Imagine: How Creativity Works Read online

  But you know you only used to get juiced in it.

  Juiced in it? It’s an incredibly effective phrase, even though the listener has no idea what it means. It’s not until the next cou-plet that the need for juiced becomes clear:

  And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street

  And now you find out you’re gonna have to get used to it

  Dylan uses the surprising word juiced because it rhymes with used, which is part of the snarling line that gives the stanza its literal meaning. Nevertheless, the innovative use of juice as a verb is one of those poetic flourishes that make “Like a Rolling Stone” so transcendent. It’s a textbook example of how the imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.

  The story of “Like a Rolling Stone” is a story of creative insight. The song was invented in the moment, then hurled into the world. It took only a few seconds before a mental block became a work of art; a season of creative despair gave way to some of the most inspired music of Dylan’s career. In a 1966 interview with Playboy, Dylan assessed the impact of this sudden breakthrough on his music. “Last spring, I guess I was going to quit singing,” he said. “The way things were going, it was a very draggy situation . . . But ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ changed it all: I didn’t care anymore about writing books or poems or whatever. I mean, here was something that I myself could dig.”

  What Dylan dug was the strangeness of the song, the way it sounded like nothing else on the radio. In that lonely cabin, he found a way to fully express himself, to transform the fragments of art in his head into a new kind of song. He wasn’t just writing a pop single — he was rewriting the possibilities of music.

  Ch. 2 ALPHA WAVES (CONDITION BLUE)

  Creativity is the residue of time wasted.

  — Albert Einstein

  This is a story about tape. It begins in the summer of 1925.

  Dick Drew was a sandpaper salesman with the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. He spent a lot of time demonstrating the effectiveness of sandpaper in auto-body shops trying to convince mechanics to buy his brand. Sometimes, after Drew made his sales pitch, he’d sit in the back of the shop and watch the men work. He soon noticed that all of the mechanics shared a common problem. It occurred when the mechanics were applying two-toned paint to a car. The workers would begin by painting everything black. Then they would protect this new coat of paint with taped-on sheets of butcher paper and carefully apply the second shade — usually a sleek line of white or red. Once the paint dried, the paper was removed. Here is where the process failed: the paper was usually attached to the metal with a strong adhesive, which meant that removing the paper and tape often peeled away the newly applied black paint. And so the frustrated workers would begin on that section again, their labor undone.

  After watching this happen several times, Drew realized that the adhesive was too sticky. The workers were only hanging paper; they didn’t need a strong glue. And that’s when Drew had his first insight: sandpaper might help him solve the auto-body problem. Sandpaper, after all, was simply a mixture of adhesive and abrasive. (A tough paper backing coated in glue and then rolled in crushed minerals.) If you left out the abrasive, then you were left with a moderately sticky paper, which is precisely what the mechanics needed.

  When Drew got back to the office after this realization, he began exploring his new idea. The first thing he discovered was that the glue used in sandpaper was also too strong — it ripped the wet paint right off. And so he began experimenting with the adhesive recipe, trying to make the rubber resin a little less sticky. This took him several months. He then had to find the right backing. Most adhesives were applied to woven fabrics, but Drew’s experience as a sandpaper salesman led him to focus on a backing of paper. Unfortunately, he couldn’t think of a way to store the sticky sheets; they kept sticking together, forming a crumpled stack. After two months of struggle, Drew was ordered by his boss, William McKnight, to stop working on the project. The company was in the sandpaper business; Drew should go back to selling industrial abrasive.

  But Drew refused to give up. Although he was stumped, he still stayed past closing time at work, testing out different varieties of backing and recipes for glue. And then, late one night in his office, everything changed. In the time it took to have an insight — that burst of gamma waves erupting in the right hemisphere — Drew grasped the solution to his sticky problem. The idea was simple: Instead of applying the adhesive to square sheets of paper that needed to be stacked, it could be applied to a thin strip of paper that was then rolled up, like a spool of ribbon. The mechanics could unwind the necessary amount of sticky paper and attach it directly to the car, allowing them to paint without tack or glue. Drew called it masking tape.

  Nobody knows where this revelation came from. Some say that Drew was inspired by the car wheels in the auto-body shop; others think he borrowed the idea from the large spools of paper that were shipped to the sandpaper factory. Drew himself had no answer. And yet, the insight happened. Drew was able to imagine a long roll of stickiness, a pressure-sensitive adhesive that could be applied to metal and then ripped off without damaging the paint.

  In retrospect, the idea for a roll of tape seems incredibly obvious; it’s hard to imagine a world where stickiness is limited to glue and tack and sticky sheets. Sure enough, the product was an instant hit in the marketplace, and not only among car mechanics. By 1928, Drew’s company was selling more masking tape than sandpaper.

  1.

  The Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company is now called 3M. The corporate headquarters, just outside St. Paul, looks like a college campus, a sprawling five-hundred-acre landscape of lab buildings, grassy fields, and parking lots. Although the company still sells sandpaper and tape, it has since expanded into an astonishing array of product categories. (The company currently sells more than fifty-five thousand different products, giving it a nearly 1:1 product-to-employee ratio.) A random list of 3M products includes computer touch screens, kitchen sponges, water-purification filters, streetlights, stain-resistant fabrics, lithium ion batteries, home insulation, dental fillings, medical masks, and drug patches.

  What do these products have in common? Nothing at all, except that they were pioneered by 3M. “We’re an unusual company,” says Larry Wendling, a vice president in charge of corporate research. “We have no niche or particular focus. Basically, all we do is come up with new things. It doesn’t really matter what the thing is.” As a result, the company spends nearly 8 percent of its gross revenue on basic research, which makes it one of the biggest spenders in the Fortune 500. While most innovative companies are celebrated for a single innovation with a short lifespan — think of Netscape, AOL, or Atari — 3M has been inventing new products for more than seventy-five years. (The company was recently ranked the third most innovative company in the world, according to a survey of executives. It was beaten by Apple and Google.) Furthermore, 3M products that are less than five years old typically account for 30 percent of annual revenue, a fact that captures the constant churn of innovation at the company. “There’s an astonishing diversity of research going on here,” Wendling says. “I don’t think there’s another place that’s trying to invent the next sticky tape and the next energy-efficient television screen and the next generation of vaccines. We’re doing work in every scientific field.”

  This emphasis on innovation has been a defining feature of the company ever since Dick Drew invented masking tape. Although William McKnight, the CEO of the company at the time, initially disapproved of Drew’s quixotic pursuit, he quickly saw the potential of the new product line. (Adhesives, it turned out, were much more profitable than abrasives. As one 3Mer remarked to me, “Selling tape is a great business: you make it by the mile and sell it by the inch.”) And so McKnight dramatically reorganized the company, investing the tape windfall in a brand-new science lab. He hired dozens of researchers and gave them the freedom to pursue their own inte
rests. That, after all, was the lesson of Dick Drew: even a salesman could invent an important new product.

  And that’s why I’ve come to the 3M labs in the dead of winter. I want to understand how this corporate history of innovation has informed its culture. Over the years, the company has learned a few essential tricks about creativity, and those tricks have been hard-wired into its research practices. “When you’ve been at this for as long as we have, you develop some important techniques for innovation,” Wendling says. “We might not be the sexiest company” — he points to a wall display filled with office-supply products — “but our approach is time-tested. We know what works.”

  Wendling then tells me about the first essential feature of 3M innovation, which is its flexible attention policy. Instead of insisting on constant concentration — requiring every employee to focus on his or her work for eight hours a day — 3M encourages people to make time for activities that at first glance might seem unproductive. Are you struggling with a difficult technical problem? Take a walk across campus. (When I visited 3M, in the late winter, the fields were full of grazing deer and employees stroll-ing in their puffy winter parkas.) Are you stuck on a challenge that seems impossible? Lie down on a couch by a sunny window. Daydream. Play a game of pinball. While 3M demands a high level of productivity — the parking lot was full of cars at 8:00 p.m. — it also encourages employees to take regular breaks.

  One important consequence of this approach was the invention of the 15 percent rule, a concept that allows every researcher to spend 15 percent of his or her workday pursuing speculative new ideas. (People at 3M refer to this time as the bootlegging hour.) The only requirement is that the researchers share their ideas with their colleagues. While bootlegging time has since been imitated at other innovative companies — Google, for instance, gives its software engineers the same freedom — the concept was first implemented at 3M. (The Google program is officially known as Innovation Time Off. That program has led directly to the development of Gmail, Google’s successful e-mail program, and AdSense, a five-billion-dollar-a-year platform that allows Internet publishers to run Google ads on their sites. Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of search products and user experience, estimates that at least 50 percent of new Google products begin as Innovation Time Off speculations.) “It’s a little amusing that people think Google invented this idea,” Wendling says. “We’ve been doing it here forever. At first, people thought we were crazy. They said employees need to be managed. They said the scientists would just waste their free time, that we’d be squandering all our R and D money. But here’s the thing about the fifteen percent rule: it works.”

  The science of insight supports the 3M attention policy. Joydeep Bhattacharya, a psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, has used EEG to help explain why interrupting one’s focus — perhaps with a walk outside or a game of Ping-Pong — can be so helpful. Interestingly, Bhattacharya has found that it’s possible to predict that a person will solve an insight puzzle up to eight seconds before the insight actually arrives. “I never expected that we’d find such a remote precursor,” he says. “It seems really strange that I can anticipate someone else’s moment of insight before they are even aware of the answer. But that’s what we found.” What is this predictive brain signal? The essential element is a steady rhythm of alpha waves emanating from the right hemisphere. While the precise function of alpha waves remains mysterious, they’re closely associated with relaxing activities, such as taking a warm shower. In fact, alpha waves are so crucial for insight that, according to Bhattacharya, subjects with insufficient alpha-wave activity are unable to utilize hints provided by the researchers. “I can give these people really obvious clues, but it still won’t help,” he says. “They will never get it.” One of Bhattacharya’s favorite insight puzzles goes like this: A man has mar-ried twenty women in a small town. All of the women are still alive and none of them are divorced. The man has broken no laws. Who is the man? Bhattacharya will let people struggle for up to three minutes before he starts giving them hints. He’ll suggest possible analogies and fill his sentences with thinly veiled references to religion. However, unless the subjects are thinking in the exact right way — unless those alpha waves are visible on the EEG monitor — they will never have the insight: the man is a priest.

  Why is a relaxed state of mind so important for creative insights? When our minds are at ease — when those alpha waves are rippling through the brain — we’re more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inward, toward that stream of remote associations emanating from the right hemisphere. In contrast, when we are diligently focused, our attention tends to be directed outward, toward the details of the problems we’re trying to solve. While this pattern of attention is necessary when solving problems an-alytically, it actually prevents us from detecting the connections that lead to insights. “That’s why so many insights happen during warm showers,” Bhattacharya says. “For many people, it’s the most relaxing part of the day.” It’s not until we’re being massaged by warm water, unable to check our e-mail, that we’re finally able to hear the quiet voices in the backs of our heads telling us about the insight. The answers have been there all along — we just weren’t listening.

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

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

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

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