Why Do Good Ideas Scare Us?

David Byrne started working on his new book, Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up, after he came across a 2004 paper about how scientific research that had barely been cited at publication sometimes has a way of becoming massively important many years later. A dry topic, maybe, but Byrne, with his typical wit and curiosity, expands it into a beguiling theory of ideas that spans art, science, literature, medicine, and topics as specific as handwashing and concrete. This book follows the release of 2021’s A History of the World (in Dingbats): Drawings & Words and comes after a busy decade of Broadway shows and solo touring. Ahead of an event at New York’s Riverside Church on Tuesday, also the book’s release date, and just after briefly reuniting with his Talking Heads bandmates, Byrne talks about why he thinks some of our most profound ideas tend to get lost for a while.

After writing Sleeping Beauties, do you think that rejection or forgetting is a feature of interesting ideas? 
I wonder! ​​There are certain kinds of ideas where we go, Ehh … uh-uh. That’s gonna be hard to accept. There’s a through-line in a lot of the book — many things we now accept were counterintuitive at first. Like that the Earth goes around the sun. Our perception is that this bright ball comes out of the horizon on one side and goes down on the other side, and we don’t feel like we’re moving. If we’re moving, why don’t we fall off? [Laughs.] Why isn’t there this incredible headwind that blows everything over?

What do we get out of drawing comparisons between science and economics or painting and medicine? You mention Johannes Kepler inspiring Bach … 
Yes. I thought, Wow. Music as we hear it now was partly inspired by an astronomer. Who would have thought that?

How did that happen, exactly? 
Well, prior to Bach’s time, music was played on instruments and in scales that were kind of fixed. They were tuned to this perfect mathematical ratio very similar to what Pythagoras had come up with a long time before that. Kepler said, “Well, actually, Pythagoras was a little bit off, as people were off about the orbits of the planets.” And so he started refining the mathematical ratios. And then Bach — and some others; he wasn’t the only one — said, “Well, if we make some little adjustments in the instruments we’re using, and we space the notes out in equal increments, then we can jump from the key of C to the key of E and play something and it sounds fine.” He also built his own organs. So he didn’t have to wait for somebody to invent an instrument that could do that. He could build it for himself.

In the introduction of your book, you talk about an album by the largely forgotten experimental Tropicália musician Tom Zé and how you eventually reissued his work in the U.S., after which he began recording music again. You also write about how a person could go, shall we say, sleeping-beauty hunting. What would you say to someone who wants to find something to wake up? 
Where to look if you don’t know where to look or what you’re looking for?

Yeah, exactly. 
That’s pretty tricky. I just finished reading a book called The Swerve that’s about this Roman poet and philosopher named Lucretius. He wasn’t the first to do this, but he reiterated the concept of atoms, and he did things like say that all the gods and creatures and mystical beings and all that kind of stuff is just complete superstition, and that there are natural causes for things. Eventually, this book he wrote, On the Nature of Things, was completely forbidden. During the Renaissance, more than a thousand years later, there was a renewed interest in the Greeks and early Romans, and there came to be a group of professional document and book hunters. And a man named Poggio Bracciolini went looking. He didn’t know what he was going to find, but he’d heard of this book. He didn’t know where it was, but he knew it existed. He went out as part of this cadre of people spreading out across Europe, going to, like, remote mountain monasteries, and eventually he found it and revived it. That’s one process — suspecting where forgotten stuff might be and then going there. You have to be curious, and you have to be open.

As I read, I started to feel strangely bad for more ephemeral works of art, or ideas — things that were popular in their time and then their unimportance becomes clear. Is that just me, or did you have that feeling at all?
Oh, like what kind of things are you thinking about?

Like soap operas, for instance.
There are definitely some things that seem to have a great popularity, and then at some point, it becomes, like, Oh, no. We’re not interested in that anymore. Vice versa, I’m thinking of fantasy novels, which were a tiny niche for a small group of geeky fans and now they probably sell more books than anything else.

Maybe that could be your next project.
[Laughs.] I don’t know!

Your concert tour ended two weeks ago, and you did Broadway recently, and you’re rolling right into a book tour. Are you looking forward to a break at some point? 
I have my U.S. book tour and then I’ll do another one in the U.K., and then I’ll get a break. A real one, back in New York — I can work fine here. It’ll give me a chance to see, you know, where do I want to go? Am I ready to write some songs?