Imagine: How Creativity Works Read online

  Furthermore, because the act of invention is often a collaborative process — we are inspired by other people — it’s essential that we learn to collaborate in the right way. The first half of this book focuses on individual creativity, while the second half shows what happens when people come together. Thanks to some fascinating new research, such as an analysis of the partnerships behind thousands of Broadway musicals and an investigation into the effectiveness of brainstorming, we can begin to understand why some teams and companies are so much more creative than others. Their success is not an accident.

  For most of human history, people have believed that the imagination is inherently inscrutable, an impenetrable biological gift. As a result, we cling to a series of false myths about what creativity is and where it comes from. These myths don’t just mislead — they also interfere with the imagination. In addition to looking at elegant experiments and scientific studies, we’ll examine creativity as it is experienced in the real world. We’ll learn about Bob Dylan’s writing method and the drug habits of poets.

  We’ll spend time with a bartender who thinks like a chemist, and an autistic surfer who invented a new surfing move. We’ll look at a website that helps solve seemingly impossible problems, and we’ll go behind the scenes at Pixar. We’ll watch Yo-Yo Ma improvise, and we’ll uncover the secrets of consistently innovative companies.

  The point is to collapse the layers of description separating the nerve cell from the finished symphony, the cortical circuit from the successful product. Creativity shouldn’t be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldn’t be thought of as a process reserved for artists and inventors and other “creative types.” The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code. At any given moment, the brain is automatically forming new associations, continually connecting an everyday x to an unexpected y. This book is about how that happens. It is the story of how we imagine.

  ALONE

  Ch. 1 BOB DYLAN’S BRAIN

  Always carry a light bulb.

  — Bob Dylan

  Bob dylan looks bored. It’s May of 1965 and he’s slumped in a quilted armchair at the Savoy, a fancy London hotel. His Ray-Bans are pulled down low; his eyes stuck in a distant stare. The camera turns away — Dylan’s weariness feels like an accusa-tion — and starts to pan around the room, capturing the ragged entourage of folkies and groupies following the singer on the final week of his European tour.

  For the previous four months, Dylan had been struggling to maintain a grueling performance schedule. He’d traveled across the Northeast of the United States on a bus, playing in small college towns and big-city theaters. (Dylan played five venues in New Jersey alone.) Then he crossed over to the West Coast and crammed in a hectic few weeks of concerts and promotion. He’d been paraded in front of the press and asked an endless series of inane questions, from “What is the truth?” to “Why is there a cat on the cover of your last album?” At times, Dylan lost his temper and became obstinate with reporters. “I’ve got nothing to say about these things I write,” he insisted. “I just write them. There’s no great message. Stop asking me to explain.” When Dylan wasn’t surly, he was often sarcastic, telling journalists that he collected monkey wrenches, that he was born in Acapulco, and that his songs were inspired by “chaos, watermelons, and clocks.” That last line almost made him smile.

  By the time Dylan arrived in London, it was clear that the trip was taking a toll. The singer was skinny from insomnia and pills; his nails were yellow from nicotine; and his skin had a ghostly pal-lor. (He looked, someone said, like an “underfed angel.”) Dylan was taking too many drugs and was surrounded by too many people taking drugs. In a classic scene from Don’t Look Back, a documentary about the 1965 tour by D. A. Pennebaker, the singer returns to an empty suite. “Welcome home,” says a member of his entourage. “It’s the first time that this room hasn’t been full of a bunch of insane lunatics, man, that I can remember . . . It’s the first time it’s been cool around here.” A few minutes later, there’s a knock on the door. The lunatics have arrived.

  Dylan couldn’t escape from the crowds, so he learned to disappear into himself. He packed a typewriter in with his luggage and could turn anything into a desk; he searched for words while surrounded by the chaos of tour. When he got particularly frustrated, he would tear his work into smaller and smaller pieces, shredding them and throwing them in the wastebasket. (Marianne Faithfull referred to such moments as “tantrums of genius.”) Although Dylan’s creativity remained a constant — he wrote because he didn’t know what else to do — there were increasing signs that he was losing interest in creating music. 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. In Don’t Look Back, when a fan tells Dylan she doesn’t like his new single — it featured an electric guitar — his reply is withering: “Oh, you’re one of those. I understand now.” And then he turns and walks away.

  Before long, it all became too much. While touring in England, Dylan decided that he was leading an impossible life, that this existence couldn’t be sustained. The only talent he cared about — his ceaseless creativity — was being ruined by fame. The breaking point probably came after a brief vacation in Por-tugal, where Dylan got a vicious case of food poisoning. The illness forced him to stay in bed for a week, giving the singer 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 words 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.”

  In other words, Dylan was sick of his music. He was sick of strumming his acoustic guitar and standing in the spotlight by himself; sick of the politics and the expectations; sick of the burden of being a spokesman. People assumed that his songs always carried a message, that his art was really about current events. But Dylan didn’t want to have an opinion on everything; he had no interest in being defined by the sentimental self-righteousness of “Blowin’ in the Wind.” The problem was that he didn’t know what to do next: he felt trapped by his past but had no plan for the future. The only thing he was sure of was that this life couldn’t last. Whenever Dylan read about himself in the newspaper, he made the same observation: “God, I’m glad I’m not me,” he said. “I’m glad I’m not that.”

  The last shows were in London at a sold-out Royal Albert Hall. It was here that Dylan told his manager he was quitting the music business. He was finished with singing and songwriting and was going to move to a tiny cabin in Woodstock, New York. Although Dylan had become a pop icon — the prophetic poet of his generation — he was ready to renounce it all, to surrender the celebrity and status, if it meant he might 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 was leaving the folk scene of the Village behind, heading upstate to an empty house. He was done writing songs — he had nothing else to say. Dylan didn’t even bring his guitar.

  Every creative journey begins with a problem. It starts with a feeling of frustration, the dull ache of not being able to find the answer. We have worked hard, but we’ve hit the wall. We have no idea what to do next.

  When we tell one another stories about creativity, we tend to leave out this phase of the creative process. We neglect to mention those days when we wanted to quit, when we believed that our problems were impossible to solve. Because such failures contradict the romantic version of events — there is nothing triumphant about a false start — we forget all about them. (The failures also remind us how close we came to having no stories to tell.) Instead, we skip straight to the breakthroughs. We tell the happy endings first.

  The danger of telling this narrative is that the feeling of
frustration — the act of being stumped — is an essential part of the creative process. Before we can find the answer — before we probably even know the question — we must be immersed in disappointment, convinced that a solution is beyond our reach. We need to have wrestled with the problem and lost. And so we give up and move to Woodstock because we will never create what we want to create.

  It’s often only at this point, after we’ve stopped searching for the answer, that the answer often arrives. (The imagination has a wicked sense of irony.) And when a solution does appear, it doesn’t come in dribs and drabs; the puzzle isn’t solved one piece at a time. Rather, the solution is shocking in its completeness. All of a sudden, the answer to the problem that seemed so daunting becomes incredibly obvious. We curse ourselves for not seeing it sooner.

  This is the clichéd moment of insight that people know so well from stories of Archimedes in the bathtub, and Isaac Newton under the apple tree. It’s the kind of mental process described by Coleridge and Einstein, Picasso and Mozart. When people think about creative breakthroughs, they tend to imagine them as incandescent flashes, like a light bulb going on inside the brain.

  These tales of insight all share a few essential features that scientists use to define the “insight experience.” The first stage is the impasse: Before there can be a breakthrough, there has to be a block. Before Bob Dylan could reinvent himself, writing the best music of his career, he needed to believe that he had nothing left to say.

  If we’re lucky, however, that hopelessness eventually gives way to a revelation. This is another essential feature of moments of insight: the feeling of certainty that accompanies the new idea. After Archimedes had his eureka moment — he realized that the displacement of water could be used to measure the volume of objects — he immediately leaped out of the bath and ran to tell the king about his solution. He arrived at the palace stark-naked and dripping wet.

  At first glance, the moment of insight can seem like an impenetrable enigma. We are stuck and then we’re not, and we have no idea what happened in between. It’s as if the cortex is sharing one of its secrets.

  The question, of course, is how these insights happen. What allows someone to transform a mental block into a breakthrough? And why does the answer appear when it’s least expected? This is the mystery of Bob Dylan, and the only way to understand the mystery is to venture inside the brain, to break open the black box of the imagination.

  1.

  Mark Beeman was stumped. It was the early 1990s and Beeman, a young scientist at the National Institutes of Health, was studying patients who had suffered damage to the right hemisphere of the brain. “The doctors would always tell these people, ‘Wow, you’re so lucky,’ ” Beeman remembers. “They’d go on about how the right hemisphere was the minor hemisphere — it doesn’t do much, and it doesn’t do anything with language.” Those consoling words re-flected the scientific consensus that the right half of the brain was mostly unnecessary. In his 1981 Nobel lecture, the neuroscientist Roger Sperry summarized the prevailing view of the right hemisphere at the time he began studying it: The right hemisphere was “not only mute and agraphic but also dyslexic, word-deaf and apraxic, and lacking generally in higher cognitive function.” In other words, it was thought to be a useless chunk of tissue.

  But Beeman noticed that many patients with right hemisphere damage nonetheless had serious cognitive problems even though the left hemisphere had been spared. He started making a list of their deficits. The list was long. “Some of these patients couldn’t understand jokes or sarcasm or metaphors,” Beeman says. “Others had a tough time using a map or making sense of paintings. These might not seem like debilitating problems, but they were still very unsettling for these people, especially because they weren’t supposed to exist. Their doctors had told them not to worry because the right hemisphere wasn’t supposed to be important.” The struggles of these patients led Beeman to reconsider the function of the right side of the brain. At first, he couldn’t figure out what all these deficits had in common. What did humor have to do with navigation? What possible link existed between sarcasm and visual art? The mental problems triggered by right hemisphere damage just seemed so incomprehensibly varied. “I couldn’t come up with a decent explanation,” Beeman remembers. “I couldn’t connect the dots.”

  And then, just when Beeman was about to give up, he had an idea. Perhaps the purpose of the right hemisphere was doing the very thing he was trying to do: find the subtle connections between seemingly unrelated things. (This notion of the right hemisphere as a connection machine originated in the 1870s with the English neurologist John Hughlings Jackson. After studying numerous patients with injuries to the right side of the brain, Jackson concluded that, while the left hemisphere was suited for logical analysis and “willfull speech,” the right hemisphere was focused on finding “associative laws.”) Beeman realized that all of the problems experienced by his patients involved making sense of the whole, seeing not just the parts but how they hang together.

  “The world is so complex that the brain has to process it in two different ways at the same time,” Beeman says. “It needs to see the forest and the trees. The right hemisphere is what helps you see the forest.”

  Take the language deficits caused by right hemisphere damage. Beeman speculated that, while the left hemisphere handles denotation — it stores the literal meanings of words — the right hemisphere deals with connotation, or all the meanings that can’t be looked up in the dictionary. When you read a poem or laugh at the punch line of a joke, you are relying in large part on the right hemisphere and its ability to uncover linguistic associations. Metaphors are a perfect example of this. From the perspective of the brain, a metaphor is a bridge between two ideas that, at least on the surface, are not equivalent or related. When Romeo declares that “Juliet is the sun,” we know that he isn’t saying his beloved is a massive, flaming ball of hydrogen. We understand that Romeo is trafficking in metaphor, calling attention to aspects of Juliet that might also apply to that bright orb in the sky. She might not be a star, but perhaps she lights up his world in the same way the sun illuminates the earth.

  How does the brain understand the line “Juliet is the sun”?

  The left hemisphere focuses on the literal definition of the words, but that isn’t particularly helpful. A metaphor, after all, can’t be grasped by making a list of the adjectives that describe both entities. (In the case of sun and Juliet, that would be a very short list.) We can grasp the connection between the two nouns only by relying on their overlapping associations, by detecting the nu-anced qualities they might have in common. This understanding is most likely to occur in the right hemisphere, since it’s uniquely able to zoom out and parse the sentence from a more distant point of view.

  This hemisphere’s ability to “see the forest” doesn’t apply just to language. A study conducted in the 1940s asked people with various kinds of brain damage to copy a picture of a house. Interestingly, the patients drew very different landscapes depend-ing on which hemisphere remained intact. Patients reliant on the left hemisphere because the right hemisphere had been incapacitated depicted a house that was clearly nonsensical: front doors floated in space; roofs were upside down. However, even though these patients distorted the general form of the house, they carefully sketched its specifics and devoted lots of effort to capturing the shape of the bricks in the chimney or the wrinkles in the window curtains. (When asked to draw a person, this type of patient might draw a single hand, or two eyes, and nothing else.) In contrast, patients who were forced to rely on the right hemisphere tended to focus on the overall shape of the structure. Their pictures lacked details, but these patients got the essential architecture right. They focused on the whole.

  The challenge for Beeman was finding a way to study these more abstract cognitive skills. He wanted to understand the right hemisphere — he just didn’t know which questions to ask. “The right hemisphere was tainted by all this pop-psychology st
uff about right-brain people being more artistic or imaginative,” Beeman says. “And so when you said you wanted to investigate that kind of thinking in the right hemisphere, grant committees assumed you weren’t very serious. Studying metaphors and holistic thinking seemed like a sure way to ruin a scientific career.” But in 1993, Beeman heard a talk on moments of insight by Jonathan Schooler, a psychologist now at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Schooler presented the results of a simple experiment: he’d put undergraduates in a tiny room and given them a series of difficult creative puzzles. Here’s a sample question:

  A giant inverted steel pyramid is perfectly balanced on its point.

  Any movement of the pyramid will cause it to topple over. Underneath the pyramid is a $100 bill. How do you remove the bill without disturbing the pyramid?

  Reflect, for a moment, on your own thought process as you try to solve the puzzle. Almost everyone begins by visualizing the pyramid perched precariously on the valuable piece of green paper. Your next thought probably involves some sort of crane that would lift the pyramid into the air. (Unfortunately, such a con-traption violates the rules of the puzzle.) Then you might imagine a way of sliding the money out without tearing the bill. Unfortunately, for most people, no workable solutions come to mind, which is why they reach the impasse stage. The subject gets flustered and frustrated, since he has followed his train of thought to its logical conclusion. And then he starts to give up. “One of the common reactions is for people to get annoyed at the scientist,” Schooler says. “They say: ‘Why’d you give me this puzzle? It’s stupid. It’s impossible.’ You have to reassure them that the problem really has a solution.”

  At this point in the study, Schooler began giving the subjects hints. He subliminally flashed them a sentence with the word fire or told the subjects to think about the meaning of remove. Interestingly, these hints were much more effective when selectively presented to the left eye, which is connected to the right hemisphere. “We’d give people these funny goggles that allowed us to flash hints to one eye at a time,” Schooler says. “And it was startling how you could flash a really obvious hint to the right eye [and hence left hemisphere] and it wouldn’t make a difference. They still wouldn’t get it. But then you’d flash the exact same hint to the other eye, and it would generate the insight. Only the right hemisphere knew what to do with the information.” (If you’re still wondering, the solution is to set the hundred-dollar bill on fire. The insight, then, is that the bill just needs to be removed, not salvaged.)