Wisconsin Public Television University Place Academy Evenings  Jonah Lehrer Imagine: How Creativity Works  March 27, 2012 UP704  cc >> Jane Elder: Good evening and welcome. I'm Jane Elder, the executive director for the Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters, and I'm delighted to welcome you here tonight for a very special Academy Evening with Jonah Lehrer. Tonight our topic is creativity, one of the most powerful and satisfying human capacities. And whether it's a flash of inspiration or a burning desire to create something from the spark of an idea, when we're in the creative zone, we can do amazing things. The Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, Arts, and Letters has been part of the fabric of Wisconsin's creativity for more than a century. We're an independent, non-profit organization, and if you aren't already a member, we'd love to have you join us. From public talks like these to our magazine, Wisconsin People & Ideas, to the James Watrous Gallery right here in the Overture Center, to our Wisconsin Idea initiatives on major statewide challenges, we strive to bring the best in our state's leadership to making life in Wisconsin more vibrant, more informed, and more creative. In a word, better. For information on the rest of our season, please pick up a spring program booklet on your way out if you don't already have one. And please take a moment to fill out one of our yellow index cards, and return it to the table in the east lobby. 

This will serve as your entry to win a signed copy of Jonah's book. I'd also like to invite all of you to join us for a special reception this evening in the Promenade Terrace right after the talk. You can meet Jonah and purchase copies of his book, and also get to know each other. I want to thank Wisconsin Public Television for recording tonight's talk. It will be posted on University Place, on Portal Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Academy website: www.WisconsinAcademy.org Before we start, please take a moment to silence your cell phones, if you haven't already done so, so they don't live in immortality on our website. We're also delighted to have Wisconsin Public Radio as our co-sponsor for tonight's talk. So please help me welcome WPR's Anne Strainchamps, who will be introducing our speaker. [APPLAUSE]  >> Ann Strainchamps: Welcome. It is so wonderful to see all of you. I am Anne Strainchamps, producer of Wisconsin Public Radio's To the Best of Our Knowledge. 

We interview a lot of creative people on To the Best of Our Knowledge. Writers, artists, scientists, tech geniuses. One of the things we're always asking is how they think, what's their creative process, what ignites their imagination. And I just want to tell you one quick story. So for example this week, we are interviewing a young woman whose name is Anna Dietrich. She's a pilot. She has a degree in aerodynamics from MIT, and she set out a few years ago to do something that everybody in her field said was impossible. And that is to invent a car that can fly. This is something that people have been trying to do for a hundred years. It's never worked, and the consensus was that it never would. 

So Anna sets about trying, and she fails. She can't build a car that can get off the ground. And then one day, she thinks maybe we're going about this the wrong way. Maybe I don't need a car that can fly, maybe I need a plane that can drive. So that's what she invented, and it works. It's a two-seater, single-engine airplane. It can take off. It can fly somewhere. It can land. After it lands, you fold up its wings, you drive it home, and you park it in your garage. 

It is the world's first street legal airplane, and it just debuted at the New York International Auto Show. So to me that is an exhilarating story, and there is an equally exhilarating story that we are about to hear tonight. A myth-shattering story, the upshot of which is that that kind of creativity, world-changing creativity, is not a special gift possessed by a lucky few, it's a way of thinking, a set of thought processes that we all share, and we're going to learn how to share them and how to access them more this evening. So it is my privilege to introduce Jonah Lehrer and his brand new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. Jonah is, of course, himself one of the most creative writers working today. As his New Yorker colleague, Malcolm Gladwell says, "Jonah Lehrer knows more about science than a lot of scientists, and more about writing than a lot of writers." Thus, managing to offend two different groups of people. [LAUGHTER] He has a background in science and literature. He studied neuroscience at Columbia University where he worked in the Nobel Prize winner Eric Kandel's lab. He studied literature and philosophy at Oxford. He's a Rhodes Scholar. 

He brought art and science together in his first book, Proust was a Neuroscientist, went on to explore the decision making process in his next book, How We Decide. Currently, he somehow manages to be a contributing editor at Wired magazine, a frequent contributor to the New Yorker, the New York Times magazine. He writes the "Head Case" column for the Wall Street Journal, and of course, Public Radio listeners know him for his brilliant work on WNIC's Radio Lab. I'm a huge fan of his work. I think his new book, Imagine, is his best yet. I'm slightly disappointed that he didn't share the secret to his phenomenal level of productivity, but he does promise that we will all be much more creative after tonight. So please join me in welcoming Jonah Lehrer. [APPLAUSE]  >> Jonah Lehrer: Thank you so much for that incredibly kind introduction. Thank you all so much for coming tonight. Thank you to the Academy for having me. 

I'd like to begin tonight with a story about Bob Dylan. It's a story that takes place in the early summer of 1965, when Dylan is finishing up his tour of England. It's been a grueling few months as Dylan has been struggling to maintain a nonstop performance schedule. He'd first traveled across the northeast on a bus playing in small college towns and big city theaters. Then he crossed over to the west coast and crammed in a few hectic weeks of concerts and promotion. He had been paraded in front of the press and asked and endless series of benign questions, from what is the truth, to why is there a cat on the cover of your last album? When Dylan wasn't surly, he was often sarcastic, telling journalists that he collected monkey wrenches, was born in Mexico, and that his songs were inspired by chaos, watermelon, and clocks. [LAUGHTER] That last line almost made him smile. By the time Dylan arrived in London, it was clear that the tour was taking a toll. The singer was skinny from insomnia and pills. His nails were yellow from nicotine, and his skin had a ghostly pale pallor. 

Joan Baez said he looked like an underfed angel. For the first time, his solo shows felt formulaic as if he were singing the lines  of someone else. He rarely acknowledged the audience or paused between songs. He seemed to be in a hurry to get offstage. Before long, it all became too much. While touring in England, Dylan decided that he was leading an impossible life. The only talent he cared about, his ceaseless creativity, was being ruined by fame. The breaking point probably came after a brief vacation in Portugal, where Dylan came down with a vicious case of food poisoning. The illness forced him to stay in bed for a week, giving him a rare chance to reflect. "I realized I was very drained," Dylan would later confess. 

"I was playing a lot of songs I didn't want to play. I was singing songs I didn't really want to sing. It's very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you, if you yourself don't dig you." The last shows were in London. It was here that Dylan told his manager he was quitting the music business. He was finished with singing and song writing, was going to move to a tiny cabin in Woodstock, New York, where he'd paint. Although Dylan had become a pop icon, the prophetic poet of his generation, he was ready to renounce it all. He just wanted to be left alone. Dylan wasn't bluffing. As promised, he returned from his British tour and rode his Triumph motorcycle straight out of New York City. He didn't even bring his guitar. 

Of course, our story doesn't end here. Bob Dylan did not retire in 1965. After a few relaxing days in Woodstock, just when Dylan was most determined to stop creating music, he was overcome with a strange feeling. "It's a horrid thing to describe," Dylan said, "just the sense that you've got something to say." And so Dylan did the only thing he knew how to do. He grabbed a pencil and started to scribble. Once Dylan began, his hand didn't stop moving for the next several hours. "I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit, 20 pages long," Dylan said. "I'd never written anything like that before, and it suddenly came to me that this is what I should do." Vomit is the essential word here. Dylan is describing with characteristic vividness the uncontrollable rush of the creative insight, that flow of associations that can't be held back. "I don't know where my songs come from," Dylan said. 

"It's like a ghost is writing a song. It gives you the song and it goes away. You don't know what it means." Once the ghost arrived, all Dylan wanted to do was get out of the way. In retrospect, we can see that this frantic composition, this piece of vomit in Woodstock, allowed Dylan to fully express for the very first time the full diversity of his influences. In these cryptic lyrics, we can hear his mental blunder at work, as he mixes together scraps of Blake, Fellini, Woody Guthrie, Robert Johnson. The song is modernist and pre-modern, avant-garde and country western. What Dylan did, and this is why he's Bob Dylan, is find the strange thread connecting these different voices. In those first minutes of writing he found a way to make something new out of this long list of influences, drawing them together into a catchy song. When Dylan gets to the chorus, and he knows this is the chorus as soon as he commits it to paper, the visceral power of his words become obvious. How does it feel to be without a home, like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone. 

The following week, on June 15, 1965, Dylan brought this sheaf of papers into the cramped space of Studio A at Columbia Records. After just four takes the musicians were only beginning to learn their parts, "Like a Rolling Stone" was cut on acetate. Those six minutes of raw music would revolutionize rock and roll. Bruce Springsteen would later describe the experience of hearing the single on the radio as one of the most important moments of his life. The story of "Like a Rolling Stone," the reason I'm talking about Bob Dylan tonight, is because it's a story of a moment of insight. At times, such stories can feel like romantic cliches, the sort of make-believe breakthroughs that happened to Archimedes in the bathtub, and Newton under that apple tree. And yet, insights do happen. They are a genuine mental event. They really are responsible for the theory of gravity and "Like a Rolling Stone."  In recent years, neuroscientists and cognitive scientists have become very interested in trying to understand moments of insight, and it turns out there are two defining features of moments of insight. The first defining feature is that the answer comes out of the blue. 

It arrives when we least expect it. So we write our best song, the song that becomes our most influential set of lyrics, after we've given up song writing, when we've moved to a remote cabin in Woodstock, New York. That's the first defining feature. Second defining feature is that as soon as the answer arrives, we know that this is the answer we've been searching for. The solution comes attached with this feeling of certainty. We don't have to double check the math or scan our lyrics. We know this is it. This is what we've been searching for. Now, at first glance it's not quite clear how one could scientifically study such moments, study these epiphanies, because you can't just put undergrads in a brain scan or in a fancy fMRI machine and say have an epiphany, we're ready for you, have a breakthrough. That'd be a very inefficient way to collect data. 

So instead, what scientists had to do was come up with a way to generate a set of moments of insight on the fly, generate a lot of data. So I'm talking here primarily about the research of Mark Beeman at Northwestern and John Kounios at Drexel. They've pioneered a set of creative puzzles called Compound Remote Associate Problems. The acronym is a bit unfortunate, C-R-A-P. [LAUGHTER] But, essentially, what these problems consist of is, I'm going to give you three words. We'll do the first one together. I'm going to give you a fourth word that can form compound word with those three. And in that fourth word, often arrives in this light bulb moment, in this sudden flash of insight, this ah-ha moment. So we'll do the first one together. The three words are pine, crab, and sauce. 

The answer in this case is apple. If apple occurs, it often comes in one of these ah-ha moments. So here's one for you guys. The three words are age, mile, and sand. So just shout out the epiphany. >> Stone. >> Stone. So if it happened that quick, it almost certainly came to you in a moment of insight. And so by giving people these compound remote associate problems inside fMRI machines, they can begin to understand where these insights came from. So the first thing Beeman and Kounios discovered was that right before, seconds before people had one of these ah-ha moments, the part of the brain called the anterior superior temporal gyrus showed a sharp spike in activity. 

It's a bit of the cortex nobody knows too much about. It's pretty obscure. It's in the back of your right hemisphere just behind the ear. It's a bit of brain that's been previously associated with things like the processing of jokes. It lights up when people hear a punch line. And also the interpretation of metaphors. This begins to make a little sense. When Romeo declares that Juliet is the sun, we know he's not saying that Juliet is a big flaming ball of plasma gas. We know he's trafficking in metaphor, and the way we make sense of that metaphor is not by looking at the set of associations they literally have in common, because Juliet and the sun have very little in common. Instead it's by looking past those surface similarities for the underlying themes, the underlying connections they actually share. 

So we're able to make sense of the metaphor. We're able to understand that what Romeo is saying is that Juliet lights up his world the way the sun lights up ours. Now, something similar is going on when we're trying to make sense of pine, crab, and sauce. Those aren't three words that go together very frequently. We probably have never used them in a sentence before. What this one brain area, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, is so good at is finding that one other word, which in this case is apple, that binds these words together, that fragile thread of connection, that remote association. When you need a big breakthrough, when you need one of these epiphanies, when you're struggling with a seemingly impossible problem, this is also the brain area that may generate the solution because, like I said, it's very good at looking past surface dissimilarities for those underlying connections. So that's the first thing Beeman and Kounios discovered is the importance of this brain area in the back of your right hemisphere. This is rooted, in a sense, in this pop cliche about the left hemisphere is the rational/analytical side, the right hemisphere is the free wheeling artist inside our head. And in general, that pop cliche is an over simplification of how our hemispheres actually work, but people like Beeman especially have really begun to map out the fact that our hemispheres do have different tendencies, and those tendencies are rooted in the fact that they process information differently. 

To make a long story short, the left hemisphere has a bit more interest in the trees and the granular details, while the right hemisphere excels at seeing the forest, at seeing the connections between things. And you can demonstrate this easily by looking at patients who have suffered brain damage to one of the hemispheres. So that's the first thing Beeman and Kounios discovered, is they began to localize where these moments of insight come from. The second thing they discovered happened when they were using EEG on subjects who were solving these compound remote associate problems. EEG is like wearing a big, bulky shower cap. Hundreds of electrodes that you strap to your head. It measures the waves of electricity just pouring out of the cortex. And what they discovered in conjunction with researchers at UCL is that it was possible to predict up to eight seconds in advance whether or not someone was going to have a moment of insight. Just think for a second how spooky this is. They could look at your EG waves and they could say, sorry, buddy, you may feel creative, but you're just wasting your time right now. 

[LAUGHTER] You could struggle all day long, and chances are you're not going to have a breakthrough. Or they read your brain waves and they could say, hmm, interesting, the chances are looking pretty good right now that in the near future, in about seven and a half seconds, you may have an epiphany, so brace yourself. [LAUGHTER] The question, of course, is what this predictive signal is. It turns out to be something called alpha waves. Like most things in the mind, alpha waves remain pretty mysterious but they are closely associated with states of relaxation. So things that reliably produce thoughts of alpha wave activity are things like taking a hot shower, going for a walk by the lake, lying on your couch, taking a nap, watching television with a beer in hand. Wherever we go, whatever we do that puts our mind at ease that gets us to stop thinking about those nagging problems at work, that's probably an activity that's probably a place that is leading to lots of alpha waves. Now, the reason these states of relaxation are so important is because when we're not relaxed, when we're really focused, when we're really vigilant, our attention is out here. It's out in the world. We are fixated on the problem itself. 

So pine, crab, sauce, pine, crab, sauce, it's running like a broken record inside our head, and there's often probably a wrong answer we're fixated on, as well. A common wrong answer for pine, crab, and sauce is tree. So you're thinking pine, crab, and sauce, pine, crab, sauce. Tree, tree. But that doesn't work, and you just get stuck in this recursive loop, and you can't get out of it. It's incredibly frustrating and tedious. And that's why it helps to get relaxed. To get those alpha waves going because when we're relaxed, when we're in the shower shampooing our hair, we can't check our email because they haven't made a waterproof iPhone yet, we turn the spotlight of attention where it's at long last. Instead of being fixated out here, we're in here. And that's when we hear that quiet voice coming from the back of our head saying, the answer is apple. 

The answer is apple. [LAUGHTER] Maybe that insight has been there for hours, or days, or weeks, we just haven't taken a moment to listen. There is something counter-intuitive about this research. I think most people assume that when faced with a really hard problem that what they need to do is to invest in attention, to focus, focus, focus. But this research suggests that that's the exact wrong thing to do. We'll be hopped up on caffeine but we'll be making no progress. Instead, the next time we hit the wall, the next time we're faced with a problem that we just don't know how to solve, the next time we need one of those moments of insight, we should take a break. We should take a long shower, play some ping pong, take a nap, watch our favorite television show. We should find a way to relax. The answer will only arrive after we stopped looking for it. 

This reminds me of my favorite lines about creativity, which comes from Einstein. He said, "Creativity is the residue of wasted time." I think we all have to learn how to get a bit better at wasting time. Now, I really wish I could stand up here and tell you that the way to solve every creative problem is to take a long shower. [LAUGHTER] That relaxation is a universal cure, that alpha waves are the only secret to creative breakthroughs, but that would be terrible advice. As Nietzsche once observed, creators have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration shining down from heavens as a way of grace, but this is often a lie. In reality, all great artists and thinkers are great workers. To illustrate his point, Nietzsche described Beethoven's musical notebooks, which documented the composer's painstaking process of refining his melodies. It wasn't uncommon for Beethoven to experiment with 70 different versions of a single musical phrase before settling on the final one. "I make many changes and reject and try again until I'm satisfied," the composer wrote to a friend. In other words, even Beethoven, the cliche of artistic genius, needed to constantly refine his ideas, struggling with his music until the beauty shown through. 

Let's not sugar coat. This rejecting process described by Nietzsche and Beethoven, it's not fun. It's the red pen on the page and the discarded sketch, the trashed prototype and the failed first draft. Nevertheless, such a merciless process is sometimes the only way forward. We keep on thinking and paying attention because our next thought might be the answer. So what defines this kind of creativity? How can we identify and predict which people are willing to invest that time to go through draft after draft? I think this kind of creativity is largely defined by a new character trait called grit, G-R-I-T. When you look at people on the far right side of the creative bell curve, these epic creators like Bob Dylan, and Pablo Picasso, and Steve Jobs, you try to figure out what makes them so special. At first glance it's not really clear because you give them the IQ test, and they'll look pretty normal. They're not smarter than the rest of us. And you give them a battery of personality tests like Myers/Briggs and stuff like that and they look pretty normal there, too. 

They may be a little bit more open to experience, but nothing leaps out at you. Instead, I would argue that really what defines these people is grit. They're more persistent. They're more stubborn than the rest of us. Like JK Rowling who suffered through 12 rejections from publishers, but kept on writing about Harry Potter in coffee shops while her baby daughter took naps, these people are simply more stubborn. They refuse to quit. The best way to explain the importance of grit is to tell you a story about supermarket cashiers. This is work done in the early 1980s by a psychologist named Paul Sackett, now at the University of Minnesota. He was asked by a supermarket chain to come up with a way to measure the speed, the performance of their cashiers. Sackett thought about this for a little while, and he realized this is a fairly straightforward task. 

He gave everyone a 100 items, 100 grocery items to check out. Gave them 10 minutes to check out as many items as possible, and then he asked them to perform, he asked them to take this test. Sure enough, he generated a bell curve of performance. Some cashiers were much faster than others. They were more efficient. They had better hand/eye coordination so they could check out a lot more items in that short amount of time. This is known as a maximal test. And this is something we use all the time. We assume people are motivated. They want to perform well and want to see what they're capable of. 

And these are tests like the SAT, like the IQ test. We use maximal tests all the time. Our society runs on maximal tests. We assume that this is the way to identify talent, whether it's supermarket cashiers or creative people. We can find some way to give them a maximal test. So Sackett turns over his data, turns over this bell curve to the supermarket company. Then he assumes his work is done. He's identified the fastest cashiers. But it's about this time that supermarkets are introducing electronic scanners. And Sackett realizes that if he got access to the scanner data that he could measure the performance of cashiers without having to give them a maximal test. 

You just look at their typical performance over the course of a day or a week or a month. So he gets access to the scanner data, and sure enough, it was another bell curve of human performance where some cashiers check out a lot more people over the course of a day or a week, they check out a lot more items that you see the same variation. Then Sackett has the bright idea to compare these two bell curves to see what the correlation is between, on the one hand, his maximal test and his typical record of performance. And what he discovers is that the correlation is statistically indistinguishable from zero. That there is basically no correlation between these two bell curves. That his maximal test tells you very, very little about what of course the company actually cared about, which is typical performance. This is known as the typical maximal distinction. And I would argue it's a pretty important idea because, like I said, we live in a world obsessed with maximal tests. How you do on the SAT, a classic maximal test, will help determine what kind of college you can get into. It'll put you on certain trajectory. 

When we want to evaluate talent in perspective employees, we give them a battery of maximal tests. One of my favorite examples of how obsessed we are with maximal tests comes from the NFL. Every player entering the NFL draft has to go to the NFL combine, which consists of this laundry list of maximal tests. Vertical leaps, 40-yard dashes, a short version of the IQ test called the Wonderlic. The assumption of the teams, of course, is that how players perform on these maximal tests will predict how they will do in the pros. So if you do really well at the combine, you go higher in the draft, you make a lot more money, and so on. Last year, two economists at the University of Utah decided to put this assumption to the test. They looked to see what the correlations were between how people did at the combine and how they did at the pros, and what they discovered is that the NFL combine is a huge waste of time and money. [LAUGHTER] That all these maximal tests are utterly worthless, that they tell you nothing about performance in the pros. The sole exception is the 40-yard dash for running backs. 

That tells you a little bit, but every other test we give to these college athletes tells us absolutely nothing. Now, the reason these maximal tests so often fail to predict typical performance returns us to grit, because what you can't by definition measure in a short, 10-minute test, in a test of a 40-yard dash, in a 5-minute IQ test is grit. Grit is a macro character trait. It's something that you demonstrate over the long-term. It's what you demonstrate when you don't even know you're being tested. It's what allows you to put in those 10,000 hours of practice, so if you're a quarterback, you can become a better quarterback. If you're a creator, you can develop your talent. You can persist and go after draft, after draft, after draft, invest in those iterations. Some of the most interesting work on grit has been done by a psychologist name Angela Duckworth at Penn. And she first got interested in grit when West Point came to her with a nagging problem. 

West Point, for the last 50 years, had struggled with the problem of dropouts, and, in particular, about 5% of the class would drop out within the first six weeks. So this is known as Beast Barracks. It's when you get your head shaved, you go on long runs, and you wake up early. We try to turn the squishy citizens into hardened soldiers. It's a very grueling few weeks. And West Point was losing between 5% and 10% of its class every year. There are no transfer students, so this was a big problem. Here were future leaders of the army they wanted to groom, and they were just disappearing. West Point had for years tried to predict retention, which cadets would make it and which cadets wouldn't. They look at all these different maximal tests from SAT scores to physical fitness. 

Nothing predicted retention. In desperation, in 2005 they go to Angela. She comes up with a short survey called the Grit-O survey. It asks the questions in two different domains. The first domain is, how committed are you to this goal? Have you always wanted to go to West Point? Have you always wanted to be a painter, to be a rock and roll star, to play in the NFL? Whatever the goal is, are you single-minded about it. The second domain is, as you work toward that goal, how do you respond to the inevitable frustrations and failures? Are they a sign that you should try something new? That you should develop a new goal, or is it a sign that you should double-down and try even harder, work even harder? So those are the kinds of questions she asked. And what Duckworth discovered is that her short Grit-O survey is the first test that allowed West Point to predict who would actually make it through. West Point has used it every year since, and it still predicts retention every single year. She has since gone on to show that levels in grit are the single most predictive variable of success, and also to different domains. If you're trying to figure out which 12-year-old is going to win the national spelling bee, not the smartest ones, not the ones with the highest IQ scores, not the ones with the best grades, it's the ones with the highest levels of grit. 

If you're trying to figure out who's going to make the special forces, become an Army Ranger, it's grit. If you're trying to figure out which teachers are going to last at Teach for America, it's the grittiest ones, not the ones with the highest SAT scores or the best grades. If you're trying to figure out who's going to make the most money in their first three years out of business school, it's the grittiest ones. In domain after domain, she argues that grit explains success or at least it's the single biggest predictor of success, because it determines whether or not we can persevere invest in practice, invest in the right kind of practice, and suffer through those really inevitable frustrations. Now, if we return to creativity, I think grit is particularly important for creative achievement, because if it were easy to make something new, if it were easy to write that poem, write that song, create that gadget, create that patent, it would have been done already. Someone else would have come up with it. So the ideas we've got left, the new ideas that we have yet to discover, they are going to take lots of work. They're going to take lots of drafts, lots of iterations, lots of failures, lots of frustrations, lots of mistakes. The question is whether or not we can persist through them, whether or not we can deal with the red pen on the page, deal with the criticism, stick with it long enough, like Beethoven, until it's perfect. Woody Allen has this great quote about 80% of success is simply showing up. 

Well, grit is what allows us to show up again and again. So far I've been attempting to describe these two very distinct forms of creativity which depend on very different mental processes in the brain. The more practical lesson, though, is that different kinds of creative problems benefit from different kinds of creative thinking. The question, of course, is how to adjust our thought process to the task at hand. When should day dream and take warm showers and when should we drink another cup of coffee? What requires relaxation and what requires grit. The good news, and I think this is very good news, is the human mind has a natural ability to diagnose our problems, to assess the kind of creativity we need. These assessments have an eloquent name. They're called feelings of knowing. And they occur whenever we suspect that we can find the answer if only we keep on thinking about the question. One of my favorite examples of a feeling of knowing is when a word is on the tip of your tongue. 

It's an incredibly annoying mental moment. You're walking down the street and you see someone and you know you know their name. Maybe they're an old friend from high school or an acquaintance on Facebook, you know you know their name, but you just can't quite place them. It's on the tip of your tongue. This drives me crazy. It's so annoying, yet it's also kind of profound because how do you know you know something if you don't actually know it? [LAUGHTER] You know? Why are you so convinced that memory is inside your head if you can't remember it? Here's where feelings of knowing prove essential. A feeling of knowing is a hunch reminding you, you know what, if you simply invest the next five minutes or 10 minutes searching for that name, eventually you will recover it. You will remember what they're called. When it comes to creative problem solving, I think feelings of knowing play an essential role. Numerous studies have demonstrated that when it comes to creative problems that don't require moments of insight, so-called analytical problems, the human mind is remarkably accurate at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved. 

We can glance at a question and know that the answer is within our reach if only we put in the work. The end result is that we're motivated to stay focused on the challenge. Now, what makes these feelings of knowing even more useful so they become attached with a sense of progress, this was best demonstrated by Janet Metcalfe at Columbia University. She asked people working on various creative problems whether or not they feel like they're getting warmer or closer to the solution. When the subjects were working on problems that required moments of insight, there was no increase in warmth before the answer. They went straight from freezing cold to burning hot. The insight just popped into their head. There was no feeling of knowing. In contrast, Metcalfe found that problems that didn't require insight were only answered after people reported a gradual increase in warmth which reflected their own sense of progress. Now, what's impressive, what's sort of miraculous about such feelings of knowing is that people were able to assess their closeness to the solution without even knowing what the solution was. 

This ability to calculate progress is an essential part of the creative process. When we don't feel that we're getting closer to the answer, we've hit the wall so to speak, we probably need an insight. In these instances, we should rely on the right hemisphere which excels at revealing those remote associations. Focusing on the problem will be a waste of mental resources. We will stare at our computer screen and repeat our failures. Instead, we should find a way to relax. The most productive thing we can do is forget all about work. However, when those feelings of knowing are telling us that we're getting closer, that the answer is within our reach, then we should keep on struggling. We need to continue to pay attention until it hurts to rely on those muscles of grit. Before long, that feeling of knowing will become actual knowledge. 

So far I've been talking about individual creativity, how we invent when we're alone, but I'd like to spend my remaining time focusing on creative collaborations because I think this form of creativity is definitely becoming more important. The increased necessity of collaboration is best demonstrated by the work of Ben Jones, an economist at Northwestern. He's data-mined nearly 20 million peer-reviewed science papers over the course of the 20th century, and what he discovered is you go back to 1950 and you look the most highly cited papers in a field, those home run papers, they're almost always the product of someone working by themselves. A lone genius. Think Einstein, think Darwin, someone who all by themselves shifted the paradigm, saw farther than the rest of us. But you fast forward to the 1990s and those home run papers look very, very different. Now they're almost always the product of a group, of a collaboration of people in different fields coming together. Furthermore, this trend seems to be accelerating by about 20% every decade. The argument for why, the explanation for why is pretty simple. Our problems are getting harder. 

All the low-hanging fruit is gone. So we either have to learn how to work together or fail alone. Now, this raises the obvious question: how should we work together? What's the ideal template for creative collaboration? There is lots to say on the subject such as don't brainstorm. Whatever you do, don't engage in a brainstorm. And that we should be sure to seek the input of outsiders who often see more because they know less. But today I'd like to focus on a single theme in successful group collaborations which is the importance of spaces that bring a diverse mixture of people together in person, in the flesh. One of my favorite examples of how this process works and why it's so important comes from Pixar Studios. I was fortunate enough to spend some time at Pixar while researching the book. In my first couple days there, I kept on asking, you know, to figure out where the bathroom was, and people always directed me back to the atrium. And I was like, gosh, this is a huge building. 

It's a huge studio, don't you have more than just one set of bathrooms? And I quickly heard the story of why there's only one set of bathrooms in the entire Pixar Studios. And the story goes something like this. In the late 1990s, when Steve Jobs was designing the Pixar Studios, the original plans for the studio space, they bought this beautiful plot of land outside Oakland, called for three separate buildings. One building would house the animators, one building would house the computer scientists, one building would house everyone else, the writers, directors, editors, and so on. Steve Jobs looked at these plans and tore them up. He said that's a terrible, terrible idea. Just shredded them right in front of the architect. He insisted there be only one single vast cavernous space. The studio would all take place in one building. They actually had to maintain the original Del Monte canning factory that was on the lot. 

But Jobs realized, you know, that's not enough. I can't just put people together. I can't just put them in the same space. I have to force them to interact because the success of the studio is going to require these different cultures to share knowledge, to learn from each other so that the animators are going to have to learn from the computer scientists, and vice versa. These cultures have to mingle. We need to make them mingle. So instead he carved out this big atrium, this beautiful atrium, sort of putting everything important in the atrium. He moved the mailboxes there. He moved the gift store there. He moved the coffee shop there. 

He moved the cafeteria. It's all in this big, central lobby. But Jobs realized, you know what, even that's not enough, because I can build them this lovely cafe but the animators will just sit and have lunch with other animators, and the computer scientists will have a snack with other computer scientists. They still won't mingle. That's when he had his bright idea that there should be only two bathrooms in the entire studio, and he put those in the atrium, because if there was one place we all have to go every day... [LAUGHTER] It is the bathroom. And even though you talk to people at Pixar, they all begin by telling the story of how frustrated they were originally with having to walk 10 minutes to pee, but then they all start talking about their bathroom epiphanies. [LAUGHTER] About that great idea they had while washing their hands. They stuck up a conversation with someone else, someone they never would have bumped into otherwise, and that led down some really interesting path. Or the insight that emerged from some random chat in the hallway that came on their way to the bathroom. 

Steve Jobs, he once defined creativity, he said it's just connecting things. I think he also knew that most of those connections are going to come from other people, which is why you have to force people to mix and mingle. There is some neat, empirical proof of this concept. This comes from the work of Isaac Kohane at Harvard. He sifted through 35,000 peer-reviewed papers by other Harvard researchers. He mapped out the location of every single co-author down to the meter. And what he discovered is that physical location matters. That when co-authors were located closer together, their papers tended to be of much higher quality, at least as measured by subsequent citations. In fact, the best research was consistently produced when scientists were working within 10 meters of each other. While the worst papers tended to emerge from collaborations that were a kilometer or more apart. 

In other words, our most important new ideas don't arrive on a screen. Rather, they emerge from idle conversation, from too many people sharing the same space. Now, I think it's a little surprising. You go back 15 years and you have these futurists confidently predicting the death of geography, that thanks to these wonderful new tools we have, email and video chats and Skype, that we no longer need to commute to an office, we no longer need to put up with the hassles of a city, put up with the high rents, and the crime, and the bad public schools. We can all move to the excerpts and telecommute. We'll get all the interaction we need remotely, online, on our computer screens. Needless to say, that hasn't happened. If anything, the opposite has happened, that cities are more important than ever before, that urbanization is only accelerating. It's really the great theme of the 21st century. More people are going to move to cities in the next hundred years than have moved to cities in all of human history. 

One of my favorite factoids is that attendance in business conferences has nearly doubled since the invention of Skype. So here we have this tool that we can get all the content, all the information, in theory, remotely, and yet we're more willing than ever to put up with the hassles of air travel, and airport delays, and taxis, and noisy hotel rooms, simply because we know there is something intangible, some inexplicable value that comes from coming together in person. It is those random chats we can't predict in advance. That is where our best ideas come from. Now, I don't mean to diminish the importance of these interactive tools. I think Google is wonderful. It makes life a lot easier. They make it so much easier to find stuff. They make our everyday routine so much more efficient. But the larger point is that creativity is not about efficiency. 

Creativity is about serendipity, about those random conversations that we never expected. Even in this age of glittering technology, it is still the human friction, the friction of people in the flesh, that is what makes the sparks. The last idea I'd like to discuss tonight, it's a provocative one and it speaks directly, I think, to the difficulty of fostering innovation, whether it's in a big company or in a university. In fact, it suggests that many of the things we do with the best of intentions, from holding brainstorming meetings to hiring chief innovation officers, that they actually get in the way. They actually hinder our natural creativity. I think it's best demonstrated by the work of Geoffrey West. He's a theoretical physicist at the Santa Fe Institute. And he's best known for his work on cities. He data mines cities, so he collects fast tracks of data from the patent office and the Census Bureau and governments all across the world, and he's interested in why some cities are more creative, more successful than others. Why has San Jose always produce an absurd number of patents? Even when it's mostly walnut and apricot farms, San Jose County, Silicon Valley, seem to be a very innovative place. 

Why has New Orleans always had an elevated crime rate for as long as we've been tracking crime statistics? So he gathers all this data, and he searches for these hidden correlations, these subtle correlations that seem to tell us something interesting about the life and death of cities. One of his most, I think, surprising correlations comes when he looked at what allows you to predict how many patents per capita a city will invent. And it turns out one of the most predictive correlations is the walking speed of pedestrians. So that cities where people walk faster also invent more patents. Nobody knows what to make of this. This could just be one of these totally accidental correlations, but he's got the hypothesis that the secret of urban creativity is just about bumps, just about interactions, about those accidental chats on the sidewalk while waiting in line for a latte. Most of those conversations will lead nowhere, but every once in a while those bumps, the smushing together process of a crowded, dense metropolis, they lead us somewhere interesting. They lead us to a good, new idea, to a new patent, to a new trademark. So, in a sense, people are particles, just people bumping into each other. Particles bump into each other. 

So particles with a higher velocity, pedestrians that walk faster, they'll have more bumps, and those bumps add up. So that's his hypothesis, but I want to talk tonight about this very interesting comparison he makes between cities and big companies. And he points out that from a certain perspective, cities and companies look very similar. They're both big clusters of people in a fixed physical space, lots of infrastructure, and yet cities and companies exhibit one very interesting difference, which is that cities never die. Cities are indestructible. Cities live forever. You can nuke a city; it comes back. You can flood a city; it comes back. You can have a terrible, devastating earthquake, the whole city is leveled, and we still have San Francisco. Companies, on the other hand, are incredibly fragile. 

Even the biggest companies die all the time. The average lifespan of a Fortune 100 company? These huge firms that seem like they'll be around forever? 45 years. Only two companies in the original Dow Jones index are still around. 25% of companies in the Fortune 500 die every decade. So West's question is simple: what's the difference? Why do companies live forever, excuse me, why do cities live forever and why do companies die? I think his data tells us something interesting. So what West has found is that as cities get bigger, everyone in that city becomes more productive. The exhibit is called super-linear scaling. So when you move to a bigger city, you're going to make more money, you're going to invent more patents, you're going to invent more trademarks. By every metric we have, you're going to look smarter and more productive. This gets us back to the function of cities. 

They are just vessels of interacting people, of people sharing ideas, and all that sharing, all those knowledge spill-overs add up. They are a very good thing. This is the trend that's really driving urbanization. It's why cities keep on getting bigger. It's why we keep on moving to cities. They are the idea that unleashes our ideas. West refers to them as the most important invention in the history of human civilization, and this gets back to the fact that as they get bigger, as they expand in size, the people in them become more productive. Super-linear scaling. Now, companies exhibit the opposite trend. As companies get bigger, every one in that company becomes less productive. 

They bring in less profit per capita. They invent fewer patents per capita, fewer trademarks. By every metric we have, they look less productive. Now, over time this is a very dangerous trend, right, because Wall Street is saying get bigger, grow the bottom line, and so you keep on trying to get bigger. That is what you need to do to satisfy Wall Street, and so you get bigger, and you've got bigger fixed costs. You've got this bureaucracy that you need to sustain. But as you get bigger, you also become less innovative. So you become more reliant on these old ideas that worked in the past. And then for your new ideas you have to invest in expensive acquisitions. And sometimes those acquisitions don't work out, and eventually your old ideas will no longer bring in new money, and that's when you go belly up. 

The companies are literally starved to death by the drop-off in innovation. Now, why do you see this difference? Why are cities super-linear and companies sub-linear? Well, West argues it's because companies get in the way. When you think about a city, there's nothing to get in the way. It's just free wheeling, chaotic interaction. A mayor can't tell you who to talk to or where to live or which problems to work on. It's just a bunch of individuals, total strangers bumping into each other. And that's a great thing. That unleashes our natural innovation. It unleashes our natural ability to come up with new ideas, to share ideas, to build on the work of others, to form connections that are exciting and worthwhile. Companies, on the other hand, they try to micromanage the innovation process. 

They hire CEOs who make lots of money, who tell people what to work on and who to talk to. They tell us to brainstorm. They invent these hierarchies. They silo knowledge. They stifle horizontal interactions and become very vertical. All these things hold us back. All these things get in the way. So when in doubt, West's advice is very simple. We need to imitate the city. In closing, the imagination has always seemed like a magic trick of matter. 

Which is probably why we've always blamed our best ideas on the muses. The good news is that by finally understanding where our new ideas come from, we can hopefully have a few more of them. The science of creativity can make us a little bit more creative. But we must also be honest. The creative process will never be easy no matter how much we know about neurons or cities. The science of the imagination doesn't fit neatly on a PowerPoint slide, and it can't be summarized in a subtitle. If creativity were that easy, Bob Dylan wouldn't be so famous. In spite of all the clever studies and ingenious experiments, our most essential mental talent remains our most mysterious. The mystery is this. Although the imagination is inspired by the everyday world, by it's flaws and beauties, we are able to see beyond our sources to imagine things that only exist in the mind. 

There was nothing. Now there is something. It's almost like magic. Thank you so much for coming tonight and for listening. It was an honor and pleasure to be here. [APPLAUSE] Thank you.