By bringing together what we know and what we don't know through analogy, metaphorical thinking strikes the spark that ignites discovery.

What we know is that Fadil sometimes beat Layla.

And I said to myself, God, if it would destroy him to be called a girl, what are we then teaching him about girls?

And yet, why is it that, in creative writing courses today, the very first thing we teach students is write what you know ?

But we got to that conclusion without understanding where we were going, what we knew were a series of issues that the company and the client was confronted with.

So I have this distinction between what we're making people do and the subject that's sort of mainstream and the subject that, in a sense, people might follow with their own interest and perhaps even be spiked into doing that.

I want to ask you all to consider for a second the very simple fact that, by far, most of what we know about the universe comes to us from light.

What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original if you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity.

And, sure enough, in most of what we economists write and, more important, in what we teach in business schools it is hard to tell the difference between being pro market and being pro business.

Well it may be, but I will say that, from a scientific perspective we talked a lot about innovation today the science of innovation, how much we understand about how the brain is able to innovate is in its infancy, and truly, we know very little about how we are able to be creative.

What we don't know is the exact, precise, immediate impact of these changes on natural climate patterns winds, ocean currents, precipitation rates, cloud formation, things that bear on the health and well being of billions of people.

People relate to each other in new ways, posing questions about how we should respond to people when all that we know about them is what we have learned through a medium that permits all kinds of anonymity and deception.

This much is clear about the new Middle East It will be both more Shia and Iranian and more Kurdish, which will also make it a good deal more complicated.

And we know just an amazing amount more about the brain now than we did 10 years ago. We need a pump push from the federal government, through NIH and National Science NSF and places like that to start helping the drug companies develop some advanced psychoactive drugs.