In this raucous tour of ideas, a stellar experimental psychologist unpacks the five stages behind every breakthrough — and offers inspiration for anyone who dreams of making the world just a little bit better.
Here’s the biggest mystery in human history: Why did it take us 300,000 years to invent the toilet?
Come to think of it, why did discovering everything take so long? Why did we spend 1,500 years believing that you can deactivate a magnet with garlic? Why did centuries pass between the inventions of the button and the buttonhole?
In his debut book, written with his distinct blend of contagious enthusiasm and rigour, creator of the hit Substack Experimental History Adam Mastroianni offers an answer: it’s hard for humans to discover things because discovery is, in the short term, a bad idea. We didn’t evolve to do it, and it’s a miracle that we can at all.
But there’s good news. We can overcome the psychological hurdles to invention and discovery and build a better world. Mastroianni draws on little-known examples, from transfusing the blood of a sheep into a man to physicists who set themselves on fire, to unpack the five strange ways of thinking that lead to a breakthrough, from building a tolerance for weirdness to realizing that nobody actually knows what they’re doing.
Chock full of interactivity to make his case, from visual tricks to hidden pages, and secret endings, it busts myths and, most importantly, offers an antidote to despair about our future. Anyone who masters these moves can discover new knowledge, whether they’re a professor in a lab or a teenager in a basement. Our future depends on both!
