Since I published the books I’ve wrestled with finding better evidence of harmogenics than I actually presented. Reading back on those important sections now, my examples are accurate but too general by themselves. They establish the validity of the claim but do little to put it on display. Ultimately, the best evidence for what I am talking about is going to be you looking into your own life experiences.
Nevertheless, I claim that when people combine their practices, something emerges beyond the parts, but where is the proof? Plenty of people garden and paint and run and never connect them in a special way. Plenty of accomplished people have hobbies, and maybe they’d have accomplished just as much without them. Correlation isn’t causation, which is a really inconvenient fact.
Show me the evidence. I grounded harmogenics (or tried to anyway) in the science of emergence and complex systems, and I’m confident in that foundation. What I didn’t give enough of were specific lives, people in whom you can actually watch one practice cross into another. I assumed those would be easy to find. They weren’t. Nobody has gone looking for them, so what exists is scattered across fields that never talk to each other. Some of it can be proven. Some of it can’t. And some of it you can actually watch happen, if you know where to look.
Start with what can be proven. In 2015 the FINGER trial in Finland, which I wrote about in “Harmonious Generation Is Not a Story,” randomly assigned more than 1,200 older adults at risk of cognitive decline to either general health advice or a combined program of diet, exercise, cognitive training, social activity and vascular monitoring. The combined group did better. In 2025 the US POINTER trial followed 2,111 Americans and found that a structured, coached version of the same kind of program did better than a self-guided one. Combining practices causes real benefits in randomized trials. What they don’t show is that the combination produces more than each piece would have alone, because neither trial tested the pieces separately. So the strongest health evidence we have proves the combination works and leaves the more interesting question irritatingly open.
That question has been tested somewhere else, though, and the answer is striking. In the 1990s the economists Casey Ichniowski, Kathryn Shaw and Giovanna Prennushi studied steel finishing lines that used the same technology across many plants. Lines that adopted a whole system of practices together, work teams, flexible job assignments, training in multiple roles, employment security and incentive pay, were substantially more productive than traditional lines. Lines that adopted the same practices one at a time saw no effect at all. Every piece alone produced nothing. The combination produced a great deal. That’s organizations rather than individual lives, but it’s the clearest test I can find where a whole can be more than the sum of its parts, and it was published in the American Economic Review, not a wellness blog.
The second kind of evidence brings us closer to the individual. For more than twenty years Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein at Michigan State have studied how great scientists think. They gathered the work, hobbies and interests of 773 Nobel laureates from 1901 to 2008 and found that the science laureates were about nine times more likely than typical scientists to have training in crafts like woodworking and metalworking or in the fine arts. Most laureates had studied more than one discipline, and many had changed fields. On its own that’s just a correlation, and a skeptic could fairly say that brilliant people simply have more energy for everything.
But Root-Bernstein also took over a study that followed 38 scientists from 1958 to 1988, four of whom went on to win Nobel Prizes, and that study found something more specific. The less successful scientists treated their hobbies as an escape from work. The most successful integrated everything, letting each pursuit feed the others. The bottom third believed science and the arts couldn’t talk to each other. Every scientist at the top had a natural affinity for combining them. So the difference wasn’t having many practices. It was connecting them. That’s the line between harmogenics and simply being well-rounded, and it shows up in the data.
Something similar turns up in research on older adults who combine physical exercise with brain training. The results are mixed, and some reviews find the combination no better than either piece alone. But a 2018 meta-analysis by Freja Gheysen and colleagues found that the combination tended to work better when the exercise and the mental training were done together than when they were done separately, one after the other. Doing two things side by side isn’t the point. Letting them meet is.
Much of this is still correlation. Maybe the most successful scientists had the freedom to integrate because they were already successful. Root-Bernstein himself notes that if you’re working two jobs to survive, you may have no time for hobbies at all, which is exactly what I wrote about in “Economics of The Weight.” You can’t prove harmogenics in general from this kind of data. But you can trace it in particular.
Consider Alexis Carrel. In 1894 the French president Sadi Carnot was stabbed and died of a severed abdominal blood vessel, because no surgeon alive knew how to sew one back together. Carrel, a young surgeon in Lyon, decided to learn. He went to Marie-Anne Leroudier, one of the finest embroiderers in the city, and took lessons with her needles and silk thread. Those lessons became his method for joining blood vessels, and that method became the foundation of vascular surgery and organ transplantation. He won the Nobel Prize in 1912.
The historian Paul Craddock later worked with an embroiderer to compare Carrel’s surgical technique with Leroudier’s needlework and found specific overlaps, things Carrel couldn’t have picked up from an amateur. Carrel’s later politics were ugly, and he deserves no admiration for them, but the thread from embroidery to surgery is there to be followed. You don’t have to take it on faith. You can see where one practice crossed into the other.
Santiago Ramón y Cajal, the father of modern neuroscience, planned to be an artist and studied at an art academy as a teenager before his father pushed him into medicine. He never stopped drawing. At the microscope he sketched what he saw, and his drawings did more than record. He combined observations made at different times and by different methods into single images that argued for a hypothesis, and the hypothesis was that the brain is made of separate cells rather than one tangled web. He won the Nobel in 1906. Electron microscopes confirmed he was right in the 1950s, and his drawings still appear in textbooks. As the director of the museum that exhibited them put it, drawing was a way of thinking for him. The art didn’t decorate the science. The art was how the science happened.
The laureates are full of this once you start looking. James Allison, who won the Nobel in 2018 for discovering how to release the immune system’s brakes against cancer, plays blues harmonica in a band made entirely of cancer immunologists. They call themselves The CheckPoints, after his discovery, and his bandmates say that when they play, minds wander and insight opens.
Richard Feynman, at 44, struck a deal with the artist Jirayr Zorthian to trade physics lessons for art lessons on alternate Sundays, because he wanted to convey the awe he felt that things so different all run on the same laws. Root-Bernstein argues that Max Planck, a concert-caliber musician, worked out quantum theory partly by applying the mathematics of vibrating strings to atoms, and Einstein, a violinist, reportedly said music drove the intuition behind relativity. Morten Meldal, who won the chemistry prize in 2022, says you learn creativity by doing art and that it carries into scientific research.
Athletes call it cross-training, and they talk about it more openly than anyone. Former NFL receiver Lynn Swann studied ballet, modern dance and tap from the age of four through high school, and as a boy he felt more at home on the dance floor than the football field. Anyone who has seen his catches in Super Bowl X, where he was named MVP, has seen ballet. He later said every athlete who jumps is performing a plié.
Vanessa Demopoulos danced on a pole for thirteen years before becoming a UFC fighter and says the spatial awareness, flexibility and dexterity carried straight into her jiu-jitsu, where she still uses pole moves. Roger Federer played badminton, basketball, soccer and more as a kid, credits that range for his hand-eye coordination, and tells young players that different sports are good for the mind. David Epstein opens his book Range with Federer for exactly this reason.
Writers and makers tell it in their own words. Haruki Murakami took up running at 33 to balance the sedentary life of a novelist and says most of what he knows about writing he learned through running every day. Steve Jobs dropped in on a calligraphy class after leaving college, and ten years later it became the typography of the Macintosh. In his Stanford commencement speech he said you can’t connect the dots looking forward, only looking backward. That is about as exact a description of harmogenics as I know. It operates whether you see it or not, and you usually see it only in retrospect. The point is, if you are attentive, there are a lot of dots to be connected.
Dean Ornish’s program for reversing heart disease combines exercise, plant-based eating, yoga and meditation, and group support. One participant in Hawaii said the love of his support group was what balanced him out, and the center’s medical director called group support the glue that holds everything else together. Hmmm. One practice is what makes the others stick. That’s practices reinforcing each other, which isn’t quite the same as practices generating something new, the way Carrel’s embroidery became surgery. Harmogenics includes both, and both are worth having.
Phyllis Jones was 62, grieving her mother, worn down by a toxic job and on medical leave after a panic attack when she joined the POINTER trial. Two years of combined exercise, diet, brain training and socializing later, she told CNN she was a new person. Feeling like a new person isn’t the same as proving you are one. A large study released this year found that people in structured programs, even placebo ones, reported changes that outside observers couldn’t confirm. But I once had a doctor, one of the best I’ve had, who scoffed at the placebo effect. If the patient gets better, he said, who cares why?
Andy Hughes in England was isolated and in chronic pain when his doctor referred him to gardening groups, walk-and-talk sessions and volunteering, and he says the combination turned his life around. The research on programs like his is mixed, and I won’t claim his story as proof. But it is his story, and it has the same shape as all the others.
So here is where that leaves us. I guess I haven’t “proven” much here. Like I said, it is difficult, and these things are disassociated in our minds. But all of this, taken together, certainly suggests the idea is worthy of consideration.
Emergent effects are hard to prove by their nature. They don’t belong to any single part, so you can’t isolate them, and they often show up only when you look back. And almost nobody is looking. No field studies what happens between fields, so the evidence turns up by accident, a study of Nobel hobbies here, a surgeon’s embroidery there, each filed under its own heading. For me these traces show something.
Here’s what I can show: randomized trials showing combinations work, a study of steel mills showing a whole system succeeding where its parts alone did nothing, research showing integration separates the great from the merely busy, and a long line of people in whom you can watch one practice cross into another. Carrel’s embroidery is in every bypass surgery performed today.
For the rest, you don’t need faith. You need to see the bet. Cultivating several practices and letting them talk to each other costs you very little, some time spent on things you presumably enjoy anyway. You just have to “see” them differently.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb, author of Antifragile, would call that a convex bet: a small, known downside and a large, unknown upside. You take bets like that without proof, because the asymmetry is the argument. Jobs said sometimes you have to trust the dots will connect. I’d put it differently. Trust is what it feels like from the inside. From the outside it’s just good odds. So look at what you already do, and ask which of those things have never been introduced to each other. Then introduce them.