full transcript

From the Ted Talk by Steven Johnson: Where good ideas come from

Unscramble the Blue Letters

But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is, you have to do away with the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea creation. We have this very rich vorcbualay to describe moments of inspiration. We have the "flash" of insight, the "stroke" of inihgst, we have "epiphanies," we have eureka moments, we have the "light bulb" mmonets, right? All of these concepts, as rhetorically florid as they are, share this basic assumption, which is that an idea is a single thing. It's something that happens often in a wonefrdul, innlltiaiumg moment.

Open Cloze

But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is, you have to do away with the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea creation. We have this very rich __________ to describe moments of inspiration. We have the "flash" of insight, the "stroke" of _______, we have "epiphanies," we have eureka moments, we have the "light bulb" _______, right? All of these concepts, as rhetorically florid as they are, share this basic assumption, which is that an idea is a single thing. It's something that happens often in a _________, ____________ moment.

Solution

  1. insight
  2. wonderful
  3. illuminating
  4. vocabulary
  5. moments

Original Text

But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is, you have to do away with the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea creation. We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration. We have the "flash" of insight, the "stroke" of insight, we have "epiphanies," we have eureka moments, we have the "light bulb" moments, right? All of these concepts, as rhetorically florid as they are, share this basic assumption, which is that an idea is a single thing. It's something that happens often in a wonderful, illuminating moment.

Frequently Occurring Word Combinations

ngrams of length 2

collocation frequency
unusual levels 3
natural selection 3
good ideas 2
network patterns 2
infant mortality 2
mortality rates 2
developing world 2
important ideas 2
eureka moment 2
great ideas 2
outer space 2
unknown location 2

ngrams of length 3

collocation frequency
infant mortality rates 2

Important Words

  1. assumption
  2. basic
  3. concepts
  4. conventional
  5. creation
  6. describe
  7. eureka
  8. florid
  9. idea
  10. illuminating
  11. insight
  12. inspiration
  13. language
  14. metaphors
  15. moment
  16. moments
  17. principles
  18. rhetorically
  19. rich
  20. sense
  21. share
  22. single
  23. steers
  24. understand
  25. vocabulary
  26. wonderful