the runaway species how human creativity remakes the world

We get the idea of the heart and then we bend it to make it compatible with what we want.Īnd, of course, airplanes are a bend of what we witnessed birds doing and so on. And Dick Cheney has one of these, and he doesn’t have a pulse.Īnd so this is a bend of what we find in nature. So if you have one of these hearts you don’t have a pulse at all. And so in 2004 a couple of physicians came up with a continuous flow heart where blood flows through and is oxygenated continuously. Just as one example the artificial heart since it was invented in the 1980s has been a mechanical pump, but these are very energy hungry and they get worn down. It’s exactly the same sort of “aha” moment as the artists who’s making these tiny figurines. So he figured out how to shrink these down and make a windshield out of all these little, polarized crystals. So Edwin Land, the scientist, realized that he could solve this by using polarizing crystals. Just as an example in the early days of driving in the 1920s headlight glare was a real problem. So you see exactly this kind of thing happening all the time. And you have other sculptures that make extremely tiny little figurines.Īnd one of the arguments we make is that the exact same thing that’s happening in art, the same cognitive processes are happening in the sciences also. So the artist JR made a statue of the high jumper Mohammad Idris for the Olympics and he put that super huge and had him jumping over a building. They do that with all animal paintings and sculptures and so on. When you look at statues across human culture you find that people bend the human form any which way, making it taller or skinnier or emphasizing certain portions over the other. So bending is where you take something and you change it, you make it smaller, you make it bigger, you change something about it. David Eagleman: So what humans do that is special is we absorb all of these ideas, all these inputs, and we smoosh them up in various ways and come up with new things.Īnd so there are essentially three main ways that the brain does this, and we’ve summarized this as bending, breaking and blending.

The runaway species how human creativity remakes the world