The way our brains process thought is probably very unique to our species, and the best way to describe it is through Vannevar Bush’s Raytheon project. He crafted the plans for what could be called the world’s first computer database, the Memex.

While researching one topic, let’s use World War II as an example of research, a person can look for basic and obvious information on the topic like summarizing articles and history textbooks. Then they could be interested in the events leading up to the war, so they search for the history of Germany in the early 20th century.

From there, they look at the economy and the economic depression Germany was in at the time. The depression coincided with an election, so delve into information on that specific election. See how the multitude of political parties and candidates divided the country so badly that there was no real majority in the vote so someone with only a fraction of the vote was elected, Hitler.

The research can go on and on from that to look into concentration camps, D-Day, Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, or the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in Japan. From the previous research on German economy and politics, they can analyze how the crisis in Germany led to each atrocity during World War II.

Humans tend to jump around from one subject to another that the previous subject reminded them of, like I described above, and then circle back to the main topic and connect the dots. We don’t think linearly, like Carr tried to suggest with his rigid system of organization. When do people ever do things in logical order? Look at pictures of people putting together IKEA furniture and you’ll understand. But I digress, the point I’m trying to make is that humans have very spontaneous thoughts that lead us to new ideas and possibly new inventions. An ant probably has a linear thought process like what Carr described. If humans were like that, we would have never progressed this far without our ability to think of almost anything, even if it doesn’t exist.