The only way this story could be true is if all the Native Americans lacked the right hemispheres of their brains. Sure, the left brain, completely focused on the basket, fish, and volleyball, could ignore the ships, but the right brain would see them and bark like a frightened terrier. Still, the point is that sometimes we can’t see something when it’s standing, or sailing, right in front of us.
We spend our lives developing our own unique perspectives and, for the most part, along the way, we achieve all we can from that perspective. When something new comes along, we need to break out of the rut. We have to look at things in different ways, from different angles.
Your bottom-up processors constantly throw ideas in the general direction of the target for which you prime them, but the ideas that make it to the surface, the ones that we unconsciously judge to be good, are those that conform to our prejudices. The wetware is automatic. Our pattern-recognizing, categorizing brains, like the mythical people on the beach, can’t see past their prejudices to the novelty, and the impending doom of smallpox.
Idea prejudice is the lazy thinking that inhibits lateral thought, and lateral thought is the key to innovation, novelty, and originality.
Lateral thought, as we discussed in chapters 6 and 7, is the process of blending diverse thoughts. Getting a joke is my favorite example— you have to connect the straight lines with the wiggly ones. You might call it converging divergent thoughts, but let’s not.
The point is that to make the most of our brains, we need to entertain diverse thoughts, thoughts that we would not entertain unless we consciously primed ourselves.
To reduce our idea prejudice, we have to increase diversity of thought and diversity of viewpoint, which boils down to diversity of experience.
This idea also scales up to the team and organization level. If you already have a science writer, novelist, and high-tech consultant with a background in particle physics who drinks beer and yells obscenities at Oakland Raiders football games, you shouldn’t hire me. Bring in someone who can enhance your organization, someone whose skills and background are different from anyone else’s skills in your group. The idea is to supplement, not supplant or fortify, but rather complement your staff so that you can get another perspective that can take you to another level.
When you look at job descriptions from human resources departments, it’s pretty obvious that companies try to clone the staff they already have. If your entire staff consists of electrical engineers from MIT, hire someone from Reed College—they don’t have an electrical engineering program, but they did have Steve Jobs for a while.
One easy way to achieve diversity of thought in a group is to assemble people from diverse cultures. They automatically bring new perspectives to your team even when they have similar educations.
More irony comes from the other kind of prejudice, simple bigotry. Our pattern-recognizing, categorizing, judgmental, lazy-thinking natures can make it difficult to hire or work alongside an alien. Now I’m sure you don’t have any personal grudges against silicon-based life-forms, but I think they’re weird. That intuitive, gut feeling that the other is somehow off, somehow not quite as it should be, is an ancestral remnant that will reduce your personal effectiveness. It will cost you, personally. There’s nothing politically correct or incorrect about wanting to be your absolute best. The simple fact is that idea prejudice and prejudice toward others reduce your ability to do original work, invent, innovate, and create wealth.
So when you find yourself working alongside a silicon-based life-form from Andromeda, you might have to reduce your inhibitions so that you can learn from them. But I do get it. Andromedans are dusty; they scrape their feet and leave sand all over the place; their voices grate like shovels scraping on concrete; and don’t get me started about their rock-grinding eating habits. Just try to remember that those guys really know how to get stoned.
If dogs can accept cats into their packs, then surely a Protestant, a Hindu, a Buddhist, a Muslim, and an atheist can come together in a team. They just need time working toward a common goal.
To reduce our inhibitions to the other kind of diversity, diversity of thought, we arrive at meditation. By meditation, I don’t necessarily mean sitting on a mountaintop in the lotus position while wearing a robe and sandals—though for most people, that might work pretty well—I mean any activity that opens you up, calms you, and helps you appreciate your world and where you fit into it. For some people, I can attest, reducing idea prejudice can include yelling obscenities at football games, banging your head in the tradition of heavy-metal enthusiasts, running, singing, bicycling, writing, surfing, playing an instrument, or even meditation. For some people, it might mean zoning out to jazz.
9.2.4 Meditation and prejudice
As the Zen master Shunryu Suzuki says in his book, Beginner’s Mind, “If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.”
I’ve mentioned Allan Snyder a few times. He’s the Aussie shrink who believes that electrical stimulation that reduces inhibitory neurons can unleash your inner savant, crank up your creativity, and unveil talents you had no idea you were carrying around. Snyder’s work is controversial, so I don’t recommend plugging your head into an outlet just yet. But the concept behind it is not controversial.
When a neuron receives signals, it can do one of three things: emit an excitatory action potential, emit an inhibitory action potential, or do nothing at all. When we’re peaked and focused, those neurons are firing like crazy from your top-down consciousness. You’re doing what you do well, what you know how to do, what your neurons have trained for all your life. You’re also at your most prejudiced. It’s the rut we live in, but it’s also the rut that pays the bills. It hasn’t been such a bad rut, but it can suppress your greatness.
The expert is the river that has carved a canyon; the beginner is the snow falling on the mountaintop.
Defocusing, opening up, settling down (choose your favorite metaphor)—no matter what you call it, in one way or another, it’s meditation and we need to make time for it. I know, I don’t have time either. The reason that I don’t have time is that I spend so much of it focused on challenges, grinding my head against computer screens wasting my time. Maybe I can be more effective in getting my message across by yelling: DEFOCUSING, RELAXING, AND ENJOYING YOUR-SELF IN THE PRESENT INSTANT WILL MAKE YOU MORE, NOT LESS, PRODUCTIVE!
It makes sense. Sinking into a state of relaxation, absorbing sensory input without analyzing it, concentrating on deep breathing, and taking in just the current instant quiets your thoughts. With no voices yelling in your head, unconscious processors have a better chance of getting your attention.
Dr. Emmy Noether spent lots of time walking around campus in a daze, and she built the foundation for modern physics.
9.2.5 Perspective-altering techniques
The most obvious way to let your imagination run wild is to alter your perspective. Brandi the surfer tends to think that reality is a wave; Johnny sees his life as a riff in reality’s song; Butch realizes that life is a great hunt; Starla sees color everywhere; whales “see” by projecting sound and then reconstructing echoes into what we think of as images. By looking at the world through each of these lenses, we can see things that we’ve never seen before. Pieces come together and enable innovation and discovery.
Language itself can put blinders on us. Asking whether behavior is determined more by nature or nurture, instead of asking how they interact, leads to a simplistic dead end. One way to find a different perspective is to reframe the question.
We’ve seen that first impressions carry inordinate weight in developing our pattern-recognition wetware. One way to fight this effect is to impose different patterns on a given problem by using analogies. If reality is like a wave, is it a wave in water? A sound wave? Or a politician waving her hand from a passing float in a parade?
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nbsp; Imagine parallels, extensions, themes, relationships, and similarities to other systems. Build metaphors for each part and reassemble them into a new whole. Think of how people in different historic epochs, both past and future, might approach a situation—anything to climb out of the canyon and up to the mountaintop where we have a clear view.
Diagram your quandary. Draw charts and cartoons, maps and schematics, doodles and brain-dumps on paper or whiteboards so you can draw lines to link ideas together and scribble in notes. Then shift your perspective by looking at them upside down and backward—a literal perspective shift. It worked for Feynman and his diagrams.
Another approach, one that’s used extensively in physics and one that we’ve used a few times in this book, is to look at a situation in its extremes. Asymptotic analysis uses extreme cases to see how different parts of a puzzle fit together. All hops, yeast, and water with no malt makes a bitter brew; all malt and no hops brews a dark, sweet, but boring ale. The worst and best situations constrain the possible, making it easier to narrow in on the most likely or best.
Delve into the absurd. Most attempts fail, but something that fails in one instance stays near the surface, ready to boil up as the solution to another problem.
A particularly effective way to gain perspective is to mimic natural selection. Monte Carlo techniques use random numbers to find solutions. Using random processes is a standard technique in computational science not just because it’s easy, but because in most cases, it turns out to be more efficient than using considered choices.
Think of it like this: Given a long list of ideas, it’s easy to cherry-pick the good ones. So the faster you can generate that list, the faster you can start stroking your chin and evaluating.
In the preamble to chapter 3, the story about the Andromedan who had to predict the forms of life on Earth from nothing but atoms and their positions, I described a Monte Carlo simulation technique. When we don’t know anything, trying things at random is as good as we can get. When we do know something, but that knowledge might prejudice us, trying random things that are consistent with the facts can be more effective than rowing down the same old river.
Sometimes the best way to imagine something new is to let loose, let your mind float, deny nothing, spout gibberish, and see what floats up. It might be best to practice this technique in your underground lair rather than seated at a café in town.
9.2.6 Insight comes half-baked
Once insight boils up into consciousness, it has to be evaluated. Evaluation puts us back into fully engaged, focused analysis. Analysis is a search within the valley. The left brain is unleashed to pursue solutions along the cozy corridors of its own canyon of understanding, while the right brain keeps the left brain on task and watches out for falling rocks.
Evaluating an insight requires imagining a reality where the insight comes to life, imagining how it will play out, pruning possibilities into probabilities, looking for holes, contradictions, and paradoxes so that we can either discard a weak idea or assemble the necessary tools to implement a strong one.
Conveniently, we spend each waking moment of our lives evaluating objective reality by imagining subjective reality, dancing along the line between what we perceive as fantasy and what we believe is reality. Every thought of the future—planning, setting goals, even worrying—comes from our imaginations. Just as infants fine-tune their senses through neural pruning, we evaluate insights by imagining how they’ll play out, which amounts to pruning them down to ideas that jibe with our expectations of reality.
Once the insight has been baked into a plan, it’s time to come up with tactics, to assemble tools and people and implement it. At this point, you find out something about the value of your insight. To get others on board, you have to sell it—by the way, I was told there should be no marketing in this book. Selling and marketing form the interlaced feedback loop between perceived value and proposed value.
Whether or not your plan is a good plan comes down to the degree that other people empathize with it, which depends on how it is presented. In not confirming the existence of the æther, the Michelson-Morley experiment failed, but what if they’d declared that the æther didn’t exist and stuck to their guns? The world welcomed Einstein’s relativity because it solved problems that his colleagues considered to be important. What if his solution had preceded his community’s recognition of the problems? A fill-in critic loved Kerouac’s On the Road and, despite its unconventional style, it sold over three million copies. Would it have done so well with a bad review?
9.3 INVENTION & DISCOVERY
Let’s get back to Emmy Noether.
I want to climb the abstraction ladder of Emmy’s reality so that I can ask you a question about invention and discovery. Emmy’s immediate reality consisted of her family within the Kaiser’s Germany, a setting that set constraints on her goals that she cheerfully ignored. Then she found herself in Hitler’s Germany, which pushed her to the United States. By staying in a mathematical ivory tower, Emmy added a layer to her family, political, and social structure. Sure, they tried to kick her out the tower window every chance they got, but from her work and the comments of people who knew her, I’m convinced that she spent far more time and energy in the symbolic, synthetic world of mathematics than anywhere else. And this brings me to the difference between discovery and invention.
Noether’s theorem connects the symmetry of geometry of space and time to the laws of nature. Did she invent or discover Noether’s theorem?
It most certainly came to her in some form before she wrote it down. She was known to take long walks around campus away from the keyboards of her time—pencil and paper, chalk and blackboards. It’s easy to imagine Emmy wandering around campus and stopping short as the relationship between abstract symmetry and nature’s laws boiled up into her consciousness. Linking the essence of space and time to how stuff behaves within that spacetime must have tasted like discovery, yet Dr. Noether formulated and proved her theorem. A theorem’s validity can be proven or disproven only through symbolic manipulation. You can’t test it in the lab. A theorem is either consistent with the definitions of a specific system of logic or it isn’t. A theorem is not a thing; it’s an idea, a creation, an innovation.
On the other hand, by linking geometry—which is nothing but an imaginary set of ideals in an imaginary space and time—to the rules that matter follows, Noether’s theorem provides a hint of what makes nature tick.
If we could ask Dr. Noether whether she discovered or invented her theorem, I’d bet your bar tab that she’d say that it felt more like a discovery than an invention.
As she played around with her symbolic tools, manipulating imaginary constructs, the repercussions appeared before her. Surely she felt the awe of discovery shared by Prometheus when he first controlled fire, Ben Franklin when he realized that lightning was electricity, and Tony Magee when he kept on adding hops to his IPA brew.
9.4 FINDING THE PONY
Innovation and discovery aren’t like destinations on a map. The route from where you are to accomplishing your goal is a swirling, loopy, messy thing with lightbulb moments that are both bright and dim and packed with seeming insights and realizations that turn out to be wrong. Deciphering the wheat from the chaff, the buds from the stems, the clever from the stupid is as much a part of the process as the “aha!” moments. The process requires balancing focus and defocus, chilling and gelling, and the amazing conclusion, at least here in the overworked West, is that defocus makes you more productive.
The real trick to innovation and discovery is the ability to latch onto nuance, the tiny differences between two similar patterns and the tiny similarities between vastly different patterns. Strum the strings way up the neck of your guitar. Compare the acceleration of a car with the acceleration caused by gravity. If you want to study mathematics but you lack the requisite y chromosome, sit in on the lectures anyway.
To develop a reservoir of identifiable patterns, we need to expo
se ourselves to as many ideas as possible. The greater our answer resolution, the more archetypal patterns we can access, and the more accurate our imagined replica of reality is.
Immersion sounds great, but we’re already inundated. Every device we have demands attention, and most of it is noise. The reason we’re prejudiced against some ideas and their sources is because they truly suck.
How do we crank the signal up out of the noise?
We have the ability to surround ourselves with quality input, at least to some extent. You and I might not agree on what has quality and what doesn’t, and that’s fine. The answer must lie in where we choose to immerse ourselves. I don’t want to waste my time wallowing in manure, but I don’t want to miss out on the pony either.
We only get a few decades of awareness, so we need to choose carefully.
Some approaches for choosing signals are obvious: Take classes in subjects in which we’re ignorant. Follow and feed curiosity. Check idea prejudice by seriously considering subjects that don’t immediately spark your interest. Museums are great places to improve answer resolution. Traveling to different places and hanging out with different people are pretty obvious too. Art and history are king for me, especially since most of my education has been in science, mathematics, philosophy, and literature.
Before I started researching this book, I knew enough about art to enjoy a few days at the National Gallery. Landscapes used to be my favorites. I liked to space out and wonder what it would be like to live in those landscapes. I still love landscapes, but they’re not my favorites anymore. Before I clued in on the relationship between empathy and value, art never freaked me out. Landscapes rarely freak me out, but some artists affect me more than others. My favorite artists engage my empathy.
The Left Brain Speaks, the Right Brain Laughs Page 22