Metaskills- Five Talents for the Robotic Age

by Marty Neumeier

  During the Industrial Age our feelings were unceremoniously kicked to the curb. There was no place in the factory for emotions, since emotions were believed to cloud one’s judgment and slow one’s efficiency. Even today, if you inject your feelings into a business conversation, you can almost watch your credibility leaving the room. This is too bad, since we now know that our emotions are far smarter than our rational brain for handling complex tasks.

  Until recently some people thought that emotion was simply a vestige of our primitive past, a residual flaw that needed correcting with rational thinking. Sigmund Freud likened the ego and the id—the emotional brain and the rational brain—to a horse and rider. “The horse provides the locomotive energy, and the rider has the prerogative of determining the goal and of guiding the movements of his powerful mount towards it.” Freud often advised his patients to “hold their horses” rather than “give free rein” to their emotions.

  Scientists have long speculated on why a particular area of the brain known as the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is larger in humans than in other primates. Freud might have guessed that its purpose was to protect us from the animal instincts of our emotions. Thanks to recent advances in neuroscience, however, we can see that the purpose of the OFC is actually the opposite—its job is to connect us with our emotions. It turns out that the more evolved a species is, the more emotional it is.

  Why would emotion be so important? Because it allows us to “feel” our way through situations that are too complex to think through. Our feelings are central to our learning, our intuition, and our empathy. They allow us to make sense of rich data sets that our rational brains are not equipped to comprehend. Emotion is not a substitute for reason, but a partner to it. If our rational brains were deprived of emotion, even the most banal decisions would become impossible.

  Emotion was less than welcome on the assembly lines of the Industrial Age. But in the creative labs of the Robotic Age it’s essential. Feeling is a prerequisite for the process of innovation. It feeds learning, fuels intuition, fosters empathy, and powers creativity.

  Let’s take these abilities one at a time.

  I’ll define learning as the process of acquiring new knowledge, skills, or habits. Later in the book I’ll elevate it to the status of a metaskill, but here I’m talking about it as a physical process of the emotional brain. Whenever we get a jolt of joy, fear, happiness, or sadness, our brain rewires itself, building neurological pathways that connect the emotion back to the sensory signal. In other words, we’re learning how to make predictions about ourselves and the world.

  The reason emotions are so smart is that they’ve evolved to turn mistakes into learning opportunities. Errors create emotional events that the brain can easily remember. This insight is key to understanding innovation. Innovation requires working through a series of prototypes, or predictions, to find out which ones work and which ones don’t.

  The brain operates in a similar fashion, testing predictions against reality while our dopamine cells keep score. Before our predictions can be right, they first have to be wrong. A wrong prediction then becomes a “wake-up call” that our dopamine cells convert into a powerful emotion, which then lets our anterior cingulate cortex take note of what we’ve just experienced. Put another way, failure triggers an emotion that we remember as knowledge.

  Emotional learning leads directly to intuition, the ability to “think without thinking,” to arrive at a solution or conclusion without the use of logic. Once you’ve taken the time to train your dopamine neurons, you don’t have to make as many conscious decisions—you simply recognize the pattern and act. You switch to autopilot and let your subconscious do the driving. This is particularly useful when you’re faced with difficult decisions, complex information, or situations where you need to act quickly. Easy problems are best suited to the conscious brain. Complex problems need the superior processing power of the emotional brain.

  Intuition is a result of deep experience in a particular activity, profession, or domain. We’re not born with it. We have to earn it. There’s a chicken-and-egg problem with intuition: It takes many hours of trial and error before we can trust it, yet if we don’t trust it we’ll never develop it. The Industrial Age has been particularly hard on intuition, rewarding people who stick to the script over those who “waste time” guessing at the answers. Now that intuition is rising to the top of the talent wishlist, we’re at a loss to find people who have it.

  Intuition isn’t just for artists, scientists, or other professionals in so-called creative fields. It’s for anyone who has to make decisions or find solutions when there’s not enough information or time to be painstakingly thorough. It’s for the doctor whose patient presents a commonly found set of symptoms, and still something doesn’t “feel” quite right. Or the accountant who scans a balance sheet and without focusing on it finds an anomaly that seems to jump off the page. Or the mother who doesn’t hear any sounds coming from her child’s room and realizes that something is wrong. In other words, it’s for everyone who lives in the modern world. It’s the eyes in the back of your head, the extra sense that defies rational explanation.

  These are the nonlogical processes that help us to “know,” not through reasoning, but through judgment, decision, or action. Learning expert Donald Schön called this process “reflection in action,” because this type of knowledge doesn’t come from books but from the conversational back and forth of doing. Think of the painter who puts a brushstroke onto a canvas, then reacts to that brushstroke with another, then another, and so on, never knowing exactly where the painting will go, but always comparing its trajectory to her original vision in the process.

  While we learn best by doing, we also learn by watching. What help make this possible at the brain level are “mirror neurons,” a small cluster of cells in a part of the brain associated with muscular control. When neurophysiologist Giacomo Rizzolatti was studying the frontal and parietal cortex of the macaque monkey, he and his team noticed that the neurons needed for a given task would automatically fire in the brain of one monkey as it observed another monkey performing the same task. This gave rise to speculation about a “monkey see, monkey do” gene in humans. Whenever we see someone else smile, our mirror neurons light up as if we ourselves were smiling. Whenever we watch someone else swing a golf club, they light up as if we ourselves were swinging the golf club.

  Mirror neurons, said Rizzolatti, “allow us to grasp the minds of others, not through conceptual reasoning, but through direct simulation; by feeling, not by thinking.” Tellingly, this area of the brain seems to be compromised in people with autism. Intuition is closed off to autistics, leaving them to think their way through every experience and every situation using reason alone.

  The behavior-mirroring part of the brain may be largely responsible for our ability to interpret the thoughts and feelings of others. We call this ability empathy. In a world with seven billion people, empathy has become a valuable commodity. It lets us work together to achieve results we couldn’t achieve separately. It facilitates business by helping us understand the needs and desires of customers. And it allows us to live together in relative peace, based on mutual respect for one another. When empathy breaks down, actual war becomes possible as we redefine our enemies as less human than ourselves.

  This brings us to morality, another specialty of the emotional brain. Here I’d like to create a slight separation between morality and ethics: morality is a natural instinct for “doing unto others” as reflected in the universal laws of both religious belief and secular philosophy; ethics, however, is more nuanced, requiring the fine-tuning that only conscious thinking can deliver. I’ll return to this subject later in the book.

  The ancient laws of morality were already in effect before the Ten Commandments was ever carved in stone. They were written into the genetic code of the primate brain. What the religions of the world did was to translate these natural laws into spoken language. Our ancestors may not have
agreed on the ethics of eating someone else’s dinner, but they most certainly knew you didn’t push your best friend from the top of a tree.

  Science writer Jonah Lehrer pointed out that psychopaths aren’t the ones who can’t manage to behave rationally. They’re the ones who can only behave rationally. Their emotional brains have been damaged. When we act in a moral manner—when we recoil from violence, treat others fairly, and help strangers in need—we’re making decisions that take other people into account. We’re thinking about their feelings, sympathizing with their states of mind. This is what psychopaths can’t do.

  Without basic morality we could never have reached a population of seven billion people. If we should put aside our basic morality in the coming years, it’s doubtful that we could continue evolving as a species. Feeling, our oldest metaskill, is likely to be an important ally, as we begin to invent artificial life and to augment our natural gifts with manmade ones.

  When the right brain goes wrong

  Now that I’ve just spent several pages extolling the virtues of feeling, let me give equal time to the drawbacks of relying on feeling alone. None of these should be surprising to you, since they’re same cautions that have kept our emotions in the back seat during the Industrial Age.

  Here’s a research question taken from Daniel Kahneman’s book, Thinking, Fast and Slow, revealing the limitations of intuition:

  Linda is single, outspoken, and very bright. As a student she was deeply concerned with issues of discrimination and social justice. Which is more probable? 1) Linda is a bank teller. Or 2) Linda is a bank teller and is active in the feminist movement.

  Number two, you say? If so, your intuition is working perfectly. But your conclusion is perfectly wrong. There’s no way that number two could be more probable, because it’s more limiting. If Linda happens to be active in the feminist movement, she fits description number one as well as number two. But if Linda is not active in the feminist movement, she’s eliminated from number two. Don’t feel bad if you blew it. A full 85% of Stanford business students, steeped in probabilities, were tricked by this question.

  This is merely one variety of cognitive bias, a large category of logical pitfalls that play havoc with our intuition. Other traps include negativity bias, in which bad is perceived to be stronger than good; perceptual defense, which causes us to ignore inconvenient facts; hindsight bias, the illusion that we “knew it all along”; the gambler’s fallacy, or believing in “streaks” or in “being due” when no such possibilities exist; the anchoring effect, causing us to weigh a single piece of evidence far too heavily; belief bias, in which we evaluate an argument based on the believability of its conclusion; and the availability heuristic, which causes us to estimate the likelihood of something according to what is more available in memory, favoring events that are vivid or emotionally charged.

  These are all examples of how the human mind tries to make sense out of just about anything. Our brains are meaning-making machines, according to anthropologist Carolyn M. Bloomer, author of Principles of Visual Perception. She proves it by asking her students to clip cartoons out of magazines. She then has them separate the captions from the pictures, making one pile of captions and one of pictures. When the students connect the captions and pictures randomly, they’re surprised to find that at least half of them are still funny. She says, “Creating meaning is an automatic process.”

  This automatic quality of the emotional brain is both a boon and a bother. On one hand we depend on it for turning experiences into learning, and learning into mastery. By repeating a task over and over, we’re able to delegate our practiced skills to our subconscious minds so we can move on to a next-level task. A common example of this is how we manage to drive to work while thinking about what to say at the morning meeting. When we get to work we can barely remember our commute.

  On the other hand, our emotional brains can trip us up when we need to learn something new. If our dopamine neurons have been well trained in an old task, they can have trouble performing a competing task.

  The Stroop Test is a good demonstration of this principle. If you’re asked to identify a series of words for colors, such as red, blue, green, brown, and purple, you’ll have no problem reading back the words. But if the words are printed in colors other than what the words say, and you’re asked to identify only the colors, you’ll find it almost impossible to read them back. Your dopamine cells have been trained to recognize words more easily than colors, and only a superhuman effort by your pre-frontal cortex can contradict the training of your emotional brain.

  The prefrontal cortex gives us executive control over our emotional brains. As in Freud’s metaphor of the horse and rider, it allows us to “override” our instincts and behave more rationally. It can also help us behave more irrationally in certain sitations, such as when we’re trying to exercise our imagination or think in new ways. Executive control gives us the profound aptitude of metacognition, the ability to think about our own thinking.

  Yet executive control is subject to yet another bias: the illusion that we know more than we do. The workings of the human brain are best approached with a great deal of curiosity, humility, and appreciation of mystery. For there is no greater mystery than how we make sense of the world.

  The magical mind

  Consciousness, intellect, and the mind are overlapping ideas that are hotly contested among—well—brainy people. But since the requirements of the Robotic Age include a passing acquaintance with the process we call thinking, I’d like to introduce you to three people who can shed light on the subject.

  The first is Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, a psychology professor whose Hungarian name is more fun to pronounce than it seems (ME-high CHEEK-sent-me-HIGH-ee). He’s a founder of positive psychology and author of a series of books on flow, a mental state that describes what it’s like to be fully engaged in creative work.

  The second is Tor Nørretranders, Denmark’s leading science writer, whose book The User Illusion goes far to explain consciousness in terms of information theory.

  And the third is Nicholas Humphrey, an English psychologist who has written a number of books on the evolution of the human mind. His most recent, Soul Dust, contains a delightful theory on the evolutionary advantages of consciousness.

  Let’s start with a few rudimentary definitions of the words above so we can be on the same page. When you engage in thinking, or cognition, you’re using your mind to bring order out of chaos. Your mind is not your brain or some physical thing, but an emergent property that arises from the interaction your brain and body with your environment. You experience your conscious mind as a combination of emotion, perception, imagination, memory, and cognition.

  Your mind is part of your intellect. Intellect is a conscious ability to understand things, or to reach conclusions about what is true or real in the world. Western philosophy has tended to separate intellect from behavior, as if your mind and body were two separate entities. But in reality your intellect is a seamless integration of your conscious mind, your physical body, and your environment. Psychologist Howard Gardner defines it as “a biopsychological potential to process information,” a way to solve problems or create products in a cultural setting. Creativity, the subject of this book, is a special quality of your intellect.

  Where the real mystery is, however, is consciousness. Generally speaking, consciousness is the subjective experience of being awake and aware. But the function of consciousness, according to Csikszentmihalyi, is to represent information about what is happening inside and outside our bodies in such a way that we can evaluate it and act on it. The information-processing ability of the intellect would be useless without some way of representing the world to ourselves. So we have consciousness to serve as a clearinghouse for our sensations, perceptions, feelings, and ideas, establishing priorities among these inputs.

  Without consciousness we would still “know” what was going on, but we’d have to react to it in a reflexive, instinctive
way. Consciousness lets us judge what our senses are telling us and respond accordingly. We can also invent information that didn’t exist before. “It is because we have consciousness that we can daydream, make up lies, and write beautiful poems and scientific theories,” says Csikszentmihalyi. While automatic emotions take care of the immediate variables, our conscious mind can do more—it can expand the list of possibilities.

  As amazing as consciousness is, it’s capable of much less than we imagine. We’re constantly fooled into believing that rational thought is our most powerful way of knowing. Our rational brain often behaves like a bully, trash-talking our emotional brain and autonomic nervous system simply because it can. The fact is, most of the brain is engaged in unglamorous but crucial work like bodily metabolism, glandular functions, muscle control, and the sensations we get from touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing, and motion. Conscious thought takes up a tiny percentage of this total effort.

  Nørretranders looks at consciousness from the point of view of information. Drawing from work done by Manfred Zimmermann at Heidelberg University, he highlights a remarkable fact that has been known for half a century, yet remains relatively obscure. Namely, that although our senses receive eleven million bits of information per second, our conscious minds normally process sixteen bits per second. The eye sends at least ten million bits per second to the brain. The ear, a hundred thousand. The nose, another hundred thousand, and the taste buds about a thousand bits.