The idea was right, but the environment wasn’t ready for it yet.

know that during REM sleep acetylcholine-releasing cells in the brain stem fire indiscriminately, sending surges of electricity billowing out across the brain. Memories and associations are triggered in a chaotic, semirandom fashion, creating the hallucinatory quality of dreams.

When one of our peers calls the blue painting green, or comes to the defense of a suspect who is clearly guilty, he or she is, technically speaking, introducing more inaccurate information to the environment. But that noise makes the rest of us smarter, more innovative, precisely because we’re forced to rethink our biases, to contemplate an alterna

Being right keeps you in place. Being wrong forces you to explore.

The more we embrace these patterns—in our private work habits and hobbies, in our office environments, in the design of new software tools—the better we will be at tapping our extraordinary capacity for innovative thinking.3

The mental recombinations of sleep helped them explore the full range of solutions to the puzzle, detecting patterns that they had failed to perceive in their initial training period.

The city and the Web have been such engines of innovation because, for complicated historical reasons, they are both environments that are powerfully suited for the creation, diffusion, and adoption of good ideas.

let his mind roam on the page.

in the long run, innovation will increase if you put restrictions on the spread of new ideas, because those restrictions will allow the creators to collect large financial rewards from their inventions. And those rewards will then attract other innovators to follow in their path.4