obsessed with this idea of exaptation
exaptation is a concept from
evolutionary biology and it’s when
something that originally evolved
because of one set of survival
advantages gets serendipitously co-opted
for something completely different and
thrives there the quintessential example
is birds feathers feathers originally
evolved because they kept animals warm
they trapped a lot of air and air is a
good insulator if you’re an animal with
a lot of feathers trapping a lot of air
and a predator chases you off a cliff
instead of plummeting down and dying you
might flutter down and survive and that
means you get to reproduce and you give
time for those feathers many generations
to evolve into something completely
different like flight so flight is a
serendipitous exaptation of warmth think
about that the next time you zip up your
down jacket now why am I so obsessed
with this I’m not a biologist I’m a
software architect and I’m not
particularly interested in flight what I
am interested in is how people have good
ideas and I think that exaptation holds
the key I think that exaptation is not
just a biological phenomenon but it’s a
cognitive one and that most of those big
aha moments of innovation are moments
when somebody realizes often
serendipitously that’s something they
thought only applied in one context can
actually be applied somewhere else
harvard university created the
astronomical medicine team after the
serendipitous discovery that the 3d
imaging techniques that doctors used to
explore a brain if applied at a vastly
different scale can help astronomers
explore a supernova this is just one
example of mental exaptation zin history
is replete with these sorts of antidotes
anecdotes and I like to tell them but
what I don’t like is how prominently
serendipity plays a role in these
equations that’s why for the last six
years my team’s been working on
developing the right set of tools the
right conditions
the right environment in which mental
except ations can flourish we believe
that by understanding how good ideas
happen we can create virtual software
environments that help people have more
of them over the next few minutes we’ll
listen to what it sounds like when new
ideas are born and not born just from
serendipity but from intentional
facilitation from a set of interactions
that I believe can be optimized can
scale and when scaled can dramatically
change the way innovation happens today
a couple weeks ago I set up a meeting
between these two people dr. Christoph
Diaz PhD scientist who lives in Boston
and is a program manager at cowan
veterans Biosciences that’s doing
research on post-traumatic stress
disorder and somebody some of you may
recognize he’s here in the audience
today dr. David Vishnoi associate
professor of Religious Studies right
here at OU you specializing in Islamic
hermeneutics these people had never met
before and I didn’t set up this meeting
because they particularly wanted to meet
in fact you can listen to Christoph just
before the meeting any idea of what you
and David ish not having home besides
what botha went to Fez do I have the
right one the professor and I guess I’m
stuck first off has no idea why I’ve set
up this meeting and I can assure you
that it’s not because they had both been
to Fez what they had in common is that
over the last year they had both
participated in an experimental new
platform my team’s been developing
called the cognitive Network it’s like a
social network because it connects
people together but it’s not about being
social it’s about facilitating thought
and the first step in a cognitive
network is to get the ideas in people’s
heads into a tangible format so that
they can become first-class citizen
nodes in the network with everything
else now there’s many different ways
that ideas can take tangible form but I
work in software so what my team is
developed is a set of tools that makes
it easy to translate ideas into software
apps and because we’re interested in
exaptation we call
these apps zaps when David first joined
the cognitive Network the idea he was
interested in pursuing was how to
explore the conceptual landscape of
every book ever written on his
particular topic of interest and how to
curate those concepts in the act of
writing his own book so we worked
together to build this app that used a
bunch of different data science
techniques and linked visualizations to
help him explore tens of thousands of
books returned by queries to the OE
library databases when Christoph joined
the cognitive Network he was interested
in many different things but one of the
things he was interested in was how to
help his researchers explore all of the
medical literature that had been written
about PTSD when the two of them realized
that they had these very similar zaps in
common they didn’t waste any time
talking about Fez David dug right into
some specific details how do there’s
miracle settings on question seriously
riveted on the left hand side how do you
have on YouTube he knows I haven’t used
the tool as much as you have and so this
is where um we focused more on this
other tool that i think david has also
on one of this time to take it a step
further so what’s happening here is
david’s asks about a very specific
feature set in the tool and christoph is
not familiar with those settings because
actually his tool doesn’t have those
settings these apps are similar but
they’re not exactly the same and so he
sidesteps the question by changing the
topic to another zap that he is more
familiar with but because apps are so
accessible and tangible he can
immediately give David a demo looking at
the four or five concept that we’ve
picked and it compares them to all the
concepts that exists in the model in
this case 1 1600 and is looking at what
half exists if any between the concept
that you chose and all of them are in
the model this will give an example you
pick up this one you see how do you go
from dopamine to this other concept you
can go between those two concept yet
different paths and this represent
biological experiments and results of
people reserve
used literature now there’s something
subtle that’s happening here so I need
to point it out but it’s important
because it gets right to the heart of
one of the biggest challenges of
cross-disciplinary collaboration and
that’s domain-specific languages when
two experts from different domains come
together they’re rarely using the same
language even if it sounds like they’re
using the same words I’ve watched
Christoph give this demo many many times
and I’ve never heard him use the word
concept he always uses the word entity
but when he gives the demo to David he
uses the word concept five times in 30
seconds and that’s because he knows what
he and David have in common which are
zaps around concept mapping and so he
intuitively finds a set of terminology
that he thinks has the best chance of
resonating with David and David in
response is able to use Christoph zap as
a prop for his own communication to be
in terms that he thinks will resonate
most with Christophe huge leap here is
that we remember that co-occurrence is
known as a very concept you have you
kind of try to look at the content and
determine it over when dopamine and
something else appear in this article
there’s a specific kind of relationship
in the old world or the side of evidence
you find ontology how does the world
working and you had to nap be stared at
about co-occurrence you have to turn
that into when dopamine occurs with
whatever here that’s actually
articulating idea you’re an increase in
dopamine occurs increase and you know
and that’s what I’m interested when a
religious studies professor starts a
sentence talking about dopamine and then
ends it with that’s what I’m interested
in that that’s when I get really excited
and just like Christophe had moved the
conversation in a different direction by
bringing in a secondary zap David then
moves the conversation in a different
direction now that they know how to
communicate by bringing in some of his
latest work 30 different manuscripts of
the Psalms of David not the ones you
know in the Bible if once Muslims wrote
when they just rewrote there’s some
overlap between those texts but they did
a lot of editing and it is a lot
writing and then they added more
dissident drop stuff here so you have
these 30 manuscripts or so that have
sort of the same text and trying to
figure out which was the earlier text
what each editor do let me now at this
point I think it’s best to think of this
discussion like a network and in fact I
think it’s best to think of all ideas
like networks ideas are not monolithic
things there are networks of modular
things and if we look at the discussions
so far this is how we started with
Kristoff and David connecting around the
commonality of two zaps then Christoph
brought in another zap that would had a
little bit less in common with others
and David brought in a project that also
had less in common and this introduces a
concept that i like to call exaptation
distance which is I think there’s an
optimal distance between ideas to
promote exaptation ideas that are too
close I think it’s easy to get lost in
specific details as almost happened in
the beginning of this conversation and
ideas that are too far apart they’re
just hard to bridge but we know we’re
getting close to the optimal exaptation
distance when david starts to make
direct comparisons between his more
distant work and kristof’s more distant
work just to point out why Chris that’s
cool here was looking really familiar so
with these Psalms just map out
relationships which texts are connected
to which text or you can look at the one
text to another which chunks of text got
moved around from the text on the left
of the text on the right and what news
now i wish i had a functional MRI and
EEG on Christoph and David as they were
having this conversation because there’s
actually been a lot of research most
notably being done by by dr. mark demon
about the areas of the brain that are
active during problem solving versus
during moments of insight normal
problem-solving tends to rely on the
prefrontal cortex and you can see that
very clearly through EEG and MRI but
moments of insight demons found rely on
a different part of the brain called the
a STG the anterior superior temporal
gyrus and bman was able to detect
predict moments before somebody solved
an insight problem that they were about
to just by looking at activation in the
asdg now we didn’t have the benefit of
Mr I we can’t rely on that so we have to
wait for the indication through excited
interruption you can take a whole bunch
of text and say which ones including you
just sorry I interrupted there can you
just image Google synteny map so it
looks like genome you’re at location
between different species and the gene
is in this part of the chromosome human
where is it the mouse exactly is the
entity I think you can can hear the
tenor of the conversation start to
change as these excitations start to
happen this first one and accept ations
are contagious i had a couple other
members of my team listening in on this
conversation and we were all trying very
hard not to interrupt the conversation
between David and Christoph but I think
all of our AST geez were firing and
Andrea had an idea that was definitely
worthy of interruption also to bring in
another random example do you know the
benefit project where he took check-ins
from github code if you search deep
process if the technique that he
developed to show like how code was
edited so like how pieces of code got
moved around in equipment and criminals
use the text itself as the ground for
visualization there’s something
particularly interesting I think about
Andrea’s exaptation and it’s that this
project d process by Ben Frey is not
actually about visualizing the edits of
code through github this visualization
is showing the looping structure of code
but I think it would be a mistake to
attribute this to just misremembering or
the fal ability of memory I think that
would be to presuppose that the most
important job of memory is perfect
recall which I think perhaps it is not
just like one of the most important jobs
of cell replication is to make mistakes
because without mutation there can be no
evolution of life I think in discussions
like this one of the important jobs of
our minds is too
make mistakes so that there can be these
mutations that live that lead to the
evolution of new ideas I actually don’t
think that Andria’s misremembering d
process I think she’s just already
synthesizing a number of different
projects that she does know about of
which there are many visualizations
about edits in github into this idea of
this exaptation which has actually led
to perhaps the most tangible step
forward for David displaying his own
work he says at the end oh it never
occurred to me that I could use the text
itself as the ground for the
visualization so look at what these X
applications are doing to our idea
network Christoph’s bringing in this
idea from genetics andrea is bringing in
the work of another designer that she’s
familiar with one thing that’s important
about this is that everything is
grounded in very tangible artifacts and
that’s important because conversations
like this can easily spiral up and up
into pie-in-the-sky ideas so vague to
not be actionable but in our idea
Network things are actually moving in
the other direction they’re becoming
more and more tangible and with a little
bit more discussion David comes up with
a very concrete idea for a new set of
course those now if I could get a blank
copy of that with let’s say a set of
arabic text at this data set all
enhanced you think what is the where do
i enter a little piece of information
when i read a text and then the place
where i can customize the nature’s or
the relationships to find relationships
those are the only two things i need to
be able to do and that there could even
be just my way of keeping no doubt it
finally will result in my book Yeah
right but if I if I’m doing a lot of
work over a 10-year project my book I’m
going to have notes in one format or
another it better not just me this time
around three-by-five cards word document
the charts or if I can take my notes in
this kind of environment where I will
then be able to use those notes in new
ways that’s true that’s true EG so what
started as a somewhat awkward
introduction between two strangers has
now led to a very
create idea for a new sort of notetaking
research tool and that idea actually has
ninety percent of its groundwork already
laid in work that’s been done in others
apps now I’m not sharing this discussion
with you because I think it’s the only
time discussions has led to new ideas
people have exciting discussions that
lead to new ideas all the time all over
the place in all sorts of environments
but what I do think is new is the idea
of using the lens of exaptation to look
at ideas as networks so that we can
actively facilitate innovation and we
can facilitate it in a way that can
scale if there’s one thing that
technology is extremely good at doing
today it’s building large-scale networks
in very short periods of time over the
next year Kristoff and I are working
with Cohen veterans Biosciences to build
a cognitive network that will help the
mental exaptation of all of the
researchers working on the hard problem
of post-traumatic stress disorder
David’s going to continue building zaps
for his own research and my teams
working hard to create a widespread open
version of the cognitive Network that
anyone can join these accept ations are
just the beginning thank you very much [Applause]