A characteristic of creative people is that they imagine making the impossible possible. That imagining - dreaming, noodling, audaciously rejecting what is (for the moment) true - is the way we discover what is new or important. Steve understood the value of science and law, but he also understood that complex systems respond in nonlinear, unpredictable ways. And that creativity, at its best, surprises us all.

Consider some state of affairs that people could bring about, like the nonexistence of the glyptodonts. We can assess the longterm value of this new state of affairs in terms of three factors: its significance, its persistence, and its contingency.

Significance is the average value added by bringing about a certain state of affairs. How much worse is the world, at any one time, because the glyptodonts are extinct? In assessing this, we would want to attend to all relevant aspects of the glyptodonts’ extinction: the intrinsic loss of a species on the planet, the loss to humans who could have used their shells or eaten their meat, and the impact on the ecosystems the glyptodonts inhabited.

The persistence of a state of affairs is how long that state of affairs lasts, once it has been brought about. The nonexistence of the glyptodonts may be exceptionally persistent, starting 12,000 years ago and lasting until the end of the universe. It would only fail to be exceptionally persistent if, at a future time, we were to bring them back…

The final aspect of the framework is contingency. This is the most subtle part of the framework. In English the word “contingency” has a few different meanings; in the sense I’m using it, an alternative term would be “noninevitability.” Contingency represents the extent to which a state of affairs depends on a small number of specific actions. If something is very contingent, then that change would not have otherwise occurred for a very long time, or ever. The existence of the novel Jane Eyre is very contingent: if Charlotte Brontë had not written it, that precise novel would never have been written by someone else. Agriculture is less contingent because it emerged in multiple locations independently.

If something is very noncontingent, then the change would have happened soon anyway, even without the individual’s action. Knowledge of calculus was not very contingent because Leibniz independently discovered it just a few years after Newton did. Considering contingency is crucial because if you make a change to the world but it’s a change that would have simply happened soon afterward anyway, then you have not made a longterm difference to the world.

A period of plasticity also commonly occurs when some idea or institution is still new. For example, the US Constitution was written over just four months—a moment of great plasticity—and amended eleven times in its first six years of operation. After that, though, it became more rigid. Between 1804 and 1913, only three amendments were passed, all immediately following the Civil War: they abolished slavery, granted citizenship to African Americans and formerly enslaved people, and prohibited race from influencing the right to vote. Today, the Constitution is again very rigid: it’s only been amended once in the last fifty years, and that amendment—to prevent increases in congressional salaries from taking effect until the next term of office—was first proposed in 1789.

The more time that passes, the more details we forget, and research shows that the act of recalling an event can actually change our memory of it. In short, as a tool for studying past events, the human memory is at its best imprecise, and at its worst, inventive.

This cognitive ability to remember the past and anticipate the future is one reason some of us feel so busy—not because of the number of tasks we have to complete in the day, but because of the sheer number of things competing for our attention. What is commonly called “distraction” is probably better understood as overstimulation.

Recent findings in neuroscience have shown that our conscious minds cannot do more than one thing at a time. It may feel like you are able to multitask and think about two (or more) things at once, but really your mind is switching between them. This is a costly process neurologically speaking. Switching from one task to another takes energy and a measurable amount of time. Then, when we switch back, it takes another period of time to really wrap our minds around the original object of attention. And it’s not only about the time cost; it’s about the quality of our attention. If we are always switching from one thing to another, then we are never able to truly focus and experience the pleasure and effectiveness of a focused mind. Instead we live in a state of constant recalibration, or what the writer Linda Stone perceptively calls “continuous partial attention.”

Human awareness is not the speedy, nimble creature some of us believe it to be. Our brains have evolved to be more like owls than hummingbirds: we notice something, turn our attention to it, and focus in. It is in this state of intense, solitary focus that we are in possession of our most uniquely human and powerful mental faculties. When we focus on one thing, we are at our most thoughtful, creative, and productive.

But in the screen-heavy environment of the twenty-first century, our mind-owls, large and unwieldy, are treated like hummingbirds, and they end up flopping ineffectively from one thing to the next. Doing this day in and day out accommodates us to what is actually an unnatural, anxiety-producing mode in which the mind struggles to find nourishment.

Which owl is going to feel busier, the one focusing on the sound of a mouse in the snow, or the one trying to draw tiny bits of nectar from a thousand flowers? And which owl is going to be, in the end, better nourished?