Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (5 page)

Over and over again, iconoclasts like Lauterbur and Chihuly point to the visual nature of their insights. And so visual perception is where the hunt for the iconoclastic brain begins.

Persons, Places, and Things

After V1, the visual information splits into the high road and the low road, to meet up eventually in the frontal cortex. Along these two roads, the brain transitions from local processing mode to global processing and makes judgments of object identities and their locations in space. As you might imagine, it is an incredibly complex feat to perform. Only the most powerful computers can perform the task of identifying objects and cross-reference them with a catalog of labels and images from memory. Although it is a trivial task for you to distinguish an automobile from a bicycle, no matter from which direction you see them, a computer would have a great deal of difficulty doing this. Both objects have wheels, yet they may not be visible when the objects are viewed from behind. Imagine the even more complex task of how we distinguish different people from one another. Everyone has the same basic anatomy, and yet we are able to identify people, sometimes from extreme angles in which we don’t even see their face full on.

The ability to perform such complicated perceptual functions comes with a price. Evolution has resulted in a human brain that can accomplish amazing perceptual tasks, all the while saving energy. The need to distinguish friend from foe, or predator from prey, and to do it quickly enough to decide whether to run or fight, meant that the brain had to take shortcuts and make assumptions about what it was seeing. From the earliest levels of processing in the visual system, the brain extracts useful pieces of information and discards others. Depending on which road the information takes, the bits retained or discarded may be different. The high road is concerned with extracting where objects are located and throws away the elements related to their identity. The low road, on the other hand, is concerned with identification and categorization, and less so with objects’ spatial locations.

Although the spatial location of what we see may be important, most of what iconoclasts do differently from other people lies in how
they categorize what they see. Whether one person sees ugliness or beauty in asymmetry is entirely a result of categorization. In the same way, whether an NMR spectrum is viewed as noisy or full of extra information doesn’t come from the image itself, but in the way the viewer categorizes the image. For this reason, understanding how the low road pigeonholes objects into categories suggests ways out of predictable perception.

As in playing the game 20 Questions, the first, and most salient, decision the brain makes is whether it is viewing a person or something else. People constitute a special category of objects. The high degree of social interaction, both at the level of facial and body expression and in the use of language, dictates that the brain treats people differently than anything else. So specialized is this function, neuroscientists have identified the precise location in the brain that responds to human faces. If we were to examine the brain from its underside, the temporal lobes would fan out like butterfly wings. The innermost portion of the lower wings contains neurons that respond only to faces and is called the
fusiform face area
, or FFA. Some of these neurons perform highly specialized functions and seem to be active only when viewing a face from a particular angle. Many years ago neuroscientists hypothesized that the level of specialization might go so deep that neurons might exist that responded to one thing, and one thing only. These hypothetical neurons were dubbed
grandmother cells
, because you might have neurons that fired only when you saw your grandmother. A great deal of specialization does exist in the FFA, although not to this degree (which is probably a good thing, because if your hypothetical grandmother cell became damaged, then you wouldn’t be able to recognize your grandmother anymore). Most aspects of facial processing appear to be carried out by a network of neurons in the FFA.
⁸
This type of architecture is called
distributed processing
and is yet another example of how the brain efficiently organizes information. Because distributed processing employs a network of neurons that process different aspects of faces,
no neuron is critical to the overall function, and the network gains a level of flexibility that lets it deploy resources in different ways under different circumstances. Distributed processing also means that the brain can reprogram its networks to perceive things differently.

Although the ability to reprogram neural networks is a key attribute of the iconoclast’s brain, that doesn’t mean it works for everyone. Sometimes reprogramming must be approached gradually, or else the iconoclast’s ideas will be rejected.

Before
Pac-Man
, the Iconoclast Who Brought Us
Pong

I used the example of
Pac-Man
earlier because this game was, for a time, the most popular video game in existence. For those who grew up during that era, the image of those pies chunking around a video screen remains indelibly burned into their brains. It is easy to take those images for granted now, but at the time, video games were revolutionary. And the granddaddy of all video games,
Pong
, was perhaps the most iconoclastic of all. Every modern video game, whether it is played on a computer or an Xbox, derives from the deceptively simple computer version of table tennis.

In 1970,
Pong
’s inventor, Nolan Bushnell, was just another electrical engineer working in Silicon Valley. He was making decent money working for Ampex, a manufacturer of recording equipment, but Bushnell’s real love was for games, and he soon found himself designing coin-operated arcade games for a much smaller company, Nutting Associates. The result was a game called
Computer Space
, which was a sort of galactic dogfight between a spaceship and a flying saucer. Although
Computer Space
was a hit with his engineering friends, it didn’t go over so well in the usual environment for arcade games: bars. In fact, it was a flop. Although the game was simple by today’s standards of video gaming, it required players to control a spaceship using “thrust,” “fire,” and “rotate” buttons. At that time, Bushnell observed too many players
dropping a quarter into the game and just standing there waiting for something to happen. What happened was, the flying saucer flew over and zapped their spaceship. The players did not have a category in their brains for interpreting this type of amusement.

Because of this failure, Bushnell left Nutting and with his friend Ted Dabney and $500, formed his own company, calling it Atari, after a term for the Japanese game of Go. Outside of big mainframes, computers didn’t exist, so all these video games had to be created with specialized electronics. They hired Al Alcorn, a young engineer, to carry out the electrical wizardry. As a warm-up exercise, Bushnell gave Alcorn the simple task of creating a video version of Ping-Pong.

Nobody, for a minute, believed that a computer version of Ping-Pong would have any appeal. After all, if you wanted to play Ping-Pong, you might as well just play on a table. The pattern of dogmatic thinking was identical to what chemists said about NMR. But Bushnell eschewed dogma and plowed ahead. Keeping it as simple as possible, Bushnell suggested the screen should show only one ball, two paddles, and the players’ scores. It didn’t take Alcorn but two weeks to come up with a working prototype. Much to everyone’s surprise, the game was remarkably entertaining and addictive. And most important, it didn’t require any instructions or reprogramming in the brains of end users, who, if they were playing in a bar, were probably drunk anyway.

Pong
was field-tested for the first time in 1972 at Andy Capp’s Tavern in Sunnyvale. Two weeks later, the bar owner called Bushnell, asking him to come and fix the machine. But
Pong
wasn’t broken. The coin box had simply jammed with too many quarters. Bushnell was onto something, and the coin-op arcade business ate it up.
Pong
’s simplicity also threatened to destroy Atari. The game was easily copied, and rivals began selling competing versions to arcades. On the verge of bankruptcy, Bushnell made the bold move into a home version of
Pong
and bucked conventional wisdom that said arcade games were only played in arcades. For a company with no experience in the consumer electronics
sector, it was a risky strategy. Advances in silicon chip technology had advanced sufficiently so that, in 1974, a custom chip containing all the circuitry that the arcade game had could fit into a home console. Eventually Sears bought exclusive rights for one year and ordered 150,000 units, enough to save Atari and launch Bushnell into his next venture, Chuck E. Cheese’s.

Seeing Like an Iconoclast

If we can say one thing about the iconoclast’s brain, it would be this: it sees differently than other people’s brains. When Chihuly lost the vision in one eye, he began to see the world differently. But this is a drastic measure. It does, however, illustrate the importance of new perspectives in the creation of new ideas. The overwhelming importance of the visual system to the human mind means that many of the great innovations began with a change in visual perception. It wasn’t until Paul Lauterbur stared at a blurry NMR spectrum of cancer that he realized the potential for creating MRI. In both of these cases, the iconoclasts’ key insights were triggered by visual images. For Chihuly, it was a realization that beauty in glass sculpture need not be equated with symmetry, which was a reflection of his own asymmetry. For Lauterbur, it was a realization that blurriness in an NMR spectrum need not be equated with noise. Even Nolan Bushnell’s realization that
Computer Space
was too complicated for people came from seeing customers being dumbfounded by the game.

Iconoclasm begins with perception. More specifically, it begins with visual perception, and so the first step to thinking like an iconoclast is to see like one.

At every step in the process of visual perception, the brain throws out pieces of information and assimilates the remaining ones into increasingly abstract components. Experience plays a major role in this process. The human brain sees things in ways that are most familiar to it.
But epiphanies rarely occur in familiar surroundings. The key to seeing like an iconoclast is to look at things that you have never seen before. It seems almost obvious that breakthroughs in perception do not come from simply staring at an object and thinking harder about it. Breakthroughs come from a perceptual system that is confronted with something that it doesn’t know how to interpret. Unfamiliarity forces the brain to discard its usual categories of perception and create new ones.

Sometimes the brain needs a kick start. Although Chihuly was already marching down the path of artistic creativity, the loss of vision in one eye jolted his brain in a very literal sense to see differently. Chihuly’s brain probably adapted to monocular vision within about six months, but the effect on his art was indelible. He continued to be a visual artist, seeking out inspirations in unlikely places. Although he works in a medium that dictates individual pieces can only be a foot or two tall, he gets ideas from nature and, nowadays, architecture. It stimulates his visual system, and yet, at a different level, architecture is a tactile experience for Chihuly. Unusual spaces force his brain to process inputs in novel ways, sprouting new connections and making synapses where none existed before.

Sometimes a simple change of environment is enough to jog the perceptual system out of familiar categories. This may be one reason why restaurants figure so prominently as sites of perceptual breakthroughs. A more drastic change of environment—traveling to another country, for example—is even more effective. When confronted with places never seen before, the brain must create new categories. It is in this process that the brain jumbles around old ideas with new images to create new syntheses.

New acquaintances can also be a source of new perceptions. Other people will frequently lend their opinion of what they see, and these ideas may be enough to destabilize familiar patterns of perception. A change of vantage point may also be sufficient to yield new perceptions. The floating triangle example illustrated how focusing on details versus
standing back and looking at the whole can yield markedly different visual perceptions.

By forcing the visual system to see things in different ways, you can increase the odds of new insights. It sounds remarkably simple. But it is not quite that easy. As we shall see in the next chapter, the brain frequently resists exactly these types of new experiences because they cost energy to process.

H
UMANS DEPEND ON VISION
, more than any other sense to navigate through the world. Mostly we take the visual process for granted. And rightly so, for if we had to think too much about what we see from moment to moment, scarce brain power would remain for doing anything else. Most of the time, the efficiency of our visual systems works to our advantage. Hitting a major league fastball, for example, requires the precise coordination of eyes and body. A 90-mile-per-hour fastball reaches the plate in about 0.4 seconds, but the batter must decide whether to hit it when it gets about halfway. The limit of human reaction time is about 0.2 seconds, which means that the task of hitting a fastball pushes the vision and motor systems to their limits. There is no time for thought. The connection between eye and
body must be seamless. This automaticity lets us accomplish anything that requires hand-eye coordination, but this automaticity comes with a price. In the interests of crafting an efficient visual system, the brain must make guesses about what it is actually seeing. Most of the time this works, but these automatic processes also get in the way of seeing things differently. Automatic thinking destroys the creative process that forms the foundation of iconoclastic thinking.