The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs

by Ransom Stephens

  The sensations of light and dark, hot and cold, smelly and fragrant, loud and quiet go directly from our senses to our thoughts. One step further up in processing, exhaustion, hunger, fear, and desire result from the associating instinctual patterns and that sensory input. Another step up, and boredom, happiness, sadness, and contentment come from the synthesis of separate patterns, ultimately from our senses, but a couple of steps higher in processing.

  The feeling of conviction, of knowing, is like an abstract sensation. We feel it; there is no unringing the bell. It’s not directly related to sensory input; it requires processing. It’s specific like hunger, but it involves synthesis and association, like happiness and other forms of satisfaction.

  The weird thing about the feeling of knowing is the way it pops up. Seemingly out of the aether, we realize that the pieces of a puzzle fit together. Sure, we have to get all the pieces, we have to throw them around and try different things to see how they fit together, but without that essence of understanding, we’d never know we were finished.

  The feedback/feed-forward loops involved in how you interact with the world and how it interacts with you are replicated over and over again, and not just in individuals. You affect my brain, which affects my body, which affects my brain, which affects your body (and I apologize for that, it was incidental contact), which affects my bank account, which affects … through group dynamics at organizational levels, over and over again.

  The structure of these layers of similarity is called a “fractal.” Why mathematics and every other field like to invent jargon will be covered in a later section, though perhaps only by inference. To avoid burdening you with jargon, I prefer the term “self-similar” to fractal. Self-similar systems look nearly the same at every scale, that is, they look nearly the same whether you see the whole thing or just a slice.

  The self-similar structure of the brain replicates feelings at ever-higher levels of abstraction. The feeling of a problem, the dissonance of trouble, the feeling of knowing, and the consonance of understanding emerge from similar structures to those that encouraged Brandi to crave french fries for their salty satisfaction.

  We share the need for salt with other animals. We do not share the need for money with them. And so it is that my dog is totally cool with overdrafts, while they make me nervous.

  5.3.2 Priming

  After dropping off her surfboard and showering, Brandi walks into town to get a beer. A mile away, Randy does the same thing. On the way, they each have to cross a busy street. Brandi approaches the cross walk. The first car, a tricked-out Honda Civic, pauses immediately and the driver smiles and waves her across; Brandi smiles back and strides into the street. Other cars follow suit.

  Across town, Randy comes to a crosswalk. A staid Acura approaches from a block away, with plenty of time to yield the right-of-way. Randy steps into the street. Rather than stopping, the Acura veers around Randy at a speed well over the posted limit. The car following the Acura, which has just been cut off, doesn’t notice Randy until the last instant and, instead of trying to stop at the crosswalk, honks and blows past him. Randy now stands in the middle of a four-lane street. Traffic from the other direction stops and waits for him. Randy takes his time crossing. In response to Randy’s slow passing, the driver of one of the waiting cars offers him an unfriendly gesture involving a middle finger.

  Brandi and Randy get to the tavern at the same time. They sit at opposite ends of the bar, and each one motions to the bartender. Whom do you think I’ll serve first?

  Brandi’s in a better mood. You can see it on her face. She’s happy. She’ll be pleasant to serve and probably tip better. Randy’s brow is furrowed; he looks disgruntled and is tapping on the bar, already impatient with me. I’m heading in Brandi’s direction, even though it’s obvious that Randy needs my help more than she does.

  Priming is a form of the placebo effect. If you believe something good will happen, you are far more likely to interpret whatever does happen as good than bad. Sure, it’s all in your head, but if I’ve convinced you of anything by this point, it’s that, yes, it is all in your head.

  For example, if you assemble a thousand people with migraine headaches, give a presentation that goes into explicit details of how a new medicine conclusively solves the migraine problem and then provide them with empty capsules, about 20 percent will experience relief—not fake relief, genuine relief.

  The placebo effect has been so well demonstrated that scientists who perform tests on people and other animals have spent enormous effort refining methods to understand how it works and how to remove it from scientific results. The double-blind technique assures that the people who perform experiments don’t know whether they have administered a test drug or a placebo so that they can’t prime test subjects.

  A more familiar example of priming is forcing yourself to smile when you’re in a bad mood. Eventually, your mood will soften. Take a deep breath and count your blessings, that sort of annoying crap.

  Priming biases your gut-decision circuitry.

  We’ve been using the percolation metaphor for the confluence of bottom-up parallel processes and unified top-down consciousness because I suspect that it might be an actual percolation phenomenon. Let me switch metaphors for a minute.

  If bottom-up, unconscious, parallel processes form ripples on the surface of a pond, then priming is like a steady wind blowing in a specific direction. Since winds cause currents, the priming wind pushes the ripples in a specific direction—happy or sad, high or low, bitter or sweet. Rather than a set of symmetric, circular ripples from each processor interfering and combining into unbiased solutions, the ripples are blown in the direction of the bias wind. They still interfere and combine, but not in an unbiased way.

  Familiarity doesn’t breed contempt so much as it reduces suspicion. Familiar situations reduce our vigilance compared to foreign situations, whether or not they’re more dangerous. The probability of being mugged in Geneva, Switzerland, is far lower than it is wherever you are now (unless you’re in Geneva or some place safer than Geneva, if such a place exists), but you’re less vigilant here, where you live, than you would be there.

  Con artists capitalize on priming. You’re a far easier mark when the con includes generating a mirror response that puts you in the predicament of a supposed victim or if it relaxes you into a good mood with friendly people who express their appreciation for your talents and good looks than if you’re surrounded by people who set off alarms or doubt your genius.

  If an optimistic wind blows, you’ll experience the power of positive thought. You’ll be primed to recognize opportunity. Your priming connects you to people around you. The car that stopped for Brandi gave her a positive feeling that she brought to the bartender. Frank Ransom learned about priming early, so he laughed in crowds and wept alone.

  We’re primed by everything we encounter to some degree. The people you hang out with, the weather, the music, and the traffic prime your mood, ambition, politics, and religion.

  5.4 PRIMING YOUR GUTS

  Our guts are less likely to have shit for brains when our brains have been packed with a wide variety of patterns and good answer resolution. Learned intelligence and study feed our ability to understand, but understanding of all types comes in intuitive bursts. Vanessa relied on intuition’s instant understanding to recognize her constantly changing son and freaked out when it failed her. We rely on intuition to provide the seamless instant-to-instant recognition of answers to all the questions we face that are answered so quickly that the questions never seem posed, like Brandi’s need for salt.

  We rely on these same processes to assemble pieces of puzzles that are too complex, too numerous, and too difficult for us to assemble consciously. By focusing on a problem, large or small, we prime our bottom-up processors to provide the insights we need. As I type, words feel as though they bubble up spontaneously, but without my desire to communicate with you, these words wouldn’t surface.

 
The extent to which pure talent, like Manute Bol’s height, affects the accuracy of gut reactions is wide open. Muggsy Bogues practiced his way to the top, but practice will never make him taller. Even though I’m seriously overeducated and have spent time on Mean Street, Telegraph Ave., and in airports, compared to many people with less answer resolution, my guts still have shit for brains. Maybe I just don’t trust my guts enough. Maybe the degree to which our guts boil up accurate answers to unasked questions depends as much on some sort of intellectual talent as on how they’re primed.

  If you convince yourself you can make it, you have a far better chance. The coach who asks her team how they’ll react to defeat is less likely to win than the coach who asks them to plan their victory celebration. I’ve never been much of a rah-rah guy, loners rarely are, but there’s no denying the home-field advantage, as long as a team is well prepared.

  Our malleable, elastic, plastic brains are the kings of reuse, recycle, and repurpose. Understanding starts with simple things, the same things that other mammals take for granted. Then we construct scaffolds on top of them. A grunt becomes a word, words become symbols, some symbols become logic, other symbols become symbolic impressions, and so on up the abstraction scaffold.

  The issue, then, is how to prime our ability to think, figure, and analyze in a way that both complements and takes advantage of our intuition so that we can reach farther, climb that scaffold, and see things in ways they’ve never been seen before. When we face a challenge, whether it’s deeply personal, some dumb thing at work, a huge problem affecting billions of other people, or just trying to help a kid get through a tough day, the answer comes from the creative process.

  We create things constantly. We’re good at it. No matter how much experience you have, your past is a legacy of creativity. You’ve encountered problems and created solutions. We get good at something and reuse our solutions as much as we can, but sometimes we dig in so deep, we inhibit our ability to see as far and wide.

  Now, please indulge me in a metaphor about the power of analysis and its relationship to creativity.

  6

  ANALYSIS & CREATIVITY

  HIGH ATOP A MOUNTAIN, THE TEMPERATURE FELL. Mist condensed into rain that turned into snow that accumulated on the mountain peak in the shade of short winter days. For five months, it snowed, not every day, but most days, building up a deep icy base. The planet continued on its way around the sun, the days grew longer, the shadows gave way, and the snow and ice began to thaw.

  The melt began with a trickle. An infant stream of water tumbled down the mountain; the trickle wove its way, pooling against stones until it reached around them or the rocks surrendered to its pressure. As the sun shone down, the trickle grew into a rivulet, a brook, and then a creek. When the water found cliffs, it dove over their edges, fell to earth, and dug in.

  Then the days got shorter again, the shadows returned, the temperature dropped, and the mist turned to rain and then snow. The cycle continued, and each year, each lap of the planet around the sun, each oscillation of warming and cooling brought another flow to the trickle, the brook, the creek, and it grew into a river. As the river poured down the mountain, it converted valleys into lakes until they too overflowed their boundaries in first a trickle and then a torrent. The river worked its way ever downward, following the siren song of gravity to its salty sea home.

  The work of the river dissolved soil and rock, spread nutrients and minerals, and left behind sandy shores as it fed the engine of life, the oceans.

  The river flowed mighty in late spring and serene in autumn. The periodic nature of the seasons, each lap of the planet about its star, each accumulation and melt, dug the river ever deeper until what had started as a trickle altered the landscape into a canyon.

  The planet pushed back against the river, pushed this way and that. The continental plates converged here, diverged there, pushed up ridges that formed dams and diverted the river’s path, granting it greater structure, drawing it into snaking turns.

  Now, with the mature river flowing through an adult canyon, the destiny of each new drop of melted snow is determined. In the days of that first trickle, any new drop might have taken a different turn upon meeting a pebble or root. Those first drops could have tried any direction to get to the sea, but these drops nowadays know only one way. From the river, no new drop can see past the next turn, much less beyond the canyon walls. But it doesn’t matter; they know where they’re going and how to get there.

  6.1 THE CANYON FLOOR AND THE MOUNTAIN PEAK

  Like tributaries merging into a river, analysis combines closely associated concepts. The analysis river carves the land into a canyon of mastered terrain and can sweep away any challenge in its way.

  To create, you have to climb out of the river, up the canyon walls to the top of the mountain. From up there, you can look across the horizon and connect totally different concepts into completely new solutions. What a rush!

  When you analyze a puzzle, you have to be conscious of many different pieces. We’re pretty good at focusing on a few things at once, turning them inside and out, mixing them together, shaking and stirring, but we can only be aware of so many at one time. So what do we do when a challenge comes with too many pieces to fit into our conscious Feynmans at the same time? Well, we use tools. That’s what this chapter is really about: tools.

  When a puzzle comes along that has inconceivable parts, either because there are too many of them or because they are literally not conceivable, we combine analytical tools with the buried, prolific tools of creativity.

  Having just worked through intelligence and intuition, it’s tempting to take the bait that intelligence goes with analysis and intuition with creativity. There are similarities, but neither is straight enough to draw such simple parallels. Creativity often feels as though it blossoms out of nowhere and, just as intuition emerges from learned intelligence, creativity flows from the hard work of analysis.

  The inspiration that guides creativity isn’t a thing; it’s more like a setting, let’s say, the temperature of a room. If anything resembles a muse, it’s the concept of priming. The angel flies in, sets the thermostat to the perfect temperature, and combines your bottom-up parallel processors and top-down consciousness into a single coherent instrument of creativity, a tool made of tools.

  6.2 TOOLS FOR THOUGHT

  We trashed the myth of analysis and creativity as separate left- and right-brain processes in the first chapter. The left brain would chase its tail forever without the right brain contributing context, resolution, and judgment to the results. The right brain can detect relationships between disparate pieces of a puzzle, but it won’t put them together. The methodic, almost-plodding nature of analysis complements creativity’s knack for associating widely separated concepts. When the two get together, they integrate and differentiate ideas into new concepts—fulfilling creativity’s promise.

  True creativity and effective analysis require both hands on deck.

  Even so, no matter what we do or who we are, we’re limited by our brains’ circuitry. Plasticity allows us to adapt our circuits for a huge variety of tasks. For example, when we combine the circuits in our language centers that we use to handle the rules of grammar with our ability to position things in space, voila, we get algebra and geometry.

  We’re a long way from understanding the limits of plasticity. It’s possible that when we adapt separate processing centers to new tasks, our new abilities limit our old ones. Maybe my algebra fluency detracts from my ability to grammar.

  6.2.1 The binding problem

  You’re walking to work on a Monday morning, stuck in the crowd, wishing people would get out of your way, and something catches your eye: a rosebush. The words “stop and smell the roses” come to mind. You surface from the inner turbulence of Monday-morning moodiness and summon up enough perspective to stop and smell a rose, just to satisfy your inner Buddha.

  Okay, hold it. A lot just happened. As you were walki
ng, your forebrain pre-stressed about all the crap you have to deal with when you get to work. Since you were thinking about your boss, something that she’s been whining about boiled to the surface, some stupid thing about the seven habits of whatever: “sharpening your mental saw.” That idea excited your business cliché processors. They hunted around and found thousands of associations. Had you not passed a well-pruned rosebush at that instant, maybe some other cliché would have reached your consciousness, maybe not. But like a gardener in a bingo parlor, your pleasant bout of Monday morning anxiety was interrupted by this thought: “Roses. Bingo! Better stop and sniff them.”

  All a single neuron can do is fire action potentials down an axon or acquire them from other neurons. The number of spikes transmitted depends on your transmitting neuron’s enthusiasm. How the hell do complex associations “come to mind”? How does your wetware keep clichés, roses, appointments, and all the rest integrated, yet separate and within your grasp? And how do you pull it all together when you need it?

  The answer begins with this: “Well, there are about one hundred billion neurons, and each averages ten thousand synapses, so there are at least a gazillion possible associations,” which is science bullshit for “It’s complicated, but there are so many active parts that it manages to happen, though if it didn’t happen, I could explain that too,” hence the problem.

  You stop at the rosebush and take in the beauty of the pink blossoms. You reach for one flower.

  Okay, hold it right there. Notice how you’ve already associated the color with the shape, texture, and anticipation of the scent? That’s binding. It’s not the color, shape, or texture that brings the scent to mind; it’s the association. If the petals were brown, you’d get a different scent; if they were yellow, you’d get the same scent.