In his sixth book, “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation,” popular science writer Steven Johnson tries to dispel the notion of the “eureka moment.” As with nature, new concepts, like the Internet, slowly grow out of old concepts. They don’t spring forth from nowhere. Darwin’s theory, for instance, was built on centuries of observation, including his own. During his fateful voyage on the HMS Beagle, Darwin also discovered that atolls, islands made of coral, were created through the lives and deaths of tropical marine organisms, hardened bodies built up on one another. This key image, according to Johnson, gave Darwin a picture for his epic explanation of how life emerged. Using natural science’s tendencies to build upon itself, as well as examples of major innovations in science, technology and even art, Johnson makes a case that ideas beget ideas, which means would-be innovators don’t need an ivory tower; they need a crowd.

We spoke with Johnson from his home in Brooklyn, N.Y., about how openly collaborative communities are out-inventing corporations, whether meetings are good or bad for new ideas, and what exactly counts as innovation.

Why don’t you agree with the notion that most good ideas come from epiphanies?

What you end up seeing when you look at history is that people who have been good at pushing the boundaries of possibility, and exploring those frontiers of good ideas and innovations, have rarely done it in moments of great inspiration. They don’t just have a brilliant breakthrough idea out of nowhere and leap ahead of everyone else. Their concepts take time to develop and incubate and sit around in the back of their minds sometimes for decades. It’s cobbled together from other people’s ideas and other people’s technologies and other people’s innovations. It’s a remixed version of something. A great example from the book is Tim Berners-Lee and the Web.

But, as you point out in the book, Charles Babbage seems to have invented the computer over 100 years before the computer as we know it was possible.

Babbage was trying to invent a digital computer with Industrial Age parts. This big clanking, industrial steam-powered structure. On some level, it was right. If he had been able to build it, it might have actually worked as a programmable computer, but it just was too complicated to do that without vacuum tubes or, even better, integrated circuits and silicon chips. He also invented what is now called the calculator and it actually kind of worked. People learned and improved upon it. There’s a path of mechanical calculation that runs through the 19th century where people are advancing it step-by-step. But the early computer was so far ahead of its time that it just kind of died off and many of Babbage’s most crucial ideas had to be independently rediscovered 60 or 70 years later. He was so far ahead of his time he couldn’t have a direct line of influence, because people couldn’t figure out what to do with his idea.

Does that mean that there is no such thing as individual inspiration? Are you saying great ideas come from a “hive mind.”

No, I wrote a book celebrating the hive mind and that’s my book “Emergence.” And I do think that there are things that true collective decision-making is capable of doing. In that book I talk about building city neighborhoods, I talk about ant colonies. But this book is not about that. It’s not that we all get together and collectively contribute tiny pieces and out of the sum of our actions a good idea is formed. What I’m saying is individuals have better ideas if they’re connected to rich, diverse networks of other individuals. If you put yourself in an environment with lots of different perspectives, you yourself are going to have better, sharper, more original ideas. It’s not that the network is smart. It’s that you are smarter because you’re connected to the network.

Well, that brings me to something in the book that bummed me out. You cite a study that observed science labs and found the breakthroughs happened more often during staff meetings than at the microscope. I hate meetings.

It’s funny that you say that, because I hate meetings too. I love those stretches where I’ve just been a writer — when I haven’t been doing Internet start-ups — where I pretty much eliminate meetings from my life. But there are different kinds of meetings. What the research found was that it was the weekly status update meeting that was so generative. It was when everybody would get together and tell stories about what they were working on and the problems they were having in their particular work. That’s very different from the meeting where you’re getting together to discuss the annual budget. When it’s a sharing and improvisational meeting, where you’re riffing off other people’s ideas, that actually can be productive.

But a number of studies have found that meetings are a staggering waste of people’s time when they’re not done well. So you can keep your dislike of meetings.

Thank you. You talk about companies such as Google, which instituted time off for thinking about nothing but innovation. The response from traditional companies is going to be pretty obvious — they can’t afford it, it’s a waste of resources and the change is too radical.

The problem is that most traditional companies that don’t operate like Google talk a big game about innovation and making their workforce more creative, but what that ends up coming down to is a corporate retreat once a year where everybody goes and plays games to make everyone more creative. Then they come back and they’re back in their normal structure. In that case, you might stumble across some interesting things, but six months later, somebody has that hunch and if there’s no place to allow it to be nurtured, it disappears.

And so you need this permanent track of hunches and half-baked ideas that runs alongside the regular work-week with its immediate deadlines and fixed concepts. Innovation time off means you’re always spending a little bit of your time working on something weird that’s not part of the official plan, but might turn into something important if we give it enough time. I think having that background process is really important.

You argue that “non-market networks,” such as universities, were responsible for more innovation in the past 200 years than even corporations. I don’t think that is the assumption most people would make.

When you make arguments about how culture works, they can be hard to prove. It’s not like a science experiment. Most of the book is made of anecdotes that fit the various patterns that I’m talking about. You always run the risk in this kind of book of cherry-picking your anecdotes. So in the last chapter I tried to zoom out far enough and look at 200 to 300 stories from the last 400 to 500 years to really see from the long view what the patterns of innovation were. And it turns out that groups of people collaborating on ideas to advance science or technology without the goal of proprietary ownership are actually a bigger driver of innovation than the private sector. In many cases these other [nonprofit-minded] groups create ideas which allow commercial development on top of them. The Internet is the classic example. 

10. Nicole Richie, “The Truth About Diamonds” (2005)

If any corner of American culture needed an exposé less than Hollywood nightlife, we couldn’t think of it. Still, the celebutante’s 2005 novel was called “shockingly entertaining” by the New York Post. And why not with prose such as, “The nightclubs of L.A. are like soap operas, except they’re not Days of Our Lives; they’re more like Passions — crazy stuff happens, and no one bats a fake eyelash.”

9. Oliver North, “Mission Compromised” (2002)

North was no stranger to creating fictions, so why not pen a thriller with a Christian moral and references to actual Oliver North? Ah, those post-modernists. “Behind the cluttered desk was a watercolor of uncertain origin, depicting only what could be the grisly violence of General George Armstrong Custer’s final moments at the Little Big Horn. The National Security Advisor looked up to see Newman staring at the painting. ‘It’s by a Native American artist. … I put this one here to remind all you green- and blue-suit types how stupid and costly military operations can be.’”

8. Lauren Conrad, “L.A. Candy” (2009)

Forget “The Hills.” Conrad says writing “was always my best subject in school, and it’s something I’ve always loved to do.” Despite insinuations there’s a ghostwriter, Conrad swears she wrote the following: “Jane jumped out of bed and slammed the door behind him. She had to take a shower, like, immediately. Who knew how long he had been in her bed, polluting it with Old Spice and man sweat.”

7. Marlon Brando and Donald Cammel, “Fan-Tan” (2005)

The actor and director cooked up the idea of a pirate potboiler set on the China Seas. Brando talked, Cammel wrote and then they both gave up. Only death, of both men, could have made this book publishable. “Thick-chested, thick thumbs and eyebrows, thick tendons of the wrist and below the kneecap and at the insertion of the hamstring, a valuable asset for a violent man a little past the years of youthful resilience when being thrown out of bars and down companion ladders were just laughable excursions. Thick-bearded he was, too.”

6. Pamela Anderson, “Star” (2004)

Making home movies isn’t the “Baywatch” babe’s only hobby. In “Star,” she tells the tale of a cosmetologist discovered by a marketing executive who becomes a Playboy centerfold. Hmmm. “Like school, for example. She may have been the brightest, but she was far more likely to be called on for cutting up in class than giving the correct answer. Only her mom knew about the straight A’s. … Star never told.”

5. Paulina Porizkova, “A Model Summer” (2007)

A peek into the world of modeling, and the Czechoslovakian-born Swedish-American model actually wrote it. Even though the book was generally dismissed for plot reasons, Porizkova got credit for being literate. “I take my book out of my backpack: Kafka’s ‘Castle.’ My father’s only comment about my summer plans was to voice his fear that my IQ would shrink to my bra size.”

4. Joan Collins, “Star Quality” (1988)

The “Dynasty” actress and shoulder pad aficionado now boasts six novels, but it began with this saga of an Irish girl’s quest for fame on the stage. And speaking of sagas, enjoy this sentence: “Another maid, Patsy, even younger than Millie, with beautiful bronze hair and an angular but pretty face, stared at Milly coldly while the rest of her staff let out sycophantic giggles at Mr. Kingsley’s attempt at wit.”

3. Macaulay Culkin, “Junior” (2006)

Culkin wins for perhaps the most vitriolic Publishers Weekly review: “This self-indulgently infantile book is a novel in only the loosest sense.” Culkin might agree, if his introduction is an indication. “I want to make one thing clear before we begin: I am not a writer. I couldn’t possibly be a writer. I have written and rewritten the words ‘Introduction’ or ‘The Introduction’ so many times in the past couple of years that I’m convinced I was not born to do this. Writing could not be my calling after the mess I’ve made of all this.” Perhaps.

2. Lynne Cheney, “Sisters” (1981)

Give Cheney credit for spurning polls. Her husband was a conservative congressman from Wyoming when Cheney wrote the story of a woman who discovers her sister’s secret lesbian love affair … in 1886 Wyoming. “The women who embraced in the wagon were Adam and Eve on a dark cathedral stage — no, Eve and Eve, loving one another as they would not be able to once they ate of the fruit and knew themselves as they truly were. She felt curiously moved, curiously envious of them.”

1. Naomi Campbell, “Swan” (1994)

Behind every swan is an ugly duckling and this tale of a supermodel being blackmailed is no different. Campbell later admitted someone else did the work here – a decision she didn’t make, unfortunately, for her debut album which appeared the same year. “I just did not have time to sit down and write a book.”

Toward the end of her memoir, her father asks her, “What I really want to know is how the hell you could have thought that of me.” Salon wanted to know, too. We spoke with Maran recently about how a false memory is born, what she thinks of “Courage to Heal” today, and what her story can teach us about such dangerous political narratives as the undying “Obama is Muslim” lie.

For a reader new to your story, and perhaps even the recovered memory craze of the 1980s, can you explain briefly what happened to you?

During the 1980s and 1990s, tens of thousands of Americans — most of them middle-class, 30-something women in big cities, like me — became convinced that they’d repressed memories of childhood sexual abuse, and then, decades later, recovered those memories in therapy.

In the years leading up to that mass panic, I was working as a feminist journalist, writing exposés of child sexual abuse, trying to convince the world that incest was more than a one-in-a-million occurrence. In the process, I convinced myself that my father had molested me. After five years of incest nightmares and incest workshops and incest therapy, I accused my father, estranging myself and my sons from him for the next eight years.

In the early 1990s the culture flipped, and so did I. Across the country, falsely accused fathers were suing their daughters’ incest therapists. Falsely accused molesters were being freed from jail — and I realized that my accusation was false. I was one of the lucky ones. My father was still alive, and he forgave me.

Why write this book now?

In 2007, I was out for a walk with someone I wasn’t even that close to. She asked me if I’d ever done anything I was ashamed of and had never forgiven myself for. And without hesitation I said, yeah, when I was in my 30s I accused my father of molesting me, and then I realized it wasn’t true. She stopped walking and stood still, just staring at me and she said, “The same exact thing happened to me.” When I came home from that hike I started calling people I had known back then and speaking to some of the therapists I had seen during that period. With the exception of my ex-lover, every other person I talked to who had accused her father in the ’80s and early ’90s now believed she had been wrong. Being a journalist, you realize there’s a story there.

There’s an interesting arc in the book. As reports of molestation increase, you begin to believe you too were molested. And as reports of false memory increase, you realize that you were not, in fact, molested.

It’s a little embarrassing for a person who’s always been thought of as a critical thinker. There’s a lot about writing this book and putting it out there that’s embarrassing. It’s not exactly the most flattering portrait. I think if it were a novel my editor would have rejected it, because the protagonist wasn’t sympathetic enough. It really shocked me, I must say, to see how much influence the external had on the internal. That the most intimate emotions and relationships can be so affected by the dominant paradigm.

What surprised me was that your own discovery of molestation was more of a process than a single epiphany.

It really was a gradual thing. I don’t think there ever was a time when I would have bet a hot fudge sundae on it. I remember telling my brother, “I think, maybe, this happened.” And, of course, the statement of accusation is all it takes to put the wheels in motion. Either legally or in your family. One thing I’ve learned is the relevance of the phrase “the perfect storm.” Not only for me, but for a lot of women I know who made these false accusations, it was very much a social phenomenon. Metaphorically, everything we were saying was true. But there was a confusion between a metaphor and a fact. And it was a highly relevant difference.

There were no legal implications in your case, and you never directly confronted your father. Would it have sped the process toward realizing the truth had you talked to him directly?

I was pretty terrified by my father. People ask, “What did your father say when you confronted him?” Well, I never confronted him. I withdrew from him, and I spent years sort of patching together this story and lining up the evidence.

Including a regular set of dreams that pointed to being molested. I wonder if you ascribe any meaning to those dreams now?

I felt a little stupid when I started interviewing the neuroscientists about how I could be dreaming something if it never happened. One of the doctors basically said, duh, a dream is a dream. It’s not reality. It’s not like something had to happen in actuality for you to dream about it, as those of us who like to dream about flying during dry sexual periods have experienced. But when I dreamed over and over about my father’s hands, and all around me people were losing their heads and blaming it on incest, I said, oh, see, I’m dreaming about my father’s hands. Obviously he molested me. It was just a few links that were a little extreme.

On the other end of the story, was there a moment when you could say, I have decided it did not happen?

That too went on for years, just like the process of deciding that he had. But when I stopped believing, it was a little more dramatic, during the breakup with my incest survivor lover. Over time, I had been less and less able to believe her stories, which progressed from incest with a slightly older relative to satanic ritual abuse, to the extent where I thought she was becoming defined as an incest survivor. I knew I couldn’t say I don’t believe her without examining my own beliefs just because her story is crazier. To my family, my story is pretty crazy too. When she left me, that was the break I needed to realize it was not true.

There is this amazing scene in the book when your father calls after you’ve sent him a birthday card for the first time in years and you recall that you sort of floated to the ceiling and could look down at yourself. And you hear your therapist say floating to the ceiling is what little girls do when they’re molested. Can you tell me a little bit more about what happened to you that day?

That was a really good example of mind control, of brainwashing, that I had been so steeped in the symptomatology of incest survivors. How do you know it’s true and what happens to little girls when they’ve been molested? All that stuff had gone into my head. That is a symptom of mass hysteria. I was actually transposing what I had heard from these little girls into my own psyche. When I heard my father’s voice, I just went there.

Because the writing is so direct in that passage, I have to ask, what really happened?

Well, you know that feeling when you hear a voice you didn’t expect to hear, that means a lot to you, and you feel weak-kneed? It was more like that. It was such an intense experience coming over my body.

At one point in the book you say, “I don’t know if I’ll ever be completely sure of anything again.” But at the end of the book it seems clear that you have become as sure as possible that nothing happened. That’s where it stands, right?

Yes. Not that I check my Amazon page or anything, but there have been some early comments that say I leave some room for doubt. That wasn’t my intention.

An important catalyst for you and many women who later recanted was reading the book “The Courage to Heal.” What’s your opinion of that book today?

I feel mixed. The two women who put the book out are people I know. I have great respect for each of them as human beings and I think their intentions were nothing but the best. I happen to know them well enough to know that no publisher called them up and said, “If you will just make these really deceptive lists of symptoms and if you will write phrases like, ‘If you think it happened, it happened,’ you will become rich and famous. It’s very hard now to understand the context in which that book was published. So if you take it now and say, how did they ever sell 10 copies of this book, it’s such nonsense, it’s easy to do. The movement that created that book doesn’t exist anymore.

There’s a whole body of work that came out of that time and mind-set, some of it feminist literature. Was there anything from that time that you think was useful or should it all be forgotten?

Oh no, no. In the book there’s a conversation with a friend of mine who says very clearly, there were excesses, there were heartbreaks, there were tragedies in terms of our families. But at the same time, when you look at the overall impact on the world, I’m glad it happened. Kids didn’t used to be protected the way they are now. Another thing, one hopes, is that a little girl who does tell, or little boy, is more likely to be believed than was true before all this happened.

You make a very interesting connection in your prologue to your story and the political landscape of today.

During the election, when people were saying Obama was a Muslim, my leftie friends would say, “What’s wrong with these people? They’re such idiots. How can they believe that?” And I would be watching it and thinking, that’s me. I know how. Even though the intention was different, and the politics were certainly different, the fact of the matter is, I’ve had the experience of gradually and thoroughly coming to believe something that isn’t true and acting on it. I can never look at crazy right-wingers the same way.

There’s a scene in the book where you meet one of the major detractors of recovered memory, Elizabeth Loftus, and your old defenses return as you talk. It made me wonder if you feel like you betrayed your side.

I’m getting letters and responses from people in the False Memory Syndrome Foundation. Elizabeth Loftus gave me a blurb. You are so right. That is another example of conditioning. I spent years thinking the False Memory Syndrome Foundation, and Elizabeth Loftus in particular, were the devil incarnate. They were cover-uppers of this horrible crime. That’s why I write about finding common ground with Elizabeth in the book, because it was so startling to me.

In the middle of the book, while you are still deeply in the mind-set of being molested, there’s a notion you agree with that if one innocent man goes to prison, but it stops a hundred molesters, it’s worth it. Do you still agree with that notion?

I’m fairly close to a man still in prison, and really believe he is innocent. I know how he’s suffered. I know he’s 80 years old and in ill health. He’s spent 20 years in prison, for no reason. If every elementary school child is now taught how to protect themselves from sexual abuse — and even more to the point, some father or preschool teacher who feels the urge to molest a child will be inhibited from doing so because they think there are guys still in jail for doing that — but innocent people are in prison, do I have to make that choice? It is a Sophie’s choice kind of thing. Would I allow an innocent man to sit in prison if it meant keeping children safe?

So would you make that choice?

I think so.

But despite its tremendous cultural presence, there are still many things we don’t understand about the common cold. In her surprising new book, “Ah-Choo! The Uncommon Life of Your Common Cold,” Jennifer Ackerman reveals what serious scientists have and haven’t learned in nearly a century of research. Ackerman, a science journalist and author of “Sex Sleep Eat Drink Dream: A Day in the Life of Your Body,” clarifies the origin of the virus name (it spreads in cold weather because we go indoors), finds out how socioeconomics could affect colds, makes connections to pandemics such as H1N1 and even considers the positive implications of being stricken.

Salon spoke to Ackerman over the phone from Virginia about the surprising science of the common cold.

Why haven’t we found a cure for the cold?

There is not just one cold virus. There are actually more than 200 viruses that make up the common cold. It’s an infection by many different viruses, but they all cause generally the same symptoms — runny nose, sneezing, coughing, malaise. With something like the flu, scientists create a vaccine based on a prediction of which strains will be most common that winter. That’s just not possible with the cold, because there are so many viruses.

Why are the symptoms similar if there are so many different sources?

I think what most people don’t know, and it’s because the finding is relatively new in the world of cold science, is that we cause our own cold symptoms. Most common cold viruses don’t do any direct damage themselves. In response to the virus, the body’s immune systems makes a whole slew of inflammatory agents, which causes the runny nose and cough.

So people who have healthier immune systems may be the ones who suffer the most?

Exactly right. One of the big myths, I think, about colds is that having a weakened immune system means being susceptible to colds. And that’s really not the case. The wisdom now is if you want to tamp down a cold, boosting any element in the immune system may be the last thing you want to do. In fact, you could create cold symptoms without injecting a cold virus at all. Just injecting the body’s own inflammatory agents will give you the symptoms of the cold. So exciting those agents, by boosting immunity, may only worsen the effects.

If it’s not a case of immune systems, why do some people get more colds than other people?

There’s a whole range of factors that affect susceptibility. Age is one of them; susceptibility declines over time. Each time you catch a cold from a particular virus, the body creates an antibody and you won’t get it again. So a teenager will catch more colds than someone who’s in their 50s or 60s. And we know that there are other factors, such as sleep and stress. People who sleep fewer than seven hours a night are three times more likely to get colds than longer sleepers. And chronic stress is another indicator for increased susceptibility.

You also found studies that show socioeconomic factors.

It’s not completely understood yet, but there’s a pretty strong correlation between socioeconomic status in childhood and susceptibility to colds. What the researcher found was that the number of years that the parents owned their own house when they were growing up was correlated with whether or not you would develop a cold when you were an adult. The greater number of years the parents owned a home, the lower your risk. And the really important years were the early years, from birth to age 6. He also did a study that shows that the perception of economic status, to a degree, predicts whether you’re likely to catch a cold.

There seems to be a debate about how the virus spreads. Were you able to get to the bottom of that question?

There’s still some debate, but clearly colds spread both by airborne droplets from sneezing and they also spread through hand-to-hand, hand-to-face contact. It depends on the kind of virus. And the most common cold virus, called the rhinovirus, most commonly spreads through nasal secretions. Cold viruses grow mainly in the nose, they multiply in the nasal cells and they are present in huge quantities in nasal secretions from people with colds. And the nasal secretions get on your hands when you’re blowing your nose, when you cover sneezes with your hands and they can spread from hand to hand with pretty brief contact.

Also, they can contaminate objects in the environment and somebody can touch that object with their hand and they can spread that way. I think what a lot of people don’t understand is if you touch that virus, you won’t get it if you wash your hands or touch your face. The way that we infect ourselves is by touching our nose or our eyes with our hands. The problem is that we touch our eyes and our noses constantly. We’re mostly unaware of it, but most of us do it up to three times every five minutes.

Those people who incessantly wash their hands with antibacterial soap are doing the right thing?

No, actually, this is a really an important point. A huge misconception in the general public is that antibacterial soaps and antibiotics in general are effective against colds. They aren’t. They’re aimed at killing bacteria. The only advantage of antibacterial soap is that they’re soap and it just helps to dislodge the cold the way regular soap does. But you have to do pretty vigorous rubbing for about 15 to 20 seconds, between your fingers, under your fingernails. And then antibiotics is another critical matter. Patients go to the doctor with a cold and they want something, because they’re miserable. The pressure on the doctor is to give them something, but antibiotics are useless against colds. The problem is that antibiotics have side effects and also the overuse can result in bacteria that are resistant to drugs.

Is there any sure way to avoid catching colds?

There’s really nothing out there that will really help you prevent getting a cold. Some, like Airborne, claim you can just take them before you go into a germy environment and it protects you. That’s a lot of baloney. One of the experts in the book said the only foolproof way to avoid colds is to become a hermit and the second most effective way is to stay away from kids. For some of us that’s practical, for most of us that’s not. So the only thing left to cut down the chances is wash your hands and don’t touch your face. And cleaning off common surfaces like refrigerator handles, microwave handles, door handles, things that people use a lot. They still don’t know what is the best cleaning solution, but they’re working on that problem.

And once you’ve caught a cold, can anything really help? Didn’t one researcher find some value of chicken noodle soup in fighting the virus?

It’s been around as a cold remedy for about a thousand years and a researcher at the University of Nebraska did find some effect in reducing the severity of inflammatory agents in cells. So, in theory, it could ease symptoms. But it’s never been tested in a clinical setting, so it remains to be proven to have medicinal value. But I’ve always felt that the warmth of the broth and the love that goes into the soup, if it’s homemade, there’s a kind of healing that’s real.

And you also make the case that catching a cold is not always bad news.

It gives us a chance to get off the merry-go-round for a few days. Because it causes malaise and it makes it so hard to concentrate, it’s a way for the body to tell you to slow down for a few days. It’s a chance for uninterrupted reading, which few of us get to indulge in the way we used to. The other possible silver lining — and these are based on very tentative, preliminary epidemiological evidence that I offer with caution — there were some results that came out of the studies on swine flu that suggest having a cold may actually keep flu at bay. This is controversial, but it is a possibility and scientists are looking at this now.

And it seems that studying the cold might be helpful in understanding other epidemics.

Right. That’s one of the reasons they are studying the common cold. If they discover something important about the cold, those discoveries may be applicable to the flu epidemic. That and the cold can be potentially dangerous in people who suffer certain kinds of asthma. So there are good reasons to study the cold, beyond the basic misery it causes and the fact that it has a major impact on the economy each year, especially with days lost in work.

You participated in one of those studies, voluntarily catching a cold. What did you gain from that experience?

Well, it was good to help with the study and also for the book. I learned that it’s mostly comprised of teenage boys who are drawn to the studies by three meals a day, a chance to stay in a hotel and the modest fee.

Did you catch a cold?

Yes, and it went straight to my chest.