AMNA NAWAZ: Why are some great ideas and works of art forgotten, and why are others revived?

These are among the questions explored by musician, writer, and visual artist David Byrne.

Senior arts correspondent Jeffrey Brown joined him recently in Brooklyn for our arts and culture series, Canvas.

(MUSIC) JEFFREY BROWN: Questions and more questions.

David Byrne is a man with a curious and quirky mind, including when it comes to writing songs.

DAVID BYRNE, Musician and Author: Sometimes, I will start with the title of a song.

I did a song called "I Met the Buddha at a Downtown."

And I go, all right, what happens?

What's he like?

What's he doing?

JEFFREY BROWN: What's this Buddha guy doing at the party?

DAVID BYRNE: What does he say to you?

What do you say to him?

What does he say to you?

JEFFREY BROWN: He's a man of many turns, front man for the rock band Talking Heads, musical experimenter and collaborator with artists around the globe, Oscar winner for co-writing the score for "The Last Emperor," Broadway star in "American Utopia," and a lot more, including cycling man about town, a regular sight on New York streets, and the subject of his 2009 book, "Bicycle Diaries."

Now he's asking new questions stemming from the fairy tale of Sleeping Beauty, the princess cursed to sleep 100 years, who can be awakened only by the kiss of a prince.

Byrne came across an article in a science journal that applied the term to studies that for various reasons have been ignored or forgotten, only to be later recognized and given renewed prominence.

DAVID BYRNE: I immediately thought, I know this phenomena.

I know it from musicians that I might like, but I feel like didn't get their deserved appreciation.

I know of we're always reading about this or that or the other, and they're suddenly rediscovered, and it's like now we understand it.

Now what they did makes perfect sense.

JEFFREY BROWN: Something's lost and then found.

DAVID BYRNE: Found again, yes.

And it's -- I just love these stories, the stories of kind of a resurrection or that kind of thing, of somebody -- somebody or some work kind of coming back to life and being re-appreciated.

JEFFREY BROWN: The result is the book "Sleeping Beauties: Why Good Ideas Go Dormant and How They Wake Up."

DAVID BYRNE: This kind of clocklike device will kind of keep the telescope always pointed at the object you're observing.

JEFFREY BROWN: It's a mix of art, science, and technology that reflects his own interests.

He asked to meet us at Pioneer Works, an artist- and scientist-led cultural center in Brooklyn that he loves for its focus on creativity in its many forms.

His book offers many examples of world-famous artists lost to history for a time, sometimes centuries, thankfully rescued.

Perhaps you know this image by Italian early renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli.

DAVID BYRNE: Botticelli is really well-known.

JEFFREY BROWN: Very well-known today.

DAVID BYRNE: Very well-known.

He's on tea towels.

You can get a watch with Venus on it.

You can get you name it, and those images that are on there, Birth of Venus and all that stuff.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

DAVID BYRNE: So when you tell people, no, this guy went way out of favor for hundreds of years... JEFFREY BROWN: Byrne tells the story of Botticelli's artistic death at the hands of the crusading religious zealot Savonarola and his much later rebirth in the late 19th century.

DAVID BYRNE: Gradually, he gets re-appreciated, until, by the beginning of the 20th century, there were more books written about Botticelli than any other artist.

JEFFREY BROWN: There are as many or more examples in the fields of science and technology, such as Gregor Mendel, today known as the father of genetics, whose initial paper in 1866 went largely unrecognized.

DAVID BYRNE: For various reasons, it didn't click until, later on, two scientists were doing a very similar kind of research, and they thought, before we publish this, let's take a look and see if maybe someone else has done something similar before we take all the credit.

Yes, they found Mendel's paper.

And they go, oh, my God, he kind of did it all.

JEFFREY BROWN: And then there's something you might not expect in a book like this, concrete.

DAVID BYRNE: This is one of my favorite ones.

When people ask me, what's your book about, and I go, concrete.

JEFFREY BROWN: Concrete.

DAVID BYRNE: Yes, concrete.

And they go, what?

What?

Concrete's everywhere, yes, highways, buildings, everything.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

DAVID BYRNE: And I go, yes.

The Roman concrete, the Pantheon, for example, the dome of that is unreinforced, and it's lasted 2,000 years and doesn't have a crack in it.

The companies that make concrete now rate their concrete as guaranteed to last 50 years.

JEFFREY BROWN: Fifty years.

DAVID BYRNE: Five-zero.

JEFFREY BROWN: Yes.

DAVID BYRNE: That's a little bit of a difference.

So you go, what happened?

Who lost the recipe?

JEFFREY BROWN: Not so much lost, Byrne shows, as not understanding or ignoring Roman materials and building practices, a bias thinking we know better than people of the past.

The key for Byrne, the rediscovery to benefit us today.

DAVID BYRNE: Let's focus on how these things got rediscovered, because that's really what we want to know.

We want to know if there's other ones out there and how can we find them?

The question is, what are we suppressing, or what have we forgotten that's out there?

Because we do the same things.

JEFFREY BROWN: Byrne himself is still very much producing his own art.

He just finished a long tour for his most recent album titled "Who Is the Sky?"

And he's busy in other ways, including his online magazine titled "Reasons to be Cheerful."

WOMAN: This is just one student group.

JEFFREY BROWN: Offering positive stories by people around the country for how to overcome problems.

He calls it a tonic for tumultuous times.

DAVID BYRNE: It's so easy now to fall into despair or anger, frustration, and feel like, oh, everything's going to hell, yes, and there's nothing I can do about it.

JEFFREY BROWN: Do you feel, as you're getting older, that this is more important to you?

This is -- I don't know if you would call it a kind of service.

DAVID BYRNE: Well, there's plenty of musicians and entertainers or whatever who let people know their political beliefs and things like this.

And I thought, oh, I think what I could do is kind of not push my own particular beliefs, but kind of give a voice to these people in communities or whatever who are doing things and that that -- to me, that gives me hope and it's very encouraging.

JEFFREY BROWN: Do you think about these, about your own lasting contribution or how you will be remembered, I mean, especially in context of "Sleeping Beauties."

DAVID BYRNE: Evidence from this book, you can see that, well, you don't know right away.

Popularity or sales are not the way to judge a lot of things.

That's a very temporary measure.

You don't know the rest until time passes.

JEFFREY BROWN: You don't know whether David Byrne will one day be a sleeping beauty?

DAVID BYRNE: Yes, we don't know that yet.

(LAUGHTER) DAVID BYRNE: I'm imagining yes.

There's some fairy tale prince going in the door and going, whoa, whoa, whoa, who are you?

Yes.

(LAUGHTER) JEFFREY BROWN: Our time together ended not with a prince, but with the Statue of Liberty.

And then it was time for David Byrne to unlock his bike, put on his helmet, and ride off.

For the "PBS News Hour," I'm Jeffrey Brown in Brooklyn.