 This is a question that has fascinated me for a long time. How do you think new things? And of course, there is a shallow answer to that question. The Greek philosopher Heraclitus once famously noted that you can't step in the same river twice. That's because the river will have changed in between your first and second steps. And in a similar sense, any thought that you have, even if it seems on the surface to be identical to the thought that you had before, just by the virtue of the fact that it has a different time stamp, means that yes, it's on the surface a new thought. In that shallow sense, you can't help but have new thoughts that happen to you all the time. But I'm much more interested in a deeper answer to that question. The mechanisms by which we have new thoughts. And of course, one way that you can do that is by drugs. And I don't mean that flippantly. That is a way that you can have new thoughts. And in fact, Aldous Huxley in his book, The Doors of Perception, actually went on a mescaline trip in order to have some new thoughts using drugs as a tool. But if you want something work safe, right? It'd be really interesting to have a machine that would allow you to open up your brain to think new things. And particularly this helps, this machine would help us overcome a very particular human cognitive problem. And that is that going around in the world, we have a locus of attention that we, oh sorry, we have a locus of attention that we continually apply to the problems that we see in the world around us. And as we try things and some of them fail and some of them work, we tend to categorize these things as, okay, this is a successful strategy and these others are not. And it becomes much more difficult for us to see beyond those successes that we have had. And that's cool for finding food or avoiding tigers in the forest. That is a great strategy, right? Find what works, keep doing what works and stay there. But in times of rapid environmental change or when you are paid to be creative, that can be a challenge. What has worked before is what you specifically need not to do and that's what would be really interesting to have a machine for. This is actually a picture of Aldous Huxley as a child and you knew he was heading for masculine way back in the 1900s, right? Well, it turns out that we do have those machines. I believe that we have had them since before the Industrial Revolution. We've had them all the way back to the evolution of language and that's what I'm going to be taking you on a quick tour of in my talk. These meaning machines end up playing out in three broad categories. The first category of meaning machine that I have found, looking in the world, is divination. Divination is the mechanism by which you use tarot cards, for instance, in order to divine what is coming in the future. Let me walk you through three of them. A first one, really ancient one, is called heruspication. That's a big word that just means divining by sheep's liver. So, if you were an Etruscan priest a long time ago and the king said, I need you to tell me what's going to be coming up in the coming year, you didn't think about it, that wasn't the Etruscan way. You would slaughter a sheep, you would gut it, you would pull out its entrails, burn the meat so that the smoke would go up to the gods, and then you would take a look at the perturbations on the surface of the liver. There was a little blood vessel on the far left, you would compare that to a map and that stone you see below is actually a map for heruspication. You would say, huh, well, when we see a vein in that position, it means that we're going to have floods, so let's shore up our banks. If you saw a bit of fat on the right, you would look at the map and say, hm, fat in this area means that we're going to have foreign invasions, so let's shore up our military. And in so doing, you would be able to tell the king with a great deal of confidence and some dirty hands what was going to be coming in the near future. Let's leave ancient Etrusca and head over to Asia where a different system is called Yi Jing. This is fairly popular, but in case you don't know it, in Yi Jing, you produce some random numbers, some binary bits, either by flipping a coin, by heating a tortoise shell and looking at the cracks in the hexagons or by drawing arrow roots out of your hand. And that produces a binary number that gives you a trigram, a little symbol with a subset of meanings. Then you do it a second time and you get a second trigram that combined to form a hexagram, which has its own meaning and that hexagram actually points you towards one of 64 texts that have been pre-written. There are a couple of paragraphs long, a bit abstract, but the inquirer brings a problem to this text, goes through the randomization and it applies the text that results to the problem and therein somewhere will be a solution. Example number two. Example number three is the tarot. Tarot, if you're not familiar and I would be surprised since it's a Western European invention, has a series of cards each of which is rich with meaning and you bring a question or a problem to the reader who shuffles the cards and then pulls certain ones out and lays them out in a tableau, a very specific order. This one is one of the most popular. The first card you draw, you place it into the context. The second card you draw, you place it into and this becomes the focus and the third is the outcome and then you say oh well if there is a man and a horseback as the outcome then maybe you should expect news from afar and so on and so forth. These are only three examples and there are some similarities between them that I'm going to point out but I want to put divination down for a moment and turn and look towards a second category of very similar machines that produce new meaning and those come from entertainment. One of the nifty things about being right after Denise is that she showed you one of these and she had you stand up and do one of them and that is akin to a mad lib. In a mad lib if you're not familiar with this is a story that has been written out that includes blanks. So the reader would say okay anyone out there give me a noun somebody else give me a verb they would slot that into the mad lib and then read it aloud and I've never found them particularly funny but they're allegedly a source of humor. Another example of entertainment is arguably attributed to Mozart. I will not attempt the German but the translation of this term means a musical dice game. And in it if you wanted a new waltz you would throw a couple of dice consult that table and then look up individual stanzas that would then be put together in the grammar of a waltz and then the musicians could just begin playing looking at those stanzas. Turns out that owing to the combinatorics of this system it produces one of 46 quadrillion possible waltzes. So you were largely guaranteed to get a new waltz at your party if you used the musical dice game. Pretty cool. A third one comes from the realm of travel which a lot of us can understand being as we are in a foreign place to our home. And I'll make a quick shout out to this book. It's called The Lonely Planet Guide to Experimental Travel and that's where this technique that I'm about to share with you comes from. La Tourex is the name of the philosophy and it contains this philosophy entails a number of techniques for discovering a new place. In Ariadne's thread you simply go to the new city with no plan in place and then find a phone book. Did they still make phone books anymore? Find a woman named Ariadne either through the phone book or some other mechanism. Simply ask her what her favorite things about the city are and that becomes your itinerary for the day. No questions asked. If she likes getting her nails done in her hair at a certain salon you're off to that salon. But it's a fascinating and random way to learn about the spirit of a new place and certainly it will lead you to some experiences that you would not have planned yourself. A last one and perhaps a favorite one is the riskiest thing that I can talk about here and that's Cards Against Humanity. If you have not played this card game it's very similar to a Mad Lib or it's game precursor called Apples to Apples. In Cards Against Humanity you have two decks of cards one white deck of cards and a black deck of cards. You shuffle any individual turn. You draw a black card and that becomes the frame for the rest of the round. You look at that black card take a look at your hand of white cards and you pick what you think will be the funniest or most offensive or often both combination to fill in those gaps in this case. When I was tripping on acid a cooler full of organs turned into free samples and the results are often shocking, visceral, hilarious and the title of the slogan for the card game is a parlor game for horrible people. So be aware if you've not tried it before and you don't feel like a horrible person it might not be for you. And it produces a lot of sort of awkward things that you're not quite sure that you should be laughing so hard at. So we've just looking at two of the three categories of these meeting machines that I'm going to tour you through today but we're going to pause very briefly to take a look at the structures that underlie each of these two before we move on to the third category. I promise you it would get nerdy and here's where it's going to get nerdy. If you're not familiar with the phrase deep structure it was a term coined by Joseph Campbell who was looking at the similarities that underlie all myth around the world. So a deep structure is that thing that it's the most abstracted version of many instances of things that you see out there in the world and as I've been investigating meeting machines I have found a deep structure underneath all of them. If you're super quick and had your caffeine this morning you might be able to infer it from the examples that I have already given but I'm going to be explicit about it. This is the deep structure for all of the machines that we have seen so far. I'm going to read it and then talk about it. Signifiers and that is a term from semiotics that just means a thing, a token that means something else. It signifies signifiers that are randomized and placed into a fixed grammar to be read for new meaning. That's super academic and nerdy but I wanted to be accurate with a deep structure. So let's take a look at how that plays out. In Heruspication, anyone can tell me what the signifiers are? Blood vessels? Fat? The weird stuff on a sheep's liver. What is the randomization? Yeah, living life as a sheep. Stuff just happens, right? Biology doesn't follow clean rules and your liver and my liver and that poor sheep's liver is doomed to die are all going to be subtly different as a matter of life. And the fixed grammar in this case is that map. The map that Herusp... Heruspexes, that's the actual term, Heruspexes use in order to read the sheep's liver. In Tarot, which should be fairly obvious, right? The randomization is literally the shuffling of cards, the cards being the signifier and the grammar in this case is the tableau into which the cards go. We move over and take a look at the entertainment. Hopefully that pattern is beginning to reveal itself to you now. In the case of the musical dice game, you literally roll dice. The grammar is the fixed grammar of the waltz and the new meaning is one of the 14 quadrillion waltzes that you can get out of that machine. Cards against humanity just like Tarot. Ariadne's thread is a little more abstract but the randomization is whatever it was that this person named Ariadne likes in that city and the grammar is her like, her experience of that city that you are now trying to discover. And the randomness is just the fact that she happened to be there and you gave her a call and she picked up the phone. So that's the deep structure that's underlying all of these different meaning machines. So what? In looking to name this, I wanted to be able to say that here's the verb and here's the noun. The proper verb is semantic noodling. Now, I don't have enough time on this stage to explain why that's the right term. If you're into semiotics, let me just say that it is much easier to randomize the semantics than the syntax. Let's grab a beer during the break and we can talk about that more. And noodling is simply like playing around with something and seeing what sticks, yeah? So meaning machines let you do semantic noodling with the signifiers and the fixed grammars. So let's now turn and look at the third category which I think is the most relevant to us, how we can sort of bring this weird abstraction down to something that's concrete and usable. And that's in creativity. There are lots of creative techniques that use this exact same deep structure. Let's look at some of them. The first and most oldest is poetic form. What we see on screen now is the most popular simple poem that I could find. If you look up poetry on Wikipedia, that's the image that waits you. And the way that poetry works and really any constrained writing of this sort is that you have something you want to say and you have a fixed structure into what you much squeeze it. And though you might have wanted to say something as simple as, I love you. The force, the structure requires you just don't say I love you. You have to find something that rhymes, that fits a certain number of feet per line. And in that case, you may say, well, sugar is sweet and so are you. Okay, that's sort of a metaphor. It fits the rhyme in the meter, but now I need something to rhyme with it. So I'm going to say, oh, the rose is red and the violets blue because it rhymes, not because that's what I was really thinking about. And in fact, it's a lie. Right? Violets not blue. The violet is violet by definition. But nonetheless, because it gets locked into this form, suddenly it becomes new meaning and becomes quite memorable because we're good at rhyme. We're good at alliteration. We're good at all those sorts of things that make poetry memetic. So it's the oldest form of semantic noodling we have. And in fact, any constrained writing forces you through a similar process. One of my favorite nerdy topics is the Ulipo tradition. It was a French literary tradition that began in the 1960s in which a group of writers would generate mathematical formulas by which they could create new writing. It was founded by a fellow by the name of Georges Perrec who created something called, I think it's 14 million, million poems where he wrote a bunch of ten sonnets all using the same rhyme scheme, printed them out very precisely on sheets of paper and then cut horizontal slats through it so that you could turn any one of those lines in the sonnet and still read complete sonnet, but the parts were randomized. Another one of their techniques is the N plus 7 engine. This is fascinating. In it, you write a couple of paragraphs in a short story, just as if you were writing in prose. Then you pause, you grab a dictionary and you go through that text and find every noun. And for every noun you find, you consult the dictionary and replace it with the noun with the seven entries below the one you intended. And then you continue writing the story as if that was what you had intended from the very beginning. I took the deep structure for semantic noodling and meaning machines and pushed it to that same engine. What came out the other side was senoras randomized in a fixed gram and read for mean square. Not necessarily sensible, but certainly new meaning. The Ulipu tradition continues to today. It's not just in peace. It was actually one of its big proponents. So is this fellow by the name of Richard Beard, who wrote a novel called Damascus in which he only used words that appeared in a particular newspaper. And while I don't like reading while I am presenting, I'm going to read this directly because I could not ask for an artist to better describe about how this constrained writing helps generate new meaning. He says, in Damascus, I only use nouns that appeared in the Times of November 1st, 1993. How does this work? In one paragraph, some children are racing to the sea and one of them wants to say, last to touch the water is a donkey. But there's no donkey in the paper, so they end up saying in the novel, last to touch the water is a walrus. So you end up with some interesting and novel linguistic formulations. Another bit of constrained writing that forces you through the structure to get to something that you wouldn't ordinarily have said. Outside of languages, there are other techniques as well. This is the one where we're going to have a video, and the one bit of sound I have recorded is here. And to my utter delight, and I hope yours too, the meaning machine in this case is the game of Scrabble. Crazy trippy, right? So this is a French ad firm who had artists play games of Scrabble and then use those words to create interconnected illustrations and then animate them live. There were three commercials that even made posters out of them because they were so trippy they ended up being quite popular. But of course, the way that the words were generated were not because somebody thought, what's the trippiest thing I can think of? What they did is they played a word game that has a series of rules that resulted in particular words that they then drew. It was a creative engine driven by math. You can also find lots of story generator tools. A favorite game of mine is David Malky who writes a webcomic. He created a game called The Machine of Death in which case the players all play futuristic assassins who have to assassinate a person who knows how they're going to die. So you draw cards in order to figure out the ways that they have been told they're going to die and then creatively interpret them for your assassination plans. In this version, it creates some unbelievably wacky adventures. Another technique for creativity is the force fit grid or the creative matrix. Neither of these are good names but I actually haven't found a good name for this technique. In it, you simply put one thing down the y-axis and another across the x-axis and then combine them and fill in the blanks. What do these two things make? This one is the official Cree Bobby comics archetype times table which allows you to figure out, well, what is the combination of Abraham Lincoln and T-Rex? You may not have had the question before but you've got the answer now. David Malky, who produced The Machine of Death, also created this sort of beautiful zoological times table by which one can see that the narwhal crossed with a horse becomes a true unicorn. But it also creates some crazy things like the Flamicus which is the Flamingo... I think in that case, a horse or a Pegasus? Yeah. There's the delightful narwhal whale. No, that's the... What is that one? Oh, the narwhal gorilla. Creepy and delightful. And a last one of this example is from Jessica Hagee who, on her website, this is indexed. Tried to simply do the combinatorics underneath the seven deadly sins in order to discover things like, oh, the combination, say, of, oh, lust and gluttony is edible undies. In my academic and my professional life, I have used these techniques. They're not just idle fun things. For one client, we combined the customer engagement cycle with all of the new technologies in the natural user interface category that we could think of in order to brainstorm ideas for how we might inspire that client in order to come up with new stuff, new ways that they can engage their clients. So I'm not going to fill in that box, but just to illustrate the fact that you can use these techniques professionally in order to drive your own creativity. I think I do have the time for this, even though we're running a few minutes late, because what I'd like to do is now that I've gone through a number of those creative examples, I want to ask you to do the same thing. We're only going to take two minutes, introduce one other constrained creative writing technique that you can do at almost any time, and certainly at any cocktail parties where you're meeting new people. The technique is called name reconstruction, and in it, you take a person's name and you break it down into parts, salient little parts. Reinterpreting deliberately is fine, and you interpret those parts as individual words, and then you use those words in order to come up with a story description. What I'd love to ask you to do is I'm going to get you to get your neighbor's name and use this technique in order to come up with a story based on their name. And then tweet it, the meaning machines is the handle that I use for this topic, and the hashtag is namedail. I'd love to have both the original name and the story that you created, and I'm going to give you one example. At the speakers, with a welcome speakers dinner, Bruno was trying to help me pronounce his last name. I don't speak Portuguese, so it didn't roll off my tongue quite well. And he explained that Bruno could be broken out, the last name could be broken out as Figueiredo. Figueiredo. Figueiredo. How do I do Bruno? Where are you? Pretty good? So we can break that down into the following words. Bruno Figueiredo. Look at that story. Well, Bruno sounds like making beer. No fee sounds like charity work. So let's imagine that there is a monk, really conservative monk, who in order to do charity work begins to brew a very, very popular beer and sell it at cost, but not just above cost and then donating those funds to charity. So now we have to figure out gay redo. Ah, okay. So much to everyone's surprise, the particular yeast that he uses causes people after they have been drinking for a while to question their sexuality. A story about a monk who brews a popular beer for charity only to learn it makes the drinkers question their sexuality. I can guarantee you, before I had a cocktail dinner with Bruno, I would not have come up with that storyline. You guys ready? Okay, so what I'd like you to do is to turn to the person next to you, get their name and two minutes turning that name, breaking it down and creating a story. Can you share the name? You may have to speak into the mic. So his name is Thiago Verandas and I turned it into Tiago Verandas and it's a story about a gentleman who drinks tea on his veranda but never enjoys it because he's always rushing. Lovely. Good to meet you, Thiago. Hopefully if you are interested you can follow, it's a locked Twitter stream but I'm happy to let everyone in the conference into it and read the other stories that have resulted from this engine. But I love this trick and again, at a cocktail party it's a fun game you can think of to play when otherwise conversation fails you. Okay. So, I've just gone through three different large categories of meaning machines and semantic noodling but you'll notice the collection of examples that I've presented today were curated quite precisely. Notably that all of these were analog, right? The Yi Jing uses coins or tortoise shells. The Cards Against Humanity uses cards in order to do the shuffling. They're all physical in nature but of course we live in the digital age and that means that the new machines that we create are not necessarily bound by those same physical constraints. And in fact, we see lots of examples oh, wait, I forgot, I'm moving on a little bit further. If I had more time I could tell you all about some other ones from history. The Zajira of the World which was an ancient Islamic code that sought to do divination by a set of concentric rings or the Majorcan mystic named Ramanyoi who saw this Zajira of the World and tried to create his own with what he called the Ars Divinatoria or the Ars Combination. Or we could talk about that the section out of the story of Jonathan Swift in Gulliver's Travels who made fun of Ramanyoi with his professors Lovilagato or John Cage who used the Yi Jing to create composition that is musical compositions that are created on the fly or Sidney Omar who thought he was inventing this all afresh when he became the astrologer to the stars in the 1950s. There are lots of others that we could talk about and nerd out a lot on but I do want to get on to that notion of computation. Which is to say that computers all of these machines so far that I found have been translated into the computer world. You can go online at any time and download an app or head to a website in order to have your Yi Jing reading done. See what those trigrams are, what those hexagrams are and then give you a whole lot of stuff to contemplate around your problem. You can have tarot readings online easy as cake and you can even have mad libs and yes even the musical dice game. There is a website where you can go have it randomized and download the MP3 of your unique waltz and even Cards Against Humanity. It's an open source game and people have made open source software in order to grab that hilarity but these are all transliterations of existing systems. They don't take advantage of the medium on which they are, right? For Cards Against Humanity the original game was fairly constrained. You can only shuffle comfortably about 70 cards in your hands at any one time but computers aren't bound by those same sorts of constraints. They can shuffle a deck of nearly infinite size. They could shuffle a deck for you of 40,000 signifiers which is roughly the equivalent of an adult's English speaker's vocabulary. You can generate language from the very beginning with semi-randomness in order to create new meaning and that's why the promise of recognizing this deep structure in our modern age has so much underneath it and so much promise to it. So, I'm right close to time so I want to wrap up by asking well so what, right? We spent a lot of time with Denise this morning in order to do a lot of creative techniques and I'm just walking through the nerd version of the same thing trying to understand what this deep structure is. Certainly on one level I'm here to give you permission to participate in things like divination even if you're a skeptic that's really a appendage that's guiding that tarot hand in order to tell you bits about the future you can still participate understanding that it's a semiotic machine. I hold a party at my place every year called the divination party where a whole bunch of skeptics get together and read tarot or do a pendulum divination. It's all hilarious fun and nobody feels like we're giving in because we're doing it. Similarly you can seek out this kind of entertainment. You can do things like at a cocktail party like we went through with the name reconstruction technique and most appropriate for your work there are creative techniques that you can look out there you can even make them up on the fly if you need to in order to help you when your muse fails you and that's really what these things are about as we discussed at the very beginning your locus of attention and your experience in the world really constrains you I'll just hopefully once noted in the Doors of Perception that consciousness is not an expansive tool it's a constraining tool it's a reducing valve that prevents you from processing all of the information that you are taking in through your senses at any one time and everything that you could be remembering at any one time consciousness traps us and experience makes it worse. But getting familiar with semantic noodling and meaning machines means that you have a technique you have a machine for that when your muse fails you and she will you've got options thank you