by Jonah Lehrer
At this point any other mechanic would have given up. The car was hopelessly broken. But not Jeff. If he couldn’t find the fault in the engine, then he’d have to look at everything else in the car. He began by investigating the wonky convertible top. He accessed the convertible control unit—a green electrical circuit the size of a VHS tape in the back of the car—and began tracing out the wires. Jeff remembered that the convertible control unit had a communication link to the engine. This was for safety reasons: “You don’t want some jerk raising the roof on his car when he’s going eighty on the highway. So the top is disabled at certain speeds.”
When Jeff opened up the convertible control unit, he noticed a small amount of white corrosion on the circuit board. “Corrosion is pretty common, but this corrosion was bridging the gap between two different terminals. Now, one of the problems with corrosion is that it’s semiconductive, which means power can travel across it.” Jeff saw that rusty bridge and suddenly had a crazy theory—power from the convertible control unit might be back-feeding voltage to the engine. “It probably wasn’t a lot of power, but maybe, just maybe, it was enough to keep the engine control unit from turning off. And if the engine control unit won’t turn off, neither will the engine.”
To test his hypothesis, Jeff began pulling the wires that connect to the convertible control unit. “It’s got like five plugs going into it. I pull the first plug and the brake lights turn off.” That was intriguing, since the brake lights had also been acting strangely. So Jeff pulled another wire. And another. And then, when he pulled that last wire heading into the convertible control unit, the engine suddenly went silent. “I was never so happy to hear an engine die.” After he replaced the corroded circuits, the engine worked perfectly. The car was fixed. “Only took me three months of hell,” he says with a smile.
For Jeff, the saga of the 911 that wouldn’t turn off is a testament to the limits of computer diagnostics. “The computer was never programmed to worry about voltage leaking through that circuit. It didn’t even know there was a problem, so it was never going to help me find the solution.”
This broken Porsche might be an extreme example, but it’s a reminder to Jeff to always look beyond the initial fixes suggested by the car’s microchips. (What they report is not all there is.) “The computers know what they know, but they don’t know what they don’t,” Jeff tells me. It’s a line that sounds very Zen, but it also contains an essential insight into how to think effectively in the information age. If we are going to rely on these powerful gadgets, then we need to be vigilant about their frailties and blind spots. The machines aren’t aware of their own shortcomings. Google never admits its ignorance—almost every search generates some search results—and those microchips inside your car can’t conceive of problems beyond their narrow parameters. Our job is to remember all the unknowns they ignore.
Look at a recent study of how GPS technology changes the way we interact with the world. The experiment was conducted in Kashiwa, Japan, a dense suburb outside Tokyo. A third of the subjects were taken on a winding route by a human guide. Another third used a paper map. The final third were given a programmed GPS unit—they just had to follow the electronic instructions. While the subjects given the paper maps and human guides could generally navigate the path, the GPS subjects struggled to reach the destination. They walked slower and made more mistakes. They stopped more frequently. What’s more, when asked to draw a map of the route after the experiment, those who used GPS drew maps that were much less accurate.14
What explains this failure? The problem with technology that promises answers is that it often leads people to stop asking questions. We disengage from the world. Instead of paying attention to the route, we just obey the machine. The technology encourages our mindlessness, allowing us to pretend we know where we’re going even when we don’t.
The solution isn’t to avoid GPS. Jeff, after all, still relies on those computers in his shop. It’s just that he also insists on staying mindful amid the machines, looking beyond their fast fixes. What are they not noticing? What else could be going wrong? What questions are not being asked?
Albert Hirschman, a developmental economist and essayist, devoted much of his writing to the virtues of doubt. Along with his best friend and brother-in-law, Eugenio Colorni, Hirschman came up with a professional goal: he wanted to prove Hamlet wrong. He believed that Hamlet had given doubt a bad reputation. The melancholic prince had led people to associate doubt with inaction, paralysis, soliloquies that led nowhere.15
Hirschman, in contrast, saw doubt as liberating. When we doubt, we give ourselves the freedom to see the world differently. We can consider new perspectives and solutions. We learn to act without the need for certainty.
When explaining the virtues of doubt, Hirschman often used the example of creativity. If we actually knew what the creative act would require—the endless drafts, iterations, and failures—we’d never pursue creative problems. The cost would seem too high. Why make ourselves miserable?
Take Jeff. If he’d known that the Porsche 911 would take him a few months to fix, he probably would have declined the repair. But he said yes because he didn’t know. Because nobody knew. And it was that not knowing that unleashed Jeff’s potential. As Hirschman put it, in a letter to his daughters, “The secret of creativity is then to place yourself in situations where you’ve got to be creative, but this is done only when one doesn’t know in advance that one will have to be creative.”16
Jeff had no idea how to turn off that Porsche engine. But he didn’t let his doubt stop him. To paraphrase Hirschman, he found a way to prove Hamlet wrong.
Mindfulness has always been a struggle, but it’s never been more necessary. To deal with the hard problems of life, we have to accept the mystery. We have to embrace our doubts. “There are two secrets to being good at this job,” Jeff says. “You gotta think for yourself and you gotta give a shit.”
The Fifteenth Rock
The Ryoan-ji rock garden in Kyoto looks, at first glance, like a pile of rocks. There are fifteen large stones, stained by time and moss, scattered around a groomed gravel lawn. The scattering is not an accident: each of these boulders has been positioned so that the viewer can only see fourteen of the fifteen rocks at a time, regardless of where he or she stands. You can circle the garden. You can stand on your tiptoes and crane your neck. But you will not see every boulder. The temple garden is a subtle lesson in mystery, the rocks reminding us that even the simplest spaces can contain the unknown.
This is one of the essential functions of art: it teaches us how to live with mystery. By giving us suspenseful twists and layered worlds, opaque characters and obscure lines, it trains us to enjoy our prediction errors. Instead of seeking out confirming evidence, art reminds us that doubt is more useful and mindfulness is more fun. We realize that the joy is in the verb—not the understanding, but the trying.
It’s a necessary mindset because there is no escaping mystery: the unknown will always be an essential part of our knowledge. We want perfect truths, but the reality is there’s no such thing. Our best theories get disproven; facts get falsified; in the long run, we are wrong about nearly everything. It’s the secrets that survive.
This idea was summarized by the American philosopher Willard Van Orman Quine in his seminal paper “Two Dogmas of Empiricism.” As Quine noted, many of our most fundamental scientific principles—the ideas upon which so much else depends—are actually the most mysterious. Take gravity, a force of physics so basic it’s celebrated on Sesame Street. Yet, the sheer simplicity of gravity—it makes objects fall down—obscures its profound unknowns. It has been nearly 350 years since Newton described the force, and more than a century since Einstein redefined gravity in terms of space-time, but we still have no idea what gravity is made of or where it comes from or how it fits with quantum mechanics.I We can measure its pull on the universe, but the force itself is utterly mysterious. Everything we know depends on things we never can.
Lily’s struggle is the struggle of creation. When we begin the creative process, all we have is the blank page. Nothing is known; the ending is unwritten. It’s tempting to erase these uncertainties, to fill in the emptiness with knowledge and wisdom, to pretend we knew all along.
But the best art never forgets how it began. It remembers the mysteries that inspired the work. Because those mysteries don’t just keep the artist interested in the creative process—they are also what hold the scarce attention of the audience. We are drawn to the unknown. Our awe depends upon it.
It’s an astonishing fact of human culture: what lasts is what mystifies. Time is an acid that destroys answers. It ruins our certainties. What remains instead are those stories and paintings and characters that find ways to contain what they cannot fathom, hooking us with their unspilled secrets. They are alive with the mystery of the universe. Which is why they live on.
I. Here’s Richard Feynman: “What is gravity? Newton made no hypotheses about this; he was satisfied to find what it did without getting into the machinery of it. No one has since given any machinery. It is characteristic of the physical laws that they have this abstract character.”17
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First, Ben Loehnen. My extraordinary editor. You found the structure in my ruminations, and helped me discover the book I wanted to write. I will forever be in your debt for giving me a chance.
Andrew Wylie and Rebecca Nagel have guided this book from the start, back when it was a few rambling pages on wonder and awe. They’ve read every draft and offered invaluable notes.
Kyle Paoletta worked tirelessly fact-checking this book. I’m so grateful he took this project on—he was meticulous and diligent. Whatever mistakes remain are all mine.
Thank you to all the brilliant people, teachers, and scientists who shared their insights with me. And if that wasn’t enough, they also took the time to read and correct the text. A special thank-you to the late James Carse, who was so patient and thoughtful; our first conversation ended up inspiring an entire chapter.
Steve Boldt did an excellent job copyediting the manuscript. A huge thank-you to him and Carolyn Kelly for getting this book to the finish line.
Shlomo and Steve were the best colleagues anyone could ask for.
Two dear friends deserve special mention. Robert Krulwich has encouraged my interest in this subject for years. (He’s always been a model of human wonder.) I was worried about writing a book on the beauty of questions—didn’t people want answers? But on one of our long walks around New York he convinced me that mystery and its synonyms were worthy of investigation.
Bruce Nelson has patiently listened to me talk for years about mystery between bites of deli sandwiches. He’s responsible for so many of the best threads of this book. And when inspiration flagged, he kept me inspired with his own beautiful art.
And then there’s my family. Without whom not. My parents, my siblings, my cousins—you all kept me going.
This book, like everything in my life, has been profoundly shaped by my children. The hermeneutics of Harry Potter, the tricks of Ryan’s ToyReview, the appeal of Sherlock, and the abiding joys of curiosity—these are all things Rose, Isaac, and Louisa have taught me. I’m very excited to learn more from you tomorrow.
And Sarah… There will never be words. You make me better every day. Never gonna let you go.
More from the Author
A Book About Love
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jonah Lehrer is a writer, journalist, and the author of A Book About Love, How We Decide, and Proust Was a Neuroscientist. He graduated from Columbia University and studied at Oxford University as a Rhodes Scholar. He’s written for The New Yorker, Nature, Wired, The New York Times Magazine, The Washington Post, and The Wall Street Journal. He lives in Los Angeles.
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NOTES
Introduction: The Mystery of Mystery
1 Jared Cade, Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days (London: Peter Owen, 2011), 79.
2 Tina Jordan, “When the World’s Most Famous Mystery Writer Vanished,” New York Times, June 11, 2019, https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/11/books/agatha-christie-vanished-11-days-1926.html.
3 Laura Thompson, Agatha Christie: A Mysterious Life (New York: Pegasus, 2013), 166.
4 Cade, Agatha Christie and the Eleven, 97.
5 Ibid., 81.
6 Ibid., 81–83.
7 Ibid., 99.
8 Ibid., 98.
9 Ibid., 103.
10 Thompson, Agatha Christie, 222.
11 “Mrs. Christie Found in a Yorkshire Spa,” New York Times, December 15, 1926, https://timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1926/12/15/98410135.html?pageNumber=1.
12 Cade, Agatha Christie and the Eleven, 130
13 Thompson, Agatha Christie, 209.
14 Agatha Christie, An Autobiography (New York: William Morrow, 2012), 437.
15 Cade, Agatha Christie and the Eleven, 106.
16 Thompson, Agatha Christie, 202.
17 Christie, Autobiography, 358.
18 Edgar Allan Poe, “A Few Words on Secret Writing,” Graham’s Magazine, July 1841; and Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1992), 122.
19 Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance (New York: Harper Perennial, 1992), 172.
20 Ibid., 173.
21 Interview, September 26, 2019.
22 Wystan Hugh Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage,” Harper’s Magazine, May 1948.
23 Wolfram Schultz, “Dopamine Reward Prediction-Error Signalling: A Two-Component Response,” Nature Reviews Neuroscience 17, no. 3 (2016): 183.
24 Scott Waddell, “Dopamine Reveals Neural Circuit Mechanisms of Fly Memory,” Trends in Neurosciences 33, no. 10 (2010): 457–64; Wolfram Schultz and Anthony Dickinson, “Neuronal Coding of Prediction Errors,” Annual Review of Neuroscience 23, no. 1 (2000): 473–500; and Wolfram Schultz, Leon Tremblay, and Jeffrey R. Hollerman, “Reward Prediction in Primate Basal Ganglia and Frontal Cortex,” Neuropharmacology 37, no. 4–5 (1998): 421–29.
25 Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 5.
26 John Berman, Deborah Apton, and Victoria Thompson, “Stephen Sondheim: My ‘West Side Story’ Lyrics Are ‘Embarrassing,’ ” ABCNews, December 8, 2010, https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/st
ephen-sondheim-west-side-story-lyrics-embarrassing/story?id=12345243.
27 John Keats, The Complete Poetical Works and Letters of John Keats (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1899), 277.
Chapter 1: The Mystery Box
1 Stefan Zweig, Burning Secret (London: Pushkin Collection, 2008), 52.
2 Madeline Berg, “How This 7-Year-Old Made $22 Million Playing with Toys,” Forbes, December 3, 2018, https://www.forbes.com/sites/maddieberg/2018/12/03/how-this-seven-year-old-made-22-million-playing-with-toys-2/#3f11a21f4459.
3 J. J. Abrams, “The Mystery Box,” filmed March 2007 at TED200, Monterey, CA, video, 17:50, https://www.ted.com/talks/j_j_abrams_mystery_box?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare, accessed January 10, 2019.
4 Steve Jobs, keynote address, Macworld San Francisco, January 9, 2009, Moscone Center, San Francisco, CA, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN4U5FqrOdQ.
5 Leonard Mlodinow, The Upright Thinkers (New York: Vintage, 2016), 21–23; Ian Leslie, Curious: The Desire to Know and Why Your Future Depends on It (New York: Basic Books, 2014), 28; and Paul L. Harris, Trusting What You’re Told: How Children Learn from Others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).
6 Michelle M. Chouinard, Paul L. Harris, and Michael P. Maratsos, “Children’s Questions: A Mechanism for Cognitive Development,” Monographs of the Society for Research in Child Development 72, no. 1 (2007): 1–129.
7 P. E. Shah et al., “Early Childhood Curiosity and Kindergarten Reading and Math Academic Achievement,” Pediatric Research, 2018, https://doi.org/10.1038/s41390-018-0039-3.