Human knowledge has grown into an extraordinary collection of discoveries, observations, theories and documented facts. Yet some important insights may still be waiting — not beyond what humanity knows, but in the relationships between things already known. Technology professional and author Jay Gontu calls this territory Intercognix: the unknown between the known.
A Library Without Corridors
Picture everything humanity has written as one vast library — medicine in one wing, physics in another, history, law and literature each in its own hall, meticulously catalogued. Now notice what the library lacks: corridors. A historian rarely reads an obscure pharmacology paper. A physicist rarely encounters an observation buried in an unrelated field. No single mind has stood in two halls at once.
That structure creates an intriguing possibility: two established findings from separate disciplines may together suggest a third insight, even though no one working in either field has previously connected them.
The phenomenon has historical precedent. During the 1980s, information scientist Don Swanson examined separate medical literatures concerning dietary fish oil and Raynaud’s phenomenon. Neither literature contained the answer on its own. Considered together, they suggested a therapeutic connection that had previously gone unrecognized — one later supported by clinical investigation.
Swanson described the broader phenomenon as “undiscovered public knowledge.” His work demonstrated that potentially meaningful relationships can remain hidden even when the underlying information is already publicly available — hidden not for lack of facts, but for lack of a corridor between them.
Gontu believes artificial intelligence creates an opportunity to search that territory at a much larger scale. Modern AI systems can represent and compare concepts across very large bodies of text, making it increasingly practical to examine relationships between disciplines that would be difficult for any individual researcher to approach by hand.
“Every question we ask a machine is limited by what we can already imagine. We have built extraordinary systems for answering questions. The harder frontier is discovering the questions nobody has thought to ask — and that is where these unrecognized connections may be hiding,” Gontu says.
Two Known Things, and a Bridge
Gontu coined Intercognix from “inter,” meaning between, “cogni,” relating to knowing, and “X,” representing the unknown. He defines an Intercognix candidate as an insight discoverable only through a previously unrecognized relationship between two independently known things: A is known, B is known, and nothing about either is new — but the bridge between them implies something else, call it X, that was never stored in A or B alone.
The word “candidate” is deliberate. A computationally identified relationship between two fields is not automatically a discovery. It must withstand prior-art review, domain-expert scrutiny and, where appropriate, empirical testing. Most candidates will collapse under that scrutiny, and should. The value lies in the small number that survive it.
“The science on each side is often already done. What remains is the bridge — and building a bridge is a smaller ask than building both shores,” Gontu says.
AI Could Help Researchers Find Better Questions
Artificial intelligence is commonly valued for answering questions faster. Intercognix points toward another use: surfacing questions that may not yet have occurred to researchers at all. That doesn’t remove the need for human expertise — AI may expose a possible connection, but specialists must determine whether it’s scientifically meaningful. A promising connection between two disciplines can also bring together two experts rather than requiring one person to master both fields.
This makes the idea particularly relevant to researchers, students, technologists and domain specialists willing to look beyond traditional disciplinary boundaries — to search for something before knowing exactly what it is.
A Frontier That Expands With Knowledge
The potential search space grows as humanity adds to its collective knowledge. Every new finding does more than increase what humanity knows; it may also open new corridors to knowledge that already exists. That gives Intercognix an unusual property as a frontier: it expands as knowledge itself expands.
For Gontu, the idea is simple: humanity may already possess pieces of important discoveries whose relationships have not yet been recognized.
Jay Gontu is a technology professional based in the Chicago area and the author of Close Your Eyes to See*, a work of philosophical nonfiction. Through Intercognix, he explores the unknown between the known — the possibility that meaningful new insights may exist in relationships between independently known things.*