Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently

by Berns, Gregory

  Again, clues can be found in bird behavior. Birds might be more similar than different, but because of where they live, they just become accustomed to more or less novelty. The answer to this question is found by looking at birds raised in captivity. In such a setup, the environment is held constant, and the only thing that is different is the biology of the species. In these experiments, species differences tend to diminish. But what does pop out is the drive for exploration in young birds. Three to four weeks after the fledging stage, many birds display an intense drive for exploration. These are the adolescents. It doesn’t always manifest in terms of food. Juvenile birds like to play with objects such as string that have no nutritive value. The best explanation for why some birds like to explore and others don’t is that the birds pass through a period of plasticity during adolescence. If they happen to live in an environment that is complex and affords opportunity for exploration, they will do so. This experience gets imprinted during adolescence and remains relatively stable through adulthood.

  Adolescence is a special time for humans as well. Setting aside the issues of sexual maturity, human adolescence is marked by an intense drive to explore the world. It is marked by a desire to try new things and eschew that which is perceived as old and stodgy. It is also the time when the dopamine system reaches its peak in physiological activity. Time and again the dopamine system pops up as a key player in both innovation and iconoclasm. Understanding the relationship between dopamine and novelty also explains why some people are receptive to new ideas. These are the early adopters that Rogers described, and these are the people whom the iconoclast must target if he is to become an icon.

  Until recently, the relationship between dopamine and personality types was largely speculative. But two brain imaging studies have provided direct evidence of a link between dopamine activity and personality dimensions related to novelty seeking. As it turns out, this relationship changes throughout the human life span, which may explain the adolescent propensity for novelty seeking. It may also explain why, in many fields, the age of innovation and creativity reaches its peak sometime before thirty years old.

  There is good evidence that the brain trades off risk and reward in dopamine-rich areas such as the striatum.6 Is this a universal property of brain function, or is it more prominent in some individuals than others? In 2006, neuroscientists at the University of Ulm, Germany, conducted a brain imaging experiment to measure the relationship between brain activity and personality traits. The task was simple. Subjects were presented with a visual cue that looked like a two-color pie chart. On each trial, the chart indicated the probability with which the subject would win one euro. The probabilities ranged from 0 percent to 100 percent. After three seconds, the chart was replaced with either a square or a triangle. If it was a square, the subject had to hit a button on a keypad, and if it was a triangle, they had to hit a different button. On each trial, they had one second to respond. If they responded correctly, then a virtual coin was flipped with the appropriate probability to see whether they won the euro on that trial.

  As in many studies before them, the scientists found a direct relationship of activity in the striatum (the brain region with the densest concentration of dopamine receptors) to the probability of winning, but this depended on the personality of the person. Individuals who scored high on the personality traits of novelty seeking and thrill seeking had the highest levels of striatal activation. Here, novelty seeking was defined as a tendency toward exploratory activity, intense excitement in response to novelty, and the active avoidance of monotony or frustration. Thrill seeking was defined by the pursuit of varied, novel, and intense sensations and experiences, and the willingness to take physical, social, legal, and financial risks to achieve these goals.7

  The relationship between striatal activity and personality is not specific to money. A different study, conducted in Cambridge, England, found a similar link between novelty seeking and the brain’s response to images of food. Here, subjects were presented with color photographs of foods that were either highly appetizing (chocolate cake, an ice cream sundae), disgusting (rotten meat, moldy bread), or bland (uncooked rice, potatoes). Subjects simply had to rate the degree to which each picture was pleasant, disgusting, appetizing, or nauseating. The brain imaging data showed that parts of the striatum became active when subjects viewed either appetizing or disgusting foods, but not bland ones. As in the German study, the Cambridge group found that the degree of striatal activation was linked to personality traits. The Cambridge group used a different personality scale, called the behavioral inhibition/approach scale (BIS/BAS). The BAS measures how strongly a person pursues goals (e.g., “I go out of my way to get things I want”), their inclination to seek out new rewarding situations (e.g., “I’m always willing to try something new if I think it will be fun”), and excitability (e.g., “When good things happen to me, it affects me strongly”). The BIS, on the other hand, measures sensitivity to punishment (e.g., “If I think something unpleasant is going to happen, I usually get pretty worked up”). When the Cambridge group measured in striatal activation, they found that subjects who scored high on the BAS had the highest level of activation in response to appetizing foods. This was not simply a matter of being more emotional, because the relationship did not exist for the disgusting or bland foods.8

  These two studies provide a key piece of evidence for the biological link between dopamine and novelty seeking. Individuals who exhibit more activity in their dopamine systems are much more likely to be people who seek out new experiences. These people should be the initial targets in a campaign to sell an idea. These people are likely to demonstrate a high level of motivation to pursue their goals, but they are not necessarily iconoclasts. These high-dopamine novelty seekers tend to be young (because young people have more active dopamine systems), but most importantly, they link iconoclasts with the rest of society.

  An iconoclast who tries to sell a new idea to the masses needs to use an inefficient strategy. Most of the population will look to other people before adopting a new technology. To be efficient, the iconoclast should target the high-dopamine novelty seekers first. These people will provide the bridge to everyone else.

  Steve Jobs: The Iconoclastic Icon

  You know the type: the Apple devotee. Ever since Steve Jobs created the Apple personal computer in the 1970s, the computing world has been divided between Apple people and everyone else. What is more amazing is that the Apple devotees have always been in the minority, maybe 10 percent at best. And yet, Steve Jobs has become a cultural icon by marketing to this group. He is a case study in how the quirky, iconoclastic computer designer has become one of the most worshipped people in information technology. And while Bill Gates has made vaster sums of money, it is Jobs who has achieved Buddha-like status.

  Much has been written about Jobs’s personality. He has been described as temperamental, aggressive, demanding, and worse. There is little doubt about his charisma at large-scale events such as Macworld Expo, but the reason that he is particularly interesting from the iconoclastic perspective is how he honed the art of marketing to the young, high-dopamine novelty lovers just described. This has nothing to do with the technical superiority of the Mac over the PC. This is about tapping into the dopamine systems of the 13.5 percent of the population Rogers identified as early adopters.

  The first iPod was introduced in October 2001. With a list price of $399 for the 5 GB model or $499 for the 10 GB model, the iPod was not a cheap piece of technology. Apple has never been cheap; nor has Apple marketed its products for the budget minded. The Macintosh line of computers has always cost more than comparable PCs. So it is reasonable to ask why people are willing to shell out $500 for a device to play songs—songs that they still have to buy. The same question could be asked of why people would pay $400 for an iPhone when similar products could be had for half the price. The answer to these questions is found by asking a slightly different question, which is, what type of person wou
ld pay a premium for these ultracool gadgets?

  The answer, of course, is the high-dopamine novelty seekers. Half of Jobs’s genius is in his flair for design, but the other half lies in his talent for connecting to the pool of early adopters that ultimately link him to the rest of the population. Many of the iconoclasts described in this book have developed the ability to see things differently within their area of expertise. Some have developed the courage to face down the fear of the unknown, and a select few have gone on to success because of their social intelligence. But to make the transition from iconoclast to icon like Steve Jobs, you need something more than even these three qualities.

  Many iconoclasts are so iconoclastic that they cannot recognize that most people do not see things differently and that most people are afraid of things that are unfamiliar. In order to reach the masses, either you need to make your ideas compatible with existing social frameworks, as Salk did with his vaccine; or if the idea is truly incompatible with existing institutions, then you need to reach out to the fraction of the population that can serve as a bridge between the ubericonoclast and the rest of the world. This is what Jobs has done.

  The Youthful Brain

  Although Rogers took a statistical approach and arbitrarily said that 13.5 percent of the population are early adopters, he didn’t say anything about who these people were or how they became that way. Some of the bird data suggests that environment drives innovative behavior. Under the right circumstances, even birds that are not particularly innovative will adopt exploratory behaviors. However, these studies also suggest that it is the juvenile birds that are primarily responsible for exploration. When it comes to humans, the situation is complicated by the difficulty in characterizing the environment. Humans navigate complex technologies and information systems that are changing on a daily basis. But even beyond technological challenges, the complexity of human social interactions exceeds that of any other species. To answer the question of whether iconoclasts are made or born, we must look at the development of the human brain.

  The human brain is far more adaptable than previously thought. The old view was that humans are born with most of the neurons they will ever possess, and as they get older, the number of neurons steadily declines, but the modern picture of the human brain reveals a far more dynamic and complex picture of development. Different parts of the brain grow at different rates and reach maturity at different points in time. Moreover, the definition of maturity has become increasingly complicated as neuroscientists have come to understand that brain size is not the be-all and end-all of maturity.

  At its most basic level, brain development can be understood as a tug-of-war between two processes: growth and pruning. Of the two, growth is more easily understood because it is quite visible. A newborn child, for example, has a brain about one-quarter the size of an adult’s, but this reaches 80 percent by age two. Not all of this growth is in the number of neurons. Most of the growth is in the fibers that traverse the brain and connect different regions. These connecting fibers, or white matter, are swathed with insulating layers of fat and cholesterol, giving them a white appearance. The insulation, called myelin, increases the speed of information transmission through the fibers by a hundredfold. Because the growth of white matter generally exceeds the growth of neurons, or gray matter, the predominant time course of development in the brain is one of decreasing gray matter density. Part of the process is also due to the active elimination of synapses, called synaptic pruning. The pruning process appears to be dependent on how the neurons in a particular region are used. This means that experience literally shapes the structure of the brain during the pruning process. What is interesting, however, is that the rate at which this occurs varies by the region of the brain. In the visual cortex, synapses appear to reach their maximal density at about four months of age. After that, synaptic pruning kicks in and continues until preschool age. In contrast, the prefrontal cortex reaches maximal synaptic density at around three to four years and declines steadily through early adulthood. Until recently, these changes were essentially unobservable because it was impossible to study the brains of children and adolescents. By allowing the exquisite definition between gray and white matter, MRI has allowed neuroscientists to track brain development all the way from childhood to old age. The results provide tantalizing insights into the relative contributions of experience and genetics to make someone a novelty lover.9

  There seems to be a direct correspondence between the development of specific cognitive functions and the onset of synaptic pruning in the parts of the brain that implement those functions. It may seem strange that less gray matter actually corresponds to maturity and not the other way around. The best explanation for this phenomenon is that the brain becomes more efficient at processing certain types of information as it matures. Initially, the brain has no template of what the world looks like. As the individual gains experience, the brain becomes better at predicting how the world works. One of the primary mechanisms of learning appears to be a specialization of synapses, which means getting rid of synapses that don’t contribute and retaining those that do.

  There is one exception to the pattern of declining gray matter density with age. The most lateral aspects of the brain, in the posterior temporal and inferior parietal lobes, show an unusual profile of gray matter change. Unlike all the other brain regions, which decrease rapidly beginning in adolescence, these parts of the temporal and parietal lobes show a subtle increase in gray matter density until about age thirty. Gray matter in this region remains remarkably stable for decades, only to decline precipitously at the onset of old age. These are the very same regions involved in perception that were highlighted in chapters 1 and 2. If we can take declining gray matter density as an index of maturity, then this suggests that in many ways perception may not ever be mature. Perception, in particular, may be the most plastic and adaptable of all cognitive functions. There is a catch. Although perception remains plastic far longer than other cognitive functions, this plasticity begins to peter out beginning around age thirty. This may explain why so many of the early adopters tend to be young adults. In addition to a robust dopamine system, their perceptual processes are more open to seeing the world in new ways.

  So what about the genes? I have made a big deal about the role of dopamine in novelty seeking. And although there are statistically significant relationships between different variants of genes, such as COMT, the question remains as to how important genes are relative to experience. Making the picture more complex, genes are not static. So although one person may possess a particular form of the COMT gene, it is not active at the same level all the time. COMT activity changes throughout the life cycle and, to some extent, in response to environmental events. One study that examined the level of COMT activity in the prefrontal cortex found a steady doubling of activity from the infant brain to the adult brain.10 This age-related increase in COMT is similar in magnitude to that conferred by the type of gene an individual possesses and is yet another argument for targeting young adults as a bridge to the general population.

  I Feel So Young

  So, is early adoption all about youth? The biological evidence makes for a strong case that novelty seeking peaks during adolescence and early adulthood. Add to this the relative plasticity of the perceptual system before age thirty, and you have a strong argument for marketing to this demographic group.

  The brain is lazy. It changes only when it has to. And the conditions that consistently force the brain to rewire itself are when it confronts something novel. Novelty equals learning, and learning means physical rewiring of the brain. It is a biological fact that youthful brains are more easily rewired than old brains. For the iconoclast to become an icon, not only must he possess an exceptionally plastic brain that can see things differently, but he must rewire the brains of a vast number of other people who are not iconoclasts. From this perspective, it makes sense to start with the people whose brains are most likely to be receptive to new
experiences and are in such a state that they can be rewired.

  As we have seen, one strategy is to appeal to the minority of the population who are generally more open to new ideas, while the other strategy is to make the new ideas seem more familiar. It helps to dichotomize these approaches because they tap into very different biological mechanisms in the brain. The novelty-seeking strategy appeals to young brains that are trying to get a leg up in the Darwinian struggle for mating rights. Possessing the newest piece of technology—for example, an iPhone—is like having a peacock’s tail. It is costly in terms of time to learn new ideas, and new technology is expensive. So, for the youthful brain trying to impress competitors or members of the opposite sex, these items scream, “I am so fit that I can afford to take the time and money to invest in this new gadget.”

  But what if the target demographic is older? All is not lost. Although the youthful brain is more easily rewired, the older brain is not necessarily frozen in a state of inertia. It may be harder to change than the adolescent’s brain, but it will change under the right circumstances. For a new idea to be adopted by a large percentage of an older population, factors such as familiarity and compatibility may weigh more heavily than the dopamine kick that accompanies novelty. Jonas Salk became an icon not through a newfangled vaccine, but through an approach that was familiar to millions of parents.

  The iconoclast trying to reach a larger audience faces a tough decision in his marketing approach. Go for the high-dopamine novelty seekers and hope that they will serve as a bridge to the rest of the population, or go for the conservative masses, in which case the idea must be wrapped in a cloak of familiarity? In many ways, these two approaches are polar opposites. Aiming for one group will alienate the other. And there is no middle ground. Trying to strike a balance between novelty and familiarity will likely achieve neither.