The Working Memory Hypothesis says the Bell Labs is useful, in part, because whenever you need to combine multiple interdisciplinary concepts that are each complicated to invent a new concept…
instead of having to read a textbook that explains it one-particular-way (and, if it’s not your field, you’d need to get up to speed on the entire field in order to have any context at all) you can just walk down the hall and ask the guy who invented the concept “how does this work” and have them explain it to you multiple times until they find a way to compress it down into a 7 chunks, optimized for your current level of understanding.
The Working Memory Hypothesis says the Bell Labs is useful, in part, because whenever you need to combine multiple interdisciplinary concepts that are each complicated to invent a new concept…
instead of having to read a textbook that explains it one-particular-way (and, if it’s not your field, you’d need to get up to speed on the entire field in order to have any context at all) you can just walk down the hall and ask the guy who invented the concept “how does this work” and have them explain it to you multiple times until they find a way to compress it down into a 7 chunks, optimized for your current level of understanding.