Elastic

Today we consume, on average, a staggering 100,000 words of new information each day from various media—the equivalent of a three-hundred-page book.

If you didn’t need a vacation when you started planning one, you might by the time you are done.

elucidated

In the bottom-up mode of processing, individual neurons fire in complex fashion without direction from an executive, and with valuable input from the brain’s emotional centers (as we’ll be discussing). That kind of processing is nonlinear and can produce ideas that seem far afield, and that would not have arisen in the step-by-step progression of analytical thinking.

analytical thought—a step-by-step approach through which an organism moves from one related thought to another based on facts or reason.

in analytical thinking, thoughts and ideas come in sequence, from A to B to C, each following its predecessor according to a fixed set of rules—the rules of logic, as might be executed on a computer. As a result, analytical reasoning, like scripted processing, often fails to meet the challenges of novelty and change.

The process of elastic thought cannot be traced in an A to B to C fashion. Instead, proceeding largely in the unconscious, elastic thinking is a nonlinear mode of processing in which multiple threads of thought may be pursued in parallel.

the brain function that produces bottom-up elastic thinking is quite different from that which generates top-down analytical thinking.

there’s no such thing as a free lunch—unless you’re the lunch.

A novelty-seeking organism might get injured exploring alien terrain or might face a predator, but an organism that avoids the unfamiliar at all costs might fail to discover sufficient food sources and starve.

An unchanging environment offers those who have found a comfortable niche no urgent impetus to explore or innovate.

what used to be the safe terrain of stability is now often a dangerous minefield of stagnation.

In the mid-twentieth century it took decades for people to change their simple habit of using a dial phone, while in the twenty-first century it took very little time for people to make the transition to carrying around with them what is essentially an entire computer system.

Today, when alien ideas land in your professional or social world, it’s a better bet to take your chances, climb aboard the spaceship, and check them out.

“We [humans] jump borders. We push into new territory even when we have resources where we are. Other animals don’t do this,”

climate change—that decimated our ranks about 135,000 years ago. At that time, the entire population of the subspecies that we now call human plummeted to just six hundred.

for hundreds of thousands of years, humans had remained close to their origins in Africa. But then, as fossils discovered in China and Israel reveal, within a few thousand years of the die-off, the descendants of those hardy survivors were “suddenly” traveling to distant new worlds. In 2015, those discoveries were bolstered by analysis of both modern populations and ancient genetic material.

Dopamine is a neurotransmitter, one of several protein molecules that neurons use to communicate with one another.

your feelings of pleasure, and dopamine carries those signals.

Some versions of the gene, such as the DRD4-7R variant, endow people with a particularly high tendency to explore. That’s because those with that variant respond more weakly to the dopamine in their reward system. As a result, they require more dopamine to get a rush in their day-to-day life than those with other variants, and seek a higher level of stimulation in order to achieve a satisfying level.

The discovery of the role of DRD4 answered some questions, but it raised others. For example, if that gene is truly related to our tendency to explore, do populations that have wandered far from our African origins possess a higher incidence of DRD4-7R than those who strayed less? If our picture of the origin of our novelty-seeking behavior is correct, one would expect that. That expectation proved valid.

the farther our ancestors migrated from their African roots, the higher the prevalence in that population of the DRD4-7R variant.

Certainly, that younger people exhibit greater neophilia is due in part to the more rapidly changing world they are growing up in. But since seeking novelty entails risk, this age variation is also no doubt partly due to the fact that the rational, risk-avoiding part of a person’s brain doesn’t fully develop until about the age of twenty-five.

It is one of the basic tenets of cognitive neuroscience that the structure and form of thought is independent of its specific content. In other words, the mental activity that leads to the creation of new businesses, shampoos, and meals is fundamentally the same as that which produces new scientific theories, paintings, and symphonies.

“all life is problem solving.”

“Thought is the act of attending to, identifying, and making meaningful responses to stimuli … characterized by the ability to generate strings of ideas, many of which are novel.”

thinking is evaluating circumstances and making a meaningful response by generating ideas.

When we are confronted with familiar situations of that sort, she and her colleagues concluded, we tend to behave mindlessly, according to programmed patterns, and with relatively little adjustment due to the specifics of the situation at hand.

a researcher sat at a table that had a view of a Xerox machine and approached people who walked up intending to make copies. He said, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the machine?” Sixty percent of the Xerox users allowed it. But to others, the researcher instead said, “Excuse me, I have five pages. May I use the machine because I’m in a rush?” When asked that way, 94 percent acceded to the request. As with the mother goose, this appears to be thoughtful behavior. It seems as if most of those who would have been among the 40 percent who refused the first request responded differently when a justification was offered that allowed them to weigh the urgency of their need versus that of the person “in a rush.”

the first step in nurturing either analytical or elastic thinking is to nurture thinking—to become more conscious of when you employ automated scripts, and to discard them when they don’t serve you well. For it is only when you are self-aware that you can interrupt an automatic script if it is not appropriate.

“Compared with what we ought to be, we are only half awake.”

When you are being mindful, you are fully aware of all your current perceptions, sensations, feelings, and thought processes and accept them calmly, as though seen from a distance.

The Body Scan. Sit or lie down, in a comfortable position. The activity should take ten to twenty minutes. Loosen any tight clothing and close your eyes. Take a few deep breaths and focus on your body as a whole. Feel its weight on the floor or chair, and how that contact feels. Then, beginning with your feet, become aware of how each part of your body feels. Are your feet warm or cool, tense or relaxed? Do you feel any sensations, discomfort, or pain? Slowly, let your attention drift to your ankles, calves, knees, thighs, buttocks, and hips, and then up your torso. Next, focus on your fingers, then move up your arms to your shoulders, and finally to your neck, face, head, and scalp. Finally, reverse the process, moving down your body.

Mindfulness of Thoughts. Like the body scan, this can be done in twenty minutes or less, and you begin by closing your eyes and taking deep breaths. Focus on your breathing until you’ve quieted your mind. Then relax your concentration and let thoughts drift in. Pay attention to each thought in a detached manner, without judgment or engagement: Is it a feeling, a mental image, a bit of internal dialogue? Does it simply fade, or lead to another thought? If you encounter the thought that you are having difficulty in this exercise, accept and observe that thought as well.

perform your exercise of choice three to six times a week, after a month you will have achieved a measurable improvement in your ability to avoid automatic responses, as well as in other “executive functions” of your brain (see chapter 4), such as the ability to focus and to switch your attention from one task to another.

The relative lack of an emotional component is one reason analytical thought is simpler than elastic thought, and easier to analyze.

No one back then made too much of the difference between playing a chess game from start to finish and composing an original symphony, starting from the blank page. But from today’s point of view, the gulf is enormous. The former can be accomplished through the linear application of rules and logic, Boole’s laws of thought. The latter requires more—namely, the ability to generate new and original ideas. The former can be reduced to algorithms, while the latter (as we’ll see), when we attempt to reduce it to algorithms, falls flat. Traditional computers can do the former better than any person but cannot do the latter very well at all.

The elastic thinking of the brain is non-algorithmic, by which I mean that we achieve our ideas and solutions without a clear definition of the steps needed to get there.

bottom-up processing arises from the complex and relatively “unsupervised” interaction of millions of neurons and can produce wildly original insights. Top-down processing, in contrast, is directed by the brain’s executive regions and produces step-by-step analytical thought.

Parkinson’s results from neurons dying in a part of the brain that controls your body’s movements. No one knows why the neurons die off, though the dead neurons show an accumulation of a certain protein. Exposure to pesticides will increase your risk, and, ironically, smoking will decrease it.

Parkinson’s patients find that they might be able to will an arm or leg to move, but their body doesn’t respond as they want it to. Their speech can become slurred, their balance unstable, and their limbs stiff and painful or numb—and they may begin to shake. We know of no way to bring the dead neurons back to life, or to coax the body into growing new ones. The cells that die are “dopamine neurons”—nerve cell factories that create dopamine and then use that neurotransmitter to send their signals to other nerve cells. They are located in the brain stem, at the top of the spinal column, in a part of the primitive midbrain called the substantia nigra, which is involved in selecting the physical action, such as the initiation of motion, that you take in response to a situation.

humans “have to constantly be jumping off cliffs and developing our wings on the way down.” We like to set up challenges for ourselves and then invent ways to overcome them.

dopamine in the substantia nigra is involved in the initiation of motion (which is why a lack of it affects the mobility of people with Parkinson’s).

dopamine also plays a key role in communication among a group of diverse structures that work together in a complex manner to constitute what is called the brain’s reward system.

Unfortunately for Parkinson’s patients, we don’t yet have the technology to deliver dopamine therapy in a precise manner, to affect only specific structures. As a result, Darcy’s drug didn’t just boost her low-functioning substantia nigra; it supercharged all the areas reliant on dopamine, including her reward system. And that was what caused her obsession.

the human brain’s “on” switch is internal. It is your reward system that provides the motivation to initiate or continue a chain of thought.

“There is no greater joy that I have in my life than having an idea that’s a good idea. At that moment it pops into my head, it is so deeply satisfying and rewarding … My [reward system] is probably going nuts when it happens.”

Pat Darcy’s reward system inspired her to engage in the elastic thought processes involved in her artistic and creative endeavors. But its enhancement due to dopamine therapy put her interest in creating art into overdrive, depriving her of the ability to stop engaging in it.

the disease is caused by the death of cells that produce dopamine.

If your reward system motivates you to think, what would a person be like if he were unable to experience the pleasure the reward system provides?

not being in touch with your feelings is different from not having any.

orbitofrontal cortex, a part of the brain’s reward system.

We are adept at confronting novelty and change because, when faced with an unfamiliar obstacle to achieving our goals, our emotion-based reward system guides us toward elastic thinking, stimulating us to generate alternative ideas and invent a way to choose from among them.

The lesson of EVR is that emotions, especially pleasure, do not just make our lives rich—they are an integral ingredient in our ability to face the challenges of our environment.

Perhaps the elusive key to success in artificial intelligence is to learn to build a computer that solves problems because it enjoys solving them.

when faced with too many choices or too many decisions to make, we experience a “choice overload,” analogous to the “information overload” so famous in our current age. Both types of overload stimulate the primitive parts of your brain that respond to fear in life-and-death situations, depleting your mental resources, causing stress, and undermining your self-control.

“There is no more miserable human being than one … for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.”

there is a remedy for choice overload. One can employ a decision-making strategy in which one accepts the first satisfactory option, rather than continuing to look for a superior one. Psychologists call those who do the former “satisficers,” as opposed to “maximizers,” who always try to choose the best.

exhaustive analyses, paradoxically, doesn’t lead to more satisfaction.

Letting go of the idea that a choice must be optimal, on the other hand, preserves mental energy and allows you to feel better if you later learn that a better choice existed.

for most situations, those who accept options that are good enough, rather than feeling compelled to find the optimal one, tend to be more satisfied with their choices and, in general, happier and less stressed individuals.

Under ordinary circumstances, the achievement of a goal comes through effort that we expend over time. As a result, your reward system evolved not just to provide pleasure when you reach a goal, but to continually predict the consequences of what you are doing and reward you at every stage.

As a goal is achieved, your body generates feedback to diminish the reward value of continuing the activity. The pleasure you felt at the beginning fades

The nucleus accumbens that Olds had inadvertently stimulated is a reward system structure involved in that process, in particular with regard to a basic need, such as obtaining food, water, or sexual contact.

The signal for the nucleus accumbens to spring into action comes from another reward system structure, called the ventral tegmental area (VTA).

satiety occurs when the body, sensing that we’ve had enough, communicates that to the VTA, which diminishes or halts its signal to the nucleus accumbens.

If we are thirsty and drink water, for example, the VTA signals the nucleus accumbens and we experience pleasure, but with each successive sip, the signal diminishes, and we eventually lose our motivation to continue drinking.

By pressing the lever, the rats were stimulating their nucleus accumbens directly, which overrode the role of the VTA. To the rats, each press must have felt like a swallow of water at a moment of thirst, a mouthful of food that quenches hunger, or perhaps even an orgasm, with no diminishment due to repetition.

An unflappable drive toward goals is one of the keys to personal and professional success—psychologists call it grit. It’s what compels you to keep working until your work of art is just right, or to persevere when you hit an impasse, until your elastic brain generates the idea that’s the key to solving your problem.

Many recent studies in social psychology suggest that monetizing creative output can disrupt the processes that lead to innovation.

offering an extrinsic reward for an intrinsically enjoyable behavior can be counterproductive.

Difficulty in original thinking arises, says psychologist Teresa Amabile, when you “try for the wrong reasons.”

Those big guys pumping iron at the gym are chick magnets, but little do they know that the strength of their attractiveness depends on a woman’s time of the month.

both children with ADHD and gifted children were branded as distractible and having a gluttonous appetite for activity.

A third of the ADHD group scored high enough to qualify for the elite and super-selective scholars’ program, while a quarter of those in the scholars’ program were diagnosed with ADHD—four to five times the prevalence in the general population.

Today, ADHD carries little stigma, and kids are sometimes misdiagnosed with the condition to satisfy parents seeking a “cure” for what is simply their child’s natural and healthy, highly active state.

There is no single brain structure or system responsible for all the traits of ADHD. But the most critical traits can be attributed to the same ventral tegmental area–to–nucleus accumbens circuit in the reward system that Olds had stumbled upon. In ADHD, the dopamine receptors in those structures are impaired, resulting in a weakening of the brain’s reward pathway. As a result, the steady stream of feel-good reinforcement that keeps others moving toward their goal is diminished.

those with ADHD have difficulty performing some of the routine tasks of everyday life. But the disorder can also cause the opposite effect. Since it can make everyday life feel routine and boring, the brain tries to compensate by seeking more stimulation. As a result, when an ADHD brain comes upon a task it finds truly interesting—that is, a task that briskly stimulates the reward circuits—it obsesses over it and becomes hyperfocused.

For better and for worse, the thinking of those with ADHD is less constrained and more elastic. So, although many see ADHD as a disorder, one could also view it as tailor-made for today’s turbulent and changing environment.

ADHD is generally a condition of the immature brain, and when children grow up, they usually grow out of it. But whether or not we have ADHD, all of us have a greater or lesser propensity to explore or exploit, to wander or focus.

“Innovators,” on the other hand, are elastic thinkers who like to find new approaches to problems. They are often distractible and poor at time management, and they produce less familiar, and sometimes less acceptable, solutions that, in the corporate world, often encounter resistance.

A primitive human of the species Homo habilis, the predecessor of Homo erectus, is wrestling down some small creature when he rolls over a sharp rock and slits open his own skin. After overpowering his prey, he is about to tear into its tough flesh with his teeth when his mind makes an association: The sharp rock tore my skin; I want to tear this animal’s skin; I can use the sharp rock. For the millions of years of Homo habilis’s existence, that crude stone cutter was its only original creation.

In nature, different atoms collide and combine to create molecules with properties unlike those of the atoms that form them. In our minds, one neural network in our brains overlaps with and activates another, and we compound diverse concepts and observations to form new ones.

we often don’t know how that end point will be valued by society until long after our act of creation. Think of Vincent van Gogh, who sold very few paintings in his lifetime. Or Copernicus’s heliocentric picture of the solar system, which impressed no one until Galileo adopted it some seven decades later.

I was lucky enough to learn many years ago to appreciate even the thought processes that lead to “small ideas,” or to failed attempts.

Though scientists rightfully treasure only theories that work, we can also recognize the degree of intellectual beauty in a proposed theory, whether or not it ultimately proves successful.

As for Feynman, he didn’t see his most famous breakthrough as being different from any of the other problems he solved in his long career, whether big or small, or the little puzzles of ordinary life that he had to face like the rest of us. That a person who made a monumental and revolutionary contribution to his field could find equal pleasure in solving problems of far less significance is a testament to the fact that the exercise of elastic thinking is intrinsically rewarding.

A problem is grand in science if it lies before us unsolved and we see some way for us to make some headway into it. I would advise you to take even simpler, or as you say, humbler, problems

No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.

You are not nameless to me. Do not remain nameless to yourself—it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of your naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher’s ideals are.

In our own brains, the doorbell’s physical sound is transmitted by the ear and represented by the state of a network of neurons in the auditory cortex in our temporal lobes.

All species, if they are to survive, must process and react to important stimuli in their environment, and so, to their sensory input, they must assign meaning.

We experience a doorbell as a ringing sound, but it also has associations that may signify interruption (that solicitor again) or social connection (my friend is here) or gratification (the FedEx man is bringing the cashmere sweater I ordered). That single disturbance of air molecules triggers a cascade of related meanings—physical, social, and emotional.

Neuroscientists call the neurons in networks that represent concepts “concept cells” or “concept neurons.” We have networks of concept cells for people, places, things—even for ideas such as winning and losing. I used the image of your grandmother to illustrate the idea of concept cells because they used to be called grandmother cells. The term was invented when neuroscientists didn’t think that such cells existed, and it was meant to be derisive and sarcastic, as in “You can’t really believe that your brain reserves a network of cells for thoughts of your grandmother!” But scientists changed their tune when those cells were actually discovered in 2005, and they also changed their terminology.

The fact that neurons are shared among different networks seems to be the root of the associations we make between different concepts, for it allows the activation of one neural network to spread to another.

Every concept we ever conceive takes the physical form of a constellation of the neurons in a concept network. They are the realization, in hardware, of our ideas.

The neurons in our brains are, in one sense, simple objects. Each receives thousands of electrochemical signals per second from the other neurons to which it is connected. Like the zeros and ones that constitute the language of digital computers, these signals come in two types: excitatory and inhibitory. The neuron applies no intelligence when assessing those input signals; it simply adds up the excitatory signals and subtracts from them the inhibitory signals. If the net input over a short period is large enough, the neuron fires, sending its own signal (which may be either excitatory or inhibitory) to the other neurons to which it is connected.

faced with a challenging and often changing environment that overwhelms their simple preprogrammed abilities, certain insects evolved a method of inventive group processing that, like our neurons, creates an intelligent response from a group of unintelligent components, the individual insects. The insects that do this, which include ants, bees, wasps, and termites, are called social insects. From the point of view of evolution, they are the most successful of all insects.

if all the ants in the world could be placed on a scale, their weight, taken together, would equal that of all the humans in the world.

The term social insect is in a way a misnomer, for these animals don’t care one bit about their cohorts. They don’t have friends, and if they hang around at cafés, it is to eat the morsels you drop, not to meet with their friends. In fact, that’s my point: The members of social insect species are mindless automatons, each responding to its environment through a set of simple programmed scripts.

what distinguishes the social insects is that, over millions of years of evolution, those mindless scripts have developed in a way that, taken together, allows them to process information in a new way. As individuals, their mode of information processing is scripted and rigid, but as a group it is elastic. So as a group, though not as individuals, they can evaluate complex new situations and take meaningful action. They have a collective intelligence that is called, in the terms of mathematical complexity theory, an “emergent phenomenon.”

colonies of social insects exhibit so cohesive a collective mind that some scientists like to think of the colony, rather than the individual ants, as the organism.

the ant queen, unlike human royalty, does not hold authority or implore other ants to carry out any action. No executive ant directs the behavior of any other ant. That is how ant colonies operate—as many as half a million ants do just fine with no management at all.

Countless interactions among individuals obeying simple preprogrammed rules result in the choices and behaviors of the colony as a whole, allowing it to thrive.

unlike ants, which communicate with one or two other ants at any given time, each of our neurons is connected to thousands of other neurons via structures called axons and dendrites.

the outer layer of the brain’s neural tissue is called the cortex. It is divided by a fissure into right and left hemispheres, and each hemisphere is divided into four lobes.

Within each hemisphere, the frontmost lobe—the frontal lobe—is where the brain integrates information to produce thought and action.

Found only in mammals, the prefrontal cortex is the key structure that allows us to rise above the automatic response to environmental triggers that comes from scripted behavior. fn1 Acting as the brain’s “executive,” it supervises our thought and decision-making by identifying objectives, guiding attention and planning, organizing behavior, monitoring consequences, and managing the tasks performed by other areas of the brain—a role analogous to that which a company’s CEO performs.

In his classic book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, Thomas Kuhn wrote about what he called “paradigm shifts” in science. These are alterations in scientific thinking that represent more than incremental advances.

Paradigm shifts are peculiar in that they leave many previously successful people behind, people whose rigidity of thought causes them to cling to the old framework to which they are accustomed, despite often overwhelming evidence that the paradigm shift is valid. Or sometimes, those who cannot accept a shift form the vast majority, and its implementation is blocked or delayed.

scientists hold institutionalized everyday beliefs, which may, on occasion, be altered by a transformational discovery.

We each develop our point of view on common issues during our first few decades of life or our first years in a new job. We form a framework to apply those ideas and apply them when we’re called upon to draw conclusions in those realms. For some, those paradigms never evolve, but for the fortunate they do change, often in Kuhnian jumps.

Those who are open to such personal paradigm shifts—to altering their attitudes and beliefs—have always had an advantage in life, because they are more able to adapt to changing circumstances.

I list some of my strongly held beliefs on slips of paper. I fold them, pick one, and imagine someone telling me that the belief written on it is false. Of course, I don’t for a moment think my belief is really wrong. That is just the point—when my instinct to reject the notion that I’m wrong kicks in, that’s when I am in the position of all those who, in the past, failed to adapt to challenges to the ideas that they, too, held firmly. That’s when I push myself, and try harder to be open to the possibility that I’m mistaken. Why do I hold that belief? Are there those who don’t? Do I respect them, or at least some of them? Why might they have come to a different conclusion? I try to recall times in the past when I was wrong about something, even though I’d been confident of being right. The bigger the mistake, the better. The process helps me to understand that the mental adjustment to a new thought paradigm isn’t as easy as hindsight always makes it seem.

We tend to make quick initial assessments of issues based on the assumptions of the paradigms we follow.

the mental flexibility to consider theories that contradict our beliefs and don’t fit our existing paradigms not only can make you a genius in science; it is also beneficial in everyday life.

the way you frame an issue has a profound influence on the results of your analysis.

A man is reading a book when the lights go off, but even though the room he is in is pitch-dark, the man goes on reading. How? (The book was not in an electronic format.)

Two mothers and two daughters were fishing. They managed to catch one big fish, one small fish, and one fat fish. Since only three fish were caught, how is it possible that each woman caught her own fish?

Marsha and Marjorie were born on the same day of the same month of the same year to the same mother and the same father—yet they are not twins. How is that possible?

To solve the riddles, these preconceptions must be abandoned.

Like many challenging problems, the riddles are made difficult not by what we don’t know, but by what we do know—or think we know—which turns out to be incorrect.

changing circumstances invalidate assumptions that are so ingrained that people don’t question them, or have trouble accepting that they no longer hold. Success comes to those who realize this and can revise their understanding of the situation.

When we talk about triumphs of intellect, we tend to focus on brilliant analytical thinking, the kind of thought produced by powerful logic. But rarely do we recognize the contribution of being able to reimagine the framework in which our thinking occurs, the terms in which our mind defines the issue we are considering.

Creating new representations is difficult to automate, and most animals have trouble doing it, but it is often the key to successful problem-solving in the human world.

Psychologists call the process of altering the framework through which you analyze an issue “restructuring.”

Today, as the assumptions of the past are being rendered obsolete at a blinding pace, the ability to restructure your thinking is less and less a requirement for standout achievement and more and more simply a requirement for survival.

In problem space, if the dog begins by moving toward the bone, it will be increasing its distance from its goal, but if it moves toward the open gate, it will be diminishing it. And so dogs that create this new framework will race to the open gate.

Effective thinking often boils down to that—the ability to restructure your framework of thought about the facts and issues. And so the dog-and-bone problem, though simple, separates the thinkers from the nonthinkers, the humans and bright dogs from the chess-playing computers.

there is no way to place dominoes on the board in a manner that covers an unequal number of black and white squares. The complete checkerboard has an equal number of white and black squares, so this law doesn’t preclude you from covering it with dominoes. But the mutilated board, with two opposite corners removed, has thirty-two white squares and thirty black squares (or vice versa), so the law tells us that there is no way to cover it.

The annals of mathematics, and much of problem-solving in all fields, can be viewed as a relentless series of assaults on unhelpful frameworks, employing the weapon of restructuring.

look at numbers as abstractions that obey rules, rather than as concrete entities.

Whatever its source, the influence of culture is so powerful, it affects even our perception of physical objects.

Culture is to a group what personality is to an individual.

cultural differences that reach as deep as one’s physical perception are bound to profoundly affect the way different people approach problems in their respective societies.

Does culture affect a society’s level of innovation? If so, the relative ranking of countries with regard to innovation should be stable over time, reflecting each society’s underlying culture.

Our culture can provide an approach to issues that will help us see solutions, but it can also hinder us. A strong cultural identity, if it produces a deeply ingrained approach to problems, can make it more difficult to change that approach, even if it is not working.

exposing yourself to other cultures is beneficial, because those who grew up in or work within a different culture will often have different attitudes toward life, and studies show that simply interacting with such people can open our minds and increase our elasticity of thought.

the process of idea generation is seated deep within our unconscious mind and is most active when our conscious processes of analytical thought are at rest.

Every creation begins life as a challenge, just as every answer begins as a question.

quiet brains are not idle brains, that in periods of mental peace, our unconscious may be overflowing with activity.

thinking while we are not consciously focused is a fundamental feature of the mammalian brain, possessed even by lowly and primitive rodents.

what ultimately defines the value of an investigation in science is not what is being investigated, but how carefully and intelligently the research is done.

since metabolism requires oxygen, he could measure blood flow as a proxy for energy. That principle was almost a hundred years ahead of its time—it is the key to the functional magnetic resonance imaging technology (fMRI) that helped launch the neuroscience revolution in the 1990s.

Berger finally published his first paper on that research, “On the Electroencephalogram of Man.”

Berger’s EEG was one of the most influential inventions of the twentieth century. It opened a window to the brain, enabling neuropsychiatry to become a true science.

I would like to draw attention to a certain point I have made in the past. When mental work is performed or when the type of activity designated as active conscious activity becomes manifest in any way … a considerable decrease in the amplitude of the potential oscillations of the human brain occurs in association with this shift in cortical activity.

Berger could just as well have screamed into the vacuum of space. His words reached no one—one of the costs of being so far ahead of your time.

Each man faces an image Of what he is meant to become. As long as he does not achieve it He cannot achieve his full measure of peace.

“random episodic silent thinking,” but it is also tongue-in-cheek, because her point was that when a person’s mind seems to be at rest, it isn’t. It is just processing information unconsciously, in a different manner.

the default network governs our interior mental life—the dialogue we have with ourselves, both consciously and subconsciously. Kicking into gear when we turn away from the barrage of sensory input produced by the outside world, it looks toward our inner selves. When that happens, the neural networks of our elastic thought can rummage around the huge database of knowledge and memories and feelings that is stored in the brain, combining concepts that we normally would not associate and noting connections that we normally would not recognize. That’s why resting, daydreaming, and other quiet activities such as taking a walk can be powerful ways to generate ideas.

The power of the default mode stems from its place of origin in the brain—the components of the default network are all within subregions of the brain called association cortices.

We have an association cortex for each of our five sensory systems and for each motor region, and we have what are called “higher-order” association areas for complex mental processes not associated with movement or the senses.

a brain region called the primary visual cortex detects the basic features of the visual world, such as edges, light and dark, location, etc. But that is just data. What does the data mean? What persons, places, and things are you looking at, and what is their significance? It is an association cortex that defines the objects you identify.

When you read a sign that says NO TRESPASSING, the printed letters create an image on your retina. That is just a reproduction of the lines that make up the letters. The sign’s message achieves meaning only when that information is passed on from the retina to the visual cortex to an association cortex that identifies the sign, and the letters and words written on it. And that’s just the beginning. The image is then passed on to other association regions where connotation, emotional tone, and your personal memories and experience give the words additional meaning.

Our culture tends to view discovery and innovation as materializing out of nothing, the product of the ethereal magic of a gifted intellect. But breakthrough ideas, like mundane ideas, often arise from the association and recombination of what is already lying around in the corners of our minds.

If you have ever seen Stephen interviewed on television, the quickness with which he responds to the questions is an illusion. He receives the queries long in advance and requires days or weeks to fashion his answers. Then, when the interviewer asks the question, Stephen simply clicks his mouse to initiate the reading of his response, or the sound editor later adds it.

iPhone users were found to suffer from anxiety and an increase in heart rate and blood pressure when they were prevented from answering their ringing phone. Another showed that 73 percent of smartphone users feel panicked if they misplace their phone. And yet another documented that many people can’t help being on their phone, even when they know they shouldn’t. These are classic signs of addiction, and such syndromes are becoming so serious, and so common, that psychiatrists have begun to fashion names for them, such as iPhone separation, nomophobia (for no-mobile-phone-phobia), or, more generally, iDisorders.

The result of our addiction to constant activity is a dearth of idle time and, hence, a dearth of time in which the brain is in its default mode.

though some may consider “doing nothing” unproductive, a lack of downtime is bad for our well-being, because idle time allows our default network to make sense of what we’ve recently experienced or learned. It allows our integrative thinking processes to reconcile diverse ideas without censorship from the executive brain.

The associative processes of elastic thinking do not thrive when the conscious mind is in a focused state. A relaxed mind explores novel ideas; an occupied mind searches for the most familiar ideas, which are usually the least interesting.

It’s ironic, but the technological advancement that makes elastic thinking ever more essential also makes it less likely that we’ll engage in it. And so, if we are to exercise the elastic thinking that is demanded by our fast-paced times, we have to fight the constant intrusions and find islands of time during which we can unplug.

interludes will give your elastic mind a chance to process—and question—what that last hour of concentrated thought produced.

As art historian Giorgio Vasari put it, “The prior of the church entreated Leonardo with tiresome persistence to complete the work, since it seemed strange to him to see how Leonardo sometimes passed half a day at a time lost in thought, and he would have preferred Leonardo, just like the laborers hoeing in the garden, never to have laid down his brush.”But Leonardo “talked to him extensively about art and persuaded him that the greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they work less.”

The next time you stare out the window, remember, you aren’t slacking off—you’re giving your artistic side a chance to do its work.

Sometimes the most powerful revelation one can have is that circumstances have changed. That the rules you are accustomed to no longer apply.

History—and ordinary human life—is full of opportunities missed by not recognizing that change has occurred, and that the previously unthinkable is now doable.

the corpus callosum, the structure that sits between the brain’s right and left halves.

The left side of the brain was seen as being responsible for cerebral functions ranging from understanding language to arithmetic reasoning to controlling willful movement. The right hemisphere, by contrast, was said to be generally lacking in higher cognitive function—mute and unable to talk or write, even in left-handed individuals.

Sperry found that with the corpus callosum cut, cats were “unable to perform with one eye a visual-pattern discrimination learned with the other.” By severing the corpus callosum, he had precluded the communication between hemispheres.

Each of the divided hemispheres,” he would later write, “has its independent mental sphere or cognitive system—its own independent perceptual, learning, memory, and other mental processes. It is as if each hemisphere is unaware of what is experienced in the other.”

in a healthy individual the minds are highly connected through the corpus callosum and work in harmony. But when you sever that connection, they reveal their individual selves.

conventional wisdom about the roles of the hemispheres was wrong. The two hemispheres of our brains are something like independent beings.

Though the right cerebral hemisphere is not, as prevailing thought put it, “retarded,” the two hemispheres do have some different capabilities.

the right hemisphere can comprehend spoken words, it cannot speak them. So when a split-brain patient talks, it is the left hemisphere that is expressing itself.

If there are two “beings” within us, does that mean we are each two people or have two souls?

the architecture of your brain puts out of reach the behind-the-scenes influence that your unconscious mind exerts on your thinking.

people with certain left-hemisphere damage lose their speech capability, while those with right-hemisphere damage don’t. But people with right-hemisphere damage do have some language issues. Although they can still speak, “they have trouble understanding jokes and metaphors, and finding the theme of a story, or drawing inferences,”

Before an idea passes to your awareness, your brain conducts a kind of trial in which it considers all the evidence for the various meanings your unconscious mind has produced. Only then does it pass to your consciousness what it has deemed to be its best guess.

Your left hemisphere advocates for the obvious and literal meanings, while your right hemisphere takes on the underdogs, the meanings that at first may seem remote, a bit of a stretch, but that are sometimes the correct interpretation.

When you understand a metaphor, it’s because your right brain advocated the kind of fuzzy associations that allow one to understand these expressions—which explains why, if you had a stroke in the language center of your right brain, you wouldn’t be able to understand metaphors.

It’s being reported that, because of the birth of his baby daughter, Chris Brown has decided to stop calling women hoes in his music. He says he’s going to go with the more traditional term, bitch.

Your left brain makes the obvious associations and raises all the obvious answers. Your right brain searches for the obscure associations and the oddball answers. To be precise, Kounios and Beeman found that the oddball answers arise from increased neural activity in a fold of brain tissue just above the right ear, called the right anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG).

the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC, which lies just above the corpus callosum. One role of the ACC is to monitor other brain regions. I call it a judge because, though the science isn’t yet settled, scientists theorize that when the right and left brain are taking their different approaches to a problem, the ACC may step in and act to control the relative strength with which the two hemispheres are heard.

When you first consider a problem, your executive brain gives you a narrow focus. It ignores odd ideas and directs your conscious awareness toward the tried and true, the literal, the logical or most obvious of the possible answers your associative brain produces. The left brain’s guesses thus tend to come to your awareness first. That makes sense, because ordinary or unoriginal ideas are usually sufficient. According to the scientists’ theory, if those initial ideas don’t lead to an answer, your ACC broadens the scope of your attention, loosening your focus on the conventional ideas of your left hemisphere and allowing the more original ones being proposed by the right to surface. Roughly speaking, your ACC accomplishes that by arranging for the right visual cortex—the part of your right hemisphere responsible for processing visual information—to shut down. This is like closing your eyes so you can concentrate when you are trying to solve a difficult problem, but in this case, the ACC is blocking out only the visual inputs to your right hemisphere. That suppression of visual activity allows the ideas generated in the right aSTG to take up the slack and grow stronger, so that they may burst into your consciousness.

When you reach an impasse, you may feel frustrated and be tempted to give up, but that is precisely the moment when, if you keep struggling, your ACC may kick into action and your most original ideas can begin to surface.

My focus on the straightforward approach had apparently been interfering with my ability to find that superior method.

I’d wanted a romantic evening, but as she put her hand on mine, my mind was stuck on the geometry of an infinite-dimensional space.

When attacking a tough problem, impatience to make progress can lead one to a suboptimal solution while blocking your ability to find a better one.

by allowing your mind to loosen up, you can take steps to awaken your ACC and unleash your powers of insight.

Increasing your degree of mindfulness is a good way to encourage insight, but it isn’t the only way. You can also cultivate insight by adjusting your external conditions. For example, research shows that sitting in a darkened room, or closing your eyes, can widen your perspective; so can expansive surroundings, even high ceilings. Low ceilings, narrow corridors, and windowless offices have the opposite effect. And a well-lit room can make it difficult to ignore objects in your surroundings that stimulate mundane thoughts, shoving aside the imaginative musings of your right hemisphere.

Being able to think without any kind of time pressure is also beneficial for generating insight, because if you have to start on something else soon, your awareness of that can pull your mind back to the external world and block an unconscious idea from popping into your consciousness.

find a secluded spot, turn off your phone, and don’t open the email program on your computer. These steps are all useful ways to adjust our environment or circumstances to foster the generation of original ideas and insight.

“functional fixedness.” The term refers to the difficulty people have envisioning that a tool traditionally used for one purpose can be gainfully enlisted for another.

In the psychologists’ definition, functional fixedness refers to how our usual modes of thought can constrain the breadth of our new ideas in the context of tool use.

“the momentum of thought,” for, like a mass in Newton’s first law of motion, once our minds are set in a direction, they tend to continue in that direction unless acted upon by some outside force.

In a new circumstance, the momentum of old thinking can condemn you to trying to fit square pegs in round holes.

“The ideas which are here expressed so laboriously are extremely simple and should be obvious. The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones, which ramify … into every corner of our minds.”

by letting go of our fixed ways, we can accomplish goals we might never have thought possible.

The political theorist Hannah Arendt defined “frozen thoughts” as deeply held ideas and principles that we long ago developed and no longer question.

In Arendt’s eyes, the complacent reliance on such accepted “truths” was akin to thoughtlessness, something like the automatic scripted behavior of the mother goose, a computer, or a human operating on autopilot. People operating according to the dictates of frozen thoughts may be powerful processors of information, but they blindly accept ideas that conform to their frozen thoughts and resist accepting nonconforming ideas even when there is ample evidence for them.

“[The] inability to think [critically] is not stupidity,” she wrote. “It can be found in highly intelligent people.”

Or, as the photographer Dorothea Lange wrote, “To know ahead of time what you are looking for means you’re then only photographing your own preconceptions, which is very limiting, and often false.”

most errors made by doctors are connected to a tendency to form opinions quickly, based on prior experience.

It is medical dogma that medications extend life, but that can backfire when doctors are frozen in the textbook approach to all patients.

“it is often the side that adapts the fastest that prevails.”

to rely on a fixed doctrine is a false comfort, and a dangerous one—it can lead to disaster if conditions change and the doctrine doesn’t.

“The essence of military deception,” McChrystal tells me, “is to figure out what the enemy is preset to believe, and to play to that.

“Weak commanders look for prepackaged answers,” he tells me. “Strong leaders adapt.”

Once players had found the familiar, obvious checkmate, they were impeded from seeing the shorter, elegant one, even though they’d been told it existed and searched for a long time. That is classic frozen thinking, analogous to the other examples I’ve discussed. What made this study special was that scientists were able to quantify the correlation between how expert the players were and how much “dumber” their expertise made them with regard to discovering the unusual “clever solution.”

Sometimes when the experts fail, the answer is to call in a novice.

Whether our knowledge bank encompasses the theories of physics, or strategies of war and peace, or chess maneuvers—or anything else, for that matter—what we know can put a constraint on the possibilities we can imagine.

When psychologists study frozen thinking, they call it “dogmatic cognition.” In the psychologist’s definition, it is “the tendency to process information in a manner that reinforces the individual’s prior opinion or expectation.”

Zen Buddhism has a concept for a style of thought diametrically opposed to dogmatic cognition. It is called “beginner’s mind.” It refers to an approach in which you have a lack of preconceptions and perceive even routine situations as if you are encountering them for the first time, without automatically making assumptions based on your past experience.

The ideal expert in any field is one who has a great breadth and depth of knowledge and yet maintains, to a large extent, a beginner’s mind.

Social norms dictate that experts are entitled to adopt a relatively dogmatic, closed-minded orientation.” As a result, he added, “self-perceptions of high expertise elicit a more closed-minded cognitive style.”

it is one of life’s ironic truths that, though we love to be right, we are better off if sometimes people tell us we are wrong.

“When a worm sits in horseradish, it thinks there’s nothing sweeter.”

Our conscious brains can process about forty to sixty bits per second, roughly the information content of a short sentence. Our unconscious has a much greater capacity. Your visual system, for example, can handle about ten million bits per second. As a result, your primary visual cortex can pass only a small fraction of that to your conscious mind. And so, between your vast unconscious sensory perception and your limited conscious awareness stands a system of “cognitive filters.” Those filters make their best guess regarding what is relevant or important. They pass that along to our awareness and censor the rest.

Our brain’s cognitive filters are shaped over time. Each day, some neural responses are strengthened, and others suppressed. The result is a brain well adapted to its environment but wired to interpret the world through the lens of what has worked in the past.

The key to success in many new challenges, and, more generally, to innovation and imaginative problem-solving, is often to perform mental transformations akin to drawing that box around the dots that made space for the solution.

the lateral prefrontal cortex—a mass of brain tissue on the side of the prefrontal cortex region of the frontal lobe. When researchers use transcranial stimulation to interfere with that structure, they find that it improves their subjects’ powers of elastic thinking. They become more imaginative and inventive, and more insightful problem-solvers.

Though all mammals have a prefrontal cortex, as I said in chapter 4, only primates have a lateral prefrontal cortex—a region defined by its distinctive microscopic structure.

A key part of your “executive brain,” and in particular of its cognitive filtering system, the lateral prefrontal cortex gives us humans our enhanced ability to plan and execute a complex sequence of actions. That function requires an idea filter, because, as I said above, when faced with a situation or goal that demands action, your bottom-up brain gets to work generating possible responses, most of which won’t work. It is your lateral prefrontal cortex that follows up by exerting top-down control, biasing you toward some possibilities and withholding others from your conscious consideration.

It is sometimes said that we use only 10 percent of our brain. That’s a myth. We use all of it. But we do have untapped brain potential in the sense that there are situations in which it would be advantageous to adjust our filters or alter our mental mode of operation.

To have original thoughts, you have to let the ideas flow first and worry about their quality (or appropriateness) later.

“The way to get good ideas is to get lots of ideas and throw out the bad ones.”

“When people say failure is not an option, it means they are either lying to themselves or doing something boring. When you try to solve an important problem the world has looked at and failed to solve, failure is an option, and that is okay.”

In many ways, social media is the enemy of creativity.

whenever we relax our inhibitions and allow ourselves to generate an uncensored flood of ideas, we are acting like children.

One reason children are elastic thinkers is that they haven’t yet absorbed the full influence of culture or had an abundance of life experience.

within the frontal lobes, the prefrontal cortex is the laggard, with the lateral prefrontal cortex maturing last of all. As long as those parts of the brain associated with idea filtering are undeveloped, children remain elastic thinkers, naturally uninhibited.

The beginner’s mind is the Herculean strength of the young, while expertise and the power to know instinctively what works and doesn’t work is the spider-sense of the mature.

“The creative adult is the child who has survived.”

within all of us, there exist the neural networks of both a mischievous, imaginative child and a rational, self-censoring adult. The filter in the lateral prefrontal cortex helps decide which of those prevails in any given person.

The eccentric/elastic connection arises from decreased activity in the brain’s cognitive filtering system

A lax cognitive filter promotes a high level of schizotypy, a tendency toward original thinking and nonconformist behavior, while a stringent filter produces what psychologists call cognitive inhibition, leading to conventional thought and action.

the bizarre and the brilliant often have the same source

Belief in the supernatural declines as children mature and their lateral prefrontal cortex becomes more fully developed; conversely, in old age, as the vigor of the lateral prefrontal cortex declines and cognitive inhibition decreases, belief in the supernatural increases.

Many of our greatest thinkers seem to have had minds on the high end of the schizotypy scale.

the degree of cognitive inhibition is high enough for them to function, but low enough to allow them to entertain ideas most others would deem inappropriate—including, at times, ideas that change the world.

Different creative pursuits require varying degrees of unconscious elastic thinking, in combination with varying degrees of the conscious ability to modulate it and shape it through analytical thinking.

“I immerse myself in music … I think about it all day long—I like experimenting—studying—reflecting …”

Though different professions encourage different thinking styles, whether musician, scientist, or original thinker in some other realm, there is a need for a modicum of ordered, analytical thought to transform novel ideas into a creative product—one that is useful, attractive, harmonious, or otherwise compelling.

We are all, in a sense, two thinkers in one.

Within each of us are two distinct thinkers, both a logician and a poet, competitors out of whose struggle emerge our thoughts and ideas. We can all switch between the mode of thought in which we spontaneously generate original ideas and that in which we rationally scrutinize them, and our success hinges in part upon our ability to shift modes as needed.

a marked correspondence between the effects of marijuana and an enhanced ability at elastic thinking—at skills such as idea generation, divergent thinking, and integrative thinking, which are aided by the opening of our cognitive filters.

The active ingredient in marijuana, a chemical called THC, is known to suppress the function of the brain’s prefrontal lobe filters.

marijuana is an elastic thinking equalizer—it allows you to reach toward your maximum potential, though it does little for you if you are already there.

if you begin at an elevated level of schizotypy, the use of marijuana can push you over the threshold into psychosis.

Although marijuana can be helpful for manipulating the balance of forces in your brain, in certain people it can possibly be dangerous.

But if aspects of their elastic thought processes are enhanced, ayahuasca, like other drugs, is a double-edged sword: The improvement in elastic thinking comes at the expense of their capacity for analytical thought.

drugs and alcohol can enhance elastic thinking by weakening our cognitive filters.

the simple act of exhausting your executive brain before you start pondering a challenging intellectual issue can unleash your elastic brain to mount a more effective attack.

The researchers found that when a subject’s capacity for executive function was depleted, both the total number of imagined uses and their originality were significantly greater.

when a subject’s capacity for executive function was depleted, both the total number of imagined uses and their originality were significantly greater. The lesson is that, though we expect our best thinking time to be when we are fresh, our elastic thinking capacity may be highest when we feel “burnt out.” That’s good to know when scheduling your tasks—you could be better at generating imaginative ideas if you do that kind of thinking after working on a chore that involves a period of tedious, focused effort that strains your powers of concentration.

the labels “morning person” and “evening person” are well deserved—studies confirm that our bodily processes, like heart rate, temperature, alertness, and the executive functioning of our prefrontal cortex, indeed follow regular daily rhythms. These vary from person to person, governed by a cluster of about twenty thousand neurons in our hypothalamus, just above our brain stem.

Your elastic thinking ability may peak at the other end of the day, when your analytical powers are weakest.

While the students tested at their peak times solved more of the analytical problems, more of the riddles were solved by students tested in their off-peak hours, when their prefrontal cortex was not operating at full capacity. Fatigued people’s “more diffuse attentional focus,” the researchers wrote, led them to “widening their search through their knowledge network.”

I’ve learned to listen to my rhythms—that some activities are best done when I still have sleep in my eyes, and others after the weight of the day has painted dark circles beneath them.

The nuns who’d been the most positive lived about ten years longer than those who’d been the least.

you can relax your cognitive filters without resorting to drugs or technology: by simply improving your mood.

Negative emotions like fear, anger, sadness, and disgust elicit responses in our autonomic nervous system, such as an elevated heart rate or vomiting.

negative emotion creates an instant focus on some particular behavioral response, it narrows the scope of possibilities that your cognitive filters allow through. As a result, a bad mood discourages elastic thinking.

Since the positive emotions don’t come with action items, they don’t narrow your attention.

Positive emotions, Fredrickson argued, prompt us to consider a wider range of thoughts and actions than are typical. They encourage us to create new relationships, expand our support network, explore our environment, and open ourselves to absorbing information.

Positive mood, they reveal, has an effect that is similar to getting high, enabling more original ideas to surface in our conscious minds.

successfully applying elastic thinking to solve a problem stimulates your reward circuits and boosts your mood. The result is a virtuous circle in which positive mood and creative problem-solving reinforce each other.

The most famous activity that positive psychologists promote is the “gratitude exercise,” in which people are instructed to write down, regularly, three things for which they are grateful.

The first step is to acknowledge a bad thought and to accept it without immediately attempting to suppress it—acceptance tends to lessen the impact. Next, imagine that it is not you but a friend who is having the thought. What advice would you give that person?

an offer of help as an accusation of inadequacy.

As we age, and our neural connections dwindle, that balance of power is shifted, and the harmony disrupted.

Only we ourselves, through being mindful of how we operate, can choose the optimal practices for us to follow.

Survival of the Elastic