Jonah Lehrer on Creativity

Jonah Lehrer
Photo by Nina Subin
New York Times

I think this is my third time to blog on Jonah Lehrer, but that shouldn't surprise anyone used to my blog since I'm noticeably intrigued by the art of thinking clearly, critically, and creatively -- though the chronological order for these three might be the reverse if they occur in logically sequential steps. Anyway, I recently read Michiko Kakutani's review -- "How to Cultivate Eureka Moments" (NYT, April 2, 2012) -- of Lehrer's new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works. Based on Kakutani's report, the art of thinking outside of the box is largely a matter of taking two or more old ideas and putting them together in new ways for new applications:

The 18th-century philosopher David Hume, Mr. Lehrer notes, argued that invention was often an act of recombination, of compounding an idea or transposing it from one field to another:

"Johannes Gutenberg transformed his knowledge of wine presses into an idea for a printing machine capable of mass-producing words. The Wright brothers used their knowledge of bicycle manufacturing to invent the airplane[, for t]heir first flying craft was . . . [largely] a bicycle with wings . . . . George de Mestral came up with Velcro after noticing burrs clinging to the fur of his dog. And Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed . . . [Google's] search algorithm . . . by applying the ranking method . . . for academic articles to . . . the World Wide Web[, . . . the] hyperlink . . . [being] like a citation."

In each case, Mr. Lehrer points out, "the radical concept was merely a new mixture of old ideas."

That's sort of comforting. We don't need radically new ideas to be creative; we just need to see new applications for old ideas combined with other old ideas. Easier said than done, no doubt, but Lehrer offers advice:

[G]roup interaction appears to play a key role in innovation . . . . Mr. Lehrer makes a strong case for cities as incubators of innovation . . . . [H]e argues that the sheer density of urban life, "the proximity of all those overlapping minds," forces people to mingle and interact with a diversity of individuals. This . . . creates exactly the sort of collision of cultures and classes that often yields new ideas . . . . The jostle and serendipity of city life, he believes, can provide a model for how the Internet might be retooled to accelerate creativity[, . . . . so he suggests that "i]nstead of sharing links with just our friends, or commenting anonymously on blogs, or filtering the world with algorithms to fit our interests, we must engage with strangers and strange ideas . . . . The Internet has such creative potential; it's so ripe with weirdness and originality, so full of people eager to share their work and ideas. What we need now is a virtual world that brings us together for real."

Collaboration? Sorry folks. Like Mr. Incredible, I work alone. On the other hand . . . that working style didn't work out too well for him, did it? And in fact, I have often collaborated with others. That has worked best when the others are open-minded and flexible, for I'm not. Just kidding. I'm also open-minded and flexible, or at least try to be.

Indeed, I try my hardest to be more than one person myself, so you (or I) might say that I never work alone, for I am 'Legion' . . .

On Lying about Dylan . . .

David Kinney

David Kenny, in a New York Times column, "Freewheelin': Bob Dylan, Jonah Lehrer and the Truth" (August 2, 2012), notes the irony of Jonah Lehrer making up quotes he attributed to Bob Dylan:

He earned a place among journalism’s shamed stars by playing it fast and loose in a story, coincidentally enough, about a cultural icon known for liking his facts slippery.

Lehrer, who ought to have been teaching us to imagine how creativity works, instead taught us a moral lesson by way of a bad example, lying about a creative artist known for being a man with a penchant toward 'telling stories' about himself:

In 2004, when Bob Dylan published his memoir, "Chronicles: Volume One," it was hailed for its striking candor. In it, he tells the story of arriving in New York and hitting it big in the 1960s, and about losing his way and rediscovering himself in the 1980s. The critics cheered. Finally, the Sphinx was telling it like it was.

Dylan obsessives knew better than to take him at his word. This was the master fabulist, a man of many masks, king of the tricksters, and memoir is the least dependable of genres.

Everyone knows Dylan 'lies', but he's a creative artist writing a memoir, so he gets a free pass, whereas Lehrer . . .

. . . was working in nonfiction rather than memoir, where scenes and dialogue are understood to be reconstructed from memory rather than from rigorous reporting.

In short, Lehrer was 'creative', but no artist, so bye-bye Bro-Jo.

Keep Reading: This'll Make You Smarter!

More Perspicacious Minds?

Illustration by Patrick Thomas

(Image from NYT)

Worried about computers and the internet dumbing you down? Fret no more, dear reader, for according to Jonah Lehrer, "Our Cluttered Minds" (NYT, May 27, 2010), quite the reverse occurs:

[T]he preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that the Internet and related technologies are actually good for the mind. For instance, a comprehensive 2009 review of studies published on the cognitive effects of video games found that gaming led to significant improvements in performance on various cognitive tasks, from visual perception to sustained attention. This surprising result led the scientists to propose that even simple computer games like Tetris can lead to "marked increases in the speed of information processing." One particularly influential study, published in Nature in 2003, demonstrated that after just 10 days of playing Medal of Honor, a violent first-person shooter game, subjects showed dramatic increases in ­visual attention and memory.

Lehrer is citing this against the argument by Nicholas Carr in his recent book, The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains, for according to Lehrer, Mr. Carr argues that the internet and "computers are destroying our powers of concentration" because "our mental malleability has turned us into servants of technology, our circuits reprogrammed by our gadgets" as we "lurch from site to site, if only because we constantly crave the fleeting pleasure of new information." Web surfing is a rather different issue than 'gaming', I would think, but as Lehrer notes after this summary of Carr's views:

Carr's argument also breaks down when it comes to idle Web surfing. A 2009 study by neuroscientists at the University of California, Los Angeles, found that performing Google searches led to increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, at least when compared with reading a "book-like text." Interestingly, this brain area underlies the precise talents, like selective attention and deliberate analysis, that Carr says have vanished in the age of the Internet. Google, in other words, isn't making us stupid -- it's exercising the very mental muscles that make us smarter.

I'm pleased to hear this. Now if only the internet would compensate us monetarily for the time we spend surfing it.

Despite Lehrer's optimism, I still wonder if the internet doesn't distract us from deeper, more continuously sustained thinking. Lehrer does note, consistent with Carr's pessimistic concerns, that "numerous surveys suggest that the Internet has diminished our interest in reading books." I certainly read fewer books these days, though that's also due to the demands of my work. Editing, translating, and researching all detract from my time as much as or more than the internet distracts me from reading. But at least, I'm getting smarter, if Lehrer is right.

If . . .

Intellectual Diversity and Fruitful Discussion

Jonah Lehrer

Firekid

Jonah Lehrer is a really smart guy (as you can see by checking his website), though I think I've mentioned him in just a single blog entry prior to this one. I bring him up now because I'm using an article of his in my Academic English course. Not that I chose the article. The one responsible for that was a colleague who also has an M.A. in the history of science, which means that we have interests in common, so we both liked Lehrer's article "Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Screwing Up" for Wired Magazine (December 21, 2009). I especially appreciated his description of the sort of discussion that goes on in lab meetings, a process studied by Kevin Dunbar, "a researcher who studies how scientists study things -- how they fail and succeed":

While the scientific process is typically seen as a lonely pursuit -- researchers solve problems by themselves -- Dunbar found that most new scientific ideas emerged from lab meetings, those weekly sessions in which people publicly present their data. Interestingly, the most important element of the lab meeting wasn't the presentation -- it was the debate that followed. Dunbar observed that the skeptical (and sometimes heated) questions asked during a group session frequently triggered breakthroughs, as the scientists were forced to reconsider data they'd previously ignored. The new theory was a product of spontaneous conversation, not solitude; a single bracing query was enough to turn scientists into temporary outsiders, able to look anew at their own work.

But not every lab meeting was equally effective. Dunbar tells the story of two labs that both ran into the same experimental problem: The proteins they were trying to measure were sticking to a filter, making it impossible to analyze the data. "One of the labs was full of people from different backgrounds," Dunbar says. "They had biochemists and molecular biologists and geneticists and students in medical school." The other lab, in contrast, was made up of E. coli experts. "They knew more about E. coli than anyone else, but that was what they knew," he says. Dunbar watched how each of these labs dealt with their protein problem. The E. coli group took a brute-force approach, spending several weeks methodically testing various fixes. "It was extremely inefficient," Dunbar says. "They eventually solved it, but they wasted a lot of valuable time."

The diverse lab, in contrast, mulled the problem at a group meeting. None of the scientists were protein experts, so they began a wide-ranging discussion of possible solutions. At first, the conversation seemed rather useless. But then, as the chemists traded ideas with the biologists and the biologists bounced ideas off the med students, potential answers began to emerge. "After another 10 minutes of talking, the protein problem was solved," Dunbar says. "They made it look easy."

When Dunbar reviewed the transcripts of the meeting, he found that the intellectual mix generated a distinct type of interaction in which the scientists were forced to rely on metaphors and analogies to express themselves. (That's because, unlike the E. coli group, the second lab lacked a specialized language that everyone could understand.) These abstractions proved essential for problem-solving, as they encouraged the scientists to reconsider their assumptions. Having to explain the problem to someone else forced them to think, if only for a moment, like an intellectual on the margins, filled with self-skepticism.

This is why other people are so helpful: They shock us out of our cognitive box. "I saw this happen all the time," Dunbar says. "A scientist would be trying to describe their approach, and they'd be getting a little defensive, and then they'd get this quizzical look on their face. It was like they'd finally understood what was important."

What I glean from this is that not only are problems better solved through discussion, they are best solved through discussion among individuals with different strengths who are free to challenge each other, and are free to do so even at the expense of harmony, indeed especially at the expense of harmony. The importance of this sort of discussion has significant implications for education, especially in Korea, where the educational system still aims at producing identical students intent on getting the top mark on a single exam that determines one's educational future.

Well, not entirely, and Korea is changing, but one doesn't often encounter open discussion, not a diversity of views. I'm interested to see what my students think about this article . . . if I can just get them to discuss it.

Creative Collisions and Collaborations

Telstar 1
Photo:
Alcatel-Lucent USA Inc.
and
 AT and T Archives and History Center
New York Times

Walter Isaacson, in his article "Inventing the Future" (New York Times, April 6, 2012), reviews Jon Gertner's recent book in the history of science and technology, The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation. From what the review tells us, Gertner's account of Bell Labs' knack for innovations would appear to offer support for some of Jonah Lehrer's ideas that we've recently looked into:

The lesson of Bell Labs is that most feats of sustained innovation cannot and do not occur in an iconic garage or the workshop of an ingenious inventor. They occur when people of diverse talents and mind-sets and expertise are brought together, preferably in close physical proximity where they can have frequent meetings and serendipitous encounters.

Recall that Steve Jobs intentionally redesigned the Pixar company's layout to ensure that employees would come into contact by chance and inadvertently exchange ideas that changed ideas? He had a precedent in Bell Labs:

Bell Labs concentrated on helping the military during World War II. But in the middle of the war, Bell Labs began moving to a new campus in Murray Hill, N.J., and [Bell Labs research director, Mervin] Kelly began to create interdisciplinary teams that threw theorists and engineers together into the same work spaces. "By intention, everyone would be in one another's way," Gertner writes. Among the teams was one doing solid-state research. It included [physics theoretician William] Shockley and [physics experimentalist Walter] Brattain. Kelly recruited John Bardeen, a very quiet theorist, to join the group, but there was no vacant office, so Bardeen decided to share space with Brattain, the experimentalist. This was a smart idea. Gertner describes how innovations came not just from new theories but from linking them to advances made by the lab's experimental chemists and metallurgists who were creating a revolution in materials. "Indeed, without new materials," Gertner writes, "Shockley would have spent his career trapped in a prison of elegant theory."

As Gertner points out, collaborative work was essential, and not only for generating new ideas:

"If an idea begat a discovery, and if a discovery begat an invention, then an innovation defined the lengthy and wholesale transformation of an idea into a technological product (or process) meant for widespread practical use. Almost by definition, a single person, or even a single group, could not alone create an innovation. The task was too variegated and involved."

The hardest trick, as Steve Jobs points out, is figuring out how to sustain an organization's creativity, and Isaacson notes that Gertner's book looks at this point:

Steve Jobs once said that the most difficult and important thing to create was not an innovative product but a great organization that could continually create innovative products. That required joining creative people with product designers and great engineers so that imagination and technology could be connected. For much of the 20th century, Bell Labs played that role. It showed the value of having theoreticians, researchers, developers and engineers all huddled together. "People had to be near one another," Gertner writes. "Phone calls alone wouldn't do." Mervin Kelly even created branches of Bell Labs at the phone company's factories so that the theoreticians and scientists could be closely involved with the manufacturing workers.

From my own job at Ewha, where we expat instructors exchange ideas on better teaching, I know by experience the importance of people working together to work better. This hasn't always been easy for me since I'm a bit of a loner, but it's usually been for the best.