I felt like a caveman last week. A friend of mine, let’s call him Jack (because well, that’s his name), introduced me to this great website called Ted.com. I can’t believe I have never seen that before, because they host some very interesting material.
There was a specific video in particular, which caught my attention. It is a presentation by Robert Full, who talks about what he calls biomutualism. Knowledge mutualism is the blending together of two fields of science, in this case Biology and Robotics, hence the term Biomutulism.
But you can use knowledge mutualism too, on a personal scale.
Knowledge Circle
I view knowledge as a circle (or a sphere) around an individual. We will use circles in this example, because they are easier to represent, and the analogy is the same. Everything that resides inside of the circle is your knowledge. Everything which is outside of the circle, is unknown to you. This picture illustrates how to visualize this concept:
Knowledge Circle
There is always more that you don’t know, than what you do know. What you don’t know is infinite. It even includes things that humanity as a whole does not yet know. By increasing your knowledge, you increase the surface of the circle, by expanding its borders, which is shown below:
Knowledge Circle Increase
This is a very interesting way of looking at your knowledge, because it implies that when you increase your knowledge, you will also have more knowledge of what you don’t know. This is caused by the circumference of the circle increasing. The edge of the circle is where your knowledge meets the unknown. This is the place where those things are of which you are aware of not knowing.
So by increasing your knowledge, you are also increasing your knowledge that you don’t know everything. Depressing isn’t it? Well, no, because this phenomenon also allows you to use biomutualism to your advantage.
Knowledge mutualism
Expanding your knowledge may cause you to understand there are many, many things you do not yet know, but it also allows you to find overlaps with other people’s knowledge. The picture below shows how your knowledge and another person’s knowledge may intersect:
Knowledge Circle Intersection
The intersection between the two surfaces illustrates knowledge that is both known to you and the other person. However, this small intersection provides a great opportunity for a synergetic cooperation; or biomutualism.
The intersection between the two circles gives you access to all the knowledge of the other person, and the ability to apply it to your knowledge. This is of course also true for the other person. If you cooperate with such a person who has an overlap in knowledge, you effectively increase your creativity, because you can now tap into his knowledge.
For more inspirational insights in how knowledge mutualism can greatly increase your creativity, I recommend you watch Robert Full’s video below.
July 22nd, 2009 at 1:07 pm
“There are known knowns. There are things we know that we know. There are known unknowns. That is to say, there are things that we now know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns. There are things we do not know we don’t know.” -D. Rumsfeld, 2002