How to get 7000 points in bartender mix genius

Table of Contents

Title Page Table of Contents Copyright Dedication Epigraph Introduction Alone 1. Bob Dylan’s Brain 2. Alpha Waves (Condition Blue) 3. The Unconcealing 4. The Letting Go 5. The Outsider Together 6. The Power of Q 7. Urban Friction 8. The Shakespeare Paradox Coda Notes Acknowledgments Index How We Decide Introduction 1. The Quarterback in the Pocket Hmhlogo Footnotes

Copyright © 2012 by Jonah Lehrer All rights reserved

For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215

Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003. www.hmhbooks.com

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lehrer, Jonah.

Imagine: how creativity works / Jonah Lehrer. p. cm.

ISBN 978-0-547-38607-2 1. Creative ability. 2. Creative thinking. 3. Imagination. I. Title.

BF408.L455 2012 153.3'5—dc23 2011044597

Book design by Alex Camlin Illustrations by Bruce Mau Design

Printed in the United States of America DOC 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Excerpt from “September 1, 1939” © 1939 by W. H. Auden, renewed. Reprinted by permission of Curtis Brown, Ltd.

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For Sarah and Rose

Hell is a place where nothing connects with nothing.

—T. S. Eliot, Introduction to Dante’s Inferno

Introduction

Procter and Gamble had a problem: it needed a new floor cleaner. In the 1980s, the company had pioneered one lucrative consumer product after another, from pull-up diapers to anti-dandruff shampoo. It had developed color-safe detergent and designed a quilted paper towel that could absorb 85 percent more liquid than other paper towels. These innovations weren’t lucky accidents: Procter and Gamble was deeply invested in research and development. At the time, the corporation had more scientists on staff than any other company in the world, more PhDs than the faculties of MIT, UC- Berkeley, and Harvard combined.

And yet, despite the best efforts of the chemists in the household-cleaning division, there were no new floor products in the pipeline. The company was still selling the same lemon-scented detergents and cloth mops; consumers were still sweeping up their kitchens using wooden brooms and metal dustpans. The reason for this creative failure was simple: it was extremely difficult to make a stronger floor cleaner that didn’t also damage the floor. Although Procter and Gamble had invested millions of dollars in a new generation of soaps, these products tended to fail during the rigorous testing phase, as they peeled off wood varnishes and irritated delicate skin. The chemists assumed that they had exhausted the chemical possibilities.

That’s when Procter and Gamble decided to try a new approach. The company outsourced its innovation needs to Continuum, a design firm with offices in Boston and Los Angeles. “I think P and G came to us because their scientists were telling them to give up,” says Harry West, a leader on the soap team and now Continuum’s CEO. “So they told us to think crazy, to try to come up with something that all those chemists couldn’t.”

But the Continuum designers didn’t begin with molecules. They didn’t spend time in the lab worrying about the chemistry of soap. Instead, they visited people’s homes and watched dozens of them engage in the tedious ritual of floor cleaning. The designers took detailed notes on the vacuuming of carpets and the sweeping of kitchens. When the notes weren’t enough, they set up video cameras in living rooms. “This is about the most boring footage you can imagine,” West says. “It’s movies of mopping, for God’s sake. And we had to watch hundreds of hours of it.” The videotapes may have been tedious, but they were also essential, since West and his team were

trying to observe the act of floor cleaning without any preconceptions. “I wanted to forget everything I knew about mops and soaps and brooms,” he says. “I wanted to look at the problem as if I’d just stepped off a spaceship from Mars.”

After several months of observation—West refers to this as the anthropologist phase—the team members had their first insight. It came as they watched a woman clean her mop in the bathtub. “You’ve got this unwieldy pole,” West says. “And you are splashing around this filthy water trying to get the dirt out of a mop head that’s been expressly designed to attract dirt. It’s an extraordinarily unpleasant activity.” In fact, when the Continuum team analyzed the videotapes, they found that people spent more time cleaning their mops than they did cleaning the floors; the tool made the task more difficult. “Once I realized how bad mopping was, I became quite passionate about floor cleaning,” West says. “I became convinced that the world didn’t need an improved version of the mop. Instead, it needed a total replacement for the mop. It’s a hopeless piece of technology.”

Unfortunately, the Continuum designers couldn’t think of a better cleaning method. It seemed like an impossible challenge. Perhaps floor cleaning was destined to be an inefficient chore.

In desperation, the team returned to making house visits, hoping for some errant inspiration. One day, the designers were watching an elderly woman sweep some coffee grounds off the kitchen floor. She got out her hand broom and carefully brushed the grounds into a dustpan. But then something interesting happened. After the woman was done sweeping, she wet a paper towel and wiped it over the linoleum, picking up the last bits of spilled coffee. Although everyone on the Continuum team had done the same thing countless times before, this particular piece of dirty paper led to a revelation.

What the designers saw in that paper towel was the possibility of a disposable cleaning surface. “All of a sudden, we realized what needed to be done,” says Don Buchner, a Continuum vice president. “We needed to invent a spot cleaner that people could just throw away. No more cleaning mop heads, no more bending over in the bathtub, no more buckets of dirty water. That was our big idea.” A few weeks later, this epiphany gave rise to their first floor-cleaning prototype. It was a simple thing, just a slender plastic stick connected to a flat rectangle of Velcro to which disposable pieces of electrostatic tissue were attached. A spray mechanism was built into the device, allowing people to wet the floor with a mild soap before they applied

the wipes. (The soap was mostly unnecessary, but it smelled nice.) “You know an idea has promise when it seems obvious in retrospect,” West says. “Why splash around dirty water when you can just wipe up the dirt? And why would you bother to clean this surface? Why not just throw it away, like a used paper towel?”

Procter and Gamble, however, wasn’t thrilled with the concept. The company had developed a billion-dollar market selling consumers the latest mops and soaps. They didn’t want to replace that business with an untested cleaning product. The first focus groups only reinforced the skepticism. When Procter and Gamble presented consumers with a sketch of the new cleaning device, the vast majority of people rejected the concept. They didn’t want to throw out their mops or have to rely on a tool that was little more than a tissue on a stick. They didn’t like the idea of disposable wipes, and they didn’t understand how all that dirt would get onto the moistened piece of paper. And so the idea was shelved; Procter and Gamble wasn’t going to risk market share on a radical new device that nobody wanted.

But the designers at Continuum refused to give up—they were convinced they’d discovered the mop of the future. After a year of pleading, they persuaded Procter and Gamble to let them show their prototype to a focus group. Instead of just reading a description of the product, consumers could now play with an “experiential model” clad in roughly cut plastic. The prototype made all the difference: people were now enthralled by the cleaning tool, which they tested out on actual floors. In fact, the product scored higher in focus-group sessions than any other cleaning device Procter and Gamble had ever tested. “It was off the charts,” Buchner says. “The same people who hated the idea when it was just an idea now wanted to take the thing home with them.” Furthermore, tests by Procter and Gamble demonstrated that the new product cleaned the floor far better than sponge mops, string mops, or any other kinds of mops. According to the corporate scientists, the “tissue on a stick” was one of the most effective floor cleaners ever invented.

In 1997, nearly three years after West and his designers began making their videotapes, Procter and Gamble officially submitted an application for a U.S. patent. In the early spring of 1999, the new cleaning tool was introduced in supermarkets across the country. The product was an instant success: by the end of the year, it had generated more than $500 million in sales. Numerous imitators and spinoffs have since been introduced, but the original

device continues to dominate the post-mop market, taking up an ever greater share of the supermarket aisle. Its name is the Swiffer.

The invention of the Swiffer is a tale of creativity. It’s the story of a few engineers coming up with an entirely new cleaning tool while watching someone sweep up some coffee grounds. In that flash of thought, Harry West and his team managed to think differently about something we all do every day. They were able to see the world as it was—a frustrating place filled with tedious chores—and then envision the world as it might be if only there were a better mop. That insight changed floor cleaning forever.

This book is about how such moments happen. It is about our most important mental talent: the ability to imagine what has never existed. We take this talent for granted, but our lives are defined by it. There is the pop song on the radio and the gadget in your pocket, the art on the wall and the air conditioner in the window. There is the medicine in the bathroom and the chair you are sitting in and this book in your hand.

And yet, although we are always surrounded by our creations, there is something profoundly mysterious about the creative process. For instance, why did Harry West come up with the Swiffer concept after watching that woman wipe the floor with the paper towel? After all, he’d done it himself on numerous occasions. “I can’t begin to explain why the idea arrived then,” he says. “I was too grateful to ask too many questions.” The sheer secrecy of creativity—the difficulty in understanding how it happens, even when it happens to us—means that we often associate breakthroughs with an external force. In fact, until the Enlightenment, the imagination was entirely synonymous with higher powers: being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the ingenious gods. (Inspiration, after all, literally means “breathed upon.”) Because people couldn’t understand creativity, they assumed that their best ideas came from somewhere else. The imagination was outsourced.

The deep mysteriousness of creativity also intimidated scientists. It’s one thing to study nerve-reaction times or the mechanics of sight. But how does one measure the imagination? The daunting nature of the subject led researchers to mostly neglect it; a recent survey of psychology papers published between 1950 and 2000 revealed that less than 1 percent of them investigated aspects of the creative process. Even the evolution of this human talent was confounding. Most cognitive skills have elaborate biological

histories, so their evolution can be traced over time. But not creativity—the human imagination has no clear precursors. There is no ingenuity module that got enlarged in the human cortex, or even a proto-creative impulse evident in other primates. Monkeys don’t paint; chimps don’t write poems; and it’s the rare animal (like the New Caledonian crow) that exhibits rudimentary signs of problem solving. The birth of creativity, in other words, arrived like any insight: out of nowhere.

This doesn’t mean, however, that the imagination can’t be rigorously studied. Until we understand the set of mental events that give rise to new thoughts, we will never understand what makes us so special. That’s why this book begins by returning us to the material source of the imagination: the three pounds of flesh inside the skull. William James described the creative process as a “seething cauldron of ideas, where everything is fizzling and bobbing about in a state of bewildering activity.” For the first time, we can see the cauldron itself, that massive network of electrical cells that allow individuals to form new connections between old ideas. We can take snapshots of thoughts in brain scanners and measure the excitement of neurons as they get closer to a solution. The imagination can seem like a magic trick of matter—new ideas emerging from thin air—but we are beginning to understand how the trick works.

The first thing this new perspective makes clear is that the standard definition of creativity is completely wrong. Ever since the ancient Greeks, people have assumed that the imagination is separate from other kinds of cognition. But the latest science suggests that this assumption is false. Instead, creativity is a catchall term for a variety of distinct thought processes. (The brain is the ultimate category buster.) Just consider the profusion of creative methods that led to the invention of the Swiffer. First, there was the anthropologist phase, those nine months of careful observation and tedious videotaping. Although this phase didn’t generate any new ideas —the point was to clear the mind of old ones—it played an essential role in the creative process, allowing the team to better understand the problem. And then, when West watched the woman sweep up the coffee grounds, there was the classic moment of insight, a breakthrough appearing in a fraction of a second. But that epiphany wasn’t the end of the process. The engineers and designers still had to spend years fine-tuning the design, perfecting the spray nozzle and the electrostatic wipes. “The concept is only the start of the process,” West says. “The hardest work always comes after, when you’re

trying to make the idea real.” The point is that the Swiffer creative process involved multiple forms of

creativity. This is where the tools of modern science prove essential, since they allow us to see how these various forms depend on different kinds of brain activity. The imagination is transformed from something metaphysical —a property of the gods—into a particular twitch of cortex. Furthermore, this new knowledge is useful: because we finally understand what creativity is, we can begin to construct a taxonomy of it, outlining the conditions under which each particular mental strategy is ideal. Some acts of imagination are best done in a crowded café sipping espresso, and some are helped by a cold beer on the couch. Sometimes we need to let go and improvise on our own, and sometimes we need the wisdom of others. Once we know how creativity works, we can make it work for us.

But just because we’ve begun to decipher the anatomy of the imagination doesn’t mean we’ve unlocked its secret. In fact, this is what makes the subject of creativity so interesting: it requires a description from multiple perspectives. The individual brain, after all, is always situated in a context and a culture, so we need to blend psychology and sociology, merging together the outside world and the inside of the mind. This is why, although Imagine begins with the fluttering of neurons, it will also explore the influence of the surrounding environment on creativity. Why are some cities such centers of innovation? What kind of classroom techniques increase the creativity of children? Is the Internet making us more or less imaginative? We’ll look at evidence showing that seemingly irrelevant factors—such as the color of paint on the wall or the location of a restroom—can have a dramatic impact on creative production.

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

For most of human history, people have believed that the imagination is inherently inscrutable, an impenetrable biological gift. As a result, we cling to

a series of false myths about what creativity is and where it comes from. These myths don’t just mislead—they also interfere with the imagination. In addition to looking at elegant experiments and scientific studies, we’ll examine creativity as it is experienced in the real world. We’ll learn about Bob Dylan’s writing method and the drug habits of poets. We’ll spend time with a bartender who thinks like a chemist, and an autistic surfer who invented a new surfing move. We’ll look at a website that helps solve seemingly impossible problems, and we’ll go behind the scenes at Pixar. We’ll watch Yo-Yo Ma improvise, and we’ll uncover the secrets of consistently innovative companies.

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

Alone

1. Bob Dylan’s Brain

Always carry a light bulb.

—Bob Dylan

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

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

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

around here.” A few minutes later, there’s a knock on the door. The lunatics have arrived.

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

Before long, it all became too much. While touring in England, Dylan decided that he was leading an impossible life, that this existence couldn’t be sustained. The only talent he cared about—his ceaseless creativity—was being ruined by fame. The breaking point probably came after a brief vacation in Portugal, where Dylan got a vicious case of food poisoning. The illness forced him to stay in bed for a week, giving the singer a rare chance to reflect. “I realized I was very drained,” Dylan would later confess. “I was playing a lot of songs I didn’t want to play. I was singing words I didn’t really want to sing . . . It’s very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don’t dig you.”

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

observation: “God, I’m glad I’m not me,” he said. “I’m glad I’m not that.” The last shows were in London at a sold-out Royal Albert Hall. It was

here that Dylan told his manager he was quitting the music business. He was finished with singing and songwriting and was going to move to a tiny cabin in Woodstock, New York. Although Dylan had become a pop icon—the prophetic poet of his generation—he was ready to renounce it all, to surrender the celebrity and status, if it meant he might be left alone.

Dylan wasn’t bluffing. As promised, he returned from his British tour and rode his Triumph motorcycle straight out of New York City. He was leaving the folk scene of the Village behind, heading upstate to an empty house. He was done writing songs—he had nothing else to say. Dylan didn’t even bring his guitar.

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

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

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

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

sooner. This is the clichéd moment of insight that people know so well from

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

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

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

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

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

1.

Mark Beeman was stumped. It was the early 1990s and Beeman, a young scientist at the National Institutes of Health, was studying patients who had suffered damage to the right hemisphere of the brain. “The doctors would always tell these people, ‘Wow, you’re so lucky,’” Beeman remembers. “They’d go on about how the right hemisphere was the minor hemisphere—it doesn’t do much, and it doesn’t do anything with language.” Those consoling words reflected the scientific consensus that the right half of the brain was

mostly unnecessary. In his 1981 Nobel lecture, the neuroscientist Roger Sperry summarized the prevailing view of the right hemisphere at the time he began studying it: The right hemisphere was “not only mute and agraphic but also dyslexic, word-deaf and apraxic, and lacking generally in higher cognitive function.” In other words, it was thought to be a useless chunk of tissue.

But Beeman noticed that many patients with right hemisphere damage nonetheless had serious cognitive problems even though the left hemisphere had been spared. He started making a list of their deficits. The list was long. “Some of these patients couldn’t understand jokes or sarcasm or metaphors,” Beeman says. “Others had a tough time using a map or making sense of paintings. These might not seem like debilitating problems, but they were still very unsettling for these people, especially because they weren’t supposed to exist. Their doctors had told them not to worry because the right hemisphere wasn’t supposed to be important.”

The struggles of these patients led Beeman to reconsider the function of the right side of the brain. At first, he couldn’t figure out what all these deficits had in common. What did humor have to do with navigation? What possible link existed between sarcasm and visual art? The mental problems triggered by right hemisphere damage just seemed so incomprehensibly varied. “I couldn’t come up with a decent explanation,” Beeman remembers. “I couldn’t connect the dots.”

And then, just when Beeman was about to give up, he had an idea. Perhaps the purpose of the right hemisphere was doing the very thing he was trying to do: find the subtle connections between seemingly unrelated things.1 Beeman realized that all of the problems experienced by his patients involved making sense of the whole, seeing not just the parts but how they hang together. “The world is so complex that the brain has to process it in two different ways at the same time,” Beeman says. “It needs to see the forest and the trees. The right hemisphere is what helps you see the forest.”

Take the language deficits caused by right hemisphere damage. Beeman speculated that, while the left hemisphere handles denotation—it stores the literal meanings of words—the right hemisphere deals with connotation, or all the meanings that can’t be looked up in the dictionary. When you read a poem or laugh at the punch line of a joke, you are relying in large part on the right hemisphere and its ability to uncover linguistic associations. Metaphors are a perfect example of this. From the perspective of the brain, a metaphor is

a bridge between two ideas that, at least on the surface, are not equivalent or related. When Romeo declares that “Juliet is the sun,” we know that he isn’t saying his beloved is a massive, flaming ball of hydrogen. We understand that Romeo is trafficking in metaphor, calling attention to aspects of Juliet that might also apply to that bright orb in the sky. She might not be a star, but perhaps she lights up his world in the same way the sun illuminates the earth.

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

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

The challenge for Beeman was finding a way to study these more abstract cognitive skills. He wanted to understand the right hemisphere—he just didn’t know which questions to ask. “The right hemisphere was tainted by all this pop-psychology stuff about right-brain people being more artistic or imaginative,” Beeman says. “And so when you said you wanted to investigate that kind of thinking in the right hemisphere, grant committees assumed you weren’t very serious. Studying metaphors and holistic thinking

seemed like a sure way to ruin a scientific career.” But in 1993, Beeman heard a talk on moments of insight by Jonathan

Schooler, a psychologist now at the University of California at Santa Barbara. Schooler presented the results of a simple experiment: he’d put undergraduates in a tiny room and given them a series of difficult creative puzzles. Here’s a sample question:

A giant inverted steel pyramid is perfectly balanced on its point. Any movement of the pyramid will cause it to topple over. Underneath the pyramid is a $100 bill. How do you remove the bill without disturbing the pyramid?

Reflect, for a moment, on your own thought process as you try to solve

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

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

information.” (If you’re still wondering, the solution is to set the hundred- dollar bill on fire. The insight, then, is that the bill just needs to be removed, not salvaged.)

To Beeman, Schooler’s finding was a revelation. It made perfect sense that the right hemisphere excelled at solving insight puzzles since that side of the brain was better able to see the hidden connections, those remote associations between separate ideas. While the left hemisphere was frantically trying to lift the pyramid into the air—that’s the obvious way to “remove” the money—the right hemisphere was busy thinking about alternative approaches. “I suddenly realized that moments of insight could be a really interesting way to look at all these skills the right hemisphere excelled at,” Beeman says. “It was a rigorous way to study some very mysterious aspects of the mind. I had an insight about insight.”

2.

Mark Beeman has a tense smile, a receding hairline, and the wiry build of a long-distance runner. He qualified for the Olympic trials in 1988 and 1992 with a time of 3:41 in the fifteen-hundred-meter race, although he gave up competitive running after, as he puts it, “everything below the hips started to fall apart.” He now subsists on long walks and the manic tapping of feet. When Beeman gets excited about something—whether it’s the cellular properties of pyramidal neurons or his new treadmill—the pace of his speech accelerates and then he starts to draw pictures on whatever scratch paper is nearby.