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medical search engine called Medline, which makes it possible to search millions of scientific papers in medicine—you can think of Medline as a high-level map of human medical knowledge. He began his work by using Medline to search the scientific literature for connections between migraines and other conditions. Here are two examples of connections he found: (1) migraines are associated with epilepsy; and (2) migraines are associated with blood clots forming more easily than usual. Of course, migraines have been the subject of much research, and so those are just two of a much longer list of connections that he found. But Swanson didn’t stop with that list. Instead, he took each of the associated conditions and then used Medline to find further connections to that condition. He learned that, for example, (1) magnesium deficiency increases susceptibility to epilepsy; and (2) magnesium deficiency makes blood clot more easily. Now, when he began his work Swanson had no idea he’d end up connecting migraines to magnesium deficiency. But once he’d found a few papers suggesting such two-stage connections between magnesium deficiency and migraines, he narrowed his search to concentrate on magnesium deficiency, eventually finding eleven such two-stage connections to migraines. Although this wasn’t the traditional sort of evidence favored by medical scientists, it nonetheless made a compelling case that migraines are connected to magnesium deficiency. Before Swanson’s work a few papers had tentatively (and mostly in passing) suggested that magnesium deficiency might be connected to migraines. But the earlier work wasn’t compelling, and was ignored by most scientists. By contrast, Swanson’s evidence was highly suggestive, and it was soon followed by therapeutic trials that confirmed the migraine-magnesium connection.

If you suffer from migraines you’ll know the discovery of the migraine-magnesium connection hasn’t resulted in a cure or a surefire treatment. Today, magnesium deficiency is just one of many factors known to contribute to migraines, and the primary cause of migraines remains elusive and the subject of debate. Nevertheless, uncovering the migraine-magnesium connection was a significant step in understanding what makes migraines happen and how to stop them. Furthermore, the significance of Swanson’s work goes well beyond medicine. While it has become the conventional wisdom of our age to bewail the information explosion, as though the massive increase in our knowledge is somehow a bad thing, Swanson tipped this point of view on its head. He saw the growth of knowledge not as a problem, but as an opportunity. He realized that tools such as Medline expand our ability to find meaning in humanity’s collective knowledge, and so enable us to discover patterns in the whole that are invisible to unaided humans. No human mind could ever encompass the millions of experiments indexed by Medline. Fortunately, no one mind needs to. Working in symbiosis with tools such as Medline, we can extend our minds so that we can find connections hidden in superhuman amounts of knowledge. Effectively, such tools are enabling a new method of scientific discovery.

Searching for Influenza

The method used by Swanson to discover the migraine-magnesium connection is just one of many new ways of finding meaning hidden in existing knowledge. A different approach has recently been used by scientists at Google and the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to develop a better way of tracking the spread of the influenza virus—the flu. Each year, the flu kills between 250,000 and 500,000 people around the world. Governments and health organizations carefully track the spread of the flu, so they can respond quickly to outbreaks, and prevent pandemics such as the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed more than 50 million people. In the United States, the flu is tracked by the CDC, which signs up doctors across the country to participate in a tracking program. When a patient reports flu-like symptoms—a fever and sore throat or cough—the doctor reports