Randomness as a Growth Strategy: Why Jostling Your Mind Matters

In my teens and early twenties, I had a fascination with neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. This obsession led to a book by Dr. Ernest Rossi, The Psychobiology of Gene Expression. The fundamental insight: three conditions optimize gene expression and neurogenesis—novelty (new, surprising experiences), environmental enrichment (stimulating, varied environments), and exercise (physical activity).

Though this book was published in 2002, the premise behind the insights has continued to be validated and expanded. Brain development is choreographed by complex gene programs, regulated in turn by epigenetic mechanisms—behavior, diet, and environment. Neurons demonstrate plasticity and dynamic responsiveness to environmental and other signals, and epigenetic mechanisms help govern both critical period and lifelong plasticity. Environmental perturbations during development can become encoded in the epigenome.

For those of us who generally have an internal locus of control, this gives us a list of growth primitives. Things we can build into our everyday lives to ensure a healthy and vibrant mind—turning on all the brain dials. Who wouldn’t want to have an agile mind that’s continually building itself through innate growth mechanisms? Yes, this is a simplistic view, but directionally valid.

From this framework, I adopted a mantra: “jostle my mind.” Jostle conveys a sense of accidentally bumping into something or being shaken, the way true novelty should feel at times. I added a healthy dose of the big three (novelty, enriched environments, and exercise) to my daily activities. I already had a tendency to go this direction, but now it was becoming codified. The reason I over-indexed on “mind” is that I felt it encompassed the ethos of the big three.

Randomness as a Feature

It’s ironic that randomness, generally thought of as a non-rational thing (try telling your boss that you’re adding randomness to your job duties), has such high status in the hard sciences—information theory, statistics, stochastic dynamics, and quantum mechanics, to name a few. As it relates to the big three, randomness is one way to unlock novelty in the real world. It’s a simple heuristic for overriding your habituated patterns. By the way, it’s also baked into evolution: random mutations.

One way I embedded randomness into my learning agenda to generate novelty was through my treasured bookstore visits. I would read my main interests, and then meander into random areas and pick up something else at random. It was not uncommon to see me reading something on economics, philosophy, architecture, and biochemistry—albeit leading to befuddled stares.

The big three are not mutually exclusive but overlap and complement each other. For example, exercising in and of itself has positive neuronal effects, but you can also layer novelty into your regular exercise routine, adding layers of robustness to your growth plan. This is something you could plan to do, or something you just randomly meander into, like a cycling class.

Jostling the Deep Structure for Growth

Down the mind stack, there are layers of consciousness ripe for novelty and randomness. Down the ladder of our mental maps, we find subtler things like beliefs, ideas, categories, and knowledge. To shake or rattle a way of thinking at the root is not easy. It’s a bit like being forced to eat your vegetables as a kid, assuming you didn’t like eating vegetables as a kid. After all, who among us actively seeks to destabilize something we hold to be true?

But if we seek novelty, enrichment, and growth, then challenging what we hold to be true—whether that be our beliefs about business, methodologies, possibilities, capitalism, or, dare I say, faith—can be enlightening and healthy.

Most of us have encountered external events impacting these parts of our identities, forcing us to deal with a challenge to the core of who we are and what we do. Fewer of us actively seek it. Emerson, my favorite transcendentalist, articulated it this way:

“...in our lapsed estate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not cooperating with the divine expansion, this growth comes by shocks...Calamity...which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character.”

In Emerson’s world, the base state of our life presupposes growth, either deliberate or imposed by external powers—divine and otherwise.

Mind Jostlers Worth Reading

A few of my favorite, safe-for-all yet contrarian mind jostlers are listed below:

Against Method, by Paul Feyerabend: Feyerabend, a one-time disciple of Karl Popper, broke from Popperian falsification as the gold standard of rationalism. In his most popular work, he makes a strong case for an “anything goes” approach to rational progress. He holds that no single methodological rule has governed all successful science. Feyerabend considered this an empirical finding, not a prescription. For those of us beholden to strict scientific standards, this one rattles the foundation in a thoughtful, evidence-backed essay.

Order Out of Chaos, by Ilya Prigogine: One of my favorite works by a Nobel Prize–winning scientist. Most of us are familiar with the second law of thermodynamics—everything moves toward disorder (entropy). Prigogine describes the physics of “dissipative structures,” open systems that will spontaneously form a new order when exposed to energy that takes the system far from equilibrium. For example, a pot of water heated to an extreme level will eventually form an ordered oscillating pattern of steam, while up to that point no semblance of steam “order” or “structure” seems present. The interesting part is that the properties and critical point at which the “new order” emerges is unpredictable from previous states. This is analogous to the properties of LLMs, which develop “emergent” properties from token prediction when given enough data and compute (energy).

One From Many, by Dee Hock: The man responsible for stewarding the genesis of Visa is Dee Hock. Imagine Rockefeller meets Thoreau. Dee’s personal story is a mixture of happenstance, preparation, perseverance, and the power of “ordinary” people. My favorite part is the insight behind empowering people to do great things. The common wisdom you hear is “get the best and brightest.” Every company thinks that the smartest and most capable people exist as a fixed supply, and the only way to succeed is to fill your company with these people (which is by definition not possible). Dee’s story and insight are that everyone is capable, given the right inspiration and freedom to act. The story of his life and role in driving the development of Visa—the first quasi-decentralized payments network—shatters your preconceptions of what it takes to win.

Why Greatness Cannot Be Planned, by Ken O. Stanley and Joel Lehman: This is probably my most regularly gifted book. Although written in 2014, before the GenAI moment, it has become a bit of a cult classic among those of us in AI. Foreshadowing both the LLM movement and Rich Sutton’s well-known “Bitter Lesson,” Stanley (former OpenAI researcher) and Lehman share AI research findings that lead to counterintuitive conclusions. Based on research involving image generation, the researchers found that more often than not, iterating on images based on a desired end state yielded poorer outcomes than simply using a novelty heuristic:

“The important point is that novelty (and interestingness) can compound over time by continually making new things possible. So instead of seeking a final objective, by looking for novelty the reward is an endless chain of stepping stones branching out into the future as novelty leads to further novelty. Rather than thinking of the future as a destination, it becomes a road, a path of undefined potential.”

What If?

One of the unlocks of indulging in “mind jostling” activities is that your ability to generate “what ifs” increases. A big part of hope, optimism, and inspiration is tied to this. Side note, the elite military recently began to construct new training around the value of “What if” scenario building, see “Primal Intelligence” by Angus Fletcher.

During the journey of developing the governing structure of Visa, Dee Hock felt frustrated with the arguing between all the parties involved. A spark of inspiration suddenly came to him. He asked himself:

“What if we quit arguing about the structure of a new institution and tried to think of it as having some sort of genetic code?”

Inspired by the possibilities of using nature’s principles to build the foundation of the first-of-its-kind network, Dee and his collaborators pivoted. They abandoned their previous frames and explored the possibilities of using principles to create an institution that could emerge in a way in which it could create and develop itself. The network of networks was born.

Opinions My Own

Angel Armendariz