and noise in the brains of dozens of children. He notes that nose period lasted in average 55 milliseconds. The kids who has more noise period has higher IQ (every extra millisecond spent in the chaotic mode - noise period- added as much as twenty IQ points. The phase-lock mode is where the brain executes an established plan or habit and the chaos mode is where the brain assimilates new information, explores strategies for responding to a changed situation. In this sense, the chaos mode is a kind of background dreaming.

Reproduction without sex is a simple matter of cloning; you take your own cells, make a copy and pass that on to your decedents. It does not sound like much fun to our mammalian ears, but it is a strategy that has worked out very well for billions of years for bacteria. Asexual reproduction is faster and more energy efficient than the sexual variety: you don’t need to go to the trouble of finding a partner in order to create the next generation. Asexual organisms reproduce on average twice as quickly as their sexual counterparts in part because without a male/female distinction, every organism is capable of producing offspring directly. But evolution is not just a game of sheer quantity. Overpopulation poses its own dangers and a community of organisms with identical DNA makes a prime target for parasites or predators. For this reason natural selection also rewards innovation, life’s tendency to discover new ecological niches, new sources of energy.

The water flea Daphnia under normal conditions Daphnia reproduce asexually with females producing a brood of identical copies of themselves (females) in a tiny pouch. But when conditions get tough, when droughts or other ecological disturbance happen, or when winter rolls in, the water fleas make a remarkable transformation: they start producing males and switch to reproducing sexually. This switch is attributable to the sturdier eggs produced by sexual reproduction which are more capable of surviving the long months of winter. This strategy of switching back and forth between asexual and sexual goes by the name ‘heterogammy” and while it is unusual many different organisms have adopted it - Slime molds, algae, and aphids have all evolved heterogamous reproductive strategies.



Private serendipity can be cultivated by technology. For more than a decade now, I have been creating a private digital archive of quotes that I have found intriguing, my twenty-first-century version of commonplace book. Some of them are passages that I have transcribed from books or articles; others were clipped directly from web pages. Thanks to Google books and the Kindle, copying and storing interesting quotes from a book has grown far simpler). I keep all these quotes in a database using a program called DEVONthink where I also store my own writing. DEVONthink features a cleaver algorithm that detects subtle semantic connections between distinct passages or text. These tools are smart enough to get around the classic search-engine failing of excessive specificity.

Google and other search engines made easier to find what you are looking for - it is efficient, but dull. You miss time consuming but enriching act of looking through shelves of pulling down a book because the title interests you or the binding... Looking for something and being surprised by what you find - even if it is not what you set out looking for - is one of life’s great pleasure. and so far no software exists that can duplicate that experience. Old style browsing does indeed lead to unplanned discoveries.

There are seven elements in order to understand the history of innovation.

The adjacent possible -
Liquid networks
The slow hunch
Serendipity
Error
Exaptation
Platforms

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NugRZGDbPFU
http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_johnson_where_good_ideas_come_from.html



Words from the book
Serendipity \ ser-ən-ˈdi-pə-tē\ is a propensity for making fortunate discoveries while looking for something unrelated
Hunch - an intuitive reckoning /a collective intelligence decision making system
Heterogammy - Switching back and forth between sexual and asexual reproduction.
Exaptation - The utilization of a structure or feature for a function other than that for which it was developed through natural selection.

Groundswell by Charlene LI & Josh Bernoff

This book provide many examples of how customer rule the product and this behaviour - that authors call as ‘Groundwell’ - can threaten institutions like companies and brands. Institutions should understand the power of the customer and tap the strength of the customer base using groundwell to strengthen their brand and penetrate to mass market.

[I find the book looks very good, if I read it few years. Now, we all know what is this and hence lacks relevance; hence I am not write the review in detail]

It covers, the following
Why teh groundwell and why now?
Jujitsu and the technologies of the groundwell
The social technographics profile
Strategies for tapping the groundwell
Listening the groundwell
Talking with groundwell
Energizing the Groundwell
Helping the groundwell support itself
Embracing the groundwell
How connecting with the groundwell
The groundwell Inside your company
The future of the groundwell

In the next-gen social technologies, the relationship it builds overrule the power of the technoogy. Following are some of the checkpoints:

1. Does it enable people to connect with each other in new way?
2. Is it effective to sign up for?
3. Does it shift from institutions to people?
4. Does the community generate enough content to sustain itself?
5. Is it an open platform that invites partnership?

The art of thoughts by Graham Wallace

The art of thoughts by Graham Wallace

[One of the first models of the creative process based on his knowledge of the accounts written by artistic and scientific luminaries].


As per Walls, creativity has following steps - preparation (gathering background information and exploring and focusing on the problem to be solved), incubation (internalizing the problem and then taking a break from actively thinking about it), illumination (a moment of insight in which a creative solution to the problem pops into conscious awareness) and verification (judging the appropriateness of the solution or idea, elaborating on it and actually applying it to the original problem).



Following are in fact taken from ‘Your creative Brain by Shelley Carson who abstracted the book - Art of thoughts in the following way.

Preparation:
Your brain is home to an immense repository of information, including semantic knowledge (gleaned from school, books and other source of information), auto biographical memories (you. The moment to moment experience of the world) and physical skills (how to ride a bike etc). This collection of information is unique to you. No one else has this particular mental library. That is why there is no doubt that you can create novel and original ideas, because none has your unique database.

The second part of the preparation process consists of acquiring the skills and information that are specific to your particular area of desired creative endeavor (Needs to be a domain expert to create new idea in that domain).

Incubation:
There are two routes in this phase. Deliberate pathway & spontaneous way.

Deliberate pathway steps in the following order::
Gather General Knowledge and specific skills, problem finding, problem solving (iterative), Evaluations, Elaboration, & Implementation.
You will resist the incubation period and continue to consciously searching for a solution to the problem.

Spontaneous way steps:
Gather General Knowledge and specific skills, problem finding & immersion, incubation, Evaluations, Elaboration, & Implementation.
You will be taking break from your creative problem can allow several beneficial things to happen in brain. The incubation period allows you to attend to other matters while you continue to work on the problem at a level below conscious awareness.

Illumination:
This stage is called ‘insight or inspiration (from Greek notion that the gods breathed into). All describe feeling as though the creative idea were coming from somewhere outside themselves because they did not consciously think up the idea: it was just suddenly there. many people believe that illumination is the province of so-called creative geniuses. Illumination is a skill that can be learned.

Verification:
Not all creative ideas are good solutions to your problem. You need to select the best out of the whole choices/options. this is the evaluation stage. The final phase of this process is called implementation. Your work is no good until it reaches the intended audience.

Sudden Genius by Andrew Robinson

Sudden Genius by Andrew Robinson
The gradual path to creative breakthrough

[Likewise Howard Gorden’s book, discuss 10 genius cases with respect to their main creativity product and provide steps to work on your creativity in your everyday life
Leonardo da Vinci - The last supper -1498
Christopher Wren - St. Paul Cathedral - 1711
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart - The marriage of Figaro - 1786
Jean- Francois Champollion - decipherment of Egyptian hieroglyphs - 1822
Charles Darwin - Evolution by natural selection 1859
Marie Curie - discovery of radium - 1898
Albert Einstein - Special relativity - 1905
Virginia Wolf - Mrs Dalloway - 1925
Henri Cartier-Bresson - The decisive Moment - 1952
Satyajit Ray - Pather Panchali - 1955

Creativity covering talent, genius, intelligence, memory, dreams, the unconscious, savant syndrome, synaesthesia, and mental illness]


Ray’s (Satyajit) comment on creativity: “ The whole business of creation of the ideas that comes in a flash, cannot be explained by science. It cannot. I don’t know what can explain it but I know that the best ideas come at moments when you are not even thinking of it. It is very private thing really’. ‘Eureka experience?

Winston Fletcher remarks in his ‘Tantrums and talent: How to get the best from creative people: “Just as creative world is crowded with people who have ideas but no talent, it is also crowded with people who have talent, but no ideas”

Archimedes said to have perceived the principles of displacement and flotation jumped out of the tube and run naked by screaming ‘Eureka!
Newton seeing an apple fall from a tree visualized the law of gravitational attraction.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge while reading a passage in a book about the Khan Kubla, fell into an opium induced sleep and when he woke up, immediately produced poem ‘Kubla Khan’.
Dimitri Mendeleev’s had a vision in the dream and when he woke up wrote down the periodic table of the elements.
Alexander Fleming while culturing ‘staphylococcus’ bacteria in a Petri dish, quite accidently spotted the presence of a bacteria-killing mould, Pencillium which became the source of the first antibiotic drug penicillin.

Great ideas like the above ones, are may have seemed to have come ‘out of the blue’ but in every such experience the mind seems to have prepared itself by long study. As Louis Pastor once said, ‘Chance favors the prepared mind’

Kekule once said, “gentlemen, let us learn to dream and perhaps then we tell the truth.... but let us beware not to publish they have been examined by wakened mind”.

A Very English Genius - A BBC TV program on ‘ The man who deciphered linear B - Michael Ventris http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CgjVjI2bNU. The last man who knew everything - Thomas Young a Polymath who decipher Egyptian Rosetta Stone. ‘The man who deciphered Linear B’ told the story of the mid-twentieth century decipherment of Europe’s earliest readable writing by Michal Ventris. ‘The last man who knew everything’ narrated by the life and work of Thomas Young, an eighteenth-century child prodigy in languages and an adult polymath who deciphered the Rosetta Stone. in both cases, their decipherment breakthroughs depended on their knowledge of disparate domains. which their scholarly rivals did not have. their ideas arose from their versatility.

The invention of writing might be said to be the ur-breakthrough, since there would be no history no science and no literature without it. Proto-writing - that is signs capable of expressing a limited range of meaning but not the full range of spoken language seems to have existed during the last ice age in the form of enigmatic cave drawings, petroglyphs and notched bones, perhaps 20,000 years old. The break through that transformed proto-writing into full writing was the rebus. Rebus permits spoken words to be written in terms of their constituent parts - vowels, consonants, syllable and so on - that cannot be depicted pictographically. With Rebus principle, the sounds of a language can be made visible in a systematic way and its abstract concepts symbolized. How was rebus conceived? Some scholars believe it resulted from a conscious search by an unknown Sumerian in Uruk (biblical Erech), circa 3300 BC - the place and date of the earliest clay tablets that apparently record full writing. The world’s oldest surviving literature-in Sumerian cuneiform dates from about 2600 BC.

Even the majority of breakthroughs do involve an identifiable pivotal episode of revelation whether one calls it a eureka experience or not. What is absolutely clear in all ten cases is the long lead-up needed for the breakthroughs and the effort required, following the revelation to explore and substantiate the achievement.

Dreams giving access to unconscious processing may or may not have led to celebrated examples of breakthroughs. The creative role of unconscious processing was recognized long before the work of Sigmund Freud perhaps early as the beginning of 18th century. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz said in early 18th century, “ Our clear concepts are like islands which arise above the ocean of obscure ones. Yet it is not easy to conceive that a thing can think and not be conscious that it thinks’.

Talent & Genius

The relationship between inherited ability and long practice is the most contentious aspect of talent. However genius is even more problematic than talent. Although genius has never inherited or passed on, it seems like talent to be partly genetic in origin in many cases. Unlike talent, genius is the result of unique configuration of parental genes and personal circumstances. Since genius never transmits the full complement of his or her genes to offspring, whose personal circumstances inevitably differ from those of the parent genius, this configuration never repeats itself in the offspring.

IQ & Intelligence:

The IQ test created by Lewis Terman does not measure creativity and even failed to discover gifted students by this IQ method (couple of students who got rejected by his IO tests became Nobel winners).

Reading at the age of three - compared with the age of size - is equivalent to an IQ of six divided by three then multiply by 100 (the average or base IQ by definition), which gives an IQ of 200. As part of creating this IQ test, Terman contacted 15 famous experts to define the conception of intelligence. Terman’s definition was ‘the ability to carry on abstract thinking’. Another one favored, “the capacity of knowledge and knowledge possessed’. The other seven answers were (5 of them did not respond).

1. the power of good responses from the point of view of truth or fact
2. having learned or ability to learn to adjust oneself to the environment
3. the ability to adapt oneself adequately to relatively new situations in life
4. the capacity to learn or to profit by experience
5. the capacity to acquire capacity
6. the capacity to inhibit an instinctive adjustment in the light of marginally experienced trial and error and the volitional capacity to realize the modified instinctive adjustments into the overt behavior to the advantage of the individual as a social animal
7. a biological mechanism by which the effects of a complexity of stimuli are brought together and given a somewhat unified effect in behavior.

All the 9 definition involves the capacity to learn from experience and adaption to one’s environment.

James Flynn in his book, “What is intelligence’, says there are three elements - brain’s neural clusters, individual differences in performance and society.

Henri Poincare, book ‘The foundation of Science, Graham Wallace’s The art of Thoughts & Arthur Koestler’s the act of Creation are all agree that creativity emerges from the combination of unconscious and conscious ideas. However the problem is lack of definition for unconscious. - is it dream, daydream, hallucination or reverie?

Savant:
The word savant originally referred to a learned person, generally a distinguished scientist epitomized by the brilliant and far-ranging scholars. Today, in striking contrast, ‘savant’ is normally applied to individuals of below average IQ who display an amazing untutored talent often involving inexplicable feats of memory in a restricted field such as calenderical or arithmetical calculations, language learning, music art etc. It is usually with autism kids. There is a consensus among autism researchers that mind-blindness lies at the heart of ASC (Autism spectrum condition) because it accounts well for the impaired and the intact social and communicative behavior of autistic individuals. Autism kids may also respond literally to a question like, “can you pass the salt? by saying merely ‘Yes’ without understanding the implied meaning of the question.

There is a much less agreement as to why mind-blindness should predispose autistic individuals to be talented. In a survey published by Happe in 2009 and a collaborator reviewed three possibilities.

1. It might be argued that individuals with ASC free up both mental and time resources that called ‘neurotypicals’ use on tracking and remembering social content and that these may contribute to talent development.
2. Difficulty tracking the mental states of others may contribute to the originally expressed in a developing talent. Peer pressure can stifle original thinking in children (and also in adult world), but people with ASC on the other hand may oblivious to what others think and hence able to keep the originality of their idea.
3. Mind-blindness for one’s own mind may be relevant to talent development. Self-conscious - too great an awareness of one’s working methods - can easily inhibit the production of talented work. That is the reason, why many artists do not like discuss their creativity. - Not merely because they don’t want to give their secrets, but also because they resist reflecting on their talent.

The other proposes that autistic individuals prefer to process information by focusing on details rather than the whole picture. Autism researcher Simon Baron-Cohen says, “In the social world there is no benefits to a precise eye for detail, but in the world of mathematics, computing, cataloguing, music, linguistic, engineering and science, such an eye for detail can lead to success rather than failure. The success of Silicon Valley depends on the love of detail among its geeks’ software developers.

With numbers, savant rival or even excels great mathematicians in calculating skill. Some of them are Thomas Fuller, Shakuntala Devi (an Indian). Many have come from humble background and were probably autistic. These auditory calculators ‘hear’ the numbers in their heads when calculating and their calculation is often associated with some verbalization of exaggerated motor activity. By contrast visual calculators ‘see’ the numbers mentally and stay relatively quite while calculating.

The Lunatic, The Lover and the Poet:

“The combination of these three, the one who sees more devils than the vast hell can hold”, Says Theseus. Aristotle is said to have asked,” why is it that all men who are outstanding in philosophy, poetry or arts are melancholic?” There is a link between insanity and genius. In the 20th century, three of the America’s leading figures, Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath and Jackson Pollock took their lives because of depression and so, in UK, did Virginia Woolf. Scientists as a group show less mental illness. Einstein Faraday suffered from mild psychopathology, Darwin and Pasteur from ‘marked’ psychopathology and Bohr and Galton from ‘sever’ psychopathology along with number of other major scientists.

To establish a definitive connection between normal illness and creativity is impossible, at present.

Ten breakthrough in art and science:

Leonardo Da Vinci:
Last supper is his best known painting after the Mona Lisa. As per historian E.H. Gombrinch, “The last supper remains one of the great miracles wrought by human genius”. He emphasis on observing nature is so important in both his art and his writing on art. he is equally good in other fields like military engineering. His books show detailed engineering details on creating various military equipments.

Leonardo’s highly probable homosexuality was surely a factor in his developing power to disturb. As for his art, he unquestionably showed a preference for the male over the female nude.

He is infamous in not completing the projects - mainly due to his artistic perfectionism. Following note from his nephew on the power of the monastery.

“He sometimes stayed there from dawn to sundown, never putting down his brush, forgetting to eat and drink, and painting without pause. He would also sometime remain two, three or four days without touching his bush. Although he spent several hours a day standing in front of the work, arms folded, examining and criticizing the figures to himself. I also saw him driven by some sudden urge, at midday when the sun was at its heights leaving the Corte Vecchia where he was working on his marvelous day horse, to come straight to Santa Maria delle Grazie without seeking shade and clamber up onto the scaffolding, pickup the brush put in one or two strokes and then go away again”.

A second story reveals his passion for perfection. Leonardo delayed the last supper to complete and the impatient prior of Santa Maria della Grazie, eventually told duke in exasperation: “There is only the head of Judas still to do and for a over a year now, not only has Leonardo not touched the painting, but he has also only come to see it once”. Duke Ludovico Sforza summoned the artist and an unabashed Leonardo responded that he had in fact spent the year night and morning in a notorious part of Milan studying ruffians searching for the perfect model for Judas. “but I have not able to discover a villain’s face corresponding to what I have in mind. Once I find that face, I will finish the painting in a day. But if my research remains fruitless, I shall take the features of the prior who came to complain about me to your Excellency and who would fit the requirements perfectly”. The Duke laughed, but appreciated the seriousness of the issue and agreed to Leonardo to take more time.


Christopher Wren
“An architect ought to be jealous of Novelties in which fancy blinds the judgment and got think his judges as well those that are to live Five Centuries after him, as those of his time. That which is commendable now for novelty will not have new invention to posterity. when his works are often imitated and when it is unknown which was the original, but the glory that which is good of itself is eternal.’ - Christopher Wren.

Wren architected the St.Paul Cathedral in London- - the design and construction of the Cathedral was groundbreaking in at least three ways which might be regarded as breakthrough in architecture. First, unlike the medieval or Renaissance cathedrals like Westminster Abbey or St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, St. Paul was the work of only one architect and was built in his lifetime. Second, unlike previous architects, Wren was distinguished scientist and a skilled draughtsman who personally conceived and oversaw both the structural and the aesthetic aspects of the building from the foundations to the carvings on the walls. Third, unlike earlier domed buildings, St. Paul was finished with a unique ‘triple’ dome supporting its lantern which had no precedent in the history of architecture and has not been repeated.

Wren’s most basic problem was follows: a dome that looked right to a worshipper inside the cathedral would puny on London skyline. and yet a dome with the right external silhouette would look like a chimney to those standing underneath it. Hence he needed a double dome. There were other double domes structure and he knew that his foundations and piers which were already showing differential settlement in the 1680s could not stand the weight of two brick domes. So while the inner dome could be made of brick, the outer dome could be much lighter, made of wood covered in lead. Yet, a wooden dome could not support the weight of the planned heavy stone lantern visible both from the outside and from the inside while looking up through the oculus at the top of the inner dome. A wooden dome was ruled out as insufficiently impressive and also liable to rot. Wren’s eventual solution was therefore his ingenious triple dome.

Its inner dome is an almost hemispherical shell made of bricks about 18 inches thigh which supports nothing other than its own height. Above it, but not resting on it, is a hollow brick cone between the inner and outer domes, invisible from below, cut off at the top to reveal light streaming through widows Invisible from outside) located just below the lantern. These cones serve two functions: to support the weight of stone lantern (about 700 tones) and to support the timber framework that holds up the timber outer dome and its lead covering. the invisible brick cone is therefore a key structural element.

Like all breakthroughs, it was the perfect of long experience and passionate involvement made possible in Wren’s case by a rare combination of scientific and aesthetic perception.

Skipping the case study of other eight creative geniuses:

Findings:

One of the most interesting patterns among genius concerns the effect of the early loss of a parent. A remarkably high fraction of our ten individuals - 9 out of 10 - suffered the early loss of a parent. The 10th one - Leonardo - has to dealt with illegitimate issue of his fatherhood and hence his grand-parents brought him up. Another survey of 699 famous historical personages conducted by J.M. Eisenstadt revealed 25% of them had lost at least one parent before the age of 10 and more than half lost patent before the age of 26. This naturally raises the issue of why some children become stronger through the loss of a parent.

Only two of the ten individuals had a equally important partner. Curie’s husband is also a scientist and got Nobel Prize along with Curie. Wolf’s husband was, if anything even more crucial to Virginia Wolf's. A sensitive and hones-tic critic and editor of her work, Leonard saved her from suicide where she was writing her first novel, The Voyage out. In her much quoted last letter, before she drowned herself in the river in 1941, she wrote to him: “What I want to say that I owe the happiness of my life to you. You have been entirely patient with me and incredibly good. I want to say that everybody knows it. If anybody could have saved me, it would have been you. Everything has gone from me, but the certainty of your goodness. I cannot go on spoiling your life any longer. I don’t think two people could have been happier than we have bee, V.”


Exceptional creativity and breakthroughs have long had an uneasy co-existence with formal education. Following from Mihaly Csikszementmihalyi’s Creativity: Flow and Psychology of discovery and invention,” Often one sense that, if anything school threatened to extinguish the interest and curiosity that the child had discovered outside its walks. How much did schools contribute to the accomplishment of Einstein or Picasso or T.S> Eliot? The record is rather grim, esp. considering how much effort, how many resources and how many hopes go into our formal educational system”.

Mark Twin says about his schooling, “ I have never let my schooling interfere with my education”.
Thomas Young, says, “Masters and mistress are very necessary to compensate for want of inclination and exertion; but whoever would arrive at excellence must be self-taught”.

Mihaly Csikszementmihalyi’s interview with many geniuses, showed that their school days were rarely mentioned by any of them as a source of inspiration. Same with BBC broadcaster John Tusa’s interview with 100 people on creativity in 2000-2002; none mentioned the schooling made any difference to them in their path.

As per Edison, ‘Genius is one percent inspiration and 99 percent perspiration” . This quote was misattributed to Einstein in some magazines.

R.Ochse mentioned in his book, ‘Before the gates of Excellence: The determinants of Creative genius’ “These individuals lead one to realize very important fact - these people must have spent the major part of their waking hours and their energy on their work”. Howard Gordon’s 10 year rule of hard dedication says the same.

Several psychologists such as Arthur Koestler , David Perkins and Dean Keith Simonton have attempted to design theories of creativity. None of these has been truly explanatory except for Wallas’s preparation/incubation/illumination/verification model and Csikszementmihalyi’s domain/field/person model.

One of the more useful is Simonton’s theory that creativity arises as a ‘joint product of logic, chance, genius and Zeitgeist. Zeitgeist is a German word that can be translated as ‘spirit of times meaning the trend of thought and feeling in a period. It is a product of the socio-cultural system and therefore the antithesis of the notion that history is made by ideas and actions of great individuals - geniuses- standing outside their society and culture. Good examples of Zeitgeist are the Romanticism of the nineteenth century, and the anti-imperialism of the second-half of the 20th century. Applied to the history of science, the term suggests that a discovery or invention such as the structure of DNA or WWW is determined not by individual scientist but the developments internal to a particular science by emerging social needs. In other words, discoveries and inventions become virtually inevitable when the levels of scientists are focused on solving a problem. It is the Zeitgeist that is said to bring about the phenomenon of more or less simultaneous discovery or invention by two or more independent investigators.

Famous instances of multiple discoveries include: the discovery of sunspots by Galileo in 1610, and other three individuals independently in 1611 and there are more such examples....

Genius is not a myth. However sudden genius is a myth. The ten individuals did not involve magic or miracles. They were the work of human grit, not the product of superhuman grace. From this truth we can surely derive both strength and stimulus for our own life and work.

Musical minded Einstein is reported to have said of Mozart, his favorite composer along with J.S. Bach: Mozart’s music is so pure and beautiful that I see it as a reflection of the inner beauty of the universe”.

PS – Book recommended in this book.
‘Tantrums and talent: How to get the best from creative people: by Winston Fletcher
Lateral Thinking: A textbook of Creativity - Edward Bono
Before the gates of Excellence: the determinants of Creative genius by R. Ochse. (Excellent book as per the author)
The early mental traits of three hundred geniuses by Catherine Cox
Hereditary Genius by Francis Galton (1869)
The foundation of Science by Henri Poincare
Bright Splinters of the Mind by Beate Hermelin (Study on Savant)