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.