Smart World

"My next book is called Smart World and is by Richard Ogle, who is a private consultant and entrepreneur. And he takes some of these ideas that I’ve been talking about and translates them into the world of business and creativity. And his book is very underappreciated, I think. The other books I’ve chosen are very famous, but this one hasn’t got the attention it deserves. Ogle is a populariser of the work of a philosopher named Andy Clark, who emphasises that ideas don’t just exist in one head, but they exist outside the mind, in a whole bunch of minds at once. And one of the traits of unconscious thinking is that we’re intensely social, we catch ideas and thoughts in ways we’re not consciously aware of from each other. According to Ogle, we’re embedded in what he calls ‘idea-spaces’, what most of us would call culture. So, for example, the simple illustration is Picasso, who existed in one culture, the culture of western art. He came across a separate culture, of African masks, and he really merged these two cultures to create Cubism. The creativity came from these two idea-spaces merging together. Ogle’s book is really about how that happens, ranging from Picasso to the invention of the personal computer."