How to Fly a Horse

by Kevin Ashton

  Which means “selective attention” is another way of saying “obvious facts.” As Robin Warren and Sherlock Holmes remind us, obvious facts can deceive. They are all we will see with the blindness of inattention. Developing expertise is essential, but it can block us from seeing the unexpected.

  Becoming an expert is only the first step to becoming creative. As we are about to find out, the second step is surprising, confusing, and perhaps even intimidating: it is becoming a beginner.

  4 | SHOSHIN

  In 1960, twelve elderly Japanese Americans waited at a gate in San Francisco International Airport. It had been nineteen years since the Japanese navy had attacked America’s Pacific Fleet in Pearl Harbor. After the attack, these men and women were imprisoned in stables at a horse track in San Bruno. Three years later, the American government set each of them free with twenty-five dollars and a train ticket, then dropped atom bombs on Japan. They were Zen Buddhists and congregants of Sokoji, or the San Francisco Temple, which they had built in an abandoned synagogue near the Golden Gate Bridge in the calm before the war. They had continued to pay the mortgage while imprisoned. They were at the airport to meet their new priest.

  As the sun rose, a silver-and-white Japan Air Lines Pacific Courier arrived from Honolulu, where it had stopped for fuel on its twenty-four-hour journey from Tokyo. Passengers started down stairs behind its port-side wing. Only one traveler, a tiny man in robes, sandals, and socks, looked energetic: Shunryu Suzuki, the priest.

  Suzuki arrived in America when it was on the cusp of the 1960s. Children of the war were coming of age, animosity toward Japan was becoming curiosity, and young San Franciscans had started visiting Sokoji to ask about Zen Buddhism. Suzuki gave them all the same answer: “I sit at 5:45 in the morning. Please join me.”

  It was an invitation to the seated meditation called zazen in Japanese and dhyāna in Sanskrit. People in India and East Asia had sat in quiet contemplation for thousands of years, but the practice was little known in America. The few Americans who had tried it used chairs. Suzuki made his students sit on the floor with their legs crossed, backs upright, and eyes half-open. If he suspected they were sleeping, he struck them with a stick called a kyōsaku.

  The class grew throughout the 1960s. In 1970, Suzuki’s American students published his teachings in a book. The next year, a little more than a decade after his arrival, he died. The book, Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, was as small, modest, and inspiring as he was. His was American Buddhism’s first voice. His book is still in print.

  Beginner’s mind, shoshin in Japanese, was the essence of Suzuki’s teaching. He described it simply: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

  In Zen, simple words can have deep meanings. Beginner’s mind is not the mind of the beginner but the mind of the master. It is an attention beyond the selection and blindness of expertise, one that notices everything without assumption. Beginner’s mind is not mystical or spiritual but practical. It is Edmond Albius looking at a flower, Wilbur and Orville Wright looking at a bird, Wassily Kandinsky looking at a canvas, Steve Jobs looking at a phone, Judah Folkman looking at a tumor, Robin Warren looking at a bacterium. It is seeing what is there instead of seeing what we think.

  Nyogen Senzaki, one of the first Zen monks in America, explained beginner’s mind with a story, or kōan:

  Nan-in, a Japanese master, received a university professor who came to inquire about Zen.

  Nan-in served tea. He poured his visitor’s cup full, and then kept on pouring.

  The professor watched the overflow until he no longer could restrain himself. “It is overfull. No more will go in!”

  “Like this cup,” Nan-in said, “you are full of your own opinions and speculations. How can I show you Zen unless you first empty your cup?”

  David Foster Wallace made the same point with a joke:

  There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

  Creation is attention. It is seeing new problems, noticing the unnoticed, finding inattentional blind spots. If, in retrospect, a discovery or invention seems so obvious we feel as if it was staring us in the face all along, we are probably right. The answer to the question “Why didn’t I think of that?” is “beginner’s mind.”

  Or as Suzuki writes in Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind: “The real secret of the arts is to always be a beginner.”

  To see the unexpected, expect nothing.

  5 | STRUCTURE

  While Shunryu Suzuki was teaching Eastern philosophy at Sokoji, Thomas Kuhn was teaching Western philosophy on the other side of San Francisco Bay, in Berkeley. Kuhn was recovering from a great disappointment. He had spent sixteen years at Harvard University, earned three degrees in physics, and become a member of the university’s elite Society of Fellows, but had been denied a position as a tenured professor. He had come to California to rebuild his career.

  Kuhn’s problem was that he had changed his mind. His degrees were in physics, but while working on his PhD, he had developed an interest in philosophy, a subject for which he had passion but no training. He also taught an undergraduate course on the history of science. He was not a scientist, philosopher, or historian but some odd combination of all three. Harvard was not sure what to do with him, and, he soon discovered, neither was the University of California, which hired him as a professor of philosophy, then changed his role to include history. It was clear he was no longer a scientist. The rest was fog.

  This change in Kuhn’s path started one summer afternoon when he first read Aristotle’s Physics. The conventional view was that the book laid a foundation for all the physics that followed, but Kuhn could not see it. For example, Aristotle says:

  Everything that is in locomotion is moved either by itself or by something else. In the case of things that are moved by themselves it is evident that the moved and the movement are together: for they contain within themselves their first movement, so that there is nothing in between. The motion of things that are moved by something else must proceed in one of four ways: pulling, pushing, carrying, and twirling. All forms of locomotion are reducible to these.

  This is not imprecise Newtonian physics or incomplete Newtonian physics; it is not Newtonian physics at all. The more Kuhn read old science, the more he realized that it was not connected to the science that followed it. Science is not a continuum, he concluded, but something else.

  So, Kuhn wondered, what are we to make of these old theories? Were they not science and the people who practiced them not scientists? Did Newtonian physics also cease to be scientific when Einsteinian physics replaced it? How does science move from one set of theories to another, if not by gradually building on the work of the past?

  By 1962, after fifteen years of research, Kuhn had his answer. He published it in a book called The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. He proposed that science proceeded in a series of revolutions where ways of thinking changed completely. He called these ways of thinking “paradigms.” A paradigm is stable for a time, and scientists work on proving things that the paradigm predicts, but eventually exceptions appear. Scientists treat the exceptions as unanswered questions at first, but if enough of them are discovered and the questions are important enough, their paradigm is thrown into “crisis.” The crisis continues until a new paradigm emerges. Then the cycle begins again. In Kuhn’s view, a new paradigm is not an improved version of its predecessor. New paradigms vanquish old paradigms altogether. This is why it is impossible to understand scientists like Aristotle through a modern lens: they were working in a paradigm that has since been overthrown by scientific revolutions.

  Despite its obscure topic, Kuhn’s book has sold more than a million copies and is one of the most cited works in the world. Sci
ence writer James Gleick called it “the most influential work of philosophy in the latter half of the 20th century.”

  Paradigms are a form of selective attention. What changes during one of Kuhn’s “scientific revolutions” is what scientists see. In Kuhn’s words: “During revolutions scientists see new and different things when looking with familiar instruments in places they have looked before. What were ducks in the scientist’s world before the revolution are rabbits afterwards.”

  Robin Warren’s “discovery” of the bacterium H. pylori, which occurred after Kuhn’s book was published, may be the clearest example of scientists seeing what they expect, not what is there. After Warren, scientists looked at images they had looked at before and were amazed to see things they had not previously seen. Their expertise—the system of beliefs, experiences, and assumptions Kuhn calls a paradigm—had blinded them.

  6 | THE LINE BETWEEN EYE AND MIND

  Seeing is not the same as looking. Knowing changes what we see as much as seeing changes what we know—not in a metaphorical or metaphysical way but literally. People on cell phones did not see the unicycling clown. Radiologists did not see the gorilla. Generations of scientists did not see H. pylori. This is not because the mind plays tricks but because the mind is a trick. Seeing and believing evolved because making sense of the world enabled species to survive and reproduce. Later, we became conscious and creative and wanted more from our senses, but as soon they were good enough for survival and reproduction, they were good enough for everything. We may want to believe that we inhabit a stable, objective universe and that our senses and minds render it fully and accurately—that what we perceive is “real”—and we may need to believe this so we can feel sane enough and safe enough to get on with our lives, but it is not true. If we want to understand the world enough to change it, we must understand that our senses do not give us the whole picture. Neil deGrasse Tyson, speaking at the Salk Institute in 2006, said:

  There is so much praise for the human eye, but anyone who has seen the full breadth of the electromagnetic spectrum will recognize how blind we are. We cannot see magnetic fields, ionizing radiation, or radon. We cannot smell or taste carbon monoxide, carbon dioxide, or methane, but if we breathe them in we are dead.

  We know that these things exist because we have developed tools that sense them. But whether we use senses or sensors or both, our perception will always be limited by what we can detect and how we understand it. The first limitation is obvious—we know our eyes cannot see without light, for example—but the second, understanding, is not. There is a line between eye and mind. Not everything makes it across.

  Creating means opening this border: reshaping our understanding so we notice things we have not noticed before. They do not have to be big or extraordinary. David Foster Wallace told his joke about fish to introduce something apparently mundane:

  After work you have to get in your car and drive to the supermarket. The supermarket is very crowded. And the store is hideously lit and infused with soul-killing Muzak. It’s pretty much the last place you want to be. And who are all these people in my way? Look at how repulsive most of them are, and how stupid and cow-like and dead-eyed and nonhuman they seem, or at how annoying and rude it is that people are talking loudly on cell phones. Look at how deeply and personally unfair this is. Thinking this way is my natural default setting. It’s the automatic way that I experience the boring, frustrating, crowded parts of life.

  But there are totally different ways to think about these kinds of situations. You can choose to look differently at this fat, dead-eyed, over-made-up lady who just screamed at her kid in the checkout line. Maybe she’s not usually like this. Maybe she’s been up three straight nights holding the hand of a husband who is dying of bone cancer. If you really learn how to pay attention, it will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred. You get to consciously decide what has meaning and what doesn’t.

  When we change what has meaning, we change what we see. Wallace offers an alternative paradigm for the line at the grocery store. The lady’s appearance stays the same, but he sees her differently. His second interpretation—that her husband has bone cancer—is speculative and probably wrong, but it is not more speculative or more likely to be wrong than his first. It is probably closer to the truth: few of us are generally mean, but all of us have difficult days that make us look mean to strangers. Wallace directs his selective attention to select something else. He can do this because he recognizes that his “natural default” way of seeing is not his only way of seeing. It is a choice. His ability to choose to see ordinary things differently—“as not only meaningful, but sacred”—made him one of the greatest writers of his generation.

  Beginner’s mind and expertise sound like opposites, but they are not. Western philosophy has conditioned us to see things in opposing pairs—black and white, left and right, good and evil, yin and yang (as opposed to the original Chinese idea of yin-yang), beginner and expert—a paradigm called “dualism.” We do not have to see things this way. We can see them as connected, not opposed. Beginner’s mind is connected to, not opposite to, expertise because the greatest experts understand that they are working within the constraints of a paradigm and they know how those constraints arose. In science, for example, some constraints are the result of available tools and techniques. Robin Warren had developed enough expertise as a pathologist to know that the dogma of the sterile stomach predated the invention of the flexible endoscope and might be a wrong assumption caused by a lack of technology. Judah Folkman knew that assumptions about tumors were based on specimens, not surgery. The Wright brothers knew that the Smeaton coefficient for calculating the relationship between wing size and lift was an assumption developed in the eighteenth century that might be wrong. The greatest test of your expertise is how explicitly you understand your assumptions.

  There are no true beginners. We start building paradigms as soon as we are born. We inherit some, we are taught some, and we infer some. When we first create, we are already David Foster Wallace’s fish, swimming in a sea of assumptions we have not yet noticed. The final step of expertise is the first step to beginner’s mind: knowing what you assume, why, and when to suspend your assumptions.

  7 | THE WIZARD OF MARS

  There is a problem with seeing things no one else sees. How do we know we are right? What’s the difference between necessary confidence and dangerous certainty—between discovery and delusion?

  In the summer of 1894, Percival Lowell looked through the telescope in his new observatory for the first time. He had already announced he was starting “an investigation into the condition of life on other worlds,” with “strong reason to believe that we are on the eve of a pretty definite discovery in the matter.”

  Lowell watched the ice on the south pole of Mars melt in the summer heat. Other astronomers had seen straight lines crossing the Martian desert. As the ice melted, the lines changed color, becoming lighter in the south and darker in the north. As far as Lowell was concerned, there was only one possible explanation: the lines were artificial canals—an “amazing blue network on Mars that hints that one planet besides our own is actually inhabited now.”

  Lowell inspired a century of science fiction starring marauding Martians. Many matched Lowell’s descriptions. For example, in Under the Moons of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote, “The people had found it necessary to follow the receding waters until necessity had forced upon them their ultimate salvation, the so-called Martian canals.”

  Scientists were less convinced. One of Lowell’s opponents was Alfred Wallace, known for his work on evolution. Wallace did not challenge Lowell’s maps. The Lowell Observatory was one of the best in the world, and Wallace had no reason to doubt what Lowell saw. Instead Wallace attacked Lowell’s conclusions with a list of logical flaws, including:

  The totally inadequate water-supply for such worldwide irrigation; the extreme irrationa
lity of constructing so vast a canal-system the waste from which, by evaporation, would use up ten times the probable supply; how the Martians could have lived before this great system was planned and executed; why they did not first utilize and render fertile the belt of land adjacent to the limits of the polar snows; the fact that the only intelligent and practical way to convey a limited quantity of water such great distances would be by a system of water-tight and air-tight tubes laid under the ground; and only a dense population with ample means of subsistence could possibly have constructed such gigantic works—even if they were likely to be of any use.

  The argument was resolved in Wallace’s favor in 1965 when NASA’s Mariner 4 spacecraft took pictures of Mars that showed, in the words of the mission’s imaging engineer, a surface “like that of our own Moon, deeply cratered, and unchanged over time. No water, no canals, no life.”

  But there was still one mystery. Whenever other astronomers said they could not see canals on Mars, Lowell pointed out that he had a better observatory. This was largely true. Few people had access to Lowell’s private observatory while he was alive, but after he died, astronomers were finally able to look through his telescope. Still, no one could see any canals. What had Lowell been seeing?

  The answer turned out to be his own eyes. Lowell was not an experienced astronomer. He had mistakenly made the aperture of his telescope so small that it worked like an ophthalmoscope, the handheld device doctors use to shine light into the eyes of patients. The veins on Lowell’s retina were reflecting onto the lens of his telescope’s eyepiece. His maps of Martian canals are mirror images of the tree of blood vessels we all have on the backs of our eyes—as are the “spokes” he saw on Venus, the “cracks” he saw in Mercury, the “lines” he saw on Jupiter’s moons, and the “tores” he saw on Saturn.