The Medici Effect, With a New Preface and Discussion Guide

CHAPTER one

The Intersection—Your Best Chance to Innovate

MONKEYS AND MIND READERS

IN THE SPRING OF 2002, a team of researchers at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, conducted a remarkable experiment.¹ The experiment went something like this: A rhesus monkey is trained to play a computer game. The point of the game is to use a yellow cursor to chase down a red dot that moves randomly across the screen like an erratic hockey puck. The game looks and feels like something designed for a child except for one noticeable difference. The monkey doesn’t use a mouse or a joystick to play this game. Rather, the monkey moves the cursor with its mind. It controls where the cursor goes—mentally.²

When these results were published in the prestigious ...