Whenever I’m looking for a new book to read, I find that Bill Gates’ blog isn’t a bad place to start. It was there I found his review of “The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention
Gates provides a more intriguing summary book’s scope than I could, so I encourage you to read his write-up if you want to learn more (or just read the book!). However, my interest in cognition and the human brain led me to greatly appreciate one particular chapter of Rosen’s work – an exploration of the “eureka moment.”
As the (possibly apocryphal) story goes, James Watt was walking through a green space, thinking about how to build a better steam engine, when suddenly, “the whole thing was arranged in my mind” – meaning the idea hit him to create a separate condenser on his steam engine that exponentially increased the power produced and cut the fuel cost by more than half. Noticing this seemed to happen more often in the Industrial Revolution than any time in history, Rosen examines why we tend to have these eureka moments, or how he puts it, “solving problems without conscious effort, after effort has failed.”
. I had kept it on my list for three years before finally getting around to it this fall. I’m glad I did – it took me back to that class, and that’s a good thing, because evolution of the human mind is fascinating and so poorly understood.
” by Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini and Richard Lannon. It’s one of those paradigm-shifting arguments, the kind that forever alters your perception of the world. That’s not hyperbole for me. I really love this book. I found it in grad school while studying for a seminar on evolutionary political cognition (an unrelated yet fascinating topic I might write about later). My wife read it, too, and had the same reaction. In fact, we liked the book so much we incorporated passages of it into our wedding ceremony.