Sensation_The New Science of Physical Intelligence

by Thalma Lobel

  This insight or aha experience is metaphorically related to light. We use metaphors such as I saw the light and shed light on a situation. The lightbulb is often used as a symbol of invention and innovation, and to represent a sudden flash of insight into how to solve a problem. Drawings, cartoons, and comic strips depicting new ideas often feature lightbulbs over people’s heads.

  A group of researchers investigated whether people exposed to a lightbulb perform better in tasks that require insight and creativity.5 They conducted a series of studies where they presented participants with problems that required insight while exposing half of them to a lightbulb.

  In one study, the researchers gave seventy-nine students a problem that required out-of-the-box thinking—to connect four dots arranged in a square with three lines without raising the pencil.

  People often find this problem difficult because they assume that there is a boundary around the dots, and therefore they draw the line within the area of the dots. Once they realize that they can draw lines outside the boundary of the dots, they solve the problem easily.

  After assigning the dots task, the experimenter mentioned that it was somewhat dark in the room and turned on an incandescent lightbulb for half of the participants. For the other half he turned on an overhead fluorescent light. The results are amazing. Forty-four percent of those who were exposed to a lightbulb solved the problem, while only 22 percent of those who were exposed to the fluorescent lighting solved it. Just being exposed to the incandescent lightbulb increased participants’ ability to realize that they could go outside the boundary. Similar results were found in a second study when the participants received mathematical questions that required insight. Those who saw an illuminated lightbulb solved the mathematical problems more often than those exposed to fluorescent light.

  In a third study the researchers gave the participants a creative verbal task, the aforementioned Remote Associates Test, in which participants are presented with three words and have to find a word related to each of the three. For example: what is the word that is related to widow, bite, and monkey? (Answer: spider.) Again, the experimenter turned on an incandescent lightbulb for one group and an overhead fluorescent light for the other group. The results were consistent. Those who were exposed to the lightbulb solved more questions correctly.

  The researchers conducted a fourth study in which they once again presented the participants with the Remote Associates Test. However, instead of comparing a bare lightbulb with fluorescent light, this time they exposed one group to a bare, illuminated twenty-five-watt bulb. Instead of exposing the other group to an overhead fluorescent light, the researchers exposed them to a shaded forty-watt bulb, using a brighter bulb for the shaded light so that the ambient light would be the same. They once again administered the RAT, and those who saw the bare illuminated lightbulb performed better and found more correct words than those who were exposed to the shaded bulb. These results confirm that what enhances creativity is the exposure to the bare illuminated lightbulb, which is metaphorically related to innovation and insight and symbolizes discovery. Light influences our cognitive processes and leads to greater insight and creative thinking.

  An Apple a Day . . . Keeps You More Creative

  Exposing yourself to symbols associated with insight and creativity can enhance creativity. Even a brand name associated with creativity will increase creative thinking. A group of researchers chose two brands, IBM and Apple.6 Both are respectable brands, but Apple is more readily associated with creativity than IBM. Moreover, Apple emphasizes innovation and nonconformity in its advertisements and uses slogans such as Think different. A young friend of mine who has just moved to Apple from another high-tech company told me that although he liked working in the other company, he really felt the creativity in the air at Apple.

  Researchers asked a group of students to indicate the extent to which each of these two brands represents various traits, creativity among them. The results clearly showed that Apple was perceived as more creative than IBM. The students were also asked how much they liked each of these brands and how they felt about them. No difference was found regarding these questions. They liked both brands equally and perceived them positively. The only difference was that Apple was perceived as more creative.

  The researchers then conducted an experiment with two other groups of participants, who were presented with one number on the computer screen at a time, and whose task was to add the numbers as they appeared. During the presentation of each number, the participants in one group were subliminally exposed to IBM logos and the participants in the other group were subliminally exposed to Apple logos. The logos were presented for a very short time, thirteen milliseconds, too short for participants to consciously recognize the stimuli. Indeed, when participants were asked at the end of the experiment to report what they saw, no one had been aware of seeing any of the logos.

  Participants were then given a creativity assignment, the “unusual uses” task. In this task participants are asked to write as many unusual uses for a brick as they can think of. Possible uses are as a paperweight, a doorstop, or, wrapped in foil, an inexpensive bacon or sandwich press for your grill. The idea behind this task is that the more creative you are, the more you see a brick as having many uses. Those who were subliminally exposed to the Apple logos found more unusual uses for the brick. In addition, two judges evaluated the creativity of the first three uses suggested by each participant. Those who were subliminally exposed to the Apple logos suggested more creative uses. Just subliminal exposure to Apple logos was enough to enhance creativity. Amazing!

  To take advantage of these results in your own home or company, consider hanging posters with creativity-related cues, such as drawings of lightbulbs or other symbols of creativity: logos or mottoes of other creative companies, a picture of an open field or another setting without boundaries, a room with a very high ceiling, or a person actually sitting or standing outside a box. A print of a Cubist painting by Picasso could also be helpful, since Cubism epitomizes different ways of portraying and presenting more than one view at a time. Photos of faraway locations might also boost creativity, since it has been found that traveling abroad increased students’ creativity.7 Have such a poster in your study or above your desk and in your children’s rooms. According to these studies, it may help more than you think. Be creative—and think of other symbols that will increase your creativity.

  Conclusion

  Many studies described in the book have shown that our physical sensations activate abstract concepts and, as a result, influence our behaviors, emotions, and thoughts. For example, when we touch a soft object, the sensation influences how gently we will behave. Eating sweet food actually makes us act sweeter. These are remarkable findings.

  The studies described in this chapter, however, go one step further. Embodying certain metaphors for creativity or being exposed to creativity-related cues in the environment activates our existing knowledge as well as the ability to be creative, to think of new and original ideas, and to make remote associations. Embodiment of metaphors actually enlarges knowledge and influences performance. The act of embodying the metaphors or being exposed to the creativity-related environmental cues influences your ability to solve problems in ways you might otherwise not have thought of. This is fabulous news. Your creative ability lies squarely in your own hands. Your body can help your mind embody great and small achievements.

  Epilogue

  As I was writing the final chapter of this book, I heard on the news that an enormous meteorite had exploded over Russia, injuring hundreds of people. This is a strange and rare event. Other natural disasters, such as earthquakes and tsunamis, happen relatively rarely, but the meteorite made me think about how the forces of nature can change people’s lives in an instant, with no warning.

  This book, however, has not dealt with the obvious, powerful natural forces in the earth, sea, and sky that can change our lives in the most dramatic ways. My goal in
this book was to focus on the subtler environmental factors that we experience every day but do not notice, although they nonetheless affect our lives significantly. The cutting-edge, innovative studies I’ve presented demonstrate again and again the surprising effects of various physical sensations, such as tactile perceptions, flavors, weight, colors, vertical positioning, and physical cleanliness, on our behaviors, emotions, and judgments.

  Psychologists and philosophers have known for years that our bodily sensations affect our behavior, but only in the past few decades has extensive research in embodied cognition systematically examined this interaction and established these amazing connections, showing the metaphorical to be quite physical.

  According to embodied cognition theory, we understand abstract concepts via the bodily experiences associated with these concepts. Children learn about the world through their physical sensations and so develop concrete ideas of distance, tactile sensations, warmth, weight, and vertical position. For instance, children feel warmth when their parents hold and embrace them and so experience the connection between physical and emotional warmth. They learn the difference between near and far, light and dark, positive and negative, when they are put to bed and their parents leave the room and turn off the light. They learn the connection between height and power when they look up at the grown-ups around them.

  These physical sensations constitute the basis and indeed the scaffolding for representing and understanding abstract higher concepts, such as friendliness, emotional distance, and status. Our emotions, thoughts, and behaviors are grounded in physical sensations. We actually shift our attention upward when we think of powerful people or groups, and believe that an issue is more important when we are carrying something heavy.

  Not only are our sensory and motor perceptions, or physical intelligence, important in understanding how our thoughts and emotions work, but they’re also vital to building artificial intelligence. As Hans Moravec, an influential robotics inventor, theorist, and professor at Carnegie-Mellon University, has said, it is simpler to program a computer to play chess than to program the computer to imitate the perception of a baby. His theory, Moravec’s paradox, maintains that in designing robots and developing artificial intelligence, sensorimotor skills require much more computation than high-order cognitive processes, such as decisions or reasoning. Moravec’s paradox reminds us that our senses are a miracle and that they connect our intelligence to the world—they even have a role in creating our intelligence.

  These studies demonstrate that metaphors are the ideal ambassadors of embodied cognition. Metaphors are all around us, in our speech and thoughts, yet operating invisibly. A metaphor associates a concrete concept with an abstract concept; it makes it easier for us to understand the abstract concept through an immediately comprehensible comparison. We know that a person who is cold as stone hasn’t actually been standing in the frigid outdoors. A social climber doesn’t go to ladder parties. And an emotionally distant person can actually be sitting quite close to us. Nonetheless, an actual link exists between abstract ideas and our felt sense of the world. This physical intelligence provides valuable information, but it can also make us biased: we are more prone to judge a person as being cold as stone when we actually sense cold temperature, even though that assessment may be unfair. Knowing the fluid communication between body and mind can help you guard against making inaccurate judgments and can also help you avoid being taken in by false embodied intelligence.

  Some psychologists believe that metaphors are mere reflections of these associations between physical sensations and abstract concepts, but many scientists have found that metaphors are actually part of the process and play an important role in our understanding of abstract concepts. The research described in this book demonstrates that metaphors are more than just figures of speech that enrich and add depth and meaning to our language. In fact, we think metaphorically. Metaphors have evolved to become universal and picturesque units of meaning in our minds. Metaphors are more powerful than we might have imagined and actively influence our thoughts and behavior.

  We have seen cups of hot coffee melt hearts and change opinions, clipboards add heft to the value of currencies, and freshly washed hands provide the license to cheat. Although you no doubt have felt how outdoor temperature affects your mood, I am sure that you would not have guessed that just touching a warm object can influence your judgment of another person or make you more sociable. Tactile sensations play a much larger role in our lives than we might have believed. You probably never thought that the mere softness of the chair you are sitting on might affect your negotiating style and hence your performance. You may have intuited that gesturing and moving around could help you work out a problem, but you probably never dreamed that actually sitting “outside the box” improves and enhances your creative thinking.

  In describing these experiments and their alluring findings, I occasionally encounter skeptics who say something like “Well, yes, that study is very interesting, but come on, aren’t you stretching things a bit?” It’s hard not to believe that something else, something you’re missing—an external variable, the experimental design—is causing these outcomes. How can physical sensations that are metaphorically related to emotions and behaviors have such power?

  The astonishing findings that I cite in Sensation have been conducted by top scientists from leading universities and published in responsible and prestigious scientific journals, with their methodology examined by other scientists. The experiments were carefully designed and controlled, and they randomly assigned participants from the same populations to different groups. There were no other differences between the groups besides the influence that was examined. The experiments were designed to ensure that the manipulation of the examined variables was responsible for the behavior of the participants.

  Nevertheless, whenever scientists hear about findings that are strongly counterintuitive, their antennae should go up and they should be skeptical. Sometimes astonishing findings do in fact point to badly structured experiments or data that have been manipulated or possibly fabricated. Indeed, there have been a couple of bad apples in embodied cognition research (as well as in other scientific fields) whose findings have been found unreliable due to questionable data. Their papers were retracted, and two of them resigned their university positions. I don’t include these discredited psychologists’ work, of course, and I myself have also carefully reviewed all the studies that I include in this book, to ensure that I present you with only the most credible, well-developed studies and findings in this exciting new field.

  Recently, however, some of the most famous, most cited studies in social psychology have come under attack due to failed attempts to replicate their findings. Most of the studies criticized were not directly related to embodied cognition, the focus of Sensation, although some embodied cognition studies were criticized as well. In order to try to ensure that the effects of the studies I use are real, I’ve mostly cited studies that use multiple experiments, not just one. When several experiments examine the same question using different methods, we can be more certain of their general conclusion, and we have a smaller chance of arriving at an incidental, anomalous finding. In many of the cases I recount, different studies were conducted in different laboratories and sometimes even in different countries, all with similar results. For example, the influence of physical weight on the conception of importance was found in a number of studies conducted in several laboratories, both in the United States and in the Netherlands.

  The possibility remains that some of these findings will fail to be replicated. I believe that in the case of embodied cognition studies, the main reason for such a failure is the existence of variable factors, such as surroundings, personality, and culture, that were not taken into account. These factors can influence results, and frankly they’re not easy to adjust for. Nonetheless, this is a new and exciting area of research and, as often happens in science, the first stage brings amazing and nov
el results. In the second stage, further studies take into account and examine additional variables in order to develop more comprehensive theories. The challenge for the next generation of embodied cognition researchers is to examine these moderating variables and develop a theory that explains how, when, and why these fascinating associations between body and mind occur.

  Future studies could examine, for instance, when physical sensations have the least influence. For example, we learned that touching a warm object influences our judgments and behavior, but outdoor temperatures might influence this association—touching a warm object may have a different effect on a cold day as compared with a hot day. Other factors, such as the presence of other people, might also affect the association between physical sensation and behavior. Future studies should also include a diversity of cultures and children of various ages to better understand the scaffolding process by which the association between concrete and abstract concepts occurs.

  The association between physical sensations, behaviors, and emotions might also be stronger for certain types of individuals than for others. Some people tend to be more responsive to environmental cues and evince a high sensitivity to physical sensations. Some are more sensitive than others and more preoccupied with their bodies. It is logical to assume that such people will be more influenced by physical sensations than those who are less sensitive to the same cues. We can also become more attuned to our bodies through the practice of yoga or meditation. When I started taking yoga classes, I became more aware of my body and my breathing, and also was able to notice the environment around me more acutely.