Elevated dopamine levels can also cause individuals to attend to and retain cognitive stimuli that others would dismiss. Dopamine levels that are modestly higher than normal might thus enable more defocused attention and unusual associations, resulting in creative outcomes. Interesting evidence for this emerged when a number of studies found that drugs like L-DOPA that increase the body’s level of dopamine and are used to treat patients with Parkinson’s disease sometimes awaken or accelerate creative tendencies.68 Initially, researchers thought that Parkinson’s itself somehow induced big surges in creativity. Stories emerged like that of Tsipi Shaish, who worked at an insurance company and lived a “routine life” until she was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease in 2006. She had never taken art lessons, nor had she any particular interest in art. But after her diagnosis and commencing treatment, she began to feel “an uncontrollable urge” to create vivid abstracts on canvas, and by 2011, Shaish had major art exhibitions in Paris and New York City. Her works are described as exhibiting “startling symbolism” and “bold colors and pastels in a ‘gleeful pandemonium.’”69 Shaish could not explain what was happening to her and believed that the disease itself had made her more creative, but researchers now understand that the treatment for Parkinson’s disease can unlock the creativity within an individual. Prior to treatment, Parkinson’s patients have progressively less dopamine produced in their brains—the disease causes dopamine-producing cells in the brain to die off. Patients begin to feel increasingly less motivated, less verbal, and less physical. Dopamine is the brain’s primary reward drug, and without it, many aspects of life lose their luster. Furthermore, because dopamine is a crucial ingredient for motor function, patients may have trouble moving, a symptom known as “hypokinesia.” L-DOPA treatment jolts these patients back to life, making them more aware and interested in things around them, and more mobile. When L-DOPA is at its peak levels in the body, they may even be too mobile—experiencing jittery or jerky movements known as “dyskinesia.”
While moderately elevated dopamine may aid divergent thinking and retention of cognitive stimuli, too much dopamine might make it impossible for a person to screen stimuli at all. In such a situation a person may find it extremely difficult to accurately perceive the world around her, leading to something that looks more like psychosis than creativity. Not coincidentally, an extensive line of research implicates dopamine and dopamine receptors in schizophrenia, and a range of antipsychotic drugs work by blocking dopamine receptors. Numerous psychologists note that schizophrenia (which psychoanalytic theory describes as a primary process state) appears to be significantly related to creativity. First, highly creative people are overrepresented among the families of schizophrenics, suggesting a genetic link.70 Second, schizophrenics and highly creative people score similarly in a range of creativity tests,71 and creative people score quite highly on tests of psychoticism.72
An overly active dopamine system (or administration of drugs that increase the production or availability of dopamine) also produces symptoms resembling mania. Mania is a state of abnormally elevated or irritable mood, elevated arousal, and elevated energy levels. It is typically associated with feelings of grandeur, a reduced need for sleep (and nocturnal hyperactivity), indulgence in enjoyable behaviors with a high risk of negative outcomes, and a possibility of hallucinations or preoccupying thoughts.73 Both mania and elevated dopamine are also associated with an increased likelihood of addictive behavior. As noted previously, dopamine is one of the brain’s primary reward system drugs; cocaine and amphetamines act by artificially inducing dopamine “highs,” and people with elevated dopamine levels (e.g., individuals with naturally elevated dopamine or Parkinson’s patients on L-DOPA therapy) may also experience an amplification of the “highs” reaped from such activities as gambling, sex, and exercise.74 Nearly all of these patterns were repeatedly observed in Tesla. In his youth he suffered from visions that were akin to hallucinations. He struggled with a gambling addiction in college. Ideas often came to him in an overwhelming rush, causing him to engage in periods of frenzied work where he neglected all other aspects of his life. He slept very little, averaging less than two hours a night, and tended to work through the night. Finally, he pursued such grandiose ideas that people were inclined to ridicule him as a dreamer even though his track record for success was exceptional.
“Hypomania” (basically a mild form of mania), which may be caused by moderately elevated levels of dopamine, has been repeatedly linked to creativity. It thus may be no surprise that many of the most prolific innovators exhibit characteristics that resemble some degree of mania. Nearly all of the innovators, as we’ve seen, were noted for having exceptional self-efficacy, the self-confidence that they could do things others would deem impossible. Many (though not all) of the breakthrough innovators also did not sleep very much. Curie noted in a letter to her cousin that she slept five hours a night. Edison wrote in 1921, “For myself I never found need of more than four or five hours’ sleep in the twenty-four,”75 and multiple accounts suggest that he slept only three to four hours a night, and then frequently on a table in his laboratory. Franklin recounts in his autobiography that he slept five hours a night. Jobs was noted for sleeping erratically and often working at night. Kamen has told reporters that he sleeps about three to four hours a night. Musk has told reporters that he sleeps between six and six-and-a-half hours a night. By contrast, Einstein noted that he slept ten hours a night. A 2009 international study habits found that Americans sleep for an average of 8.5 hours a night, and in Japan (the advanced-economy nation with the lowest average hours of sleep), people average seven hours and fourteen minutes of sleep a night. Thus, all of the innovators except Einstein slept less than the current population average, and several slept very much less.
Unusual levels or fluctuations in the dopamine system may provide a crucial link among working memory, creativity, mania, obsessive/addictive behaviors, and schizophrenia. Research in neuroscience suggests that neurotransmitters such as norepinephrine and dopamine directly affect the functioning of working memory and cognition. For example, elevated norepinephrine speeds up neuronal activity, resulting in a burst of brain activity that can lead to the streaming of images in the brain,76 perhaps explaining Tesla’s eidetic images. Studies have also found evidence that dopamine activity in the prefrontal cortex is positively related to the personality trait “openness to experience” and to novelty-seeking behaviors.77
In sum, if modestly elevated dopamine or norepinephrine can promote creativity but excessive levels can lead to psychopathology, this sheds light on the legendary—and controversial—association between madness and genius. Genius does not require madness, nor does madness imply genius, but because both can be influenced by similar neurotransmitters, it is not surprising that people have long intuited a connection between them. It also elucidates why activities such as exercise or playing music, or a mild stimulant like coffee, might aid creative thinking: by modestly elevating dopamine they reduce latent inhibition and may enhance working memory, helping the individual to make unusual associations. Neurotransmitters such as dopamine and norepinephrine thus help to connect many of the threads of research on highly creative individuals. Many of the seemingly disconnected strands of research on creativity—personality, intelligence, patterns of association, psychopathology—are likely to be tightly connected once we better understand the chemical and physiological processes of the mind.
I didn’t really think Tesla would be successful. I thought we would most likely fail. But if something’s important enough, you should try even if the probable outcome is failure.
—Elon Musk, in an interview with Scott Pelley, March 30, 2014
Being the richest man in the cemetery doesn’t matter to me.… Going to bed at night saying we’ve done something wonderful—that’s what matters to me.
—Steve Jobs, in an interview with CNNMoney/Fortune, 1993
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“Once she had recognized a certain w
ay as a right one, she pursued it without compromise.…”
A Higher Purpose
It almost goes without saying that the great success of the innovators lay with their tackling huge problems. As important, though, is the fact that they tackled them with extraordinary fervor and tenacity. They worked excruciatingly long hours, often neglecting family, friends, and health. They often endured harsh criticism by those who doubted them, and yet on they still charged. What gave them this nearly superhuman commitment to their endeavors? All of the innovators studied here—with the notable exception of Thomas Edison—exhibited an intense idealism and an intense focus on a superordinate goal, and this sense of purpose profoundly shaped their behavior.
Idealism is the pursuit of high or noble principles and goals. Idealists prioritize ideals and values over the current reality. They focus on the world as they believe it should be rather than how it actually is.1 Idealism pushed the innovators to pursue important goals, even if doing so required them to break with established norms or incur great personal cost or risk, as was the case with Benjamin Franklin.
Franklin was an intensely intelligent child with an unquenchable thirst for reading. Raised in a devout home where all of the available reading was about Puritan religion and ideals, he began to seriously engage with moral reasoning and ideals at a very early age. In fact, his father, noting his son’s potential for spirituality, initially intended him for the ministry. Although Franklin did not pursue that path in part because his family could not afford to pay for the education required, he remained intensely interested in moral philosophy and would go on to develop his own set of beliefs and ideals that departed somewhat from Puritan orthodoxy. These beliefs and ideals were very central to his character and would drive him to spend his entire life pursuing social problems with vigorous and tenacious effort.
Franklin was born in Boston on January 17, 1706, into a family of craftsmen. The name Franklin is itself an icon of the middle class that Benjamin Franklin would idealize—it derives from the Anglo-Franco “fraunclein,” which means a landowner of free but not noble origin. Thus, a Franklin is neither a serf nor landed gentry. Generations of the Franklin family were known for being avid readers, religious dissenters, and nonconformists who were willing to defy authority yet were still able to always remain woven into the fabric of civic life.2 His grandfather, Thomas Franklin II, was a gregarious tinkerer who practiced several trades and professions, including blacksmith, gunsmith, and surgeon. Josiah Franklin, Benjamin’s father, had emigrated to America in 1682 with his wife and their first three children. Landing in Boston, he set up shop as a tallow chandler, creating soap and candles from animal fat. A Puritan, his favorite piece of wisdom was a passage from the Proverbs of Solomon that affirms the importance of both industriousness and egalitarianism: “Seest through a man diligent in his calling, he shall stand before Kings.” “Diligence in thy calling” was even inscribed on his tombstone when he passed.3 Josiah’s industriousness and diligence extended to his family life: he fathered a total of seventeen children (seven by his first wife, ten by his second). Benjamin was the third-youngest child and the youngest son.
Josiah Franklin’s plan for Benjamin’s entry into the clergy led him to send his son to Boston Latin School at the age of eight. A year later his father transferred him to another school for writing and arithmetic that was less expensive. In his autobiography, Franklin recalls that he excelled at writing but failed at arithmetic, so when he was ten his father took him home to help at the tallow shop and began searching for a trade for him. After that point Franklin continued his education through reading any books he could obtain. Most were devotional texts from his father’s library, but by borrowing books from others with more-extensive libraries, he was able to read a great range of thought-provoking works, including Plutarch’s Lives, Cotton Mather’s Essays to Do Good, Locke’s On Human Understanding, and Arnauld and Nicole’s Logic, or the Art of Thinking.
Because Benjamin’s keen love of books was obvious, Josiah determined that his son should become a printer and so indentured him (at the age of twelve) to Benjamin’s older brother, James, who had a printing business. Benjamin excelled at the trade and discovered also a talent for writing. Fueled by his reading of great works in philosophy, rhetoric, and logic, Franklin began to hone his methods of writing, oration, and argumentation. As he notes in his autobiography,
While I was intent on improving my language, I met with an English grammar (I think it was Greenwood’s), at the end of which there were two little sketches of the arts of rhetoric and logic, the latter finishing with a specimen of a dispute in the Socratic method; and soon after I procur’d Xonophon’s Memorable Things of Socrates, wherein there are many instances of the same method. I was charm’d with it, adopted it, dropt my abrupt contradiction and positive argumentation, and put on the humble inquirer and doubter. And being then, from reading Shaftesbury and Collins, become a real doubter in many points of our religious doctrine, I found this method safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore I took a delight in it, practis’d it continually, and grew very artful and expert in drawing people, even of superior knowledge, into concessions, the consequences of which they did not foresee, entangling them in difficulties out of which they could not extricate themselves, and so obtaining victories that neither myself nor my cause always deserved. I continu’d this method some few years, but gradually left it, retaining only the habit of expressing myself in terms of modest diffidence; never using, when I advanced any thing that may possibly be disputed, the words certainly, undoubtedly, or any others that give the air of positiveness to an opinion; but rather say, I conceive or apprehend a thing to be so and so; it appears to me, or I should think it so or so, for such and such reasons.… This habit, I believe, has been of great advantage to me when I have had occasion to inculcate my opinions, and persuade men into measures that I have been from time to time engag’d in promoting.…4
Franklin’s skill in persuasive writing and oration would turn out to be very important in his role as a diplomat and in his success at convincing people to cooperate in the social innovations that he initiated such as street lighting and sweeping programs, a volunteer fire department, and America’s first public lending library.
However, his rebellious side also began to be more apparent during his time as an apprentice. When Franklin’s letters appeared under the pseudonym of Silence Dogood in the New England Courant, the newspaper published by his brother James, he revealed something of himself: “I am… a mortal enemy to arbitrary government and unlimited power. I am naturally very jealous for the rights and liberties of my country; and the least appearance of an encroachment on those invaluable privileges is apt to make my blood boil exceedingly.”5 He would also express his belief in education and egalitarianism by quoting passages extracted from an essay titled “The Education of Women,” written by Daniel Dafoe in 1719 (although he does not identify Dafoe and attributes the passages only to “an ingenious writer”):
I have (says he) often thought of it as one of the most barbarous Customs in the World, considering us as a civiliz’d and Christian Country, that we deny the Advantages of Learning to Women. We reproach the Sex every Day with Folly and Impertinence, while I am confident, had they the Advantages of Education equal to us, they would be guilty of less than our selves. One would wonder indeed how it should happen that Women are conversible at all, since they are only beholding to natural Parts for all their Knowledge. Their Youth is spent to teach them to stitch and sew, or make Baubles: They are taught to read indeed, and perhaps to write their Names, or so; and that is the Heighth of a Womans Education. And I would but ask any who slight the Sex for their Understanding, What is a Man (a Gentleman, I mean) good for that is taught no more? If Knowledge and Understanding had been useless Additions to the Sex, God Almighty would never have given them Capacities, for he made nothing Needless. What has the Woman done to forfeit the Priviledge of being taught? Doe
s she plague us with her Pride and Impertinence? Why did we not let her learn, that she might have had more Wit? Shall we upbraid Women with Folly, when ’tis only the Error of this inhumane Custom that hindred them being made wiser?
Franklin began to resent the harsh authority of his brother, and at the age of seventeen he managed to escape his apprenticeship and flee to New York City and then Philadelphia, in search of employment. Gregarious and charming, Franklin soon found work with a printer and a few years later opened his own printing house. His industriousness earned him both success as a printer and the admiration of the community. A prominent local merchant even noted, “The industry of that Franklin is superior to anything I ever saw of the kind; I see him still at work when I go home from club, and he is at work again before his neighbors are out of bed.”6 Soon Franklin had also started his own newspaper, the Pennsylvania Gazette, which would rise to become one of America’s most prominent newspapers and would continue to be published until 1800, ten years after Franklin’s death.
During this time Franklin continued to read and ponder religion. He had abandoned the Puritan dogma of his childhood, and although he had been educated as a Presbyterian, he had little interest in organized religion. He described himself as a deist—believing that reason and observation of the natural world were sufficient to determine the existence of a divine creator, accompanied with the rejection of authority as a source of religious knowledge. He wrote a series of religious essays, as much for the purpose of establishing his own moral code as for influencing others. He ended up developing his own Thirteen Virtues of Life:
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