CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

ONE SUNNY SUNDAY in Buenos Aires, my daughter and I were playing her favourite game on the swings. She was two at the time, and would happily spend the best part of an hour sailing backwards and forwards through the air, occasionally tilting her head to look up at the sky. I liked to push the swing from the front so I could watch the permanent smile on her face as she fully enjoyed the moment. Every few minutes, in my naive, adult way, I would suggest she have a go on the slide or the seesaw, assuming she must be getting bored. I couldn’t understand how she could spend so much time on it. Obviously, I was using my timescale, not hers. Every now and then, I would stop pushing the swing to check my smartphone for emails, browse the newspaper online, or send a message. I did this strategically so that before the swing lost momentum and she had to ask me, I would resume pushing, and her curly locks would once more flutter against the back of the seat. Then, all of a sudden, it happened: ‘Papa, no phone,’ she said, still beaming. I walked behind her and carried on pushing the swing from there, doing my best to dissimulate while continuing to use the touchscreen on my mobile. Three minutes later, this time without the smile or the ‘Papa’, she shouted: ‘No phone!’ I slipped the mobile back in my pocket, reluctantly yet guiltily. Uma had sensed that I wasn’t a hundred percent there with her, and she was right. She taught me an important lesson, and from then on I chose not to take my mobile phone to the park any more. Each time we set off, I would show Uma that I was leaving it on the living room table, and she was much more contented as we walked the seven blocks to the local park.

I think it happened to me on our third trip to the park without my mobile phone. Uma now preferred me to push her on the swing from behind. My arms moving rhythmically back and forth lulled me into a sort of trance. Suddenly, ideas started tumbling into my head; I could see them, feel them, appearing randomly one after the other, too fast for me to respond. What to do that weekend, how to present a project to a client, how to prepare a new class, even how to invent a new shower feature or make the playground equipment in the park safer for kids. And so on ad infinitum. When Uma commented about a pigeon or another toddler in the park, or asked me for a sweet, it took me several seconds to reply, to emerge from that cloister of ideas. However, she seemed to enjoy my momentary confusion. She laughed and exclaimed: ‘Papa! Papa! Are you crazy?’

As we walked home that afternoon, I realised I had forgotten most of the ideas that had come to me while I was pushing my daughter on the swing. Some had vanished without trace, others I knew were related to a client, although I couldn’t remember exactly how.

As I lay in bed that night, I knew I’d had a lot of thoughts in that park, including some that were commonplace and unexceptional, but also others that were more unusual: ‘creative’ or new to me. And yet I couldn’t remember any of them. I soon forgot the incident, until the next time I pushed Uma on the swing and the same thing happened. Twice in a row couldn’t be coincidence. With my scientific background, I resolved to find out what was going on, and from then on, each time I pushed Uma on the swing and the rhythmical movement began, with her smiling face and her golden curls, I waited attentively to be enveloped by my private flow of ideas. Needless to say, any conscious attempt to make it happen ended in failure.

I have frequently heard speakers at international business conferences affirm that ninety percent of all new innovative products and services we enjoy come from ideas thought up by ‘ordinary’ employees outside working hours. Like me at the swings with Uma.

I have spent many years studying innovative businesses, and after speaking to a lot of interesting employees on every level of the job hierarchy and from different cultures, companies, industries and countries, I have reached the same conclusion: new ideas can arise at any time, but they tend to occur more frequently the more relaxed we are. According to the law of probabilities, the more ideas we have, the more likelihood one of them will be good, better, fresh, creative and different. Some people call this reverse brainstorming: instead of asking our brain to generate ideas for two hours on a Tuesday afternoon because our boss says so, we make the most of the fact that our mind works twenty-four hours a day, three hundred and sixty-five days a year. And we already do: we all have at least one or two places, times or situations during the day (in the car, in the shower, in bed, in the bathtub, cooking, doing sport, playing, meditating, sleeping) when our consciousness is bombarded with ideas. On the advice of employees in highly innovative organisations, of artists, including engineers at Toyota, I started to carry a small notebook with me to the park so that I could write down my ideas immediately.

We now know that we forget the majority of our thoughts, including any new ideas we might have. Amazingly, Uma doesn’t mind her papa ‘drawing’ in his little notebook, as she refers to it, while pushing her on the swing; on the contrary, she also brings her pad along so that she can draw and share an authentic father–daughter moment. That notebook has become part of my body, and I put any projects I want to remember under a heading, as opposed to jotting down ideas as they occur to me, making it much easier to find something I want to reread.

It is 5 September 2011. I am sitting in El Dorado airport in Bogotá waiting to board a flight back to Buenos Aires. I leaf through my notebook, and every ten or twenty pages I come to a fresh heading printed in capital letters, followed by an almost-illegible scrawl: my ideas. Among my current projects are: classes in Mendoza, conference in Cartagena, talk at Coca-Cola, neuromarketing, Costa Rica 2011, Sarmiento the innovator, miscellaneous projects, executive education. During this downtime at the airport, I rethink some of my ideas. Projects have a limited lifespan in my notebook and, pen in hand, I browse through some of those that have already happened and are now cluttering up my field of vision, and I draw a line through them. While doing this, I come to the heading: ‘miscellaneous projects’, and a sentence catches my eye; at some point, I don’t remember when, I increased it to the power of ten, which in my private language means I have revisited an idea many times, and given it a great deal of thought.

For example: ‘Write a book¹⁰’, it says in bold letters, almost scoring the paper.

The time has come. So here I go.

PROLOGUE

THE LAST TEN years have seen some fascinating technological advances in the field of neuroscience. In particular those aimed at achieving a greater understanding of the brain and its intimate relationship with the mind. For the very first time, we are able to see the electrical impulses inside our head that allow us to create new connections using pathways established by our experience. Using neuroimaging techniques we can photograph thoughts and measure neuron activity as the brain works to solve a problem.

We have reached a key moment in our understanding of everything we know about how we function, who we are, and the nature of our human brain. As I hope to show in this book, such an understanding will help us to improve the quality of our lives in a variety of ways; I am convinced that we can only change our brain by knowing how it works. The Agile Mind aims at debunking some of the myths surrounding the brain, the often mistaken ideas we have about it, and cultivating the things we know in ways that will help us to become more creative. Creativity can appear to spring from nowhere, as if by magic. We are now starting to understand how that creative magic works, and the deeper our understanding of it, the better we will be able to make it work for us.

You may not know it, but neuroscience already plays an important role in our lives – although scientific jargon can sometimes be an obstacle to accessing the exciting insights that field provides into the world and us. My desire as a scientist is to take the reader on a guided tour of some of the most inspired research carried out by experts in the field of creativity and neuroscience, both past and present. It is easy to show through today’s advanced technology how we are able to continue to learn and be more creative right up until the day we die. My aim is for the reader to experience this for themselves, and at the same time to realise that aside from the ability to solve problems, resolve conflicts, and do well at work, being more creative means having a more fulfilling, enjoyable life.

We live in a globalised society where products and services increasingly resemble one another, to the extent that it is often hard to tell them apart. Technology and technical expertise are ever more easily and cheaply available, whether in Singapore, China, Cyprus, the United Kingdom or the United States. Much of the knowledge that was so prized and sought after in the twentieth century no longer represents a challenge. In order to excel in today’s world, businesses, governments and organisations require people to be creative. And it is the most empathic and creative among us who make the most difference in society, economics, education and industry. Logical thinking, as we understand it, is necessary but insufficient. Organisations are keen to employ people who can empathise with others (clients, fellow employees, colleagues, partners or students), who have a greater understanding of others’ needs, concerns, tastes, expectations, what satisfies them; who are able to think creatively and innovatively and can offer different services or products, a better experience. However, people like this are in short supply in our society.

From the earliest beginnings of our educational system up to the present day, the emphasis has always been on the importance of logical analysis and deductive reasoning (which prevailed during the twentieth century) as opposed to our capacity for creativity and empathy. However, these latter qualities are essential if we are to triumph in the twenty-first century, and it is up to us to nurture them in ourselves, regardless of who we are or what we do for a living. People who are curious and courageous are promoted and rewarded and become indispensable in any organisation. It is those able to come up with alternative solutions to societies’ problems, both big and small, who truly make their mark.

In this book I will draw on current scientific advances and research into our brain/mind, so that the reader can get to know it as never before. I will also suggest alternative ways, in the form of exercises based on that research, to increase creative capacity in everyday life.

Moving on a bit. If we observe any child under the age of six, it becomes obvious that human beings are creative from the moment they are born. But then school and society gradually demand we stop using those neural pathways and focus primarily on others: logic and analysis, which become our dominant thought patterns. Up until a few years ago, scientists believed that creativity in young people and adults was a lost cause, that neurons and synapses which aren’t used are lost for ever. The good news is that today’s scientists have shown very specifically that this is untrue. As I said before, the brain has the power to regenerate and to carry on learning until the day we die. We can all be more creative if we employ the right techniques and methods to stimulate those neurons and their connections, which most of us have scarcely used. Think of the brain as a muscle, and our lives as training for a race; if we spend most of our time exercising only one part of that muscle, the rest will atrophy. But now we know that with discipline, determination and exercise, the atrophied muscle can be made to work again. If we choose to make this journey, we will end up discovering that we are more creative, and that we can use this ability to improve our quality of life.

The Agile Mind is about our most precious mental resource: our capacity to imagine things that are entirely new, and to be creative. We often think of creativity as something in-built that only happens to others, and which doesn’t involve us much. And yet our lives are defined by human creativity: your mobile phone, your favourite poem, the comfortable chair you are sitting in as you read, the central heating that protects you from the cold, that song which reminds you of a loved one, the pill you take when you have a headache.

The Agile Mind is an invitation to a brain spa, where you can learn to nurture, cosset and coax your mind and your creativity back into shape.

BREAKING OLD PATTERNS

Genes and memes

No matter who you are, you can change your mind. It all depends on you. No matter how creative you or others think you are, you can improve on that. Creativity gurus have long been telling us how to enhance our creativity, based on their own experience or intuition and with more or less good results. Today, drawing on the most advanced technology, neuroscience has shown clearly and concisely that our brains are capable of learning and changing until the day we die – a capacity known as neuroplasticity. Regardless of past experiences or genetic make-up, our minds, i.e. the way we use our thoughts, can change the structure and anatomy of our brain. When you start reading this book, your brain will be one way, with a particular set of neural connections. By the time you finish reading, your brain will have changed, made fresh connections or pathways, and it will doubtless be a better brain, because you will have learned to recognise its potential, as well as some of its limitations. And if, in addition, you methodically apply the techniques I will be proposing throughout the book, your creative potential will increase in ways that are noticeable not just to you but also to your colleagues or fellow students, to your family members and friends. I observe and experience these incredible changes not only in myself (I am and have always been my own guinea pig), but also in the hundreds of people whom I have the privilege and pleasure to work with in a number of different organisations. I wish to share this knowledge with you, dear reader, to help you to become more creative and to enjoy a more fulfilled and therefore a happier life.

How did we humans get to where we are? We could say that we are still on earth thanks to two continuous movements: biological evolution and culture. We evolve biologically according to random mutations in our genes, and those mutations that favour survival in the environment are then selected by nature in a process called natural selection, which occurs beyond our consciousness or control. Where culture is concerned, our creativity plays the biggest role, generating enormous changes in our cultural paradigms in a process that occurs on an entirely conscious level.

Consequently, creativity could be considered the cultural equivalent of the genetic changes that lead to our evolution.

We now know that due to certain mutations, some of us evolve a nervous system in which the discovery of new things, essential to the development of creativity, stimulates the brain’s pleasure centres. That’s to say, just as some people might be passionate about sex or food, others have evolved to become passionate about, and to derive pleasure from, learning new things. However, it appears this propensity towards newness, discovery and exploration doesn’t only depend on a genetic component, but is also influenced by childhood experience. If that is true, then our ancestors, who recognised the importance of innovation, would doubtless have protected and learned from these creative individuals, whose inventiveness enabled them to be better prepared to face unforeseeable circumstances and threats to their survival.

And yet, a far more primitive and powerful force than creativity also played an important role in human survival: entropy – or conserving our energy. Basically we conserve energy when there are no external demands on us, and this is when entropy plays an important part in the control of our mind and body. Our need to conserve energy is so great that we instantly associate leisure time with relaxation. Going for a walk in the park, watching a movie, reading a book or simply contemplating the ceiling. Switching to automatic pilot. Not using up our energy. It is as if we humans were being tugged at by two opposing instructions from our brain: on the one hand to use the minimum effort necessary (entropy) and on the other to explore and search for the new (creativity).

Entropy seems to exert a stronger pull on most of us than the pleasure of discovering fresh challenges or new ideas. However, fortunately, some people respond much more strongly to the rewards of discovery. Nevertheless, regardless of which of these two instructions you identify with more, or in what area or moment of your life it occurs, creativity is always extremely pleasurable and makes us feel good.

To sum up: we are born with two somewhat contradictory sets of instructions. On the one hand we are programmed to conserve our energy – the basic instinct of self-preservation. And on the other, we are oriented towards being more expansive, exploring and enjoying novelty and taking certain risks – the curiosity all children possess. It is the second that leads to creativity. Despite the need for both ‘programmes’, we can achieve the first without much effort, assistance or motivation. The latter, being creative, is difficult to cultivate alone. As adults, we have few opportunities to be curious in our work or in our everyday lives. There are too many things preventing us from taking risks or exploring, and the motivation needed to behave in more creative ways quickly fades. This is due, in large part, to the fact that most of us don’t feel or think of ourselves as creative.

Genes are automatically passed on from generation to generation, but the same isn’t true of inventions or ideas. Every child has to learn from the beginning how to use fire, the wheel or nuclear energy. These units of information, which we are required to learn so that our culture survives, are known as ‘memes’ – a term coined by Richard Dawkins in his book The Selfish Gene. The values of all our memes, from language and numbers through to theories and laws, have to be passed on to our children in order not to be forgotten. In cultural terms, then, memes could be considered as equivalent to genes.

It is possible for an extremely creative individual to change a meme. And if a sufficient number of people think that this change constitutes an improvement for society, it becomes a new part of the culture. New songs, new ideas, new machines; this is what creativity is about. But memes don’t arise automatically, as occurs in biological evolution when genes mutate. That’s to say, a price has to be paid so that creativity can occur. It takes effort and energy to change traditions, and involves learning. Learning requires us to pay attention – a limited resource – to the information we are given. We are incapable of processing large amounts of new information simultaneously, and as we are constantly busy and rushing about, we have few opportunities to think up new ideas. Most of our time is taken up with the task of survival, the everyday activities of work and home life.

In other words, we need to free up a lot of attention in order to be highly creative, or just more creative, in any given discipline or environment. If we are constantly busy, we are unlikely to come up with fresh ideas that might change or improve a product, a song, or a way of life. We need to devote our attention to our creative challenge.

A definition: creativity is the mental activity whereby at any given moment a revelation or insight occurs in the brain resulting in a new idea or action that has value. It means breaking with habitual thought patterns, which we all do more or less frequently. If we look at ideas that are going to change paradigms or memes within a tradition, culture or discipline, we will see that the decision about whether or not they were new and valuable comes from people who are knowledgeable about the medium or discipline in which the idea or action is attempting to gain ground. Consequently, once they approve and accept the idea, it will have undergone a kind of social evaluation that says: ‘This is truly creative’. And so, creativity doesn’t only exist in someone’s head, but also in the interaction of thoughts within a sociocultural context. It is a systemic rather than an individual phenomenon.

Other definitions of creativity: someone who expresses thoughts that are unusual, and who is passionate and inspired; people who experience the world in a fresh or original way; people who have a different view of the world and who are less judgemental, who are open to having particular insights that allow them to generate ideas, or products or actions which lead to important discoveries.

Lighting up new pathways

Imagine for a moment that we are on the top floor of a tall building from which we are able to contemplate a sprawling city at night. If we look more closely, we might notice that some areas are lit up. If we are able to glimpse any cars, we might also see that only a few streets are illuminated by streetlights or car headlamps. Our brain is a bit like a city that is mostly in darkness, but where a few avenues, roads and streetlights are always illuminated.

Extending the analogy, our brain possesses a huge potential to be illuminated. We could switch on numerous streetlamps (neural connections) and yet few streets (neural pathways) are lit up, connected and in constant use. This underlines the fact that we have a tendency to use the same information when trying to solve any problem. That’s to say we look in those few illuminated streets for what we already know, have seen and experienced, even though other, more poorly lit streets or avenues containing fresh material, ideas or creative solutions are always open to us.

It is as if we are living on semi-automatic-pilot, and the majority of our responses to dilemmas and challenges come from our experiences, certainties and culture. Indeed, we could say that these are the names of the three main streets that are permanently illuminated.

Let’s remember that our brain, by means of entropy, is a great conserver of energy. It has always been and it is still helpful to our survival to keep some in reserve in case of unexpected events where we might find ourselves in a fight or flight situation. That is why, when faced with an intellectual challenge, we initially look for solutions in what we already know.

We live from experience, which is a constant source of information. But if we want to find new forms and ideas, if we want to be inspired, to have insights in order to build something creative, we need to make an effort to illuminate and connect other neurons. Effort implies using energy. If we succeed, we will be able to discover several possibilities and responses to the same question, dilemma, goal or challenge. We will refer to these from now on as creative challenges.

When we get up to go to work, school, university, or wherever we go in the morning, how do we get there? We always or almost always take the same route. The same roads or side streets, the same underground or bus. We could take two, three, possibly four, different routes to get where we are going each morning. But why use different roads or buses if we know (certainty) that we can get there by taking the same route (culture and experience)? The brain doesn’t like to use energy on things it already knows. It contains thought patterns and structures that become established in our neural pathways as time passes and we accumulate more experiences – like the illuminated streets of our city. As we shall see, the creative process liberates those patterns and structures making way for the possibility of different thoughts.

I don’t think, therefore I am

At primary school, children start spending less time playing. Our education is based on processing information about things that have already happened, about the opinions of a lot of people who are no longer alive, and about what exists today. That’s to say, most of our responses are based on learned information. ‘Reply’ and ‘response’ share the same etymological root; responses are the prayers given for the dead, and there is something lifeless about the replies we give. The problem with it is that we are no longer thinking. We are being taught how not to think. In other words, the moment we believe we know the answer to something based on our education is the moment when our own thoughts die. And that is why so many of us have difficulty using our imagination and creativity to develop new ideas. Our ideas are structured in powerful and predictable ways into very specific categories and concepts. To think creatively we need to generate associations and connections between two or more different ideas. By doing so we can create new categories and concepts, only we aren’t taught to process information in this way.

In other words, chemically speaking, we think reproductively; we confront new problems based on past events or solutions. Unconsciously we ask ourselves: what do I know about this problem based on my experience, my education or my work? The brain then analyses and selects the most promising approach, thereby excluding other possibilities. It moves clearly and persistently towards a solution based on past perspectives. This is what we refer to as ‘dominant thought patterns’. It is important to acknowledge that these patterns also simplify life’s complexities: our ability to do our job, to drive a car or get on a bicycle without falling off are all achievable thanks to these unconscious thought patterns which allow us to process complex data.

To think creatively is to think productively. When we are confronted with a dilemma, we should ask ourselves how many different ways there are of looking at the problem, rethinking it to solve it, rather than how to tackle it based on what we already know. The idea is to try to find different answers, many of which might be very unconventional, and a few of which might even be exceptional. Habitual reproductive thinking leads to very rigid thought patterns, which often prevents us from solving a problem. Generally speaking, when we think reproductively, the responses we come up with are almost identical or at least superficially similar to past experiences. Reproductive thinking produces dull, not very original ideas. If you think the way you have always thought, you will come up with the same old ideas.

A form of creative thinking known as conceptual blending allows us to generate associations and connections between different ideas. As we will see later, in order to achieve this, we must liberate our thoughts to allow the space for new possibilities. Children are experts at conceptual blending. When we are young, our thoughts are like a glass of water: inclusive, fluid and clear. Everything is mixed up together and can combine in ways that generate multiple connections and associations. That’s why kids are spontaneously creative. And yet at school we are taught to define, divide, segregate and label things into different categories. For the rest of our lives these categories remain separate, they never combine. It’s as if the fluid thinking of children becomes frozen, like ice cubes in a tray, each cube representing a category; our thoughts become frozen.

Conceptual blending, a history

When examining great inventions, both past and present, we might ask ourselves: are we more creative today than we were a hundred thousand years ago? But what about fire, the spear, the wheel, the canoe, agriculture…?

Mankind’s first great creative idea was perhaps rubbing two stones together to produce fire. I can imagine those early humans seeing lightning strike a tree during a storm, setting it on fire, and the wind helping spread the flames across the African plain. I can also imagine them banging stones together to scare predators away. As they did so, they would occasionally notice sparks fly. Those humans (who, unlike most of us, hadn’t received a formal education) were practising conceptual blending. The stones producing sparks, the lightning setting fire to the trees, the wind making the flames spread. They blended these concepts and produced fire with their own hands, by rubbing sticks and stones together. There were no schools to teach them how to make fire; there were no scientists, artists or philosophers, nothing to structure their imagination, which remained absolutely pure. They thought the way they had been born to think, i.e. naturally and spontaneously. They were able to combine conceptually the different essences, functions, characteristics and patterns they perceived in the environment in which they lived. Some anthropologists, for example, think that early humans were inspired by observing spiders’ webs to create nets to snare animals and for fishing. The same process of conceptual blending led them to integrate bones, flint and wood to make tools, or weapons for hunting and killing their prey. During that era, they did paintings and drawings that narrated their experiences. And that is how art was born.

One plus one equals one

Let’s return to the present and observe logical thought patterns in action. Imagine I am confronted with a creative challenge: ‘Ideas for improving swimming pools, or how swimmers experience swimming pools’. Because I already know (from learned experience) precisely what a swimming pool is, my dominant thought patterns will unfreeze the ice cube labelled ‘swimming pools’ in order to try to find a solution to my challenge. No matter how many times I unfreeze that ice cube, the most I will achieve, or create, is a slight improvement. My resources are limited specifically to what I have learned about swimming pools and swimmers. Now, imagine if I were to unfreeze a different ice cube, one labelled ‘cranes’, for example, and place it in the same glass with the ice cube labelled ‘swimming pools’. If they melt at the same time, and combine, they will become fluid. One plus one equals one, not two. By mixing that water I am beginning to associate and connect many more possibilities which are much more creative. I might think up a swimming pool that can lift into the air, a steel pool, or one with pulleys which is moveable. Conceptual blending can have an extraordinary effect, and in many cases will generate entirely novel, creative ideas. We could even go as far as to say that creativity arises in any discipline – whether in art, science or technology, or in everyday life – when the mind can blend totally different concepts and ideas. What’s more, if we look back at the most creative ideas in human history, we will see that they always come from a combination of old ideas; in other words, novel ways of combining what we already know.