The Rea Model
Some stars need to align for serendipity to happen. We can't know which stars or when they will align, but we can imagine what kind of stars are needed.
This research note is part of the serendipity series. In it, I'll walk you through the Rea serendipity model.
Models are representations, and representations are treacherous.1 We create them to help us make sense of the world, navigate, explain, and predict. However, models have another role that I find more valuable: to provoke and generate. If engaging with this model triggers serendipitous episodes, then it is as valuable, if not more so, than a model that merely enhances our understanding of serendipity. While trying to be explicative, the Rea model should be mainly generative.
The name “Rea” has symbolic and morphological relevance. Ῥέα is the daughter of Gaia (Earth) and Uranus (sky)—to remind us that it's all a matter of dynamic interaction between agent and environment, an interaction that, in the case of serendipity, is accidental and fruitful. "Rea" is also what the two main components—Readiness and Realization—start with.
Readiness
Serendipity happens to the prepared mind, to paraphrase Pasteur.2 Much has been written on what "prepared" can mean, while "mind" has received little attention. Either the understanding of the mind is taken for granted, or it is explained in neuro-centric, disembodied terms. Rea is based on the notion that the mind emerges in the interaction between an embodied agent and her environment. Cognition does not happen only in the brain, and whatever is going on in the brain is not a manipulation of representations of the outside world. Such understanding is in line with the 4E cognition, an umbrella term for a group of cognitive science schools describing the mental processes as embodied, embedded, extended and enacted.
All elements of the Rea model should be seen in the context of dynamic interaction between the embodied agent and her environment. Central is the act of noticing, which is contingent on historical and situational readiness.
The likelihood of noticing is dependent on the history of interactions between the agent and the environment, present in the model with the word experience. Such history might be related to a history of working on a problem, or it can be of a different kind.3
The Rea model is inspired by Wendy Ross' Serendipitous Cognition Model (SCM).4 In it, the prepared mind consists of an informational and attentional state. The informational state is determined by experience and attunement, which, together with the environment, are dynamically co-shaped.
In Rea, both experience and attunement are considered, but the concept of states is absent. While states have proven helpful in science and technology, they introduce a static way of thinking about processes.5 Similarly, in Rea, instead of an attentional state, there is a working mode that, following Ross' distinctions, can be disengaged, neutral, or engaged. While an engaged working mode, or being in the flow, typically drives progress at work, serendipitous events are often interruptions. Depending on one's level of attunement, these events can be missed or ignored when deeply in the flow, especially if one is overly protective of maintaining it.
In the sketch above, experience is shown below the historical readiness and working mode below the situation readiness. The attunement has both historical and situational aspects.
The agents attention in Rea is not only dependent on the working mode, as SCM seems to suggest, but also on agent's experience and attunement.
Realization
The right side of Rea is the area of realization. Realization has a double meaning: become aware and make it happen (I have taken advantage of this feature in other models as well). Similar to the left side, the lower elements are used to modify the upper, and so as we had historical readiness and situation readiness on the left side, on the right side, we have relevance realization and output realization. Relevance realization is where the accident is noticed by the agent and not dismissed. Its relevance is realized. Relevance realization is possible only by ignoring a lot of environmental stimuli6 so that the two varieties are matched. The mind isn’t just passively reacting to the environment but actively shaping what it perceives as relevant.
The act of noticing is an act of sense-making. Sense-making is what we do all the time.
Sense-making is the capacity of an autonomous system to adaptively regulate its operation and its relation to the environment depending on the virtual consequences for its own viability as a form of life. Being a sense-maker implies an ongoing (often imperfect and variable) tuning to the world and a readiness for action."7
Through sense-making, we become attuned to the world and ready, including ready to notice, which is just another act of sense-making. What is different is that it's surprising and, at the same time, exactly what's needed. It is relevant in its irrelevance.
A serendipitous episode can consist of one or multiple serendipitous events. If it is one event, we have the Penny pattern; if it's more, it could be either the Path or Pair pattern, as explained in the previous article.
The accident can be realized as relevant, but if nothing comes out of it in practice, it doesn’t qualify as serendipity. That last part, outcome realization, corresponds to the enaction of Wendy Ross's SCM but is not called like that here since, as mentioned earlier, Rea is based on an enactive understanding of cognition, and so both relevance realization and output realization are enacted, as are any other cognitive processes.
Conclusion
In the Rea sketch above, the serendipitous accident is what looks like a star. But to be that, it needs to align with other stars: experience, attunements, attention, and the act of noticing.
That we can get fooled by representation was famously shown in the 1929 painting by René Magritte, The Treachery of Images (La Trahison des Images).
At a lecture at the University of Lille in 1854, Louis Pasteur said “Dans les champs de l'observation le hasard ne favorise que les esprits préparés”, translated as “In the fields of observation, chance favors only the prepared mind.”
See the distinction based on the relation between problem and solution summarised in the previous post.
Ross, W. (2024). Accidental Thinking: A Model of Serendipity’s Cognitive Processes. Review of General Psychology, 28(3), 253–267. https://doi.org/10.1177/10892680241254759
Motion, for example, is studied by seeing an object occupying different positions in space at equal intervals of time. In other words, motion is defined by its opposite: immobility. As William James remarked in A Pluralistic Universe, “the stages into which you analyze a change are states; the change itself goes on between them. It lies along their intervals, inhabits what your definition fails to gather up, and thus eludes conceptual explanation altogether.”
Vervaeke, J., Lillicrap, T. P., & Richards, B. A. (2012). Relevance Realization and the Emerging Framework in Cognitive Science. Journal of Logic and Computation, 22(1), 79–99. https://doi.org/10.1093/logcom/exp067
Paolo, E. A. D., Cuffari, E. C., & Jaegher, H. D. (2018). Linguistic Bodies: The Continuity between Life and Language. The MIT Press. https://direct.mit.edu/books/monograph/4107/Linguistic-BodiesThe-Continuity-between-Life-and