Karol

“Unlike modern readers, who follow the flow of a narrative from beginning to end, early modern Englishmen read in fits and starts and jumped from book to book. They broke texts into fragments and assembled them into new patterns by transcribing them in different sections of their notebooks. Then they reread the copies and rearranged the patterns while adding more excerpts. Reading and writing were therefore inseparable activities. They belonged to a continuous effort to make sense of things, for the world was full of signs: you could read your way through it; and by keeping an account of your readings, you made a book of your own, one stamped with your personality. Each rereading of the commonplace book becomes a new kind of revelation. You see the evolutionary paths of all your past hunches: the ones that turned out to be red herrings; the ones that turned out to be too obvious to write; even the ones that turned into entire books. But each encounter holds the promise that some long-forgotten hunch will connect in a new way with some emerging obsession. The beauty of Locke’s scheme was that it provided just enough order to find snippets when you were looking for them, but at the same time it allowed the main body of the commonplace book to have its own unruly, unplanned meanderings. Imposing too much order runs the risk of orphaning a promising hunch in a larger project that has died, and it makes it difficult for those ideas to mingle and breed when you revisit them. You need a system for capturing hunches, but not necessarily categorizing them, because categories can build barriers between disparate ideas, restrict them to their own conceptual islands. This is one way in which the human history of innovation deviates from the natural history. New ideas do not thrive on archipelagos.”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From

“conclusion the soundness of that conclusion is proved by the soundness of the steps by which it has been reached. With lateral thinking the steps do not have to be sequential. One may jump ahead to a new point and then fill in the gap afterwards.”
― Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step

“With vertical thinking one concentrates and excludes what is irrelevant, with lateral thinking one welcomes chance intrusions”
― Edward de Bono, Lateral Thinking: Creativity Step by Step

“Evolution advances by taking available resources and cobbling them together to create new uses. The evolutionary theorist François Jacob captured this in his concept of evolution as a “tinkerer,” not an engineer;”
― Steven Johnson, Where Good Ideas Come From