The Mechanization of Mind: Creativity, Conformity, and the Crisis of Thought

How the Modern World Strangles Serendipity, Reduces Creativity, and Trains Us to Think Like Machines

Hi everyone,

This post follows my last on neuroscience and inference. Here, I turn to neuroscience and creativity—and the broader cultural questions they raise.

Let’s get into it.

The Question of Serendipity

In the 2000s, I was fascinated by the question of how to imbue search engines with some appreciation of serendipity. This is a bit like squaring the circle, as it turns out, but the general ambition was clear enough: sometimes, when searching for something—a pair of keys, a word on the tip of our tongue, who was president in 1960, the chemical formula for iodine—we end up finding something else.

The "something else" is a surprise because we weren’t looking for it, or at least didn’t think we were. And yet, it turns out to be exactly what we wanted—or more compelling than what we originally sought.

We've all had the serendipity experience, even online—clicking through a chain of links, scanning Google search results, drifting between loosely connected ideas. But search engines and information retrieval systems aren’t designed to enhance serendipity. They are designed for accuracy—for retrieving exactly what is implied by the keywords. In other words, they return what we want. What we are looking for.

If only we always knew what that was.

Serendipity is a major force in science, discovery, and the open-ended nature of thought itself. The famous cases remain compelling: Fleming didn’t set out to discover penicillin, Kekulé’s benzene structure came to him in a dream, and Gödel, lingering in the Vienna Circle, wasn’t supposed to uncover the limits of formalism but did. These moments fascinate not only because of what was found, but because they reveal how discovery actually works—not always through direct search, but through unexpected encounter.

The Abandonment of Serendipity

By the mid-2000s, my band of misfit UT Austin grad students and I had abandoned the attempt to program serendipity—not because the idea lacked merit, but because the web itself had made it unnecessary. Internet search, in its emergent form, already provided workarounds: we could rejigger keywords (“it’s something like…”), frequent discovery-oriented platforms like the now-defunct StumbleUpon, or, later, rely on the social graph. Once Facebook took off, our “friends” became serendipity engines of their own, feeding us surprises all day long.

Building serendipity into search became a nonstarter.

The Loss of the Unexpected

Even so, the web has never been the ideal medium for pure serendipity. I still find that wandering through old bookstores does a better job of summoning the angels (or sisters, if you know the story) of serendipity than anything algorithmic. This is part of a larger cultural turn.

Serendipity is not an isolated phenomenon—it belongs to a broader category of how discovery happens. This takes us to creativity.

From Serendipity to Creativity

Serendipity is a natural lead-in to creativity because both involve a departure from rule-following. If you find something you thought you didn’t want, then the rule that led you there—by definition—failed.

Rules, despite the old saying, aren’t made to be broken. They are made to deliver consistent results.

If the rule you followed brought you to this, of what use was the rule? – Anton Chigurh, No Country For Old Men

The Cultural Decline of Serendipity

Serendipity survives in attenuated form on the web but, like creativity, has undergone a kind of reduction to the status quo, part of a larger theme in modern culture to demystify and disenchant concepts that, well, don’t fit mechanical or rule-based descriptions. The culture seems to have anticipated its left hemisphere command-and-control leaders here, as no one seems to have the time anymore to go looking for the latest news about DOGE and end up with a cool piece on the intelligence of the octopus.

As the mind is increasingly reframed in digital terms, serendipity—unless it can be measured, categorized, or controlled—is treated as an inefficiency. The public, too, seems increasingly content to let “thinking outside the box” mean assembling a slick PowerPoint rather than pursuing anything that might actually change their thinking.

The Slow Death of Creativity

A similar reduction has taken place with our concept of creativity. Not only has it been increasingly misunderstood, but its essential conditions—those that allow it to emerge at all—are being eroded. McGilchrist (following many others) explains that creativity unfolds in three stages.