Link Practices

When you are born, your world is small. Small eyes. Small ears. Small face brushing against your small blanket. As you start to learn, your world grows. It gets filled with images and sounds and discoveries. Stuff reveals itself to you, like unfurling flowers with intoxicating scents. At first, the stuff you learn is mostly small stuff, like dropping your ball makes it fall to the floor. Like, if you fall down, it hurts. Then you start learning ideas. Counting to 10. ABCs. How to turn on an iPad and get it to do things. This is stuff the older kids and adults know. Addition and subtraction. Reading out loud. The world keeps getting bigger as you make new discoveries and learn new things. There are whole new worlds to discover. Worlds in books. In movies. In nature. In the stars. You discover there are all types of people, all manner of characters, and they sport different faces and speak different languages. They have histories and hopes and fears. Some are funny. Some are scary. Oh, and there’s money, which seems to be the world within the world, and the things money can buy and the things that you can’t have if you don’t have the money to buy them. Oh, what a complex place this is, this world. And then something happens. Your life stops becoming larger. Somewhere along the way, you went from accumulating your experience to maintaining your experience. This change may coincide with the time your body stops growing, or a little before, or a little later. This is the time when you know your world around you. You recognize its features, its familiar rhythms, the people who populate it. You know where you fit. And that’s not for nothing! Knowing where you fit is a reassuring feeling. It’s a feeling that you can’t help but want to hold tight. You want to preserve it. To protect it. To maintain it. Your life is about maintaining. But life offers a cruel twist: the world keeps changing, whether you want it to or not. And that means, if you’re trying to maintain your experience, the task of maintaining your experience never ends. And sometimes it’s hard to maintain. Sometimes you have to expend a lot of energy just to keep things the way they are. And sometimes people seem to disrupt your task of maintaining your world the way you like it. And perhaps you become just a little resentful of these people. Perhaps you begin regarding people as either helpful to your world or harmful. And once you begin seeing people that way, that can be a difficult sight to unsee. So what’s the lesson? The lesson is, if your world isn’t getting bigger, it’s getting smaller. Keep making your world bigger.

A recurring theme in this blog is about connecting the unconnected. But how do you know when unconnected things can be connected? Sometimes it helps to change your perspective. Here are a few metaphorical machines that can help you do just that. The Windback Machine, as in, “to wind back the hands of time.” You can use this in conjunction with its counterpart, the Windforward Machine. These machines allow you to see how things were previously or how they will become in the future. These are good for developing perspectives on how things got to the state they are in currently, and the direction they are heading. We talked about this in the blog The Thrill of Creating Complexity. Another pair of handy metaphorical devices are the Zoomin Machine and Zoomout Machine. These machines allow you to look at your subject with a microscopic view or, in the case of the Zoomout Machine, see your subject within a much broader context. Sometimes it’s useful to see the granular composition of your subject as, for instance, if you want to deconstruct it, take it apart, or see how the parts interact. Or it could be helpful to see if your subject is part of a larger group that together represent a pattern or a trend. The Zoomout Machine is great for that. We talked about zooming in/out in the blog post Divergent Perspectives. Yet another pair of helpful devices are the Speedup Machine and Slowdown Machine. Speeding up your subject helps you to witness a long evolution in a single sitting. Slowing it down lets you see minuscule changes that may be lost when viewing your subject in real time. Think of the Slowdown Machine as a way to freeze-frame your subject in motion, allowing you to really study its attributes. These machines are especially helpful when the subject of your perspective is yourself. The Slowdown Machine lets you answer the question, “What should I do right now at this very moment?” The Speedup Machine lets you visualize how your life will play out if you continue on your current trajectory. We talked about these perspectives in the blog post, What Will You Do With the Time You Have. And let’s not forget another group of useful machines, the Augment Goggles. These appear in various pop-culture tropes such as X-Ray Specs, Detective Vision, Spectrespecs, and good old Magic Glasses. These can come in the metaphorical variety as well as the actual-physical-try-them-today variety that let you see things that are normally hidden from the naked eye. Night-vision goggles show grainy green renditions of what’s hiding in the darkness. Blue lights show you the stains on the carpet that you never noticed. 3D glasses make blurry characters on the movie screen pop out at you, startle you, and cause you to spill your popcorn on your date. These devices can help to reduce the entropy in your field of vision, as discussed in From Entropy to Order. Of course, these devices will not allow you to see things if you aren’t actively looking for them. You have to use these devices with the mindset of making discoveries. You have to ask yourself, “How can I change my perspective to see things in new and meaningful ways?” You have to be open and receptive to allow a new understanding of your subject reveal itself to you. Changing perspectives can let you visualize how unconnected things can find new meaning when connected together.

I’m fascinated with this idea that simple things can interact to create complex results. Think about that for a moment. Sometimes you can combine things in such a way as to create properties that are greater than the properties of the things being combined. They adopt heightened characteristics when they interact. Nature is full of such examples. Complex cloud formations emerge when water vapor and tiny water droplets are suspended in the atmosphere. Ocean waves form when wind interacts with the water’s surface. Clouds and waves, despite being just water in the right atmospheric conditions, exhibit all manner of unpredictable shapes, patterns, and formations. In situations where simplicity creates complexity, the key principle on display is: emergence. The term emergence refers to a dynamic where complex attributes, characteristics, patterns, or behaviors develop when simple constituents interact. A good example of emergence is the ant colony. Ants communicate with each other individually, using antennae and pheromones to share information. All communication is local. Each ant carries out its individual task on its individual path. Yet collectively, the colony behaves with a certain order as if governed by a central control system. Ants build complex cities, launch collective defense strategies against predators, harvest food to feed their population, build bridges and rafts using their own bodies to help the colony to survive flooding, and exhibit vast organizational complexity. Yet the colony doesn’t have a military-style hierarchy of commanders barking orders at the troops, “Divert resources to reinforce our defenses in the Alpha quadrant!” Rather, each ant learns from its neighbors about what local task is needed, and then it executes that local task, contributing to the colony’s complex order. Social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and X can also resemble ant colonies with their own emergent characteristics. Individuals in the network interact by sharing content and responding to the content of others. Yet from these simple interactions emerge larger trends, collective behaviors, organizations, rallies, clubs, and social movements. As ants and Facebook accounts attest, constituents in complex systems often possess the quality of self-organization. Neural networks in the brain provide another good example. Neurons themselves are simple cells, yet their collective interactions create the complex cognitive functions of learning, understanding, memory formation and retrieval, language processing, decision making, and consciousness. Although interactions may be complex, that doesn’t necessarily mean they are complicated. Complex systems create emergent properties that may not be known in advance. By contrast, complicated systems typically have many constituent parts creating outcomes that are more predictable. Think of a domino chain reaction where someone erects row upon row of dominos and begins an extensive wave-like sequence by tipping just one domino. The system is complicated, involving hundreds or even thousands of carefully placed dominos, but the outcome is predictable. It is complicated but it isn’t complex in the sense of unpredictability. Complicated situations can be comical when taken to extremes, as shown by the Rube Goldberg machine, named after the American cartoonist. Goldberg’s machines were contraptions that involved unnecessarily complicated systems to accomplish simple tasks. In one example, “Professor Butts and the Self-Operating Napkin,” the Professor is sitting for dinner. He raises a spoon to his mouth to set off a chain reaction: it jerks a ladle which throws a cracker in the air, causing a bird to jump after the cracker, tilting its perch which spills seeds into a bucket which weighs against a chord that lights a lighter flame that ignites a skyrocket that causes a blade to cut a string that releases a pendulum with a napkin on the end that wipes the chin of Professor Butts. Of course, the Professor could have more easily wiped his own chin with the napkin, but then it wouldn’t be a Rube Goldberg machine. The system uses exaggerated complexity, but its outcome is known in advance. In fact, the cartoon derives its humor from the predictability of the outcome. Each of the machine’s components has a small, specific role to play. If every component executes its small task as expected, the machine will achieve its predictable result. Complex interactions, on the other hand, often create unpredictable results. Their results are often non-linear, meaning, their outcomes are not proportional to their inputs. In complex ecosystems, a small change in one factor can lead to a large change in the entire system. In the example of the wave, increasing the wind by just one mile per hour could create a compounding effect to result in tremendously larger waves. Non-linearity is captured in the idea of the snowball effect. A tiny snowball at the top of a hill gathers more snow as it rolls down, resulting in a snow boulder at the bottom of the hill. How large will the boulder become by the time it reaches the bottom? It’s hard to predict exactly because the process is non-linear. At the top of one hill, a small amount of snow that gets displaced may simply come to rest without further activity. At the top of a different hill, however, the same small displacement could trigger a giant cliff-like avalanche. The effects are non-linear. In epidemiology, minuscule differences in transmission rates can cause one virus to die off harmlessly, while another one leaps from host to host to spread across the global population. The world learned this lesson in non-linearity during the COVID-19 epidemic. Complex interactions often create feedback loops, so the results of interactions influence the behavior of the individuals interacting. The product of one interaction becomes the input for the next interaction. Think of a sporting event where the home crowd begins spontaneously taunting one of the visiting-team players, mockingly repeating his name in unison after he makes a mistake. The group behavior influences the group behavior. Or think of a musical concert when the audience settles into a rhythmic clapping and whistling and shouting, “En-CORE! En-CORE! En-CORE!” in unison until the performers return to the stage to resume their performance. These are examples of feedback loops evident in complex environments. … Read more

An essential step in developing good ideas is discarding bad ones. The writers’ vivid expression “Murder your darlings” suggests that even your favorite ideas should be trashed if they don’t advance your project. You might have meticulously crafted the most inspiring characters, juicy plot lines, and pithy phrases since the Bard of Avon himself, but if they don’t serve the project, you must be willing to let them go. Determining if an idea is worth developing involves an element of experience. Over time, as you learn the nuances of a particular field, you become more adept at the process of discovery. You discern what works and what doesn’t, refining your ability to identify elements that propel the project forward. Your vocational filter becomes more discerning. The process begins with naive discovery, followed by mistakes, lessons learned, and then more informed discovery. Over time, mistakes diminish, and advancements grow. A cyclical progression unfolds, elevating the work to higher levels, akin to the double-helix structure of the human genome, the DNA of creation. Tasks usually take the longest when undertaken for the first time, with the process being new and unfamiliar. Focus is essential, and learning occurs as you progress. Initially, you may need to backtrack, make revisions, deletions, and corrections. This process allows you to discover more efficient methods for future endeavors. The developer is akin to a child learning to walk, with undeveloped muscles and forming coordination. Yet, as practice and skill accumulate, the process becomes more efficient. This creative process is not confined to a specific domain; it exists across all realms of learning. Writers cultivate an intuition for how different plot elements can advance their story. Actors develop a sense for various manners of speech and personality traits, infusing their characters with depth. Mechanics learn tricks for removing a seized bolt from an engine, avoiding past techniques that resulted in busted knuckles. Tailors learn the optimal way to pin fabric for smooth and symmetrical stitches. Creators in every field rely on cumulative skill, honing their understanding through trial and error. Mistakes are costly. Investing significant time in developing an idea, only to realize it doesn’t fit your work, can be disheartening. However, the experience gained from mistakes helps develop intuition to avoid errors in the future. Just as burning your hand on a hot iron prompts greater caution, the more mistakes you make, the more you’ll avoid on the next attempt. People successful in their fields often express a sentiment like, “If I have achieved more than others, it’s because I have failed more than others.” In the business world, the term “Fail fast” is frequently heard, emphasizing the need to minimize the time spent on realizing if something isn’t working and then swiftly moving on. Mistakes are inevitable; the key is to take steps to ensure they are as inexpensive as possible. Whether you call it inventor’s intuition, artist’s intuition, entrepreneur’s intuition, or creator’s intuition, it develops from the same sequence in every domain. The nest of creation is woven with trial and error. The expression “murder your darlings” delivers a not-so-subtle lesson. It teaches that when you create something, you are not ultimately serving yourself; rather, you are serving the creation. It’s not about you; it’s about the work. The goal is to create the strongest work possible and release it to the world so that it can stand on its own without you. If done well, the work you create can take on a life of its own.

It has been said that writers don’t necessarily have more ideas than other people; it’s just that they notice when they do have ideas. Writers develop a sort of metacognition, which is an awareness of one’s own thought process. In fact, this process isn’t unique to writers; it is prevalent in anyone who devotes mental energy to discovering and developing new things. Ideation involves a four-stage process: first, the occurrence of the idea; second, the awareness of the idea’s occurrence; third, a reflection on the idea in the context of what the thinker already knows, and finally, an assessment of the quality of the idea. “Is this idea any good or not?” A useful taxonomy is what I call “The Four-C Process of Ideation,” concept, conscious, context, and conclusion. Concept is the initial idea. Conscious refers to the self-awareness that an idea has occurred. Context assesses the idea in relation to a broader conceptual framework, and Conclusion is a judgement about the merits of the idea. When you brainstorm ideas, you cycle through the four Cs over and over again. You cast aside the ideas that fail to meet an initial assessment and further investigate the ones that do. Some turn into blind alleys that lead you nowhere, and you subsequently discard them. Others, however, lead to rich discoveries and additional new ideas. That’s just how brainstorming works. Ideas flow through your mind more or less continuously. Flow is your natural mental state while both awake and dreaming. In fact, stopping the flow of ideas feels about as natural at first as stopping the flow of your breath. Maintaining focus on a single idea is challenging, as you can attest if you have ever tried meditation. It takes incredible mental discipline to shut out all distractions and prevent your mind from flowing. The “wandering mind” is a good metaphor, since ideas inspire other ideas, which inspire other ideas, not bound by linearity, moving in one direction and then zigging, then zagging like the serpentine steps of a drunken sailor. Mental flow is never-ending non sequitur. You are probably familiar with the process of arriving at an idea, pausing to ask yourself how you arrived at that idea, and then trying to retrace the mental associations back to some seminal idea. This happens in conversations too. For example, you may find yourself in a coffee shop talking about Game Theory, and your friend suddenly pauses and asks, “How did we get on this topic, anyway?” The two of you take a minute to retrace the chain of ideas in reverse that got you there. Game Theory came from the discussion of the movie A Beautiful Mind starring Russell Crowe, who was also in the movie Gladiator, which featured the Colosseum in Rome, which sprang from a comment about Italian architecture, which related to your friend’s trip to Italy, prompted by you ordering an espresso in the coffee shop. That’s how you got to the topic of Game Theory. When you are brainstorming, you shuffle through the Four-C process over and over again: idea, awareness of the idea, consideration of the idea in context, and assessment as to the quality of the idea. Some of the most original thinkers are those people who are open to ideas that others discard. They allow themselves to consider ideas that may not have immediate application but merit further exploration. Some call this an intuition for good ideas. Others call it mental flexibility. They are the ones who allow themselves to play with an idea, tinker with it, turn it over in their minds before moving on. They are like the inventor who picks up an object that is unfamiliar, turns it over with his hands, looks at it from different angles, wonders about its original purpose, and considers what else it could be used for. Original thinkers engage in a sort of mental playfulness, an ideational flirtatiousness. These creative thinkers tend to spend more time lingering in the third step of the four-step process, considering the new idea in the context of what is already known. The neuroscientist David Ingvar coined the term “memory of the future,” and I like that concept in the context of ideation. Experiencing a “memory of the future” involves bridging a new observation with what you already know from previous experiences to anticipate the future. My dog exhibits a “memory of the future” when she sees me pick up her leash. She understands from previous experience that the leash in my hand means we will be going out for a walk. This idea gets her excited, and she usually runs to her water bowl to gulp down as much water as she can hold. I believe this is the K-9 equivalent of filling her pen with as much ink as possible so as to leave as many messages to other dogs as possible. But that’s just speculation. The ideation process involves a form of “memory of the future.” When you encounter a new idea, you consider it in the context of what you already know, and you anticipate its impact in the future. This is no different from your decision-making process when playing a game such as blackjack. When the dealer deals you the cards, you are faced with a choice (hold or ask for another card), and you assess the merits of each choice (how likely are you to win or lose the hand). You reflect on your current hand in the context of hands you have played in the past to anticipate the results in the future. You are experiencing a blackjack “memory of the future.” The Four-C process of ideation is linked to the concept discussed here about the spontaneous element meeting the persistent element. The spontaneous element is the new idea; the persistent element is what is already known.

In the post The Three Types of Transformation, we discussed refracting as one of the three types of transformation, along with expanding and contracting. You can read the full post here. Recall, refracting is when you transform something by changing its purpose. I was in an airport toy store recently, and although it had just a small selection of toys to sell, I noticed several of them made use of refracting. One toy, called Flexi-Sphere, encourages players to “Fidget like the ancients!” It was packaged as a flat circular mandala of stiff metal wires with beads as joints. The toy can be rearranged to form nine different shapes, including an orb, a pair of orbs attached like an hourglass, a pair of bowls joined at their bottoms, three variations of complex ring patterns, and others. This is a good example of refracting because it allows users to transmogrify a cluster of wires into multiple configurations. Another series of toys involved “3D Cardboard Model Kits” created by stacking flat cardboard slices. If someone handed you one of the cardboard slices, you wouldn’t know what you were looking at or what its purpose could be. But when you add it to the other cardboard shapes, the cluster forms a mermaid, giraffe, chipmunk, platypus, or other character. 2D-to-3D is a transformation by refracting, showing how flat objects can make objects that have depth. The toy store also included flip books. Each picture is simple and static. However, when you flip through the series, it creates the illusion of motion. Looking at the model cardboard kits and then the flip books, my mind naturally connected the two with the following thought experiment. Let’s say you created a simple flip book of a ball approaching the viewer. On the bottom page of the book (the first image to be seen), the ball might be just a tiny dot. The dot would be slightly larger on the next page, and larger on the subsequent page, and larger and larger until the circular ball filled the whole page. Flipping through the flip book would create the illusion of a round object coming towards you. Now let’s imagine a new transformation of this flip book. Imagine you cut out each image of the ball from each page. You would start with the tiny dot and end with the large circle that touches the edges of the page. Gluing them on top of each other, you would have a 3D object shaped like cone. The point of the cone would be the diameter of the first image from the flip book.  The progression of the project went from a single image (the bottom page of the flip book), to an image in motion (the flip book), to a series of cutouts (the ball image from each page of the flip book), and finally to a three-dimensional cone. The final object bears hardly any resemblance to the initial image. And yet, the whole transformation was nothing more than a series of refractions.

Many of these blog posts discuss practices you can use to discover singular links. These fall into three categories, each involving a different way of transforming the subject of your work. They include, Expanding, when you transform something by creating new iterations of it. Contracting, when you transform something by removing some elements of it.  Refracting, when you transform something by changing its purpose. Expanding is like brainstorming, spitballing, whiteboarding. The process generates multiple variations of your subject until you arrive at a version that is unique. We discussed it in the post about Divergent Thinking. To understand Expanding, think of an artist who develops a major painting by creating thumbnail sketches, detailed sketches, color studies, and other drafts to determine what will be included in the painting and how it all fits together. Or think of a musician who creates variations on a melodic theme, building a sequence of notes, exploring how the sequence might transform and expand to create new versions of the melody. Think of a data analyst designing a model, starting with a basic algorithm and then tweaking various inputs, weights, and mathematical applications until arriving at a fully optimized version of the model. The process called Expanding is like a Darwinian evolution that allows the apex version of your work to emerge through successive iterations. The second transformative process, Contracting, involves reducing, distilling, or narrowing the focus of your subject. It’s about revealing by removing. We discussed this process in this blog about comic books and this one about Seurat and other Pointillist painters. The link between the original work and the final version is a series of deletions or omissions. Work + deletion = new work. Fantasy stories often use this technique. How often have you heard, “The story takes place in a world just like ours, but with this one small change…” The Twilight Zone series loved this formula. In the episode “Time Enough At Last,” which I saw tonight while flipping channels, Burgess Meredith plays a man who finds himself in a world where all other people have disappeared. In the next episode, “The Monsters Are Due on Maple Street,” the loss of electricity leads to chaos and neighborhood warfare. Both episodes create an intriguing twist by removing a single element, people in the first episode and technology in the second. The transformative process of Contracting is about deconstructing; Xeroxing an image over and over until the final version is pure distortion; re-recording a sound until the noise and distortion become the dominant elements. The game Broken Telephone is enjoyable because it is based witnessing how people misunderstand what’s whispered in their ears. These are all transformations achieved by Contracting. The third transformation is Refracting, which changes the purpose of the subject. It involves seeing that subject from a new angle. We discussed this process in this post. Copernicus introduced the heliocentric model of the universe. Einstein explained the nature of gravity as an influence on space and time. Picasso broke down objects and people into geometric shapes and depicted them from multiple perspectives simultaneously.  One method of Refracting involves transposing. Columns become rows, and rows, columns. Inside becomes outside. Mirrors reflect opposites. A cruise ship looks like a skyscraper turned sideways. 3-D objects can be squashed, and 2-D objects inflated. 3-D objects can also be sliced into thin layers and spread out beside each other. Much of 3-D imaginag involves compiling multiple layers of 2-D images. Motion imaging is the projection of still pictures to create the illusion of movement. Dreams are refractions because they present the world in ways that are both familiar and mysterious, with their rotating cast of characters, real and imagined, and their own dream logic, as discussed here. Refracting is the most exciting category of transformation because it delivers an instant payload of gratification. Boom! Here you have one thing, and next… You have another! The ultimate transformation is the transformation of the self, changing from the person who is actively doing your work to the person who is allowing the work to be done through you. The distinction is subtle, and we’ll explore it in future posts. Expanding is the telescope, contracting is the microscope, and refracting is the kaleidoscope.

“The best ideas are born from the union of disparate thoughts.” – Unknown   Befor September 11, 2001, the idea to take down skyscrapers using commercial airplanes had not occurred to many people. It had obviously occurred to some people, including the group of terrorists who had been secretly plotting for months, but it had not yet occured to many more. On that sad, scary day, however, people around the world became aware of that idea. In retrospect, the idea seemed obvious. Many wondered, How could we have been so blind? How could we not have recognized the potential threat? Those questions carried some extra gravitas for my wife and me because we were in downtown Manhattan that day. We watched in shock as the twin towers burned, we fled in panic as the south tower began to fall, and we were overrun by its collosal gray-white cloud of dust. “How could we have been so blind to the threat?” How indeed. The answer is straightforward: air travel and blowing up buildings are two concepts that normally don’t sit together in the same part of the brain. Most people had not made the connection until that day, ourselves included. Many times since then I have glanced up at airplanes in the sky and, because of my perspective at those moments, their flight paths caused them to pass in front of buildings or behind them. Perhaps I am now more predisposed to notice the relationship between planes and buildings than I once was. I don’t know. What I do know is that whenever I’m reminded of that relationship, my mind leaps to the idea that many years previous, someone with the same type of perspective had a revelation: airplanes can take down skyscrapers. Someone made that mental link, and they carried it, eventually, to devastating affect. The point is, connecting concepts from different domains can spark powerful new concepts. This is foundational to singular links: unique combinations birth unique results. This relates to the “union of disparate thoughts” in the quote above. It is the bringing together of diverse elements, normally-unconnected elements, that sparks an Abracadabra moment. I’m not talking about the confluence of things that already exist in the same general doman. I’m not talking about, for instance, a Korean taco which you could make by filling a tortilla with Korean BBQ rather than traditional Tex-Mex ingredients. Korean BBQ and carne asada are both salty, spicy meats. More generally, they are both foods. So, substituting one food for another food is not an example of a singular link. A more demonstrative example would be to hurl tacos against a canvas to make art. That’s an idea. Food and painting are not frequently connected, so connecting them could produce unique outcomes. Or you could your taco, dip it in ink, and use it as an ink stamp on your canvas. That’s also an idea. Just imagine what Jackson Pollack would have done if he had been deprived of access to paints, but instead had access to large stockpiles of mustard, ketchup, grape jelly, cake icing, and chocolate sauce! That taco image reminds me of the expression “throwing spaghetti against the wall to see if it sticks.” It’s a quirky expression if you stop and think about it for a moment. It describes a trial-and-error process like brainstorming or whiteboarding. Presumably, if spaghetti sticks when thrown against the wall, it is properly cooked, otherwise it isn’t. To those in the know, spaghetti may connote meaning, as may tea leaves and goat entrails. That’s an idea. A singular link derives its power from the unlikeness of the elements being connected. The farther apart they are, the more power they create when combined. Consider a child’s seesaw. Its fulcrum is the fixed point over which the seesaw rotates, and changing its distance relative to one passengers or the other changes their mechanical efficiency. Two children of roughly equal weight sitting at either end of a seesaw with the fulcrum in the middle could keep themselves suspended above the ground. If one moves closer to the middle, she would decrease her mechanical efficiency and she would rise. Alternatively, if she moved farther from the middle, she would increase her mechanical efficiency and cause her partner to rise. The farther away she moves from the fulcrum, the more leverage she would exert. In a singular link, the more dissimilar the consituents are from each another, the greater their impact when combined. Have you ever encountered two married people who could not be more different from one another? They may have different ways of thinking and speaking, different interests and hobbies, different cultural backgrounds, goals, and aspirations. They seem to be the most unlikely people to have ended up together. You think to yourself, there’s no way this relationship could work… And yet it does. Each one seems to have found the one individual on this green earth with whom they fit. In fact, if they were just a little more similar to one another the relationship probably wouldn’t work. This generalizes to the intuition behind promoting diversity in the population. The more diverse the population, the theory alleges, the broader the spectrum of viewpoints, leading to more ideas, better ideas, and better decision-making. By contrast, a homogenous group of individuals is thought to produce a narrower spectrum of viewpoints, more uniform thinking, fewer ideas, and less robust decision-making. Diverse populations have a better chance of thinking about a subject orthogonally. If you think about something orthogonally, it means you are considering it from different, contrasting perspectives simultaneously. This multidimensional approach can lead to a more comprehensive understanding, in the same way that looking at an object with two eyes provides better depth perception than one. More perspectives uncover more information. What are some orthogonal ways of viewing a topic? There are too many to count! One way is to combine statistics and stories. If you rattle off a list of statistics, for instance, you may … Read more

You may wonder if anyone can put together singular links, or if certain people are better at it than others. Spoiler alert, yes, anyone can. However, since there are many different kinds of brains, some people are better at making certain types of connections than others. Harold Gardner, developmental psychologist, researcher, and educator, formulated the theory of multiple intelligences, which has some things to say about the topic. According to Gardner, people have different ways of processing information and different ways of understanding the world. Diverse minds possess diverse intelligences. Gardner identified eight types of intelligence: linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, spatial, bodily/kinesthetic, interpersonal, intrapersonal, and naturalistic. If you consider the minds of the people you know, you’ll be able to see examples of this empirically. One person may be a natural with numbers; another is an intuitive athlete; one can navigate physical places as if guided by an internal GPS; another can make musical sounds out of any object they encounter. Different people have different ways of seeing things, different ways of interpreting what they see, and different ways of interacting with the world around them. What one person considers tremendously difficult, another sees it as a piece of cake, and vise versa. Any person’s mind will possess multiple types of intelligence in varying degrees. Some areas may be highly developed while others are completely lacking. Importantly, these types of intelligence are not mutually exclusive. A useful paradigm may be to think of each category of intelligence on a scale of zero to ten, with each existing independently of the others. So, for instance, your brother the gym teacher may score an eight in bodily/kinesthetic intelligence, six in interpersonal intelligence, five in spacial intelligence, etc. This may go a long way to explaining why he always seems to clash with your uncle at holiday gatherings, who scores much lower in those areas and higher in others. If each of their minds were represented as a circle on a Venn diagram, the two circles would hardly overlap at all. In your family example, Thanksgiving awkwardness stems from neurodiveristy. Different minds make different types of connections. An individual with high linguistic intelligence may effortlessly link words to form puns, poems, and prose. Someone with high spacial intelligence may connect design elements to create unique structures. Interpersonal intelligence may allow someone to recognize social dynamics and connect relationships between different parties, making that person an excellent negotiator. Someone who has high intrapersonal intelligence understands her own emotions, thoughts, motivations, and feelings. Importantly, we’re not just talking about different types of intelligence. We’re also considering how different combinations can allow different types to complement one other. For instance, think of how the architect with highly developed spacial and interpersonal intelligence instinctively understands how a public space could facilitate large amounts of traffic, or how the artist with high linguistic and musical intelligence could become a crafty songsmith. But Gardner is just one of several researchers who have categorized different cognitive styles. Another is Temple Grandin, the scientist, animal behaviorist, and subject of the eponymous television film. Grandin identifies three different types of thikers: visual, pattern, and verbal. Additionally, within the visual thinkers, she notes there are object visualizers and spacial visualizers. Object visualizers have a keen ability to notice and recall intricate details of objects. Think of two people who visit a place together, and later one of them remembers ten times as many characteristics as the other. That’s the object visualizer. Spacial visualizers think primarily in terms of relationships and configurations. Their affinity leans more towards dynamics and systems. They are quick to learn how parts fit together to make the whole machine run. Like Gardner, Grandin suggests that cerebral processes include ranges of development in different categories. Rarely do they include hyper-development of one area at the expense of all others. However, such people considered to be savants do come along once in a very long while. Consider the blind British pianist Derek Paravicini. He has shown an ungodly ability to replicate extremely complex musical pieces after hearing them just once. Not only could he play the pieces in their entirety, but he could also play the different parts as they were performed by the different instruments in an ensemble. Again, all this after hearing the piece just once. Yet despite his musical abilities — after all, he can sing songs with perfect pitch — he has extreme learning difficulties and challenges in language and verbal communication. Coming back to the question of singular links, Derek Paravicini’s mind may be uniquely gifted at spotting connections in music. At the same time, he would probably be less effective spotting connections in the domains of linguistics, spatial relations, interpersonal or intrapersonal dynamics and elsewhere. That’s just not how his brain is wired. Different finds for different minds.

I remember my first visit to New York City when I walked into a deli to order some breakfast. There was a cacophony of activity and voices and characters scurrying around like ants in a tree stump. Someone yelled from behind the counter, “Who’s next,” and two or three people shouted their orders. The deli worker shouted back the loudest order and spun away to prepare it. Others were entering behind me and shouting their orders and getting served before me. To Manhattanites, this was just how you order breakfast. But to me, with my visitor eyes, the whole system seemed primal, transacitonal, verging on anarchy. A couple of days into my trip, however, I was yelling, “Egg and cheese on a roll!” When you first visit a new place, you see it with visitor eyes. You absorb a kaleidescope of details that form a first impression. You may note, for instance, that the street signs are painted a different color and use a different font, the pedestrians’ outfits are out of step with yours, the models of cars are unusual, as are their license plates, the air carries unfamiliar frangrants.  The new place reveals itself to you, and your senses are hungry to gobble up new information. But then, as you become familiar with a place, your relationship with your surroundings begins to change. The place metamorphosizes from something unknown to something known. Initially, all its details were novel and intriguing, but eventually they become its defining characteristics. The pace of your discoveries begins to slow. Surprises may still occur, but at increasingly longer intervals. Soon you change from the person who asks for directions to the person who gives directions. When you start getting used to a place, the way you see it changes, and those changes emerge in ways that you wouldn’t notice unless you paid close attention. After initial sigthings you continue to see the characteristics of that place, of course – the street signs, the pedestrians outfits, the license plates – only instead of providing new information to help form your impression, now they serve to confirm your existing impression.  Exploring a place for the first time is like assembling a jigsaw puzzle without knowing what’s on the picture. Before you have seen the whole picture, each piece is special. It adds new information. And some pieces add lots of new information. However, after you have completed the puzzle and you know how the whole picture appears, none of the pieces are particularly special on their own. They only serve as individual units in conjunction with all the other units to form the picture. The puzzle piece goes from special to ordinary, from valuable to banal. In an interesting twist, the puzzle piece only becomes valuable again if it goes missing. Its absence is what makes it conspicuous.  If you don’t believe me, consider baseball cards. The entire set of Topps baseball cards from 1952 has a total of 408 cards. If you had all those cards, you might not want to hold them in your bare hands because you would be holding a jackpot worth millions. However, if you were to remove just one card, the value of that set would drop by more than the value of the individual card. And, if you were to remove a special card, such as the Mickey Mantle rookie card (#311), the value of your set would plummet. Sometimes things are more valuable when they are absent.  That’s just supply and demand: withhold the supply and its value increases. But that’s not the point I wanted to make. The point I wanted to make is about visitor eyes. When a place is new, it holds a certain specialness, until it is no longer new, at which point it becomes commonplace. The same thing happens with new relationships. When you first meet someone, the person’s quirks are noteworthy. Their oddities and eccentricities are part of the charicature that forms in your mind. They are novel, intriguing. They invoke in you a curiosity to learn more about them. But eventually, those same indiosyncrasies that caught your eye become the defining aspects of who they are. At first they defined your view, and later they serve to confirm your view. When you first meet the guy with the crooked nose, that feature causes you to stare at length at his face and note how it appears from different angles. You wonder, how had that man’s nose changed over time to arrive at the unusual shape today? You used to wonder that when you first encountered him. Now when you see him, you just see Harry, the guy with the crooked nose. One of the most valuable accomplishments you can make is to see commonplace objects in new ways. Those who reveal the novelty in familiar things are worth their weight in gold. In the 1990s, astronomers hotly debated what the Hubble Space Telescope should be used to explore. Some advocated to explore one of the sky’s many dark patches, those inky blotches whose only noteworthy characteristic was its absence of any noteworthy characteristic. Many disagreed – the telescope’s resources were far too valuable to waste on dark patches, they argued. However, when they turned the telescope to observe a seemingly blank area, it revealed thousands of previously unseen galaxies. And what’s more, each galaxy contained billions of stars. The point is, never lose sight of visitor eyes!

So far we have been diving into singular links in the context of adding one thing to another thing to create an altogether new thing. This describes a cumulative process. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. One plus one equals three. But there is another way to think about singular links, where you create a new thing by subtracting something. It is a process of refinement. The whole is increased by removing one of its parts. One minus one equals three. Think of sculpture. The original state is a block of marble. The process of removing excess stone results in a statue. This too is a singular link. Stone minus excess stone equals art. As the Renaissance artist Michaelangelo said, “I saw the angel in the marble and I carved until I set him free.” In the realm of logical reasoning, this is a deductive process. Deduction begins with a general premise and then eliminates possibilities to arrive at a specific conclusion. Many of the whodunnit novels and movies use deduction to identify the murderer. Sherlock Holmes concludes that one suspect is guilty by proving all other suspects are innocent. The only suspect that cannot be unmistakenly proved to be innocent must, therefore, be guilty. All possibilities are negated except one. In mathematics, it’s the equivalent of adding negative values until the sum of all values is equal to one. Architects understand this concept. They know how to use negative space creatively designs of buildings. Think of a skylight at the top of a tall building that lets in natural light all the way to an indoor courtyard many floors below. In that courtyard there may be live trees, and the lives of those trees depend on the sunlight they get from the skylight many floors above. Negative space gives indoor people a sense of being outdoors. Minus the temperature swings. And no rain. In graphic design, artists remove imperfections to create uniformity in the images. The fashion model may have a blemish deleted, a wrinkle softened, a droplet of saliva airbrushed from her lip. These asymmetries could be distracting to the viewer. Removing them creates imagery that has greater effect, greater impact. “Narrow the focus, increase the impact.” Genetic engineers also know the power of less-is-more. They create genetically modified organisms (GMOs) by removing specific genes from the organism’s DNA. They may, for instance, remove the gene that makes a crop more vulnerable to parasites. With that gene removed, the crop is more resistant. Traveling in Central America years ago, I remember eating breakfast with a nutrition scientist. He told me there are over 1,000 species of bananas in the world, but just one – the dessert banana – accounts for 99 percent of bananas consumed each year. This strain of banana gained popularity because it was easy to grow and was highly resistant to the Panama disease which had devastated other varieties of banana in the 19th century. Engineers have been studying its properties and tweaking them ever since. The point is, reduction can be just as effective as addition to create something stronger, larger, greater, or more impactful.

When you combine various elements to create singular links, the resulting unions exhibit emergent properties. These properties spring into existence from the interaction of the underlying components. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Or, the whole demonstrates properties that its parts do not. The components interact in such a way so as to create new properties. A simple example of emergent properties is the formation of water through the molecular combination of hydrogen and oxygen. Together, they form H2O. You can’t swim in a pool of hydrogen atoms or drink a cool glass of vodka and oxygen atoms, but when you put hydrogen and oxygen together in the right combination, you can throw a bacchanalian pool party. If you remove one hydrogen atom, you have a different substance, hydrogen peroxide, with different properties including the helpful property of sterilizing the scrape on your toe that you got while dancing at your bacchanalian pool party. Examples of emergent properties abound. When you combine flour, water, yeast and salt, you can create bread, which has delicious properties for sandwich making. Emulsifying oil, egg yolk and lemon juice produces the properties of mayonnaise to spread on your sandwiches. Blending fats and lye produces the properties of soap to clean up the mess you made in the kitchen. Hiring an assistant from a classified ad and sprinkling in a generous helping of wages can create the emerging properties for a clean a kitchen. None of these ingredients individually achieves results – flour, water, lemon juice, lye, the assistant, cash – but when you combine them judiciously in the right proportions, you may find yourself with a full belly and a kitchen sink that’s free of dirty dishes. Gunpowder is another great example. It is so simple to make that any 8 year-old boy could do it by combining potassium nitrate, charcoal, and sulfur. (As an aside, please don’t tell any 8 year-old boy he can make gunpowder. There is nothing more motivating to an 8 year-old boy than the possibility to blow shit up). I don’t know what you might do with any of those three ingredients individually, aside from maybe using the charcoal to BBQ burgers at your bacchanalian pool party, but when you combine them, you too can blow shit up. Everybody knows, gunpowder explodes, producing rapidly expanding gasses, fire, and heat. Altering the proportion of ingredients can affect its burn rate, from shatteringly combustible to slow and steady like the fuse of a firecracker. Also, combining these three ingredients creates a high level of chemical stability (another emergent property), endowing the gunpowder with a long shelf life. Gunpowder swayed the course of history. It was indispensable for developing firearms, explosives and military strategy and, over time, it helped tip the balance of power towards armed militias who seized riches, land, and materials, and protected it, enjoying a disproportionate skew of wealth for generations to come. The properties of gunpowder just keep on emerging. Throughout history many cultures implemented rites of passage to mark the transformation from boyhood to manhood. These rituals, tests, and ceremonies symbolize a young man’s readiness to assume adult responsibilities and roles within their community. Bar Mitzvah in Judaism marks the coming of age of young boys and acceptance of religious responsibilities as adult members of the community. Native American boys set out into the wilderness on solitary vision quests to fast, seek spriritual guidance, and commune with dreams to gain insight into their role within their communities. Some cultures mark the transformation to adulthood by inflicting physical injuries such as bullet-cutting and scarring rituals (Papua New Guinea) and circumcision (the Dawoodi Bohra culture in India and the Maasai tribe in East Africa). The rituals are designed to be painful and traumatic, to remind the boys and their communities that manhood is serious business. They define the moment in the boy’s life when he sheds his childhood and enters adulthood with all its emergent properties. A woman develops emergent properties when she becomes pregnant. She develops the biological ecosystem to support the growth of another life inside her. And then new properties emerge when the mother gives birth. The baby is literally the property that emerges from her womb. Rewinding the tape back to inception, lovemaking sparks its own emergent properties. Two lovers undergo transformation from, a) mildly aroused individuals to, b) squirming, sweaty sex-animals in the frothy frenzies of passion. Pre-state to post-state in five minutes flat. The apogee of their movie-dinner-date night is the emerging property of orgasm. And if they’re really in sync, their properties emerge simultaneously. It is not an overstatement to say, the goal of finding singular links is to find emergent properties. It’s not just about mixing vinegar and baking soda for a volcano in a high school science project. It’s about creating a catalyst for changing one state to another. It’s about sparking transformation. Joseph Campbell’s book “The Hero With 1,000 Faces” describes the Hero’s Journey, which is a pattern found in myths and legends of cultures around the world. Throughout the Journey the Hero travels from one life stage to another, discovering new emergent properties with each stage. At the beginning, the Hero is reluctant to answer a call to adventure, but he meets a mentor who helps him, the Hero, overcome doubt. He leaves the familiar world where he is tested and forced to undergo a trial where he confronts his deepest fears. He experiences the death of his old self, but survives. The trial-and-survival open his eyes to a new awareness and understanding of the world and his place in it. He returns, reborn, carrying new insights and wisdom, gifts to benefit the community where he originated. You may recognize the Hero’s Journey if you’re a fan of Harry Potter or Star Wars or the tales of King Arthur or Homer’s Odyssey. In folklore, as in life, the ordinary man or woman becomes a hero when that individual perseveres through personal life-trials to … Read more

When you notice something that’s exciting, it creates energy in your brain and your body. Kids demonstrate this most vividly when excitement jolts through them and they leap in the air, clap and flap, shriek and squeal. Their excitement on the inside becomes excitement on the outside. Adults sometimes shine with excitement too. Think of the contestants on TV game shows, or the “Surprise!” of a birthday party, or the choreographed excitement of sporting events, political rallies, rock concerts, religious jubilees. Dogs show their excitement unapologetically every time their owner shows up. When you encounter something meaningful, there’s a tiny faint puff of energy deep down in the labyrinth of your mind, imperceptible to others around you, maybe even imperceptible to you yourself, that switches on a minuscule mental light bulb.   What is happening here? What is this special something that ignites in your brain when you encounter something meaningful? It is a little charge of current that surges through the nerves in your skull. A spark. A neural transmitter catapulting a minuscule payload of chemical activity across your synapses from one neuron to another. This biochemical activity excites the receiving neuron, causing it to come alive and reciprocate its excitement to other neurons, and so on, over and over. Imagine how this cranial process would appear if you were small enough to see it. There are ripples of activity cascading across grey matter like wind across a wheat field, or a chain of falling dominos, or a zap of blue lightning crackling sideways and jagged through the nighttime clouds. When you learn something, your brain physically changes in slight but meaningful ways. It changes the structure of the neurons being used, and it increases the number of synapses between the neurons. Some science suggests you store new stimuli in your short-term memory, a temporary faculty that keeps track of immediate things, and from there your brain may eventually discard it or otherwise move it to your long-term memory where it can be accessed in the future. This movement to long-term memory creates a more pronounced biochemical change in your neural pathways. Repeating what you learned strengthens the synapses and makes them more efficient at transmitting the information. That’s why it typically takes less time to re-learn something than it took to learn it the first time. Once your neural pathways have been trained, it’s easier to access them. “It’s like riding a bicycle.” This is the basis of learning. Your brain possesses the property known as plasticity, which basically means it has the ability to change and develop over time. Previously, the prevailing science alleged that as you age, your brain becomes increasingly fixed. “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” But more recently, science has developed to suggest your brain keeps changing throughout your entire life, right until the moment you breath your last breath. Your mind is flexible, not fixed. It can be trained and coached and cultivated, exercised, sharpened or blunted, for better or for worse. When it comes to cognition, your brain has the properties of silly putty. The mind adapts to new stimuli by forming new neural pathways which, over time, get stronger with more traffic or weaker with less traffic until the weakest ones get eliminated altogether. It’s like a proliferation of vines. In the early days of springtime the vines are all young and fragile, competing for limited water and soil and nutrients. By late summer, some have grown stronger and climbed up the wall while others withered and died off. In your brain, this type of development speaks to the expression, “You learn something every day.” By analogy, the loss of unused pathways suggests you may also forget something every day. As you excercise certain brain functions, you become more biochemically proficient at those functions. However, this proficiency can also impede your ability to learn new ways of thinking. You can form mental ruts and rigidity, becoming stuck in your ways of thinking, skeptical of new information. You may become the stereotypical stick in the mud, the bullheaded Luddite, the crusty old curmudgeon, “Get off my lawn, you kids!” If taken too far, repetitive learning can be regressive. On the flip side, learning new things can be exciting. As your brain reacts to new stimuli by forming new neural paths, that cellular excitement can generate a physically stimulating sensation. Think about how you feel when you learn something fascinating, such as when you read a well crafted story, or watch a captivating movie, or engage in a stirring verbal exchange. That stimulated feeling is the feeling of your neurons coming alive and getting all excited and jittery. The excitement can really pop when you dive into milestone experiences of your life such as leaving home for the first time or starting a new job or moving to a new city or forging a new relationship. Accelerated learning can trigger visceral, emotional responses. Sometimes a new idea or concept triggers such an intense “oh wow” moment that the new information is like the light bulb suddenly turned on in your mind. When you get hit by such a powerful concept, you close your eyes and put your hand on your forehead, shutting down your senses for a moment, giving your brain time to process the new information. And it’s not just your brain that does the processing, it’s your body too. You need a moment to collect yourself to recover from some revalations. You have to pause to get oriented to a new way of seeing the world, which has shifted, which you see a little differently, skewed through the lens of this new idea and its sunburst flare of new meaning. When you see something novel and meaningful, you can never go back to your world as it existed before your eyes were opened. You cannot unsee it. You tend to remember emotionally salient events more than emotionally neutral events. That’s because your emotions impact the encoding and … Read more

Inside your skull, your brain is floating in a silky goo. your brain resembles other brains. If someone were to scoop your brain out of your head and plop it on a counter, you wouldn’t be able to identify it from other brains on the counter. However, it is not exactly like any of the other brains. In fact, it is unlike any brain that has ever existed or any brain that will ever exist. It it your brain. Uniquely yours. And it is capable of noticing things that others don’t notice. Here’s something. It’s better to be a person who notices things than a person who doesn’t notice things. This statement may be self-evident, but it’s worth saying. If you notice something, then you have a choice: to act on what you have noticed or to not act on it. The fact that you have become aware of something opens up the possibility for a new action, a new path, a new potential outcome. Generally in life, having more choices is better than having fewer choices. Let’s say you’re in a coffee shop waiting to order and a stranger nearby spills some milk while pouring it into her coffee. If you noticed, then you could choose to either acknowledge it or ignore it. You could acknowledge it by, for instance, making eye contact with the stranger and simply giving her a sympathetic look. Or, if you’re feeling more social, you could offer to help mop up the spilt milk. It’s possible the interaction would lead to a conversation. It’s possible that you discover you have a mutual acquaintance, such as the owner of the coffee shop, who happens to invite you to a party, which you attend, where you meet the stranger for a second time. “Quite a coincidence,” you both agree, and you spend the evening chatting. It’s possible this new acquaintance goes on to become an important influence in your life, a singular influence in your life, the one person who introduces you to all kinds of vivid feelings including the vivid feeling of your heart tearing in two. All because you noticed the spilled milk. (Aside. Why do we say that hearts break? That makes no sense. Hearts don’t break. Bones break. The heart is a tender muscle and muscles don’t break. Muscles strain or bruise or tear. Hearts do ache, however. We can agree on that. The ache can be excruciating and you can actually feel that pain in your chest. It can actually feel like that muscle is tearing in two.) Back to the coffee shop where you are waiting to order, in a different iteration of the story, the stranger spills the milk, you notice, and you choose to ignore it. The woman notices that you saw the spill and you chose to turn away. She makes a snap judgment about you. “That person is unfriendly,” she thinks. At the shopowner’s party you see each other again, but since you had a non-exchange at the coffee shop, you don’t speak to each other at the party. She ends up meeting someone at the party who becomes a singular influence in her life, the one person who allows her to vividly feel the vivid feeling of her heart tearing in two. In both scenarios, the act of noticing something (the spilt milk) introduces a new potential outcome. If you were in a coffee shop in a Marvel movie, the act of noticing might open up a new dimension in the multiverse. In each of those new dimensions, different manifestations of you face a choice — to act or not to act — and that choice creates different outcomes. It’s like one of those video games whose plot changes based on your character’s actions, or like one of those books that lets you to choose your own story progression that results in different possible endings. In the coffee shop, these dimensions of the multiverse were created when you noticed the stranger spilling milk. But there’s another dimension of the coffee-shop multiverse, the dimension where you didn’t notice the stranger. In that dimension, you are not faced with a decision. It’s a non-event, a nothing burger. But here’s the thing. It’s also possible that the non-event for you becomes an actual event for someone else. Let’s say you don’t notice the stranger in the coffee shop who spilled the milk, but let’s say the stranger spilled the milk intentionally, specifically trying to get your attention. Since you didn’t notice, however, now it’s the stranger who has a choice. What should she do now that you didn’t notice the intentional spill? Her choice will open new dimensions of the coffee-shop multiverse. She could stop trying to get your attention. Or she could continue trying to get your attention by other means. Let’s say she decides to stop trying. You go about your separate ways. But then you meet at the shopowner’s party where she eventually confesses that she had seen you at the coffee shop, and possibly even confesses that she tried to get your attention by spilling milk, but you didn’t notice, and eventually she becomes the one person who allows you to vividly feel the vivid feeling of your heart tearing in two. Where are we going with this? Let’s recap. If you notice something, it offers you a choice: to act on it or not. Alternatively, if you don’t notice something, and others are aware that you didn’t notice, you offer them a choice: to act on that something you didn’t notice, or not act on it. When you notice something, that observation provides new information. If one person notices something and the other doesn’t, one person has information and the other doesn’t. There is an information asymmetry. Observation is information. Information is power. Naturally, then, observation is power. It’s better to be a person who observes things than a person who doesn’t. This is not only true for people, but also for … Read more

A toddler, held in his mother’s arms, sees a puppy and points at it. “Puppy,” his mom says, training the boy to associate the word with the dog. “It’s a puppy.” The baby holds his gaze, transfixed, and keeps pointing. He points for a comically long time, for such a long time that he causes the mother and the dog walker to grin. The toddler is looking at just the puppy, only the puppy. His vision is singularly focused on it. All other objects are excluded from his sight. He only has eyes for puppy. What happens in the brain when you focus your eyes on an object? Imagine you’re playing baseball, standing at the plate watching the pitcher as he winds up to throw a 100-mile-per-hour a fastball. You are singularly focused on spotting that ball the moment it leaves his hand, because you have to make a split-second decision about whether or not to swing. There’s a lot going on in that split second. Light enters your cornea and gets focused by the lens to the back of the eye. There it gets picked up by the retina where photoreceptor cells convert it into electrical signals. They travel through the optic nerve to your brain, passing through several processing stages including the optic chiasm, the thalamus, and the primary visual cortex near the back of your skull. The visual cortex analyses the signals for visual features such as contrast, motion, and depth. From there the signals pass to the higher-level brain regions of the inferotemporal cortex where they undergo a recognition process — “This is a swingable pitch” or, “This is not a swingable pitch” — relying on stored knowledge from prior batting experiences. Then there’s the decision-making process, to swing or not to swing, which plays out in various brain regions including the prefrontal cortex and other motor-control areas. Generally, the transmission of electrical signals and basic feature analysis that characterize the initial stages of visual processing occur rapidly, within tens to hundreds of milliseconds. Let’s face it, in the scale of human perception, such speeds are basically instantaneous. No time at all. However, higher-level functions involving recognition, cognitive processing, and decision-making typically take longer. The best major-league batters may process the information in hundreds of milliseconds, whereas the average beer-drinking baseball fan may have no clue if it’s a swingable pitch or not until well after the ball is in the catcher’s mit. When you focus on an object, you prioritize it at the expense of other objects in your field of vision. The puppy. The baseball. The beer. Whatever the object of focus, it receives the majority of your attention. The region of your visual field corresponding to the focal point is the fovea. It is centered in a tiny area of the retina and contains a dense cluster of photoreceptor cells responsible for discerning detail. Foveal vision attempts to maximize visual acuity of the focal object. Meanwhile, other visual stimuli that fall outside the immediate vicinity of the fovea are processed in a more coarse, less detailed manner. They are picked up by our parafoveal vision, also called peripheral vision. They receive less attention or they may be excluded from consciousness altogether. We described this phenomenon in the recent post, “Did You Spot the Gorilla?” The toddler sees the puppy, not the leash, the dog walker, nor the sidewalk. The batter sees the ball, not the pitcher, nor the baseball field, nor the fans in the bleachers. This area of focus is called the visual attentional spotlight. We humans have developed our attentional spotlight through millions of years of evolution dating back to times when spotting a predator or not spotting a predator meant the difference between survival and extinction. The point is, we focus on the things that are important, at the exclusion of virtually everything else. This makes us good at spotting something once we know what to look for, a skill developed over millions of years of evolution. If our hominid ancestors happened upon a berry patch, they would think, “Oh look, here are some delicious berries on this bush,” and then they would focus their vision on other branches of the bush and nearby bushes to find every delicious berry. In this type of situation, you form a mental picture of the berry in your mind, and then your eyes scan your surroundings for other objects that resemble that berry. If the berry is red, your eyes dart to other objects that are red. If the berry is fuzzy, your eyes scan for other fuzzy surfaces. But just as the mental picture in your mind can help you to identify things that are familiar, it can also prevent you from spotting things if you don’t know what they look like, or if they look like something other than the picture in your mind. Let’s say you misplaced your car key, and you’re in a hurry to find it. You don’t know where you left it but, good news, it should be easy to find because it’s attached to a hoop keychain that’s as large as a tennis ball. You have a mental picture of that keychain in your mind. You scan the area for a tennis ball-sized hoop. Where is it? Your eye goes to everything that’s round like the hoop. Where is that damn keychain? You go from room to room. You start looking in places that are less and less likely, because you didn’t find it in the places that were more likely. You know it must be in the house because you used it to lock the car door when you got home. Eventually, you have to give up and call a friend to give you a lift, otherwise you’ll be late. You spend the rest of the night wondering where that key could be hiding. It’s attached to a big hoop! How could it be lost?! The next morning you wake up still thinking about … Read more

If we are going to pioneer original work, we have to be willing to reject conventional thinking and forge new mental paths on our own. Let’s unpack this by first exploring conventional thinking. One day, XYZ Corporation announces it has positive earnings and its stock price goes up. The news headline claims, “The stock price rose because the company’s earnings grew.” The author of the headline asserts there is a connection between earnings and stock movement. This explanation seems plausible. We accept it as the reason for the rising stock price.  Another day, XYZ Corporation announces it has positive earnings, but this time its stock price goes down. The news headline claims, “The stock price fell because the company’s earnings did not grow as much as investors expected.” This explanation also seems plausible. We accept it as the reason for the falling stock price. But how could that be? The same event (earnings growth) leads to opposite results, and yet we accept both explanations. The reason is, our minds are eager to understand connections, and if explanations seem plausible, we are apt to accept them. We like to know how things relate to one another. We like the reassuring feeling of knowing why things are as they are. Explanations put our minds at ease. They provide understanding, cozy, comfortable understanding. It’s like when someone offers us their hand to shake. The normal response is to accept the hand being offered, and shake it. The handshake demonstrates that both people adhere to a common social norm. And that is comforting to both people.  The handshake is a dialog in an unspoken language: “Here is my hand. Will you shake it?” “Why, yes I will. Let’s shake hands!” The author of the headline is also offering readers a sort of handshake. It’s a conceptual handshake. He is asking, “Will you accept the connection I am making between the company’s earnings and its stock price?” And the normal response, the easy response, is, “Yes, that connections seems acceptable.” As social animals who have been conditioned to recognize social cues, we find it easier to accept explanations than to reject them. When we receive an explanation it’s like receiving one of those annual contracts whose language says it will auto-renew unless we opt out. If we do nothing, the contract will renew. If we go to sleep for 20 years like Rip Van Winkle, the contract will renew 20 times. Nothing is required. On the other hand, if we want to get out of the contract we have to do something. We have to act. We have to defy the natural flow. Logical thinking is comfortable. Among the most mentally comforting logical patterns is the “if-then” pattern. “If this, then that.” This cause-and-effect pattern is simple and direct. Our language is filled proverbs of the “if-then” variety. An old-timey word related to the if-then pattern is the word sequitur, which is also related to the word sequence and generally refers to one thing that follows something else. By contrast, a non sequitur is something that does not follow something else. It describes a fallacy, a non-connection, a chaotic leap. A non sequitur is a non-conformist, a rebel. Non sequiturs hang out by the railroad tracks and smoke cigarettes and wear their underpants over their pants. In the analogy of the handshake, the sequitur heartily accepts the handshake, but the unruly non sequitur turns away and wanders off awkwardly. Here’s the thing. If we are going to venture into uncharted territory and make singular links, we have to be willing to love non sequiturs, or at least embrace them. Conventional links are the legitimate children of conventional thinking. Unconventional links are the bastard love-children of unconventional thinking. The mental processes that create singular links require courage and conviction. We have to  be willing to embark on mental journeys. We have to serve as pioneer into new territory with no assurance that there exists an El Dorado at the end of the journey. We have to be nonconformist, independent, defiant. Unconventional thinking requires unconventional thinking! What can we do to stimulate unconventional thinking? Plenty. One way is to reverse assumptions. The CEO may assume her shareholders wanted more revenues, and if she followed that assumption she would seek ways for her company to do more — more products, more marketing, more customers. But if she challenges that assumption she may discover that her shareholders really want more profits, which could also be accomplished by reducing expenses. The answer may not be more, but less. Questioning assumptions can lead to unique insights and alternative solutions. Another way to stimulate unconventional thinking is to ask provocative questions. Thought-provoking questions can force us to challenge conventional wisdom and may open up new perspectives. For example, in the 16th and 17th centuries, scientists like Copernicus, Galileo, and Isaac Newton challenged the view that the earth was the center of the universe. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the Suffragette Movement challenged the idea that women should not have the right to vote. Civil-rights activists like Martin Luther King Jr challenged the conventions of segregation in the United States. More recently, the LGBTQ+ movement has been challenging conventional notions of gender and sexuality. Another way to stimulate unconventional thinking is to use metaphors and analogies. This mental framework seeks parallels between unrelated concepts. The handshake and the unspoken conversation described above is an example of analogous thinking. Likewise, the business world is filled with analogies to sports. These sports analogies allow business leaders to study the work of coaches and team managers to identify strategies that could apply to their business. Likewise, business strategists may use military analogies, studying the work of generals to identify battle plans that apply to the business world. Sun Tsu’s The Art of War is the most often referenced non-business book in the world of business. We can also stimulate unconventional thinking by introducing unrelated or random stimuli. In a recent post we … Read more

There once was a man who was a merchant and father of a teenage daughter. Through a series of mishaps, he found himself unable to pay his debt to a money lender. The money lender proposed a bargain: he would pick up two stones from the stone path, a black one and a white one, and put them in an empty money bag. He would ask the merchant’s daughter to draw out one of the stones. If she drew the white stone, her family’s debt would be canceled, but if she drew the black stone, she would become the money lender’s wife. The merchant and his daughter were appalled, but since the alternative was to be thrown in jail, they reluctantly agreed.  Then a curious thing happened. Watching the money lender closely, the woman observed that he picked up two black stones and placed them in the bag, rather than one black one and one white one. He had rigged the game to guarantee the outcome.  What would she do? Expose the money lender as a cheat? Refuse to draw a stone and be thrown in jail? Draw a black stone to save her father and sacrifice herself? Instead, the clever young woman drew out one stone and then clumsily fumbled it to the ground where it was lost among the other stones on the path. She apologized for her clumsiness and said, the color of the stone left in the bag, black or white, would indicate that she had chosen the opposite. The money lender was furious, because he knew the remaining stone was black. He had no choice but to follow through on his word and cancel the debt. Author Edward de Bono uses this story to illustrate the concept of Lateral Thinking in his book by the same name. He describes lateral thinking as the process of imagining creative solutions rather than solving problems logically.  Lateral thinking leads to simple, unconventional ideas that seem obvious only after they are thought of, de Bone says. It stands in contrast to vertical thinking, which is the more conventional, deductive thought process. According to the author, vertical thinking is “high-probability, straight-ahead” thinking, whereas lateral thinking “low-probability, sideways” thinking. “Since Aristotle, logical thinking has been exalted as the one effective way in which to use the mind. Yet the very elusiveness of new ideas indicates that they do not necessarily come about as a result of logical thought processes. Some people are aware of another sort of thinking, which is most easily recognized when it leads to those simple ideas that are obvious only after they have been thought of.” Lateral thinking encourages greater flexibility of mind and consideration of problems from many different perspectives. “Everyone has come across the sort of problem that seems impossible to solve until suddenly a surprisingly simple solution is revealed,” de Bono says. “Once it has been thought of, the solution is so obvious that one cannot understand why it was ever so difficult to find. This sort of problem may indeed be difficult to solve so long as vertical thinking is used.” We can all appreciate simple, creative solutions when we encounter them. The internet screams about countless creative solutions in the form of simple hacks. “36 Amazing Hacks to Simplify Your Life!” and “31 Amazingly Useful Home Hacks that Actually Work!” and “22 Simple Life Hacks Everyone Should Know!” (Always accompanied by at least one exclamation point!) In another example, de Bono cites an episode where two women each claimed to be the mother of an infant, and King Solomon had to identify a creative solution to determine which one was the legitimate mother. He ordered the child to be cut in half so each woman could receive half of the child. He suspected, however, that the real mother would rather see the other woman have the child than see it killed. And so, he concluded that the woman who proposed this alternative was, in fact, the real mother. Lateral thinking often plays out in literature and movies in the form of the whodunit. Think of detectives like Sherlock Holmes (“Elementary, my dear Watson!”) or Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot. Contemporary movie franchises like the Oceans series of heist films (Oceans 11, etc) employ outlandishly creative contrivances to pull off a heist. The stories are like calisthenics for lateral-thinking screenwriters. In each story, the author builds backwards from the improbable conclusion to construct all the elements leading up to it. They begin at the end. Clever choreography is the hallmark of magicians. The shell game. The card trick. The sleight of hand. They all rely on creative manipulation of the viewer’s perception. Tricksters and scammers use lateral thinking to take advantage of people’s tendency to think linearly. They curate information in highly selective ways to distort what their victims see and manipulate them into believing what they are shown. Their victims may buy into the ruse one step at a time, seeing connections where none exist until – presto! – the scam is complete, and the victim is astonished, wondering how they could ever have been so naive. In these situations, the shucksters count on people’s tendency to make assumptions about what they are seeing. If a magician is holding a ball in one hand and then covers it with a handkerchief in the other hand, the audience may assume that the ball is still under the handkerchief, naturally. But the skilled magician may remove the ball with the second hand while covering the first hand with the handkerchief. The ball is already gone, but the audience believes it is still there under the handkerchief.  Lateral thinkers challenge the assumptions that underpin the problem they’re facing. Rather than accepting the assumptions, they question their validity and consider opposite perspectives and alternative viewpoints. This could result in unique insights. For example, if  a company’s shareholders tell the CEO that she needs to increase revenues, she may assume the company needs to attract more customers, … Read more

In our last post we discussed divergent thinking, which is the thought process used to generate many ideas related to a subject in a short amount of time. Quantity is key. The goal is to create as many ideas as possible, regardless of whether they are any good or not. Then, after we have created a critical mass of raw ideas, we shift our focus to selecting the best idea for further exploration. This process is convergent thinking, the opposite of divergent thinking. First diverge, then converge. The converging process considers various choices in the context of the original subject and looks for a connection that is in some way valuable. Map of Convergent Thinking We use convergent thinking all the time, such as when we scroll through consumer websites. Think about what you would do if you visited Amazon.com to find something such as, I don’t know, maybe a “male grooming device.” A search for this term today yields 624 choices. That’s a lot of choices! It includes several types of devices including body hair groomers, men’s rotary shavers, hair finishing shavers and others. You could filter your choices by the body area in need of grooming (beard, face, armpit, nose, ear…), power source (cordless or corded), blade material (stainless, titanium…), and special features (waterproof, detachable head…), among other characteristics. Out of curiosity, I wondered how many choices would appear for the search, “female grooming device.” This produced fewer choices than men’s choices (422), but the categories were very different (bikini trimmers, foil shavers, hair removal epilators…). Digging deeper, a search for just “grooming device” produced nearly a thousand choices, but this also included many choices designed for grooming pets. Since I had already gone down a rabbit hole, and being a little surprised that “male grooming” produced nearly 50 percent more choices than “female grooming,” I was curious to do just a little more digging. After all, I wondered, could the market for grooming devices really be 50 percent larger for men than for women? I changed the search term from “grooming” to “pleasure,” just to see what it would yield. Again, the results were surprising. Choices for “female pleasure device” outnumbered choices for “male pleasure device” by a ratio of twelve-to-one! The results were a whopping 60,000 to 5,000 choices, respectively. If choices for consumer product reasonably reflect consumer behavior, we may infer that, 1) men are grooming themselves more than women, 2) women are pleasuring themselves more than men, and 3) there’s a LOT more self-pleasuring happening than grooming. But I digress. This is a story about convergent thinking.  The point is, whether you’re on Amazon looking for a product that you’ll use to groom yourself or pleasure yourself or do anything else you may want to do yourself or with anyone else, you’ll be engaging in convergent thinking. You will consider each of the choices in relation to the original subject and explore the more promising choice for further consideration. When applying convergent thinking in the context of singular linking, we are trying to find the singular idea that makes our subject pop. For an example that pops, look look no further than Viagra. The little blue pill was developed to address blood pressure, of all things, but the idea to use it as a boner pill thrust it into a much more lucrative market. Same for Botox, which was originally created to treat crossed eyes and eyelid spasms but found much more commercial application as a beauty product. I’m not suggesting that the commercial breakthroughs of Viagra and Botox materialized by brainstorming all possible ideas for those products and then choosing the best ones. It’s not like some lab technician at Pfizer said, “Hey, I know we’re developing a blood-pressure pill but while we’re at it, should we also see if… I dunno, maybe it also helps men get erections?” (You could just see the other technicians with their lab coats and clip boards, peering silently, awkwardly over their bifocals, searching their minds for a response, wondering, “What on earth is he thinking about in the lab while we’re together all day?”) Rather, by researching how people responded to their products, their creators iterated their way to discoving new, unexpected applications. The key is the iterative process, which is what we’re trying to manufacture with divergent-convergent thinking. We’re trying to generate ideas that lead to more new ideas that lead to still more new ideas. Eventually we find ourselves considering ideas that are several steps removed from the original subject. Their separation from the original subject is what makes them valuable. They are like distant cousins who hardly resemble one another but are related nevertheless. When we consider each of these distant ideas in relation to the original subject, occasionally we discover one that gives a whole new meaning to our original subject. This is a singular link. Think about the history of aviation. For thousands of years inventors tried to develop flying machines by copying the flapping wings of birds. They saw that birds flap their wings to get them aloft and keep them there until they decide to come down. Couldn’t people do the same? They tried developing different mechanisms with wings, different ways of flapping, different materials that were both strong and light, but nothing worked. Eventually some built gliders that could be launched from the rooftops or hilltops and float gradually downward like paper airplanes. Others pioneered balloon flight. Still, none of them allowed for bird-like flight. It wasn’t until someone introduced the concept of thrust that aviation became possible. We already had winged vessels, but now a winged vessel rigged with a thrusting mechanism resulted in modern aviation. Ariel Flying Over the Nile Could early inventors have discovered thrust in aviation through the processes of divergent-convergent thinking? Possibly. By the late 18th century, inventors were coming tantalizingly close to designing flying machines much like those that took to the skies in the early 20th century. It wouoldn’t be … Read more

“The best way to have a good idea is to have lots of ideas.” – Linus Pauling A great tool for making links is divergent thinking. Divergent thinking is a thought process used to generate many ideas related to a subject in a short amount of time. By exploring an anything-goes attitude to the subject, we give ourselves the freedom to explore every thought that comes to mind, without any limitations, and this can spark spontaneous, unexpected, exciting connections. The word diverge is frequently associated with words related to the notion of separation, among them, divert, divide, different, distinguish, deviate… Here’s an example of divergent thinking. Let’s say our subject is a mundane pencil. We know we can use a pencil to write and draw and erase. But how else could we use the pencil? Let’s use divergent thinking to brainstorm as many ideas as possible, regardless of whether they are any good. How else? Any other ideas? Sure!  We could keep going to create more and more outlandish uses for the pencil but the point is, we use divergent thinking to create as many ideas as possible. The goal is quantity, not quality. The divergence sets our minds down as many mental paths as our imaginations can conjure, creating a sprawling labyrinth of thoughts.  Many writers use the technique of “10-minute continuous writing” in the same way. Sit down, start writing, and don’t stop until 10 minutes have passed. Even if the only words that come out are, “All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy. All work and no play….” for 10-minutes, the task is accomplished. Again, it’s not about quality, but quantity. Some say this is the best cure for writer’s block. Divergent thinking is an example of what I like to call swarming the subject. Create a flurry of thoughts around the subject, not pausing,  not reflecting, not judging, not caring, just swarming like a hive of busy bees. We don’t know where a thought will lead, and sometime it will lead to another thought, then to another, then another. The result is something several thoughts removed from the original subject and probably not something that would have come to mind in more constrained exercises. It could be pure trash or pure gold, but its strength is that it is just one of many ideas that now exist. It’s about strength in numbers. These activities create the raw materials for our projects. Words and sentences are the raw materials for writers. Brush strokes and colors are the raw materials for painters. Riffs and progressions are the raw materials for musicians. Starting from nothing, creating a body of something, and then building from there. That’s the birth of original work. Sometimes it helps to arrange our ideas in a mind map, which can look like a hub with the subject in the middle and several spokes shooting off in different directions, one for each idea. And some of these spokes can themselves have several spokes shooting off from them, one for each derivative idea. When the process is done, we may have a mind map where some areas are sparse and whispy, while other areas are dense with thick tangles of ideas. Divergent Thinking Mind Map Now that we have the raw material we can shift to the next step which is to begin manipulating the material. The opposite of divergent thinking is convergent thinking. But that’s the subject of our next post.

Our story begins three million years ago in patch of African lowlands where a monkey-like hominid named Lucy is scurrying away from her hominid companion. There were 3 signs that her companion was not having a good day. 1) the insects he ate for breakfast were upsetting his digestion, 2) an annoying splinter was still lodged in his his thumb and, 3) a saber-tooth tiger just tore off his right leg. Yes, not a good day for Lucy’s companion. A few moments earlier they had both noticed a faint stirring of shadows in the shrub nearby. While her companion stood transfixed with curiosity, Lucy sprinted away, not waiting to determine if the stirring was a harmless swaying of branches or a deadly predator. Lucy’s companion is in the process of being removed from the gene pool, but not Lucy. She would survive, thanks to her ability to make a mental link: sometimes shadows signify predators. Making links can be valuable. Even life-saving. Our brains have self-trained through millions of years of evolution to see patterns. Those who could spot patterns and make mental links enjoyed certain advantages over those who couldn’t. Those advantages include such things as staying alive and propagating their lineage with offspring who could also potentially spot patterns. Making sense of complex information enhances your ability to identify connections and to demonstrate these connections to others who haven’t spotted them. In the 21st century, more occupations rely on pattern recognition than ever before. Data analysts infer meaning from large datasets. Doctors rely on pattern recognition for medical diagnoses. Investment managers seek trends in the movement of market prices. Criminal investigators look to link crimes to perpetrators. Marketing professionals use patterns to identify consumer behavior and preferences. In each of these professions, the ability to spot patterns improves decision making and creates opportunities for success. When you open your eyes, you see all manner of visual stimuli. You see colors, textures, contrast, lines, shapes, and movement. The brain’s visual cortex kicks in. It processes this barrage of information, seeks to make sense of it and determine if it recognizes familiar objects or patterns. Your visual cortex is working right now as you read this sentence. It is connecting the words into sequential order to infer meaning and, hopefully, formulating comprehension of the ideas that I’m trying to transport from my mind to yours. Your visual cortex stays busy throughout the day. You employ it so liberally, in fact, that you even use it during certain stages of dreaming. During REM sleep the brain activates several regions of the brain, and the visual cortex is thought to contribute to the vivid, often surreal visual experiences of your dreamscape. Spotting patterns is comfortable. It is reassuring. It converts complex stimuli into tidy mental categories. It corrals the chaos. It borders the boundless. It familiarizes the foreign. Your brain is so accustomed to spotting patterns that you even see them in places where they don’t exist. You often see faces in randomness. Some people see the face of Jesus in their toast. Others see a face on the surface of the planet Mars. One woman recognized the face of the Virgin Mary charred into her grilled cheese sandwich, and allegedly auctioned the holy sandwich for a cool $28,000. Her prayers were answered. I guess the buyer saw that face too. This tendency to see images in random stimuli is called pareidolia. It occurs when the brain tries to make sense of information by interpreting it as something recognizable. When processing stimuli, if the brain successfully identifies a familiar object, image or idea, it may complete the perception by filling in missing information. This allows the brain to create a coherent interpretation of the stimuli. While this process can be useful, it often gives birth to flights of fancy such as urban legends and conspiracy theories. Consider the connections between the assassinations of presidents Abraham Lincoln and John F Kennedy. The following coincidences are commonly associated with the assassinations. This list of coincidences has led many to allege there’s a conspiratorial connection between the two assassinations. After all, they wonder, how else could anyone explain such a long list of coincidences? First, although the list is long, some of the “facts” are simply false. Lincoln’s secretary was not named Kennedy; Booth was apprehended in a barn, not a theater; Booth was born in 1838, not 1839. The fact that these falsehoods have remained among the facts reminds me of the expression, “A lie races twice around the world befor the truth has even laced up its shoes.” Falsehoods aside, there are nine accurate coincidences in the list above, which is still a long list. Second, you probably shouldn’t be surprised that lists of this length could be teased out of randomness. Think about it this way. Let’s say you gathered every possible detail about each of the presidents, including their lives, circumstances, dates, trivial quirks, what they ate for breakfast on the day they were shot, as well as those details of the people who were close to them. You might identify several thousand details for each president. With several thousand details to choose from, it shouldn’t be so surprising if you were able to identify nine common details. Spotting one or two commonalities for every 1,000 details isn’t particularly noteworthy. You may be skeptical. If so, consider this. If we sat 23 random people in a room, what do you think the odds are that two of them share a birthday? The answer is 50-50. If you’re interested to understand the math, check out The Birthday Paradox. The important lesson of the presidents is that our brains see a long list of common details (including some details that are accurate and some that are inaccurate) and then some people make a link where none is proven to exist: that the two assassinations were somehow connected. This is an example of the human brain doing its job to try to identify … Read more

Have you gone out to play today? People need playtime. Especially adults. Especially serious adults. Especially serious adults who think they have no time for playtime. Whimsy (noun) – playfully quaint or fanciful behavior or humor; a whim; a thing that is fanciful or odd. Some people are apprehensive about playtime because it is not clear what benefits it will bring. The act of playing is one of those things that seems to offer scarce tangible benefit aside from the enjoyment in the moment. It’s purpose is dubious. Our culture is suspicious of play time. That’s why we have expressions like, “Idle hands are the devil’s playthings,” “Time is money,” and “No pain, no gain.” When we want people to get down to work we say, “Playtime is over.” People who spend their days playing rather than working are criticized as slackers, dawdles, shirkers and procrastinators.  Many people feel guilty about spending time on seemingly unproductive activities. But playtime is important time. When we give ourselves permission to play freely, we create an environment that encourages curiosity, free association, and the exploration of new ideas. Free play lets us tickle our interests and uncover different possibilities. It relieves pressure from the logical and rational plumbing that we use so much each day. It opens up new systems of mental irrigation that give rise to new ideas. Children know this instinctively. When we see children engaged in idle playtime, we see them deeply immersed in the moment and uninhibited in their exploration. They crackle with curiosity. They leap into activities with swashbuckling swagger. They spout spontaneous insights, and spin elaborate narratives out of ordinary objects. They fluidly switch between different roles, improvise to changing circumstances, and flexibly incorporate new ideas.  It is a joy to witness! Playtime gives children a space where their imagination rules. It’s through spontaneous play that children can supercharge their creativity without restraint, convention or regard for social norms. It’s where they explore the world and make sense of it in their unique way. Playtime helps children to develop important emotional and cognitive skills. Considering all the benefits, we may wonder, Why do children stop playing? In his book Lateral Thinking – An Introduction author Edward de Bono explains, “It could be because the world changes from an unknown place in which wonderful things can happen into a familiar place in which there is an adequate explanation for everything. It could be this boredom of superficial familiarity that stops children playing. But if one is not content with glib explanations, then things can never be familiar enough to make play boring. It could be that play is actively discouraged by logical adults who point out its uselessness and define growing up as the responsibility to behave usefully. During play ideas suggest themselves and then breed further ideas. The ideas do not follow one another in a logical progression, but if the mind makes no attempt to direct the ideas and is curious enough to pursue them, there will always be enough ideas – often there will be too many.” We interrupt this blog post for for a game. A game? Why a game? Because this blog post is about the importance of play, that’s why. Here goes. Find a word that connects these three words: The answer is at the end of this post. Here are five benefits of free-play time. And a bonus benefit… To the extent that free play involves interaction with others, it allows us to build on other’s thoughts and enhance social skills, communication and collaboration. So have you gone out to play today? “All work and no play make Jack a dull boy.” The answer to the word game is, “mind” – nevermind / mindless / mastermind.

The “Invisible Gorilla Test” was an experiment that showed participants a short video showing players in white shirts and players in black shirts dribbling a basketball and passing among them. The test asked participants to count how many times the players in white shirts passed a basketball. While most viewers managed to count the number of passes correctly, the majority of them failed to notice that the video also included an actor in a gorilla suit who walked right through the middle of the frame. Researchers Simons and Chabris attribute this failure of perception to the difficulty spotting anomalies when engaged in a difficult task, such as counting passes. This phenomenon is known as Perceptual Blindness. From Wikipedia, Perceptual Blindness occurs “When it becomes impossible to attend to all the stimuli in a given situation, a temporary ‘blindness’ effect can occur, as individuals fail to see unexpected but often salient objects or stimuli.”Perceptual Blindness can often be a weakness, but at certain times and in certain situations it may also be a strength. Consider Temple Grandin, who is not only an individual with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) but is also an advocate for autism awareness, a researcher and, according to Time magazine, one of the 100 most influential people inthe world. Grandin made significant breakthroughs noticing details and patterns that were undetected by others. In her book Thinking in Pictures, she confesses that she is blind to many aspects of the world, such as social cues, that others see abundantly. But she also describes how she thinks in photographic-specific images that help her to recognize connections that others don’t. Individuals with autism often have unique ways of perceiving and processing sensory information. I have family members and friends with ASD, and I have witnessed their tendency to perceive their worlds in ways that are different from those who do not have ASD. They may be highly attuned to sensory stimuli such as colors, movement, noises, textures and smells. Additionally, they may hyper-focus on certain details while blocking out other stimuli. As the gorilla experiment showed, sometimes an abundance of stimuli can lead to a form of blindness. One study compared people with ASD to people that are considered to be “neurotypical” according to the ways each group viewed images. It found that people with ASD tend to focus less on so-called semantic features such as faces, emotions, and locations indicated by social gaze (in other words, what people in the photos were viewing). Instead, they focused more on the center of the images and areas that were more visually exciting in terms of color, intensity and orientation. If you look at a picture shown to both groups and overlay a heat map of where their concentration is focused (see below), the results are fascinating. In a picture of an elephant, for instance, neurotypical subjects focus on the faces of the elephants, while subjects with ASD focus on the middle of the image, which just happens to coincide with the edge of a tree. With another photo that includes office furniture, neurotypical viewers focus on the chair, the lamp, and the books that are in the picture. Meanwhile, subjects with ASD tend to focus on the middle of the picture, which happens to include a section of the chair.   Take a moment to think about the image-center bias. Imagine what it would be like to watch a movie that has all but the center of the screen obscured. If mundane objects or events appeared in the center of the screen, they would take on exaggerated importance in your movie experience. If important activities were happening off-center, they would be less important or you might miss them altogether. Compared to someone watching a full-screen version of the same movie, you might walk out of the theater with a completely different movie experience. Now imagine watching a movie where you pay more attention to objects or details in the scenes rather than the characters or the plot. This is not just an autistic trait. Any of us could choose to focus on certain details or elements of a movie to deliberately alter the experience. Just ask fans of Spielberg’s Ready Player One and the hundreds of hidden Easter eggs they have found. The world that each of us inhabits is comprised of the things that we allow to occupy our attention. These are the details that loom large. Things outside our focus shrink in importance. What a powerful concept! It suggests that you shape your experience of your world by deliberately choosing your areas of focus. Objects that grab your attention due to some visual, auditory, or tactile properties may capture your imagination and inspire you in the same way as the people around you capture your attention. Maybe even more so. There’s a hilarious scene in the movie Everything Everywhere All At Once where two rocks are on a cliff and they have an existential conversation about what it’s like to be a rock. The conversation is conveyed in sub-titles. It’s funny because it turns inanimate objects into thinking, perceiving individuals whose lives are absurdly long and uneventful. The subtext is, “Stop for a minute and imagine what your life would be like if you were a rock, for Pete’s sake!” Sometimes if you shift your focus with intentionality, you achieve vivid new perspectives and capture rich glimpses of uniqueness. Or maybe you’ll just spot the gorilla on the basketball court.

Sitting down and staring at the blank slate of a new project can be intimidating, and it can fill our minds with both excitement and dread. Where do we find the inspiration for our work? How do we identify the important elements to link together? Optimism and pessimism wrestle for control of our thoughts like an angel whispering in one ear and a devil whispering in the other. We have aspirations, but we also have self-doubt. We have ideas, plans, dreams, goals. And we have uncertainty, hesitancy, ambivalence and self-doubt. The Devil’s Kitchen Visited by an Angel – Conrad Meyer If you are a pessimist, you go through life believing the world is a disappointing place. Whenever you encounter a disappointing situation, it confirms your world view. You expect it, accept it, and throw your hands up saying, “There you go — that’s life.” Pessimism allows you to categorize bad things, capture them in a mental framework, put them in a box. It makes life’s hard knocks more tolerable, in some ways, because they’re expected. They are like the arrival of winter: bitter, yet known in advance and foreseen by the calendar. You are always aware that life involves winters. If you’re an optimist you go through life believing the world is a rewarding place. It is filled with opportunities and discoveries. When you encounter a disappointing situation, you view it as a challenge. It may be a learning experience or an opportunity for growth. It may make you stronger. It’s the storm cloud in the sky that makes the sunrise more dramatic. It reminds you that you have many blessings in your life if you open your eyes to them. You shake your head and say, “It’ll all work out in the end. We’ll get through this. We always do. We’ll be alright.” And when you do get through it, the recovery has confirmed your optimistic world view. Pessimism, from the word “pessimus” meaning “worst,” manifests as cynicism, skepticism, doubt, disillusionment. The pessimist’s cup is half empty. “The beatings will continue until morale improves.”  Optimism springs from “optimus” meaning “best” and manifests as hope, expectation, encouragement. The optimist’s cup is half full. “Look on the bright side.” If you are a pessimist, the world’s animating energy exists externally all around you, and you spend your days navigating the events that life throws your way. You see risk; your primary mode is to react.  If you’re an optimist, the animating energy exists within you, and you channel that energy into life’s events. You see opportunity; your primary mode is to act. Pessimists often connect with fatalists, who see life’s events as pre-determined details of fate or destiny. They resign themselves to the belief that outcomes are inevitable. “If you want to get up, get up; if you want to stay in bed, stay in bed; the choice you make is not really a choice at all,” they argue. “It’s a choreographed dance in a movie playing on a projector.” By contrast, optimists tend to like free will. They believe individuals have the freedom to choose our own directions, to manifest our own destinies, to pen our own histories. The conclusion of our movie is not yet known because it will be determined by the choices we make in each scene along the way. I happen to be a card-carrying member of the free-will club. The belief that I can affect certain outcomes is motivating. It is exciting. It is empowering. But it is also more personally challenging. After all, if we are free to make choices, and the choices we make have consequences, the consequences of our actions can be held to account. Our choices can be wise or foolish, virtuous or vicious, selfish or generous. The question lurks in the back of our minds, “What do I have to show for my life?” Free will hangs heavy with judgement. Choice carries responsibility! By contrast, if the actions of our lives have already been pre-determined by some grand plan, then there is no blame for what we do or don’t do, say or don’t say, feel or don’t feel. We may go unencumbered through life and just be, with less judgment. (“More taste! Less calories!”) And that is quite liberating. It removes the pressure of potentially making wrong decisions. There is no praise for accomplishments or condemnation for shortcomings. “If you want to get out of bed, get out of bed. Or don’t. It doesn’t matter anyway.” This philosophy has a certain morphine effect. If our actions don’t measure up to some standards, “Who cares? I don’t accept those standards. They’re not MY standards!” By the way, this is also a convenient world view for cynical culture.  There is also a practical reason to adopt the free-will mindset: resilience.  Consider this. When things go wrong for a fatalist, she tends to see it as inevitable and accept it. For instance, think about the disintegration of a marriage. The fatalist’s tendency is to see the growing gap between her and her spouse as inevitable. Whereas when the same things go wrong for a free-willy (or whatever we’re calling people who embrace free will), she faces the choice to either accept them as they are, or commit herself to finding a way to address them. In the end they may both end up in walking away from their relationships. But for the person who believes her choices steer the outcome, she may be more willing to find an alternate outcome.    This will to overcome resistance is fundamental to the creative process.  Projects don’t just create themselves. The creative process is littered with trial and error, failed experiments, blind alleys, delirious whiteboards, waste-paper baskets overflowing with discarded drafts. Creating involves trying, assessing, and trying some more, over and over and over and over. Rinse, wash, repeat.  Sometimes we pour our heart into developing a project only to later realize, “This just isn’t working.”  What we do next is key to the … Read more

“How can individuals identify links among seemingly unrelated influences to make innovative new discoveries?” I asked that question to OpenAI/ChatGPT and, in about 30 seconds, I received this persuasive response… Identifying links among seemingly unrelated influences to make innovative new discoveries requires a combination of creativity, curiosity, and critical thinking. Here are a few steps that individuals can take to identify these links: 1. Stay curious: Stay curious about the world around you, and seek out new experiences and ideas. Read widely, talk to people from different backgrounds, and explore different fields of study. This can help you develop a broad base of knowledge and expose you to different ways of thinking. 2. Look for patterns: Look for patterns and connections among seemingly unrelated ideas. This can involve looking for similarities in different fields of study or looking for patterns in the way different people approach problems. 3. Use analogy: Use analogy to identify connections between seemingly unrelated things. Analogies can be a powerful tool for generating new ideas and insights by drawing parallels between different things. 4. Experiment: Experiment with different ideas and approaches. Try combining different ideas in new and innovative ways to see what happens. 5. Collaborate: Collaborate with others who have different backgrounds and perspectives. This can help you see problems and opportunities from different angles and generate new ideas and insights. By following these steps, individuals can develop their ability to identify links among seemingly unrelated influences and make innovative new discoveries. Source: OpenAI, ChatGPT-generated content. Accessed May 3, 2023. We’ll be exploring these suggestions in future posts.

Imagine you open up a comic book and the first page shows a close up of a man’s smirking face. You have no context. Who is this man? Why is he smirking? “He seems pretty smug,” you may think. You turn the page to get more information about why he is smirking. The next page, however, shows that the man had been decapitated. His head is actually floating in a jar. Surprise! Although comic-book artists are forced to work within the limitations of their medium (all they have are pictures and words displayed with other pictures and words), comics also give us insight into how we can transform limitations into inspiration for new ideas. Growing up I loved the comics of Will Eisner such as “The Spirit.” As Eisner observes in his Comics & Sequential Art, “From the outset the conception and writing of a story is affected by the limitations of the medium. These virtually dictate the scope of a story and the depth of its telling.” Good comics exploit the limitations of the medium. By delivering one picture at a time, they provide you with little clues to the story, as if you are witnessing the events like the reader of Tarot cards. The comic book artist decides what to show, and when to show it, and counts on you to fill in your own understanding of everything that is not shown. The artist can sequentially reveal frames to either reinforce your expectations or, like the head in the jar, to introduce an element of surprise and dash your expectations. Although comics use text and language, they are primarily a visual medium. The artist knows that ideas must be communicated visually. This is both a limitation and a motivator. The artist faces some fundamental questions. What type of story can I render in comic-book form? What type of story is off limits? How can I tell this story visually? What imagery can I use to tell the story? What perspective should I use? Whose viewpoint? What style of art? Which visuals are essential to include? Which ones can be omitted? “Of the many elements of a story, the most amenable to imagery are scenery and action. It is also reasonable to expect this medium to deal with abstractions that can be conveyed by human action and scenery,” Eisner explains. “It is for this reason that stories and plots of simple, obvious action have long dominated comic book literature.” The comic-book artist understands that simple, obvious action are the medium’s building blocks. The artist works with them in the same way the musician works with rhythm and melody. They are fundamental, familiar. They are the language of comics. Once the artist realizes this, the question becomes, What powerful stories can I create from simple, obvious actions? So, building the story on simple actions and telling the story one picture at a time, these limitations actually create some very fertile conditions for creating new ideas.

Where do you discover new ideas? How do you find inspiration? What gives you new perspectives? What is the flash that takes you from something routine and conventional to something rare and extraordinary? How do you learn to create? How do you place ourselves in situations where creativity flows through you? How do you create creativity? As paradoxical as it sounds, one of the best processes for creating involves denying. You develop creativity when you overcome obstacles. Necessity is the mother of invention. When conventional avenues are inaccessible, you find unconventional avenues. Have you ever heard a skilled musician perform with nothing but a woodsaw and a bow? Or with water-filled glasses? Have you ever seen a Japanese sumi-e painting where just a few ink lines capture the motion of waves or a galloping horse? (I said “capture” in the present tense, not “captured” in the past tense, because that motion remains captured in time, in the present tense, for every new viewer who happens to see it). Have you ever witnessed the creativity of a mime or a clown who managed to tell a rich story using nothing but their gestures? The mime Marcel Marceau said, “You know that in mime, we recreate objects which are not there. We make the invisible visible, and the visible invisible. And the stage becomes, suddenly, what we want the stage to be.” I had the chance to re-watch Charlie Chaplin’s film The Gold Rush recently, nearly 100 years after its creation, and it was every bit the masterpiece that I remembered it to be. Chaplin’s humor begins with a simple idea — such as, there’s nothing to eat — and then builds from there. What do you eat when there’s nothing to eat? You eat a shoe. Chaplin pulls the shoe out of a steaming pot and places it on a plate. He ladles hot water over it like broth over a chicken. He portions the shoe for himself and his cabin mate, and sets to the task of eating it, twirling the shoelace on a fork like pasta, chewing the tender bits from the shoe nails, offering up one of the nails like a wishbone. Chaplin manages to milk several minutes of classic comedy from a simple idea: eating a shoe. Just because the storyteller works without words, that doesn’t mean the the story suffers. In fact, telling the story without words forces the storyteller to create a new voice. Words are conventional. You use them all the time, every day. But you may also take words for granted, and this can lead to lazy storytelling. The first rule of cinema is, “Show, don’t tell.” Showing how characters grow and change is so much more powerful than hearing the characters talk about growing and changing. The messages of Marceau and Chaplin were shaped by their wordless delivery, and this propelled their messages across diverse regions and cultures and eras. The next time you want to create something new, but you are not sure where to begin, a good first step is to take something away. You may find, denial is the spark of creation.