The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from
Living in Trees to Understanding the Cosmos
Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior
War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra)
The Grand Design (with Stephen Hawking)
The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives
A Briefer History of Time (with Stephen Hawking)
Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty in Physics and in Life
Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry
from Parallel Lines to Hyperspace
For children (with Matt Costello)
The Last Dinosaur
Titanic Cat
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Allen Lane is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published in the United States of America by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC 2018
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2018
Copyright © Leonard Mlodinow, 2018
Grateful acknowledgment is made to Basic Books for permission to reprint an excerpt from Perfectly Reasonable Deviations from the Beaten Track, edited by Michelle Feynman, copyright © Michelle Feynman, 2005. Reprinted by permission of Basic Books, an imprint of Perseus Books, LLC, a subsidiary of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Cover design by Tyler Comrie
ISBN: 978-0-241-33441-6
For Donna Scott
Introduction
The Demands of Change … Rising Above the Nematode … Onward
Part I CONFRONTING CHANGE
1 The Joy of Change
The Peril and the Promise … The Myth of Change Aversion … Our Exploratory Drive … Personal R&D and the Neophilia Scale
Part II HOW WE THINK
2 What Is Thought?
Peeking Inside the Skull … What Qualifies as Thought … Becoming Mindful … The Laws of Thought … The Non-Algorithmic Elastic Brain
3 Why We Think
Desire and Obsession … When Thought Goes Unrewarded … Choice Overload … How Good Feelings Happen … The Rewards of Art … Attention Deficit, Elasticity Surplus … The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
4 The World Inside Your Brain
How Brains Represent the World … How Brains Create Meaning … The Bottom-up Brilliance of Ants … Your Brain’s Hierarchy … An Intellectual Adventure
Part III WHERE NEW IDEAS COME FROM
5 The Power of Your Point of View
A Paradigm Shift in Popcorn … The Structure of Personal Revolutions … Reimagining Our Frames of Thought … The Dog-and-Bone Problem … How Mathematicians Think … The Influence of Culture
6 Thinking When You’re Not Thinking
Nature’s Plan B … The Dark Energy of the Brain … The Symphonies in Idle Minds … Smarts by Association … The Importance of Being Aimless
7 The Origin of Insight
When the Unimaginable Becomes the Self-Evident … Splitting the Brain … The Connection Between Language and Problem-Solving … The Trial of the Hemispheres … The Lessons of CRAP … Deconstructing the Insight Process … Zen and the Art of Ideas
Part IV LIBERATING YOUR BRAIN
8 How Thought Freezes Over
Building Lives and Candleholders … The Momentum of Thought … When Thought Freezes Over … Destructive Doctrine … Handicapping the Expert Brain … The Benefits of Discord
9 Mental Blocks and Idea Filters
When Believing Means Not Seeing … Thinking Outside the Box … Our Idea-Filtering System … Long Live the Sophomoric
10 The Good, the Mad, and the Odd
It’s a Mad, Mad World … Measuring Doses of Madness … Elastic Personalities, from the Arts to Science … The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Inside
11 Liberation
Let’s Go Get Stoned … In Wine There Is Truth; Also in Vodka … The Silver Lining of Fatigue … Don’t Worry, Be Happy … Where There’s a Will … Survival of the Elastic
Notes
Acknowledgments
Follow Penguin
On July 6, 2016, Niantic, a forty-person startup company founded by ex-employees of Google’s “Geo” division, launched Pokémon Go, an “augmented reality” game that employs a phone’s camera to let people capture virtual creatures that appear on their screens as if they exist in the real world. Within two days the app had been installed on more than 10 percent of all Android phones in the United States, and within two weeks it had thirty million users. Soon iPhone owners were spending more time each day on Pokémon Go than on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, or Twitter. Even more impressive, within days of the game’s release, the words Pokémon Go drew more searches on Google than the word porn.
If you’re not a gamer, you might roll your eyes or shrug at all that, but in the business world, the events were hard to ignore: The game generated an astonishing $1.6 million in revenue each day from domestic Apple users alone. Just as important, it added $7.5 billion to Niantic’s market value virtually overnight, and within a month it had doubled the stock price of Nintendo, the company that owns the Pokémon trademark.
In its first six months of existence, more than six hundred million people downloaded the Pokémon Go app. Contrast that with some of the greatest successes of the early 2000s. Facebook launched in 2004, but it didn’t hit the thirty-million-user mark until 2007. The hugely popular World of Warcraft game, also released in 2004, took six years to climb to its peak of twelve million subscribers. What seemed like pedal-to-the-metal growth back then became, ten years later, life in the slow lane. And though no one can predict what the next big new thing will be, most economists and sociologists expect that society will only continue to morph faster in the foreseeable future.
But to focus only on the speed of Pokémon Go’s ascent is to miss much of the point. The game’s massive success might not have been predictable, but neither was it accidental. In creating the app, Niantic made a series of innovative and forward-thinking decisions concerning the use of technology, such as piggybacking on the GPS and camera capabilities of a cell phone and leveraging cloud computing to power the app, which provided a built-in infrastructure and a capacity to scale. The game also took advantage, like nothing before it, of app-store economics, a business model that hadn’t even been invented when World of Warcraft launched. In that now familiar approach, a game is given away free of charge and makes its money by selling add-ons and upgrades. Maintaining that revenue stream was another challenge. In the interactive entertainment industry, a game can start out popular and still have the shelf life of raw oysters. To avoid that fate, Niantic surprised many with a long campaign to aggressively update the app with meaningful features and content. As a result, a year after its launch, 65 million people were still playing the game each month, and revenues had reached $1.2 billion.
Before Pokémon Go, the conventional wisdom was that people didn’t want a game that required physical activity and real-world interaction. And so, despite all the innovation in Silicon Valley, the Pokémon Go developers were often admonished that gamers just “want to sit and play.” But the developers ignored that widely held assumption, and by leveraging existing technologies in a novel way, they changed the way game developers think. The flip side of the Pokémon Go story is that if your thinking is not deft, your company can quickly sink. Just look at BlackBerry, Blockbuster, Borders, Dell, Eastman Kodak, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Sun Microsystems, Sears, and Yahoo. And they are just the tip of the iceberg—in 1958, the average life span of companies in the S&P 500 was sixty-one years. Today it is about twenty.
We have to face analogous intellectual challenges in our daily lives. 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. That’s compared with about 28,000 a few decades ago. Due to innovative new products and technologies, and to that proliferation of information, accomplishing what was once a relatively straightforward task can now be a bewilderingly complex journey through a jungle of possibilities.
Not long ago, if we wanted to take a trip, we’d check out a guidebook or two, get AAA maps, and call the airline and hotels, or we’d talk to one of this country’s eighteen thousand travel agents. Today, people use, on average, twenty-six websites when planning a vacation, and must weigh an avalanche of offers and alternatives, with prices that not only change as a function of when in the day you wish to travel but also as a function of when you are looking. Simply finalizing the purchase once you’ve decided has become a kind of duel between business and customer, with each vying for the best deal, from his or her vantage point. If you didn’t need a vacation when you started planning one, you might by the time you are done.
Today, as individuals, we have great power at our fingertips, but we must also routinely solve problems that we didn’t have to face ten or twenty years ago. For instance, once, while my wife and I were out of the country, my daughter Olivia, then fifteen, gave the house sitter the night off. Olivia then texted us asking if she could invite “a few” friends over. “A few” turned out to be 363—thanks to the instant invitations that can be communicated over cell phones on Instagram. As it turned out, she wasn’t entirely to blame—it was an overzealous friend who posted it—but it’s a calamity that wouldn’t have been possible when her brothers were that age, just a handful of years earlier.
In a society in which even basic functions are being transformed, the challenges can be daunting. Today many of us must invent new structures for our personal lives that account for the fact that digital technology makes us constantly available to our employers. We must discover ways to dodge increasingly sophisticated attempts at cybercrime or identity theft. We have to manage ever-dwindling “free” time so that we can interact with friends and family, read, exercise, or just relax. We must learn to troubleshoot problems with home software, phones, and computers. Everywhere we turn, and every day, we are faced with circumstances and issues that would not have confronted us just a decade or two ago.
Much has been written about that accelerating pace of change and the globalization and rapid technological innovation that have fueled it. This book is about what is not so often discussed: the new demands on how we must think in order to thrive in this whirlwind era—for as rapid change transforms our business, professional, political, and personal environments, our success and happiness depend on our coming to terms with it.
There are certain talents that can help us, qualities of thought that have always been useful but are now becoming essential. For example: the capacity to let go of comfortable ideas and become accustomed to ambiguity and contradiction; the capability to rise above conventional mind-sets and to reframe the questions we ask; the ability to abandon our ingrained assumptions and open ourselves to new paradigms; the propensity to rely on imagination as much as on logic and to generate and integrate a wide variety of ideas; and the willingness to experiment and be tolerant of failure. That’s a diverse bouquet of talents, but as psychologists and neuroscientists have elucidated the brain processes behind them, those talents have been revealed as different aspects of a coherent cognitive style. I call it elastic thinking.
Elastic thinking is what endows us with the ability to solve novel problems and to overcome the neural and psychological barriers that can impede us from looking beyond the existing order. In the coming pages, we will examine the great strides scientists have recently made in understanding how our brains produce elastic thinking, and how we can nurture it.
In that large body of research one quality stands out above all the others—unlike analytical reasoning, elastic thinking arises from what scientists call “bottom-up” processes. A brain can do mental calculations the way a computer does, from the top down, with the brain’s high-level executive structures dictating the approach. But, due to its unique architecture, a biological brain can also perform calculations from the bottom up. 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.
Though no computer and few animals excel at elastic thinking, that ability is built into the human brain. That’s why the creators of Pokémon Go were able to quiet the executive functions of their brains, look beyond the “obvious,” and explore entirely new avenues. The more we understand elastic thinking and the bottom-up mechanisms through which our mind produces it, the better we can all learn to harness it to face challenges in our personal lives and our work environments. The purpose of this book is to examine those mental processes, the psychological factors that affect them, and, most important of all, the practical strategies that can help us master them.
Every animal has a toolbox for handling the circumstances of daily life, with some capacity to confront change. Take the lowly nematode, or roundworm (C. elegans), one of the most primitive biological information-processing systems we know. The nematode either solves its problems of existence by employing a neural network composed of a mere 302 neurons, with only five thousand chemical synapses between them, or it perishes.
Perhaps the most critical challenge the nematode experiences arises when its environment runs out of the microbes it feeds on. Upon recognizing that circumstance, what does this biological computer do? It crawls into the gut of a slug, waiting to be pooped out the next day in a different location. Not a very glamorous life. To us, the plan may sound both brilliant and disgusting, but in the roundworm’s world it is neither, for the few hundred neurons in its nervous system are incapable of either complex problem-solving or sophisticated emotions. To hitchhike in slug excrement is not a desperate creation of the nematode’s mind. It is an evolutionary response to deprivation that is hardwired into each individual, because the depletion of food is an environmental circumstance that such organisms face regularly.
Even among more complex animals, much of an organism’s behavior is “scripted,” by which I mean it is preprogrammed or automatic, and initiated by some trigger in the environment. Consider the brooding goose, with her sophisticated brain, sitting on her nest. When she notices that an egg has fallen out, she fixates on the stray egg, raises herself, and extends her neck and bill to gently roll the egg back into her nest. Those actions appear to be the product of a thoughtful and caring mother, but, like the nematode’s, they are simply the product of a script.
Scripted behavior is one of nature’s shortcuts, a reliable coping mechanism that leads to results that are usually successful. It can be either innate or the result of habit, and it is often related to mating, nesting, and killing prey. But—what is most important—while scripted behavior can be appropriate in routine situations, it produces a fixed response, and so it often fails in circumstances of novelty or change.
Suppose, for example, that as the goose begins to extend her neck, the stray egg is removed. Will she adapt and abort her plan of action? No, she will continue as if the egg were still there. Like a mime, she will nudge the now imaginary egg back toward her nest. What’s more, she can also be induced to perform her egg rolling on any roundish object, such as a beer can or a baseball. In the wisdom of evolution, it was apparently more efficient to endow the mother goose with an automatic behavior that is almost always appropriate than to leave the egg-saving action to some more complex but nuanced mental process.
Humans follow scripts, too. I like to think that I give more thought to my actions than the average mother goose. Yet I’ve found myself, when passing the snack cabinet, grabbing a handful of almonds without pondering whether, at that moment, I really wanted a snack. When my daughter asks if she can stay home from school because she feels a cold “coming on,” I may respond with an automatic “No” instead of taking the request seriously and asking for specifics. And I’ve found myself, while driving to a familiar place, following my familiar route without making a conscious decision to do so.
Scripts are useful shortcuts, but for most animals it would be difficult to survive by employing preprogrammed scripts alone. After recognizing her prey from a distance, for example, a hunting female lion must carefully stalk her quarry. The environment, the conditions, and the actions of her prey can vary considerably. As a result, no fixed script inscribed in her nervous system will be adequate to meet the demands of finding food. Instead, the lion must have the ability to evaluate a situation in the context of a goal and to formulate a plan of action aimed at achieving that goal.
It is for those situations in which scripted modes of information processing do not serve an individual well that evolution has provided the two other means through which we and other animals can calculate a response. One is rational/logical/analytical thought, which, for simplicity, I will simply call analytical thought—a step-by-step approach through which an organism moves from one related thought to another based on facts or reason. The other is elastic thinking. Different species possess these in differing degrees, but they are thought to be most developed in mammals, especially in primates; and among primates, especially in humans.
Analytical thought is the form of reflection that has been most prized in modern society. Best suited to analyzing life’s more straightforward issues, it is the kind of thinking we focus on in our schools. We quantify our ability in it through IQ tests and college entrance examinations, and we seek it in our employees. But although analytical thinking is powerful, like scripted processing it proceeds in a linear fashion. Governed by our conscious mind, 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.
It is in meeting those challenges that elastic thinking excels. 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. Conclusions are reached from the bottom up through the minute interactions of billions of networked neurons in a process too complex to be detailed step by step. Lacking the strict top-down direction of analytical thought, and being more emotion-driven, elastic thinking is tailored to integrating diverse information, solving riddles, and finding new approaches to challenging problems. It also allows the consideration of ideas that are unusual or even bizarre, fueling our creativity (which also requires analytical thinking so that we may understand and explore those new ideas).
Our elastic thinking skills evolved hundreds of thousands of years ago so that we could beat the odds presented by living in the wild. We needed those skills because, as primates go, we aren’t the toughest physical specimens. Our close relative the bonobo can jump twice as high. The chimpanzee has, pound for pound, twice the arm strength. A gorilla might find a sharp-angled boulder, have a seat, and survey its surroundings; humans sit on posh chairs and wear glasses. And if it’s the wrong chair, we complain about a backache. Our ancestors were no doubt tougher than we are today, but what saved us from extinction was our elastic thinking, which gave us the ability to overcome challenges through social cooperation and innovation.
In the past 12,000 years, we humans have settled into societies that are somewhat protected from the dangers of the wild. Over those many millennia, we’ve turned our powers of elastic thinking toward improving or enhancing our everyday existence. Robins’ nests don’t have bathrooms, and squirrels don’t store their acorns in safes. But we humans live in an environment built almost entirely on our own imagination. We don’t just live in generic huts; we have homes and apartments of all designs and sizes, and we decorate them with works of art. We don’t just walk or run; we bicycle, drive cars, travel in boats, and fly in airplanes (not to mention scooting along on Razors, Segways, and hoverboards). Each of these modes of travel, at one time, did not exist. They were each, at conception, a never-before-imagined solution to some perceived problem. As were the eraser and paper clips on your desk, the shoes on your feet, and the toothbrush in your bathroom.
Wherever we go, we swim among the products of the elastic human mind. But though elastic thinking is not a new talent for the human species, the demands of this moment in history have thrust it from background to foreground and made it a critical aptitude in even the routine matters of our everyday professional and personal lives. No longer the special tool of people such as scientific problem solvers, inventors, and artists, a talent for elastic thinking is now an important factor in anyone’s ability to thrive.
Psychologists and neuroscientists are only now working out the science of elastic thinking. They have discovered that the brain function that produces bottom-up elastic thinking is quite different from that which generates top-down analytical thinking. That science rests on recent advances in the study of the brain that have recast our understanding of many of its unique and distinct neural networks. For example, in 2016, the NIH’s Human Connectome Project, employing revolutionary new high-resolution imaging techniques and cutting-edge computer technology, showed that the brain has far more substructures than anyone had previously believed. One important structure, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, was discovered to actually consist of a dozen distinct smaller elements. In all, the project identified ninety-seven new brain regions, differentiated by both structure and function. The lessons of the Connectome project have opened new vistas, and have been compared to the discovery in physics that atoms are made up of smaller particles—protons, neutrons, and electrons. In the chapters ahead, I will make use of such cutting-edge neuroscience and psychology to explore how elastic thinking arises in the brain. Once we understand these bottom-up thought processes, we will learn ways of implementing, manipulating, controlling, and nurturing them.
Part I of Elastic is about how we must adapt our thinking to change, and why our brains are good at it. In part II, I examine how humans (and other animals) take in information and process it so that they can innovate to meet the challenges of novelty and change. Part III is about how the brain attacks problems and generates new ideas and solutions, and part IV is about the barriers that can stand in the way of elastic thinking and how we can overcome them.
Along the way, I will examine the psychological factors that are important in elastic thinking and how they manifest in our lives. These include personality traits such as neophilia (the degree of affinity for novelty) and schizotypy (a cluster of characteristics that include a tendency to have unusual ideas and magical beliefs). They also include abilities such as pattern recognition, idea generation, divergent thinking (being able to think of many diverse ideas), fluency (being able to quickly generate ideas), imagination (being able to conceive of what does not exist), and integrative thinking (the ability to hold in mind, balance, and reconcile diverse or opposing ideas). Research on the brain’s role in these traits constitutes one of the hottest new directions in both psychology and neuroscience.
How do our minds respond to the demands of novelty and change? How do we create new concepts and paradigms, and how can we cultivate that ability? What keeps us tied to the old ideas? How can we become flexible in the way we frame questions and issues? We are fortunate that today the enormous mountain of new scientific knowledge about how the bottom-up mind works makes it possible to answer such questions. As I unpack the science of the bottom-up thought mechanisms behind elastic thinking, I hope to change the way you view your own thought processes, and to provide insight into how we think—and how we can think better—so that we can succeed in a world in which an ability to adapt is more crucial than ever before.