Imagine: How Creativity Works (7 page)

Dick Drew was a master at conceptual blending. After he invented masking tape, a colleague told him about a strange new material called cellophane. (By this time, Drew had become a full-time researcher.) The material was translucent and shiny but also strikingly impermeable to water and grease; it was being sold by DuPont as a packaging solution, a cheap way of wrapping products for shipping. Drew took one look at the material and had another idea, which he would later describe as the insight of his life: cellophane would make a perfect adhesive. He ordered a hundred yards of cellophane and began coating the material with glue.

Drew called it Scotch tape. By 1933, less than two years after the see-through adhesive hit the market, the product had become the most popular consumer tape in the world. Although masking tape and cellophane were completely unrelated — it had never occurred to DuPont researchers to make their wrapping material sticky — Drew saw their possible point of intersection.

This process has been repeated again and again at 3M. For instance, the adhesive used in industrial-strength masking tape gave rise to the sound-dampening panels used in Boeing aircraft. (The material is so sticky that it even binds sound waves.) Those panels in turn gave rise to the extremely strong adhesive foam used in golf clubs, which can hold together carbon fiber and tita-nium during high impact. And the concept of Scotch tape eventually inspired another 3M engineer to invent the touch-screen technology used in smartphones. (Instead of coating cellophane, the clear glue is used to coat an electrically charged glass surface, which is then attached to a display.) After a 3M engineer noticed that Scotch tape could act like a prism, a team of scientists used their tape expertise to develop transparent films that refract light. Such films are now being widely used in laptops and LCD televisions; because they direct the brightness of each bulb outward, fewer bulbs are required on the inside, thus reducing the energy consumption of the devices by as much as 40 percent. “The lesson is that the tape business isn’t just about tape,” Wendling says. “You might think an idea is finished, that there’s nothing else to do with it, but then you talk to somebody else in some other field. And your little idea inspires them, so they come up with a brand-new invention that inspires someone else. That, in a nutshell, is our model.”

In fact, 3M takes conceptual blending so seriously that it regularly rotates its engineers, moving them from division to division. A scientist studying adhesives might be transferred to the optical-films department; a researcher working on asthma inhalers might end up tinkering with air conditioners. Sometimes, these rotations are used as a sudden spur for innovation. If a product line is suffering from a shortage of new ideas, 3M will often bring in an entirely new team of engineers, sourced from all over the company. “Our goal is to have people switch problems every four to six years,” Wendling says. “We want to ensure that our good ideas are always circulating.”

The benefit of such circulation is that it increases conceptual blending, allowing people to look at their most frustrating problems from a fresh perspective. Instead of trying to invent a new tack, imagine a roll of sticky paper; instead of trying to improve the battery performance of a laptop, think about the refractory properties of its light bulbs. To get a better sense of how this mental process unfolds, consider this insight puzzle, which is notoriously difficult:

You are a doctor faced with a patient who has a malignant tumor in his stomach. It is impossible to operate on the patient, but unless the tumor is destroyed, the patient will die. There is a kind of ray machine that can be used to shoot at and destroy the tumor. If the rays reach the tumor all at once at a suf
fi
ciently high intensity, the tumor will be destroyed. Unfortunately, at this intensity, the healthy tissue that the rays pass through on the way to the tumor will also be destroyed. At lower intensities the rays are harmless to healthy tissue, but they will not affect the tumor either. What type of procedure might be used to destroy the tumor with the rays, and at the same time avoid destroying the healthy tissue?

If you can’t figure out the answer, don’t worry; more than 97 percent of people conclude that the problem is impossible — the patient is doomed. However, there’s a very simple way to dramatically boost the success rate of solving this insight puzzle. It involves telling the subjects a story that seems entirely unrelated: 

A fortress was located in the center of the country. Many roads radiated out from the fortress. A general wanted to capture the fortress with his army. But he also wanted to prevent mines on the roads from destroying his army and neighboring villages. As a result, the entire army could not all go down one road to attack the fortress. However, the entire army was needed to capture the fortress; an attack by one small group could not succeed. The general therefore divided his army into several small groups. He positioned the small groups at equal distances from the fortress along different roads. The small groups simultaneously converged on the fortress. In this way the army captured the fortress.

When the tumor puzzle was preceded by this military tale, nearly 70 percent of subjects came up with the solution. Because the subjects were able to see what the different stories had in common, they generated a moment of insight; the answer emerged from the analogy. (If you are still wondering, the solution to the doctor’s problem is to mount ten separate ray guns around the patient and set each of them to deliver 10 percent of the necessary radiation. When the ray machines are all focused on the stomach, there is enough radiation to destroy the tumor while preserving the surrounding tissue.)

How can we get better at conceptual blending? According to Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak, the psychologists behind the tumor puzzle, the key element is a willingness to consider information and ideas that don’t seem worth considering. Instead of concentrating on the details of the problem — most people quickly fixate on tumors and rays — we should free our minds to search for distantly related analogies that can then be mapped onto the puzzles we’re trying to solve. Sometimes, the best way to decipher a medical mystery is to think about military history.

The importance of considering the irrelevant helps explain a recent study led by neuroscientists at Harvard and the University of Toronto. The researchers began by giving a sensory test to eighty-six Harvard undergraduates. The test was designed to measure their ability to ignore outside stimuli, such as the air conditioner humming in the background or the conversation taking place in a nearby cubicle. This skill is typically seen as an essential component of productivity, since it keeps people from getting distracted by extraneous information. Their attention is less likely to break down.

Here’s where the data get interesting: those undergrads who had a tougher time ignoring unrelated stuff were also seven times more likely to be rated as “eminent creative achievers” based on their previous accomplishments. (The association was particularly strong among distractible students with high IQs.) According to the scientists, the inability to focus helps ensure a richer mixture of thoughts in consciousness. Because these people had difficulty filtering out the world, they ended up letting more in. Instead of approaching the problem from a predictable perspective, they considered all sorts of far-fetched analogies, some of which proved useful. 
(Another useful trick for inciting insights involves a quirk of language. According to an experiment led by Catherine Clement at Eastern Kentucky University, one way to consistently increase problem-solving ability is to change the verbs used to describe the problem. When the verbs are extremely speci
fi
c, creativity is constrained, and people struggle to 
fi
nd useful comparisons. However, when the same problem is recast with more generic verbs, people are suddenly more likely to uncover unexpected parallels. In some instances, Clement found, the simple act of rewriting the problem led to stun-ning improvements in the performance of her subjects. Insight puzzles that had seemed impossible — not a single person was able to solve them — were now solved more than 60 percent of the time.)

 “Creative individuals seem to remain in contact with the extra information constantly streaming in from the environment,” says Jordan Peterson, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto and lead author on the paper. “The normal person classifies an object, and then forgets about it. The creative person, by contrast, is always open to new possibilities.”

3.

Marcus Raichle, a neurologist and radiologist at Washington University, got interested in daydreaming by accident. It was the early 1990s, and Raichle was studying the rudiments of visual perception. His experiments were straightforward: A subject performed a particular task, such as counting a collection of dots, in a brain scanner. Then he or she did nothing for thirty seconds. (“It was pretty boring for the subjects,” Raichle admits. “You always had to make sure people weren’t dozing off.”) Although the scanner was still collecting data in between the actual experiments, Raichle assumed that this information was worthless noise. “We told the subjects to not think about anything,” he says. “We wanted them to have a blank mind. I assumed that this would lead to a real drop in brain activity. But I was wrong.”

One day, Raichle decided to analyze the fMRI data collected when the subjects were just lying in the scanner waiting for the next task. (He needed a baseline of activity.) To his surprise, Raichle discovered that the brains of subjects were not quiet or subdued. Instead, they were overflowing with thoughts, their cortices lit up like skyscrapers at night. “When you don’t use a muscle, that muscle isn’t doing much,” Raichle says. “But when your brain is supposedly doing nothing, it’s really doing a tremendous amount.”

Raichle was fascinated by the surge in brain activity between tasks. At first, he couldn’t figure out what was happening. But while sitting in his lab one afternoon, he came up with the answer: The subjects were daydreaming! (“I was probably daydreaming when the idea came to me,” Raichle says.) Because they were bored silly in the claustrophobic scanner, they were forced to entertain themselves. This insight immediately led Raichle to ask the next obvious question: Why did daydreaming consume so much energy? “The brain is a very efficient machine,” he says. “I knew that there must be a good reason for all this neural activity. I just didn’t know what the reason was.”

After several years of patient empiricism, Raichle began outlining a mental system that he called the default network, since it appears to be the default mode of thought. (We’re an absent-minded species, constantly disappearing down mental rabbit holes.) This network is most engaged when a person is performing a task that requires little conscious attention, such as routine driving on the highway or reading a tedious book. People had previously assumed that daydreaming was a lazy mental process, but Raichle’s fMRI studies demonstrated that the brain is extremely busy during the default state. There seems to be a particularly elaborate electrical conversation between the front and back parts of the brain, with the prefrontal folds (located just behind the eyes) firing in sync with the posterior cingulate, medial temporal lobe, and precuneus. These cortical areas don’t normally interact directly; they have different functions and are part of distinct neural pathways. It’s not until we start to daydream that they begin to work closely together.

All this mental activity comes with a very particular purpose. Instead of responding to the outside world, the brain starts to explore its inner database, searching for relationships in a more relaxed fashion. (This mental process often runs parallel with increased activity in the right hemisphere.) Virginia Woolf, in her novel To the Lighthouse, eloquently describes this form of thinking as it unfolds inside the mind of a character named Lily:

Certainly she was losing consciousness of the outer things. And as she lost consciousness of outer things . . . her mind kept throwing things up from its depths, scenes, and names, and sayings, and memories and ideas, like a fountain spurting . . .

A daydream is that “fountain spurting” as the brain blends together concepts that are normally filed away in different areas. The result is an ability to notice new connections, to see the overlaps that we normally overlook. Take, for instance, the story of Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M in the paper-products division. It begins on a frigid Sunday morning in 1974 in the front pews of a Presbyterian church in north St. Paul, Minnesota. A few weeks earlier, Fry had attended a Tech Forum presentation by Spencer Silver, an engineer working on — you guessed it — adhesives. Silver had developed an extremely weak glue, a paste so feeble it could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Like everyone else in the room, Fry had patiently listened to the presentation and then failed to come up with any practical applications for the compound. “It seemed like a dead-end idea,” Fry says. “I quickly put it out of my thoughts.” What good, after all, is a glue that doesn’t stick?

That Sunday, however, the paste reentered Fry’s thoughts, al-beit in a rather unlikely context. “I sang in the church choir,” Fry remembers, “and I would often put little pieces of paper into the music on Wednesday night to mark where we were singing. Sometimes, before Sunday morning, those little papers would fall out.” This annoyed Fry, because it meant that he would often spend the service frantically thumbing through his hymnal, looking for the right page. But then, during a particularly boring sermon, Fry engaged in a little daydreaming. He began thinking about bookmarks, and how what he needed was a bookmark that would stick to the paper but wouldn’t tear it when it was removed. And that’s when Fry remembered Spencer Silver and his ineffective glue. He immediately realized that Silver’s patented formula — this barely sticky adhesive — could help create the perfect bookmark.

So Fry started working, in his bootlegging time, on this new product for his hymnal. After several months of chemical tinkering — the first bookmarks destroyed his books, leaving behind a gluey residue — Fry developed a working prototype, which became the basis for a small test run. “I gave some of them to my cohorts in the lab, to secretaries, to the librarians,” he says. “Basically anybody who would take them.” Although people found the product useful — it was better than folding down page corners — nobody wanted a refill. Instead of disposing of the bookmarks, Fry’s coworkers just transferred them from book to book.