When I look down the list of aggregated del.icio.us links over there on the right-hand side of this page, I get the sneaking suspicion that I don’t get out much. By which I mean that I don’t seem to have enough volume or variety in the sources of my information/inspiration. Noah and Amber and Arthur and so many others seem to be doing much better than I in that regard. (Heaven forbid I venture out into the dangerous world where Scoble cavalierly consumes 622 RSS feeds daily.)

Steven Johnson says in Emergence that our brains are essentially massively parallel processors. They’re built to seek metaphors and find connections between seemingly unrelated events. So bumping into random things and letting your head draw connections is, more or less, the only way to get good ideas. And I haven’t had all that many good ideas recently; my ideas are breeding in a cesspool.

Here are three recent things I ran across that have contributed to my sense of paranoia. (Most from the usual sources I always tend to quote… sorry.)

First, an article in the New Yorker interviewing a fellow named Nico Muhly, who is helping to reimagine classical music. (Listen to some of his music here.) Check out how one piece of stimulus triggers another and another:

Muhly has an associative intelligence that is facilitated by Google and iTunes. The image from Digges reminded him of an anthem by William Harris that sets part of a poem by Edmund Spenser (“Fair is the heaven where happy souls have place / In full enjoyment of felicity”), and that prompted him to listen again to a recording of Elizabethan minstrel songs by the countertenor Alfred Deller. Looking at a series of images of the sun marked by sunspots—which reminded him of a computer screen cluttered with icons—he thought of a passage from Roland Barthes’s “The Empire of Signs,” in which Barthes says that a chopstick “introduces into the use of food not an order but a caprice, a certain indolence.” Muhly decided that “a certain indolence” might be a good characterization of the mood with which he wanted his violin concerto to conclude.

Second, Satish and some other folks from Naked went to McNeil Nutritionals’ Digital Day. The keynote there was given by Frans Johansson, who wrote a book (The Medici Effect). His description of the book is a bit hyperbolic, but the point is dead on:

What do termites and architecture have in common? Music records and airlines? And what does any of this have to do with health-care, card-games or cooking? Most of us would assume nothing. But out of each of these seemingly random combinations have come groundbreaking ideas that have created whole new fields.

According to Satish, examples include the original candy-colored Apple iMacs, tire treads of a Hummer inspired by Nike soles, and the MLK speech transposed over techno music and circulated digitally.

Kind of like that Obama video by Will.i.am that’s making the rounds?

Lastly, a video found on PSFK. It shows Shepard Fairey and WK getting ready for a collaborative show. It doesn’t directly build on the other examples above, but my brain says it fits too, and maybe that’s the point. It’s about how two of them draw inspiration from one another. And how their work is layer upon layer of different images, all building and contributing to a bigger, amazing whole.