What follows is THE BEST story I have ever heard illustrating why only openly connected learning content is cognitively robust online. Regrettably, there are valuable collections in walled gardens at Britannica, the Wall Street Journal, and many universities, libraries, and journals. It was fabulous when the New York Times made all its content open and connectible. It is a shame that Nature does not do so.
The following is a story Murray Gell-Mann tells in The Quark and The Jaguar (p. 21). The point it makes applies to the wasteful failure to offer cognitive richness that occurs when online content is not connected. The conversation took place in the 1950s.
The late, great Hungarian-American physicist Leo Szilard invited a colleague and me to attend an international meeting on arms control. My colleague, “Murph” Goldberger (later president of Caltech and then director of the Institute of Advanced Study in Princeton), replied that he could attend only the second half of the meeting. Leo turned to me, and I said that I could attend only the first half. Murph and I then asked if we could share an invitation. Leo thought for a moment and then told us, “No, it is no good; your neurons are not interconnected.”
