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Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath

Richard Dawkin’s The Selfish Gene and Malcom Galdwell’s The Tipping Point compared an idea spreading through a network of people to a virus spreading through a network of people. The idea’s skill at spreading depends on the likelihood of the next person absorbing the idea, the person’s level of connectedness to the rest of the network of people, and the person’s likelihood of persuading other minds to accept the idea.

Made to Stick seeks to answer a related question: what makes ideas unforgettable? It points out that urban legends, which lack value and are often easily demonstrated to be false, are very memorable, spread far and wide, and are hard to stamp out.

Made to Stick argues that to be hard to forget an idea must be simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, emotional, and told through a story. The book dissects a great number of ideas to illustrate each of these elements in greater detail.

Simple means the core intent/idea/point is told in a prioritized/compact/profound manner.

Unexpected because a surprise gets attention. It’s best if the unexpectedness is related to the Simple idea, and if there is a lack of information that keeps things suspenseful. The best unexpected ideas are the ones that set up achievable but audacious goals.

Concrete means related directly to human action or sensory information. The book makes an interesting point that novices perceive concrete details, while experts think of concrete details as symbols of higher abstract insight and thus naturally avoid concrete communication. It points out in passing that novices and experts are best able to coordinate when they focus on concrete details. Often times a physical object can be used to represent ideas in a concrete manner, even if the physical object is just a symbol.

Ideas are believed to be Credible if they mention a respected authority, mention someone who learned through hard experience, rely on the listener’s own experience, are on a human scale, and/or are testable by the listener.

Sticky ideas usually appeal to Emotion because people are wired to feel for people, not for abstractions. The key is finding the right emotion to harness. Emotions can be generated by an appeal to self interest, using associations, or appealing to identity, particularly the stories people believe themselves to be in.

Ideas told in a Story are easily visualized, have a plot, and let the listener simulate how to react to the idea.

This was an interesting book, but I’m going to have to run a wide variety of ideas against this test before I’m convinced of its usefulness.

Warped Passages by Lisa Randall

Randall is a Harvard professor of physics who provides a non-mathematical review of why space may have more than the 3 spatial dimensions and the 1 temporal dimension we are familiar with. The short answer is that experiments bashing particles into each other show very strange results, which make better sense if certain attributes of those particles and the forces that interact with them operate in dimensions beyond the ones we’re directly aware of. Like other books of its type, such as Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time, and Brian Greene’s The Elegant Universe, this book recaps a bunch of physics you may already know to get to the strangeness that you probably won’t understand* even after you’ve read it three times. Still, I liked it.

* If you do understand it, please drop me an email.

I’m going to start keeping track of the books I read on my website, mathoda.com.  If you have any feedback on the books I mention, or my review of them, please feel welcome to leave me comments at my website or send them to me via email.

Update, 3/27/08: You can also find me on goodreads.com