I began to think about the Synthesizing Mind when the great physicist Murray Gell-Mann
made an off handed remark. He opined that in the twenty-first century, the most
important mind will be the synthesizing mind. A great example of a synthesizer is
Charles Darwin. He travelled for five years aboard the Beagle, and collected a huge
amount of information about the flora and fauna of the world. He did his own
experiments and observations of the world, corresponded with everybody who was a
naturalist, and then twenty years later put forth one of the great intellectual syntheses “On
the Origin of the Species