Imagine: How Creativity Works Read online

  One day, Raichle decided to analyze the fMRI data collected when the subjects were just lying in the scanner waiting for the next task. (He needed a baseline of activity.) To his surprise, Raichle discovered that the brains of subjects were not quiet or subdued. Instead, they were overflowing with thoughts, their cortices lit up like skyscrapers at night. “When you don’t use a muscle, that muscle isn’t doing much,” Raichle says. “But when your brain is supposedly doing nothing, it’s really doing a tremendous amount.”

  Raichle was fascinated by the surge in brain activity between tasks. At first, he couldn’t figure out what was happening. But while sitting in his lab one afternoon, he came up with the answer: The subjects were daydreaming! (“I was probably daydreaming when the idea came to me,” Raichle says.) Because they were bored silly in the claustrophobic scanner, they were forced to entertain themselves. This insight immediately led Raichle to ask the next obvious question: Why did daydreaming consume so much energy? “The brain is a very efficient machine,” he says. “I knew that there must be a good reason for all this neural activity. I just didn’t know what the reason was.”

  After several years of patient empiricism, Raichle began outlining a mental system that he called the default network, since it appears to be the default mode of thought. (We’re an absent-minded species, constantly disappearing down mental rabbit holes.) This network is most engaged when a person is performing a task that requires little conscious attention, such as routine driving on the highway or reading a tedious book. People had previously assumed that daydreaming was a lazy mental process, but Raichle’s fMRI studies demonstrated that the brain is extremely busy during the default state. There seems to be a particularly elaborate electrical conversation between the front and back parts of the brain, with the prefrontal folds (located just behind the eyes) firing in sync with the posterior cingulate, medial temporal lobe, and precuneus. These cortical areas don’t normally interact directly; they have different functions and are part of distinct neural pathways. It’s not until we start to daydream that they begin to work closely together.

  All this mental activity comes with a very particular purpose. Instead of responding to the outside world, the brain starts to explore its inner database, searching for relationships in a more relaxed fashion. (This mental process often runs parallel with increased activity in the right hemisphere.) Virginia Woolf, in her novel To the Lighthouse, eloquently describes this form of thinking as it unfolds inside the mind of a character named Lily:

  Certainly she was losing consciousness of the outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things . . . her mind kept throwing things up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting . . .

  A daydream is that “fountain spurting” as the brain blends together concepts that are normally filed away in different areas. The result is an ability to notice new connections, to see the overlaps that we normally overlook. Take, for instance, the story of Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M in the paper-products division. It begins on a frigid Sunday morning in 1974 in the front pews of a Presbyterian church in north St. Paul, Minnesota. A few weeks earlier, Fry had attended a Tech Forum presentation by Spencer Silver, an engineer working on — you guessed it — adhesives. Silver had developed an extremely weak glue, a paste so feeble it could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Like everyone else in the room, Fry had patiently listened to the presentation and then failed to come up with any practical applications for the compound. “It seemed like a dead-end idea,” Fry says. “I quickly put it out of my thoughts.” What good, after all, is a glue that doesn’t stick?

  That Sunday, however, the paste reentered Fry’s thoughts, al-beit in a rather unlikely context. “I sang in the church choir,” Fry remembers, “and I would often put little pieces of paper into the music on Wednesday night to mark where we were singing. Sometimes, before Sunday morning, those little papers would fall out.” This annoyed Fry, because it meant that he would often spend the service frantically thumbing through his hymnal, looking for the right page. But then, during a particularly boring sermon, Fry engaged in a little daydreaming. He began thinking about bookmarks, and how what he needed was a bookmark that would stick to the paper but wouldn’t tear it when it was removed. And that’s when Fry remembered Spencer Silver and his ineffective glue. He immediately realized that Silver’s patented formula — this barely sticky adhesive — could help create the perfect bookmark.

  So Fry started working, in his bootlegging time, on this new product for his hymnal. After several months of chemical tinkering — the first bookmarks destroyed his books, leaving behind a gluey residue — Fry developed a working prototype, which became the basis for a small test run. “I gave some of them to my cohorts in the lab, to secretaries, to the librarians,” he says. “Basically anybody who would take them.” Although people found the product useful — it was better than folding down page corners — nobody wanted a refill. Instead of disposing of the bookmarks, Fry’s coworkers just transferred them from book to book.

  Fry was ready to give up. But then, a few weeks later, Fry had a second epiphany. He was reading a report and had a question about a specific paragraph. However, instead of writing a note directly on the paper, Fry cut out a square of the bookmark material, stuck it onto the page, and wrote his question there. He sent the report to his supervisor; Fry’s supervisor jotted down his response on a different sticky square, applied it to another document, and sent that back. The men immediately realized they’d discovered a new way to communicate. Instead of writing separate memos full of page references and excerpted quotes, they could stick questions and comments directly onto the text. And these sticky little papers weren’t useful just for documents; every surface in the office was now a potential bulletin board. This time when Fry gave out the products to colleagues, he suggested that they write on them. Within weeks, the 3M offices were plastered with canary-yellow squares. The Post-it note was born.

  It’s not an accident that Arthur Fry was daydreaming when he came up with the idea for a sticky bookmark. A more disciplined thought process wouldn’t have found the connection between Spencer Silver’s weak adhesive and the annoying tendency of those pieces of paper to fall out of the choral book. The errant daydream is what made Post-it notes possible. The boring sermon didn’t hurt either.

  Jonathan Schooler, the psychologist who helped pioneer the study of insight, has recently begun studying the benefits of daydreams. His lab has demonstrated that people who consistently engage in more daydreaming score significantly higher on measures of creativity (to evaluate daydreaming, he gave subjects a slow section of War and Peace and then timed how long it took them to start thinking about something else). “What these tests measure is someone’s ability to find hidden relationships that can help them solve a problem,” Schooler says. “That kind of thinking is the essence of creativity. And it turns out that people who daydream a lot are much better at it.”

  However, not all daydreams are equally effective at inspiring useful new ideas. In his experiments, Schooler distinguishes between two types of daydreaming. The first type occurs when people notice they are daydreaming only when prodded by the researcher. Although they’ve been told to press a button as soon as they realize their minds have started to wander, these people fail to press the button. The second type of daydreaming occurs when people catch themselves during the experiment — they notice they’re daydreaming on their own. According to Schooler’s data, individuals who are unaware that their minds have started wandering don’t exhibit increased creativity. “The point is that it’s not enough to just daydream,” Schooler says. “Letting your mind drift off is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining enough awareness so that even when you start to daydream you can interrupt yourself and notice a creative thought.” In other words, the reason Fry is such a good inventor — he has more than twenty patents to his name, in addition to Post-it notes — isn’t simply that he’s a pr
olific mind-wanderer. It’s that he’s able to pay attention to his daydreams and to detect those moments when his daydreams generate insights.

  This helps explain another interesting experiment from Schooler’s lab, described in a 2009 paper wittily entitled “Lost in the Sauce.” In this study, Schooler once again had undergraduates read a boring passage from War and Peace. However, he first gave some of the students a generous serving of vodka and cran-berry juice. Not surprisingly, the drunk readers had a tougher time paying attention to the text than their sober classmates and were much more likely to engage in idle daydreams. More important, though, the students given alcohol almost always failed to notice they had stopped paying attention to Tolstoy until probed. Schooler suggests that’s because alcohol induces a particularly intense state of mind-wandering, which he refers to as zoning out. “This is why it’s nice to have a beer or two after work,” Schooler says. “We become a little less aware of what we’re thinking. But that awareness is also the key to a productive session of mind-wandering. You might solve a problem while drunk, but you probably won’t notice the answer.”

  The lesson is that productive daydreaming requires a delicate mental balancing act. On the one hand, translating boredom into a relaxed form of thinking leads to a thought process characterized by unexpected connections, and as a result, a moment of mo-notony can become a rich source of insights. On the other hand, letting the mind wander so far away that it gets lost isn’t useful; even in the midst of an entertaining daydream, you need to maintain a foothold in the real world.

  Schooler has begun applying this research to his own life: he now takes a dedicated daydreaming walk every day. He shows me his favorite route, a hiking trail on the bluffs above a scenic Santa Barbara beach. The landscape is chaparral and oak trees; the only sound is the rhythm of the waves below. “This is where I come to relax,” Schooler says. “But just because I’m relaxed doesn’t mean I’m not working. What I realized is that the kind of thinking I do here [on the hike] is so useful that I needed to build it into my work routine. It wasn’t enough to just daydream in my spare moments, while sitting in traffic or waiting in line. I needed to be more disciplined about my mind wandering.” And so, every afternoon, Schooler parks his car on the Pacific Coast Highway, leaves his iPhone behind, and walks along these seaside cliffs. “I never have a plan or a list of things I need to think about,” he says.

  “Instead, I just let my mind go wherever it wants. And you know what? This is where I have all my best ideas.”

  • • •

  The advantage of knowing where insights come from is that it can make it easier to generate insights in the first place. When we’re struggling with seemingly impossible problems, it’s important to find time to unwind, to eavesdrop on all those remote associations coming from the right hemisphere. Instead of drinking another cup of coffee, indulge in a little daydreaming. Rather than relentlessly focusing, take a warm shower, or play some Ping-Pong, or walk on the beach.

  Look at this recent experiment, published in Science. These psychologists, at the University of British Columbia, were interested in looking at how various colors influence the imagination. They recruited six hundred subjects, most of them undergraduates, and had them perform a variety of basic cognitive tests displayed against red, blue, or neutral backgrounds.

  The differences were striking. When people took tests in the red condition, they were much better at skills that required accu-racy and attention to detail, such as catching spelling mistakes or keeping random numbers in short-term memory. According to the scientists, this is because people automatically associate red with danger, which makes them more alert and aware.

  The color blue, however, carried a completely different set of psychological benefits. While people in the blue group performed worse on short-term memory tasks, they did far better on those requiring some imagination, such as coming up with creative uses for a brick or designing a children’s toy out of simple geometric shapes. In fact, subjects in the blue condition generated twice as many creative outputs as subjects in the red condition. (Interestingly, exposing subjects to an incandescent light bulb can also increase performance on a variety of insight puzzles. Because the lit bulb is a cliché of insight, the cheap cultural artifact makes people more sensitive to those quiet insights coming from the right hemisphere.)

  We can now begin to understand why being surrounded by blue walls makes us more creative. According to the scientists, the color automatically triggers associations with the sky and ocean. We think about expansive horizons and diffuse light, sandy beaches and lazy summer days; alpha waves instantly increase. (And it’s not just blueness; the scientists speculate that any open, sunny space can lead to increased creativity. Architecture has real cognitive consequences.) This sort of mental relaxation makes it easier to daydream and pay attention to insights; we’re less focused on what’s right in front of us and more aware of the possibilities simmering in our imaginations.

  There’s something deeply surprising about these data. We tend to assume that some people are simply more creative than others, that originality is a predetermined personality trait: if a person isn’t born with the correct kind of brain, he’ll never be able to compose an original song or come up with an idea as innovative as Post-it notes. But creativity isn’t a fixed feature of the mind — that’s why merely exposing people to the color blue can double their creative output. The imagination is vaster then we can imagine. We just need to learn how to listen.

  Ch. 3 THE UNCONCEALING

  It was a flash of inspiration. Kind of a thirty-year flash.

  — Charles Eames

  The poet w. h. auden was a drug addict. He began every day the same way: He sat at his cluttered desk and gulped a cup of strong black coffee. Then he smoked a cigarette. Auden needed the caffeine and nicotine — “I need them quite desperately,” he admitted — but they were never enough. And so, before he began to write, Auden took a little white pill, Benzedrine, an amphetamine that accelerated his brain. After just a single dose, he was able to think with astonishing speed, and the intricate poetry poured onto the sheets of blank paper. “The drug is a labor-saving device,” Auden said. “It turns me into a working machine.”

  Auden was introduced to Benzedrine in 1938 by an American editor while he was on a short vacation in New York City. The drug wasn’t illegal — it had been marketed since 1927 as a treatment for asthma — and was regularly prescribed by doctors for a wide variety of other ailments as well, including obesity, impo-tence, and migraines. Although Auden began taking the amphetamine to stay awake — he wanted to explore Manhattan night-clubs — he quickly realized that the drug was a powerful writing tool that helped him concentrate for hours at a time on the details of his poetry. Writing verse was an exhausting process for him, but the pills allowed him to persist, to play with his words until they were perfect. (When he was done working, Auden would wash away the Benzedrine with a martini and barbiturates.) He liked to quote Valéry on the subject: “A person is a poet if his imagination is stimulated by the difficulties inherent in his art and not if his imagination is dulled by them.” Auden was stimulated by those difficulties, but it still helped to take some stimulants.

  Auden wasn’t the only literary speed addict; writers and amphetamines have a rich and tangled history. Robert Louis Steven-son wrote The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde during a six-day cocaine binge. Graham Greene, James Agee, and Philip K. Dick were all Benzedrine addicts; they treated the drug like a multivitamin for the mind. Dick, for instance, once remarked that his work could be classified into two categories: “The writing that was done under the influence of drugs and the writing I’ve done when I’m not under the influence of drugs. But when I’m not under the influence of drugs what I do is I write about drugs.” Like Auden, Dick started taking Benzedrine to fulfill a practical need: he needed to stay awake to write. “I had to write so much in order to make a living because our pay rates were so low,” he said. “The
amphetamines gave me the energy.” While addicted to Benzedrine, Dick completed sixteen novels in five years.

  Or look at Jack Kerouac: he steeped his brain in Benzedrine so that he could write On the Road in an epic three-week “kick-writing” session, working eighteen-hour days hunched over his tiny typewriter, a scroll of telegraph paper fed into the machine. The result was a first draft of the Beat novel. While Kerouac would later edit the prose — the 120-foot-long scroll is crammed with marks and revisions — the sense of breathless speed remained. You can hear the amphetamine in the run-on sentences.

  And it wasn’t just writers who abused Benzedrine. Paul Erdos, one of the most productive mathematicians of the twentieth century, was a notorious amphetamine addict. (He coauthored 1,475 peer-reviewed-journal articles over the course of his career, or nearly a paper every two weeks.) Erdos, a skinny man with oversize glasses, lived out of a single suitcase for most of his life. He seemed to subsist on little more than coffee and caffeine tablets and is said to have remarked that “a mathematician is a machine for turning coffee into theorems.” (Coffee is a stimulant, like a very mild version of Benzedrine, and Bennett Alan Wein-berg and Bonnie K. Bealer, in The World of Caffeine, argue that the spread of caffeinated beverages in the seventeenth century made the Industrial Revolution possible, since it allowed “large numbers of people to coordinate their work schedules by giving them the energy to start work at a given time and continue it as long as necessary.” Before coffee and tea were widely available, the European breakfast drink of choice had been beer, so the psychological contrast was especially dramatic.) Erdos supplemented those uppers with amphetamines, and when he was absorbed in a particularly difficult problem he was prone to bouts of weight loss. Ron Graham, a friend and fellow mathematician, once bet Erdos five hundred dollars that he couldn’t abstain from amphetamines for thirty days. Erdos won the wager but complained that the progress of mathematics had been set back by a month: “Before, when I looked at a piece of blank paper my mind was filled with ideas,” he complained. “Now all I see is a blank piece of paper.” At first glance, this kind of focused thought process does not seem very imaginative. Creativity is typically associated with epiphanies, not struggling to stay focused. We like to talk about our revelations, not the painstaking work that surrounds them. Although people value grit and persistence — or at least we say we do — we don’t admire these traits, at least not in the same way that we admire acts of radical genius. In fact, most of us see perseverance as a distinctly uncreative approach, the sort of strategy that people with mediocre ideas are forced to rely on. And this is why it’s easy to disregard Auden as just a doped-up copyeditor or dismiss Jack Kerouac as a second-rate writer. (After reading On the Road, Truman Capote remarked, “That’s not writing — that’s typing.”)