Common Experience book authors kick-off Innovation Week: ‘To Innovate is Human’

The Runaway Species is the 2018-2019 Common Reading book.

Authors of The Runaway Species, this year’s Common Experience book, presented to a near full-house Monday night at Evans Hall as a fitting end to the first day of Innovation Week at Texas State University. 

David Eagleman, a neuroscientist at Stanford University and New York Times bestselling author of Incognito: The Secret Lives of the Brain, and Anthony Brandt, composer and professor at Rice University’s Shepherd School of Music, took the audience on a spin through a few of the main concepts in their co-authored book.

An underlying theme of the presentation was providing a vision of how we can improve our future by understanding and embracing our ability to innovate. Innovation is the theme of this year’s Common Experience at Texas State. 

Eagleman and Brandt discussed how the specialization of the human brain’s anatomy allows us to lean into the future and think about what it can be. The brain seeks novelty and avoids repetition. However, Brandt said humans also have an aversion to too much novelty. A weekend at Burning Man is fine, but a year would be too much. 

They also described in detail the ways ideas evolve using the three Bs — bending, breaking and blending.  In summary, humans transform the raw materials of our own experience by breaking, bending and blending them to create something new.  

The authors also referred to the concepts of overt and covert creativity outlined in The Runaway Species. Most creativity happens behind the scenes and under the hood of our brains, but the arts overtly showcase the creativity that lays hidden in our everyday lives. 

Every concept in the brain is related to other concepts in the brain. Eagleman and Brandt urged the audience to “proliferate options”— every time you come up with a solution, come up with others. Don’t remain at a fixed distance, generate a range of ideas.