The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs

by Ransom Stephens

  The only obvious career path for a mathematician at the time was to continue in academia as a researcher, instructor, and then a professor. The Kaiser’s Germany had no high-tech algorithm development or big-data analytics jobs. The only place she could expand mathematical symbolism along ever-more-abstract coordinate axes was from the sanctity of the ivory tower. But again, lacking the crucial y chromosome, Dr. Noether could hardly be considered for a university faculty position.

  We don’t know how she felt when her head hit these glass ceilings, but her actions demonstrated a determined and undaunted nature. Just as she took classes even though the university rejected her application, she went right ahead and pursued her research. The men she worked with described her as someone who laughed off obstacles, at least outwardly. Perhaps, like Frank Ransom, she wept alone.

  At the time, the center of the mathematical universe was at the University of Göttingen. The Göttingen mathematics faculty were impressed by her Ph.D. dissertation (which she once described as “crap”), and she accepted an invitation for an unpaid research position. She taught as a guest lecturer and lived on her small inheritance. Her older brother, fully equipped with that all-important y chromosome, inherited the lion’s share of their parents’ modest wealth.

  As with everything she did, Dr. Noether’s teaching style didn’t fit accepted norms. Rather than deliver passive lectures to a silent audience, she proposed mathematical questions and invited students to solve them. Soon, Dr. Noether acquired a following of students who would come to be known as “Noether’s boys.”

  In 1916, Emmy Noether derived and proved Noether’s theorem, which, I think, ranks with Einstein’s relativity and Max Planck’s discovery of quantum physics in its impact on scientific progress. Nobel laureate physicist Leon Lederman once referred to it as the physics equivalent of Pythagoras’s theorem.

  Noether’s theorem relates what had been considered simple facts like Newton’s laws of motion and the laws of thermodynamics to the geometry of space and time. For example, the first law of thermodynamics, which states that energy is neither created nor destroyed but can only change form—called conservation of energy in the trade— arises from the geometry of time.

  When World War I ended and her inheritance was running low, her colleagues at Göttingen, including mathematical superstars David Hilbert, Felix Klein, Herman Minkowski, and Ernst Mach, nominated her for a low-level but paid instructor position. The department of philosophy opposed her: “What will our soldiers think when they return to the university and find that they are required to learn at the feet of a woman?”

  To this, her friend and mentor, Professor David Hilbert, replied, “I do not see that the sex of the candidate is an argument against her…. After all, we are a university, not a bathhouse.” And so she got the gig.

  Dr. Noether spent the rest of her life studying and developing abstract algebra. She’s well known within the halls of mathematics and theoretical physics, but did you ever hear of her?

  She never married and there’s no record of any intimate liaisons, but she certainly had lots of close friends. She didn’t care much about appearances, and when her long, unkempt hair broke free of its pins, she let it fall and kept right on discussing mathematics with a well-recorded passion. In every photo I’ve seen, she’s either grinning or laughing. Even in the formal shots, you can see a twinkle in her eye.

  Though she wasn’t politically active, she was a liberal pacifist in an increasingly aggressive and militant Germany. In the 1930s, some of her students came to class dressed in Nazi Brownshirts. She laughed it off at first, but she was soon one of the first Jewish professors to be fired by the Nazis. In 1933, Albert Einstein convinced the Rockefeller Foundation to match a grant from the Emergency Committee to Aid Displaced German Scholars, and Emmy was granted a one-year instructor position at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania.

  The time she spent at Bryn Mawr seems to have been the happiest of her life. But after two years in the U.S., she died of complications from surgery to treat uterine cancer.

  9.1 FACING CHALLENGES

  Emmy was denied at every turn, but she just kept going, trouncing challenges and breaking down walls. Emmy Noether was a badass. By all accounts, she was also quite happy and felt no bitterness.

  Some psychology experiments have correlated happiness with problem-solving ability. Are happy people better problem-solvers, or does solving problems make you happier? I’m going with the egg on this one: Confidence in your ability to meet challenges makes challenges feel less challenging. That confidence starts with the first challenge you conquer and, as we’ve seen, first impressions have disproportionate influence on our pattern-recognition wetware.

  Life is all about challenges.

  9.2 MAKING BETTER USE OF OUR BRAINS

  Let’s build a model for challenges, the quests that we all face. These can be any kind of challenge, pursuit, or desire, that is, a quest for whatever grail you’re after. Monet had his lily pads and bridges, Michelson and Morley had the interstellar æther, van Gogh had starry nights, and Einstein had spacetime; everyone’s got something.

  Before we row into this endeavor, I feel compelled to offer somewhat of a disclaimer. I apologize for not having solved the ultimate question of how humans can achieve perfection. My wife and my dogs will attest that it is an answer of which I am not burdened. Surely you didn’t expect the ultimate answer for less than thirty bucks (twenty pounds/twenty-five Euros).

  Instead of THE ANSWER, let’s try to put everything together into an encompassing concept and dig up some techniques that might help juice the process. You’ll think that some of the juicing ideas are stupid (I certainly do), but we’re attempting the impossible here. And it really is impossible. If we came up with a recipe for confronting challenge that actually worked, the idea would spread until the nature of human challenge would shift, and the recipe would no longer work—the marketing version of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Let’s do our best anyway. It would help if you could offer ideas from the other side of this page and whatever future from which you’re reading this. Oh well.

  I hope that our model will help us each boil up better ideas a bit more often so that we can solve bigger problems, create more valuable things and ideas, raise better people, and bring more peace and harmony to our world—and I’d like a little credit for typing that last bit with a straight face.

  Everything we do in this section should scale up from individual efforts to teams, organizations, and all the way up to, dare I say it, entire hives of human endeavor.

  9.2.1 The quest

  We turn to a young woman who grew up in the outback of Cornwall. Percifal loitered around Camelot until King Arthur noticed her. To get rid of her, Arthur told her to go find a grail. Any old grail would do. Art was actually thinking of a nice coffee mug from Tintagel, but he didn’t tell Perci that.

  Perci spent her life to this point preparing for her quest without ever knowing it. She went to school, hung out with good kids and bad kids, had a few jobs, got into some trouble, went to school again, and got into more trouble, and so on until she was confronted with a life-altering challenge. She got pretty wound up when the challenge appeared. After all, it seemed impossible: How and where will she find the grail? What if it’s too heavy or she’s too weak? What if she can’t get past the guards? What if this? What if that? At first, her inner puppy just wants to chase something and bark at the problem.

  No challenge arrives without stress from the demons of self-doubt.

  Eventually, she accepted the challenge and consciously pushed back the stress and anxiety. She distanced herself from the stakes so that she could think clearly. (This step is no mean feat, by the way.) Now able to concentrate, she reduced the problem to pieces that fit into her working memory and commenced her analysis.

  Once she broke the problem down, she started coming up with ideas for solutions. She searched for people who could help her. She used the power of crowd-sourcing, but t
ook care to avoid situations where the loudest guy’s opinion dominated. She also used the power of internal crowd-sourcing: letting ideas percolate up from her individually-stupid-but-brilliant-as-a-team bottom-up processors. During this stage of the process, she didn’t appear to be working.

  While defining the problem and recruiting resources requires disciplined, focused attention, great insights rarely occur when we’re focusing. Perci may have looked like she was staring into space, daydreaming, going out dancing, wandering around wasting time, but she was actually working with utmost efficiency.

  Convinced that Percifal was lollygagging, Arthur resigned himself to drinking from ox horns.

  The process of thinking laterally, blending different ideas into all-new concepts, only sporadically resembles what we think of as work. She primed her team to maximum creativity both internally with her bottom-up processors and externally with her assembled colleagues. Trying different perspectives and generating pieces of the solution, she waited, hoping and trusting that she would experience the upsurge of insight.

  When the insight finally lit her flame, it came with that wonderful feeling of knowing that the solution had arrived. But most insights are lame; even great ideas come to us half-baked. Evidence from fMRI tests indicates that the “aha!” feeling arrives a fraction of a second before the idea comes to mind.

  With the candidate idea on the tip of her consciousness, Perci dove back into focus and set about evaluating it. The king was pleased to see her back at work, though he did look at his watch.

  Evaluation means assembling a context and imagining how the idea will work once it is implemented. For the most part, this is the crappy-idea burial ground.

  The process of insight à evaluation à insight doesn’t so much repeat as continue, like throwing mud against a wall until Perci had a fully baked solution. Having worked it through in her imagination, she knew what tools she needed: physical tools like armor and swords, abstract tools like directions and strategy, and organic tools like knights and horses.

  Finally, our heroine set out on her quest.

  Now let’s take a look at the pattern. In the process, we’ll be engaging our bottom-up processors and, when we walk away from these pages, those processors can resonate among themselves and make us all better at whatever we do. That’s the plan anyway.

  The pattern of meeting a challenge involves both focusing and defocusing.

  As citizens of countries that prize hard, focused, and productive work, our education and business structures err on the side of focus, and so do our role models. Coming from this background, when we try to formulate practices to improve our ability to innovate, we’re likely to err on the side of defocusing. I’ll try not to.

  Here’s a simplified feedback loop for creativity and innovation. The key piece is the amplification loop of contemplation and distraction.

  Figure 27: Models for figuring things out. And don’t forget to shower.

  9.2.2 Stress and focus

  Before you can innovate, you need to suffer; Emmy Noether certainly did.

  Every challenge, however trivial or grand, begins with a mix of desire and need—a compulsion to achieve, a problem to solve, and the stress that goes along with the need to solve it ASAP. If the problem doesn’t boil up, it will never engage you.

  You know the feeling you get when you’re drawn into an argument? A flash of passion raises your hackles and prepares you for the fight, but just as often, it prevents you from debating effectively. How often do you think of the perfect comeback in the heat of an exchange? For me, it always comes an hour later.

  Our ability to abstract visceral, emotion-heavy, and reactive thought into principles and concepts allows us to reason. There’s a rub, of course, and it rubs both ways. On the lackadaisical side, if you don’t care about something, then you’re perfectly capable of analyzing the problem, but you’ll never have the passion required to solve it. On the paranoid side, if you care too much, the stress can inhibit you too much to listen to your bottom-up processors, much less perform top-down analysis. The churning dissonance defocuses us and, instead of solutions, the consequences of failure percolate up.

  Before we can solve the problem, we need to cool off and focus.

  Remember from chapter 5 how the ability to delay gratification turned out to be a better predictor of a kid’s future success than her IQ? Being able to delay gratification also may indicate that you have the self-discipline to delay panic. Several low-statistics, difficult-to-control tests have indicated that we might have fixed allowances of self-discipline to spend each day. If so, you should cash some in right now.

  Artists who wait around for a cherub-like muse to shoot them full of inspiration don’t get a lot of work done. Inspiration isn’t a thing; it’s a state of being, a mood that you experience when you’re in the zone. So the muse must be whatever it takes to get you into the zone.

  We talked about the zone in chapter 6. It’s not your comfort zone. If your comfort zone is a nice chair, being in the zone is the state of engagement and balance you find at the edge of your seat.

  The zone is not a state of relaxation, though relaxation can help you get there. Self-discipline and its disciple, determination, might be enough, but it’s also possible to use defocusing techniques to cool off. We’ll talk about some techniques in a minute. I’ll warn you in advance: I’m going to use the word meditate, though I’ll also say head-bang. By blowing off steam and cooling off, we let our inner puppies help by giving us hope and confidence.

  When you’re in the zone, ideas simmer up, and you’re in position to apply them consciously. Picture a quarterback running the two-minute offense (a forward dribbling the ball downfield with the striker forty meters across, sprinting to the net). The zone is intense engagement, including the rush of high-pressure situations with limited time and dubious hope, situations conducive to both letting go and going for it.

  The exhilaration of surrendering to the situation in a way that is anything but surrender has always been a part of us. That moment of release as you run from the saber-toothed tiger, sprinting along the cliff above hopelessness, you engage in the instant and start to feel that your plan might just be crazy enough to work.

  Now that the immediacy of anxiety is past, it’s time to analyze the problem. Now you can use intellectual tools like reduction and abstraction to slice it into pieces that you can contemplate. Remember, your brilliant, top-down, conscious thinker can’t hold more than three to ten concepts in working memory. Your top-down thinker may be brilliant, but it’s limited.

  Analyzing the problem achieves two goals: First, you get a clue of just how hopeless the situation is, but more importantly, you recruit your bottom-up parallel processors for the effort. Where your brilliant, serial, top-down consciousness can’t entertain more than a handful of ideas at once, your stupid, parallel, bottom-up processors are, for all practical purposes, unlimited. Taken one by one, they’re not very good, but when you put them all to work, they’ll blow you away.

  You may have heard of this New-Age-y thing called “the secret” or “the law of attraction.” The idea is that by asking something of the universe, you will attract the answer. Here’s its most valid kernel: When you analyze a goal, you engage the power of your whole brain. Your parallel processors work below consciousness and, once attuned, they will notice everything you come across that can help your cause. It’s powerful, but it’s not a secret; it’s an example of priming.

  The idea scales up to the team or organization level. Getting everyone engaged distributes the workload. With everyone on the team primed, you have a much wider swath of fertile imagination than you do with an individual, though managing them can be a hassle. Personalities can influence the perceived value of ideas—the echo-chamber effect.

  Where do you get your best ideas? In the shower? At the beach? In bed when you wake up in the middle of the night? I’m pretty sure it’s not while you are at your desk pounding your head against a problem
. Why do we even have desks? Workstations should be in shower stalls, not cubicles.

  Notice something ironic about the process at this point. Now that you’ve engaged the full power of your bottom-up processors, you need to be in position to listen to them. Instead of continuing to hack away at a problem, you need to kick back and stop analyzing. It’s a counterintuitive irony that we all experience. Software developers have an intimate relationship with this stage. You can grind away for thirty hours straight and feel like you’re getting nowhere. Then you go for a walk, and a dozen ideas come bubbling up to the surface. Most of them seem obvious, but none of them came to mind in the heat of analysis.

  9.2.3 Defocusing into insight

  “Perspective,” Miles Dylan once said. “Use it or lose it.”

  Galileo assembled his telescopes from magnifying lenses by looking through combinations of lenses with differing focal lengths and pointing them up at the night sky. Adding a layer of complexity is all it took. Monet invented impressionist art by changing the focal length of his paintings. Seriously, when you stand up close to an impressionist painting, it just looks like paint; you have to stand back and look not just at but into the painting, that is, you have to focus and defocus to fire up your mirroring wetware and get his message.

  In retrospect, these innovations seem like small alterations, but they changed everything. Why, then, are such small changes so hard to come by? Have you heard the story of Native Americans who couldn’t see Columbus’s ships as they sailed toward shore? It goes like this: A bunch of indigenous people are hanging around the beach, hunting crabs, body surfing, spear fishing, playing an early version of volleyball, and weaving baskets; you get the picture. Columbus’s three ships sail over the horizon. It takes hours for the ships to make their way to shore. The folks look up from their tasks and out onto the horizon, and even though the ships are right there, getting larger every minute as they approach, the people can’t see them. Their eyes take in the light, but since they have no pattern for identifying ships, no concept that anything could possibly approach in this fashion, the ships are so out of context that they might as well be invisible.