Imagine: How Creativity Works (6 page)

This also helps explain the power of a positive mood. German researchers have found that when people are happy, they are much better at guessing whether or not different words share a remote associate. Even when the subjects in the German study did not find the answer — they were forced to guess after looking at words for less than two seconds — those in a positive mood were able to accurately intuit the possibility of an insight. In contrast, those feeling gloomy performed slightly below random chance. They had no idea which remote associates were real and which were a waste of time.

More recently, Beeman has demonstrated that people who score high on a standard measure of happiness solve about 25 percent more insight puzzles than people who are feeling angry or upset. In fact, even fleeting feelings of delight can lead to dramatic increases in creativity. After watching a short, humorous video — Beeman uses a clip of Robin Williams doing standup — subjects have significantly more epiphanies, at least when compared with those who were shown scary or boring videos. Because positive moods allow us to relax, we focus less on the troubling world and more on these remote associations. Another ideal moment for insights, according to Beeman and John Kounios, is the early morning, shortly after waking up. The drowsy brain is unwound and disorganized, open to all sorts of unconventional ideas. The right hemisphere is also unusually active. “The problem with the morning, though,” Kounios says, “is that we’re always so rushed. We’ve got to get the kids ready for school, so we leap out of bed, chug the coffee and never give ourselves a chance to think.” If you’re stuck on a difficult problem, Kounios recommends setting the alarm clock a few minutes early so that you have time to lie in bed. We do some of our best thinking when we’re half asleep.
(There’s one additional cortical signal that predicts epiphanies. Looking at the data, Beeman and Kounios saw a sharp drop in activity in the visual cortex just before the insight appeared, as if the sensory area were turning itself off. At first, the scientists couldn’t figure out what was going on. But as they were struggling to decipher the data, Beeman watched Kounios cover his eyes with his hand. That’s when it occurred to him: the visual cortex was going quiet so that the brain could better focus on its own obscure associations. “The cortex does this for the same reason we close or cover our eyes when we’re trying to think,” Beeman says. When the outside world becomes distracting, the brain automatically blocks it out.)

One of the surprising lessons of this research is that trying to force an insight can actually prevent the insight. While it’s commonly assumed that the best way to solve a difficult problem is to relentlessly focus, this clenched state of mind comes with a hidden cost: it inhibits the sort of creative connections that lead to breakthroughs. We suppress the very type of brain activity that should be encouraged. For instance, many stimulants taken to increase attention, such as caffeine, Adderall, and Ritalin, seem to make epiphanies much less likely. (According to a recent online poll conducted by Nature, nearly 20 percent of scientists and researchers regularly take prescription drugs in order to improve mental performance. The most popular reason given was “to enhance concentration.”) Because these stimulants shift attention away from the networks of the right hemisphere, they cause people to ignore those neurons that might provide the solution. “People assume that increased focus is always better,” says Martha Farah, a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania. “But what they don’t realize is that intense focus comes with real tradeoffs. You might be able to work for eight hours straight [on these drugs], but you’re probably not going to have many big insights.”
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Marijuana, by contrast, seems to make insights more likely. It not only leads to states of relaxation but also increases brain activity in the right hemisphere. A recent paper by scientists at University College, London, looked at a phenomenon called semantic priming. This occurs when the activation of one word allows an individual to react more quickly to related words. For instance, the word dog might lead to faster reaction times for wolf, pet, and Lassie, but it won’t alter how quickly a person reacts to chair. Interestingly, the scientists found that marijuana seems to induce a state of hyperpriming, meaning that it extends the reach of semantic priming to distantly related concepts. As a result, one hears dog and thinks of nouns that in more sober circumstances would seem completely disconnected. This state of hyperpriming helps explain why can-nabis has so often been used as a creative fuel: it seems to make the brain better at detecting the remote associations that define the insight process.)

Consider an experiment that investigated the problem-solving abilities of neurological patients with severe attention problems.

(Most of these patients had suffered damage to the prefrontal cortex, a part of the brain just behind the forehead.) Because of their injuries, these poor people lived in a world of endless distractions; their focus was always fleeting. Here’s a sample problem given to the brain-damaged patients:

IV = III + III

The task is to move a single line so that the false arithmetic statement becomes true. (In this example, you would move the first I to the right side of the V so that it reads VI = III + III.) Nearly 90 percent of the brain-damaged patients were able to correctly solve the puzzle, since it required a fairly obvious problem-solving approach: the only thing you have to do is change the answer. (A group of subjects without any attention deficits found the answer 92 percent of the time.) But here’s a much more challenging equation to fix:

III = III + III

In this case, only 43 percent of normal subjects were able to solve the problem. Most stared at the Roman numerals for a few minutes and then surrendered. The patients who couldn’t pay attention, however, had an 82 percent success rate. This bizarre result — brain damage leads to dramatically improved performance — has to do with the unexpected nature of the solution: rotate the vertical line in the plus sign by ninety degrees, transforming it into an equal sign. (The equation is now a simple tautology: III = III = III.) The reason this puzzle is so difficult, at least for people without brain damage, has to do with the standard constraints of math problems. People are not used to thinking about the operator in an equation, so most of them quickly fix their attention on the Roman numerals. But that’s a dead end. The patients with severe cognitive deficits, by contrast, can’t restrict their search. They are forced by the brain injury to consider a much wider range of possible answers. And this is why they’re nearly twice as likely to have an insight.

Or look at a recent study led by Holly White, a psychologist at the University of Memphis. White began by giving a large sample of undergraduates a variety of difficult creative tests. Surprisingly, those students diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) got significantly higher scores. White then measured levels of creative achievement in the real world, asking the students if they’d ever won prizes at juried art shows or been honored at science fairs. In every single domain, from drama to engineering, the students with ADHD had achieved more. Their attention deficit turned out to be a creative blessing.

The unexpected benefits of not being able to focus reveal something important about creativity. Although we live in an age that worships attention — when we need to work, we force ourselves to concentrate — this approach can inhibit the imagination.

Sometimes it helps to consider irrelevant information, to eavesdrop on all the stray associations unfolding in the far reaches of the brain. Occasionally, focus can backfire and make us fixated on the wrong answers. It’s not until you let yourself relax and indulge in distractions that you discover the answer; the insight arrives only after you stop looking for it.

Kounios tells a story about a Zen Buddhist meditator that illustrates the importance of these alpha waves. At first, this man couldn’t solve any of the CRA problems given to him by the scientists. “This guy went through thirty or so of the verbal puzzles and just drew a blank,” Kounios says. “He assumed the way to solve the problems was to think really hard about the words on the page, to really concentrate.” But then, just as the meditator was about to give up, he started solving one puzzle after another; by the end of the experiment, he was getting them all right. It was an unprecedented streak. According to Kounios, this dramatic improvement depended on the ability of the meditator to focus on not being focused so that he could finally pay attention to all those fleeting connections in the right hemisphere. “Because he meditated ten hours a day, he had the cognitive control to instantly relax,” Kounios says. “He could ramp up those alpha waves at will, so that all of a sudden he wasn’t paying such close attention to the words on the page. And that’s when he became an insight machine.”

2.

While 3M’s flexible attention policy is a pillar of its innovation culture, the company doesn’t rely on relaxation and distraction alone to generate new insights. As Wendling notes, “Sometimes, you’ve got to take a more active role . . . We want to give our researchers freedom, but we also want to make sure the ideas they’re pur-36

A L P H A W A V E S ( C O N D I T I O N B L U E ) suing are really new and worthwhile.” This is where horizontal sharing, the second essential feature of the 3M workplace, comes in. The idea is rooted in the company’s tradition of inventing new products by transplanting one concept into different domains. Just consider the invention of masking tape. Drew’s fundamental insight was that even a simple product like sandpaper — nothing but sturdy paper coated with a sticky glue — could have multiple uses; Drew realized that those same ingredients could be turned into a roll of adhesive. This led William McKnight, the executive who turned 3M into an industrial powerhouse, to insist on sharing among scientists as a core tenet of 3M culture. Before long, the Tech Forum was established, an annual event at which every researcher on staff presents his or her latest research. (This practice has also been widely imitated. Google, for instance, hosts a conference called CSI, or Crazy Search Ideas.) “It’s like a huge middle-school science fair,” Wendling says. “You see hundreds of posters from every conceivable field. The guys doing nanotechnol-ogy are talking to the guys making glue. I can only imagine what they find to talk about.”

The benefit of such horizontal interactions — people sharing knowledge across fields — is that it encourages conceptual blending, which is an extremely important part of the insight process.

Normally, the brain files away ideas in categories based on how these ideas can be used. If you’re working for a sandpaper company, for instance, then you probably spend most of the day thinking about sandpaper as an abrasive. That, after all, is the purpose of the product. The assumption is that the vast store of mental concepts work only in particular situations and that it’s a waste of time to apply them elsewhere. There’s no point in thinking about sandpaper if you don’t need to sand something down.

Most of the time, this assumption holds true. However, the same tendency that keeps us from contemplating irrelevant concepts also keeps us from coming up with insights. The reason is that our breakthroughs often arrive when we apply old solutions to new situations; for instance, a person thinking about sandpaper when he needs something sticky. Instead of keeping concepts separate, we start blending them together, trespassing on the standard boundaries of thought.

The best way to understand conceptual blending is to look at the classic children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon. The premise of the book is simple: Harold has a magic crayon. When he draws with this purple crayon, the drawing becomes real, although it’s still identifiable as a childish sketch. For instance, when Harold wants to go for a walk, he simply draws a path with his crayon. This fictive sketch then transforms into a real walkway, which Harold can stroll along. This magic crayon is seemingly the solution to every problem.

But here’s the twist that makes Harold and the Purple Crayon such an engaging book: it blends together two distinct concepts of the world. Although the magic crayon is clearly a fantastical invention — a conceit that could never exist — Harold still has to obey the rules of reality. So when Harold draws a mountain and then climbs it, he must try not to slip and fall down. When he does slip — gravity exists even in this crayon universe — Harold has to draw a balloon to save himself. In other words, the book is delicate blend of the familiar and the fictional; Harold has a surreal tool, but it operates amid the usual constraints. Mark Turner, a cognitive psychologist at Case Western Reserve University, has used this children’s book to demonstrate that even little kids can easily combine two completely distinct concepts into a single idea. If they couldn’t, then the travails of Harold would make no sense.

What does conceptual blending have to do with creativity? Although people take this mental skill for granted, the ability to make separate ideas coexist in the mind is a crucial creative tool. Insights, after all, come from the overlap between seemingly unrelated thoughts. They emerge when concepts are transposed, when the rules of one place are shifted to a new domain. The eighteenth-century philosopher David Hume, in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, described this talent as the essence of the imagination:

All this creative power of the mind amounts to no more than the faculty of compounding, transposing, augmenting, or diminishing the materials afforded us by the senses and experience. When we think of a golden mountain, we only join two consistent ideas, gold, and mountain, with which we were formerly acquainted.

Hume was pointing out that the act of invention was really an act of recombination. The history of innovation is full of inventors engaged in “compounding” and “transposing.” Johannes Guten-berg transformed his knowledge of winepresses into an idea for a printing machine capable of mass-producing words. The Wright brothers used their knowledge of bicycle manufacturing to invent the airplane. (Their first flying craft was, in many respects, just a bicycle with wings.) George de Mestral came up with Velcro after noticing burrs clinging to the fur of his dog. And Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed the search algorithm behind Google by applying the ranking method used for academic articles to the sprawl of the World Wide Web; a hyperlink was like a citation. In each case, the radical concept was merely a new mixture of old ideas.