It's a Jungle in There: How Competition and Cooperation in the Brain Shape the Mind (31 page)

Many people who were told the story did
not
make the connection. On the other hand, when people were explicitly told that the tale about the invading armies bore on the problem, more of them could see that the tumor could be killed by shooting weak beams at the tumor from many angles. This finding about the explication of analogies shows that sometimes you’ve got to “hit people over the head” to help them use their heads more wisely. Why some people need this more explicit advice and others don’t is, as far as I know, not well understood.

What really matters in problem-solving is the ability to solve problems that truly matter, that can change the course of history, hopefully for the better. True creativity is a great asset. It’s one of the things that define genius. This doesn’t mean that creativity can be shown only in lofty spheres where geniuses strut their stuff. It can also arise in the context of the little party-game problems that are often studied in cognitive psychology labs, always with an eye toward shedding light on the ability to solve more important problems.

Consider, for example, the 9-dot problem again. I once read about a solution to this problem that was so clever it made me swoon. Whoever came up with the solution realized that the 9-dot problem could be completed with just
one
line! His or her solution didn’t rely on the implicit premise that the 9-dot surface is flat. “Suppose, instead,” this person must have said to him-or herself, “that the surface is curved, like the Earth’s surface. On the Earth’s crust, straight lines are actually curved, which is why, if you keep going in a straight line on Earth, you end up where you started.” Based on this insight, it became possible to solve the 9-dot problem with one straight line, or a line that would appear straight from the perspective of an earthling. A spiral going around Earth, passing through all the dots of the 9-dot problem, satisfies the problem and then some (
Figure 14
). Whoever came up with this solution was a particularly inventive person. I have no idea who it was. If he or she is reading this book, “Hats off to you!”

FIGURE 14.
Connecting nine dots with a single line.

Perhaps the ultimate form of creativity is seeing a solution to a problem that wasn’t even recognized as a problem before. A wonderful example concerns a man wandering through a field in Switzerland with his dog. While walking past some thistles, the canine brushed against some burs, which then clung to the dog’s fur. Had this happened to you or me—had a thistle clung to your sweater or mine—you or I might have been annoyed to the point of proclaiming, “Damn thistles!” or words less fit for print. The man in the story had a different reaction. He realized that having objects stick to fabric could be useful. Based on this insight, he invented one of the most common and useful items known: Velcro.
¹⁹

It’s inspiring to learn the story of the invention of Velcro. You may even say to yourself, “I’ll be on the lookout for things that may solve problems.” But feeling inspired and saying that inspiration is the source of problem-solving isn’t all that useful from a scientific perspective. Deciding to be more creative is about as useful, scientifically speaking, as saying that problems are solved through insight. Saying you’ll be open-minded may get your creative juices flowing (whatever they are), but the statement doesn’t have much explanatory
power. As Thomas Edison so famously declared, “Invention is 10% inspiration and 90% perspiration.”

Hard work is indeed important for invention because it keeps you involved with a problem for a sustained period of time. The longer you work on a problem, the greater the chance you’ll hit on a solution. An egg kept warm for a long time is more likely to hatch than an egg warmed briefly. Merely declaring that you’d like to lay an egg is fine for starters, but it hardly cracks the surface of what’s needed to go from a bird in the bush to a bird in the hand.
²⁰

If invention takes time, you should be able to find evidence for it brewing. As a practical matter, though, it’s unlikely that you can actually catch an invention when it first comes to mind because inventions come along rarely.

Not to be deterred, two researchers, working at the National Institutes of Health at the time, managed to devise a way of seeing invention in progress. The researchers—Charles Limb and Allen Braun—scanned the brains of jazz musicians as the musicians improvised at the keyboard.
²¹
The scientists reasoned that during jazz improvisation, invention goes on continually. Consequently, they hypothesized that the brain activity of jazz improvisers might provide a glimpse into the neural basis of invention generally.

Limb and Braun studied their jazz-pianist participants in two conditions. In the experimental condition, the pianists improvised at the keyboard. In the control condition, the pianists played a piece they had memorized. The memorized piece was composed by the researchers to mimic in critical ways the keyboard sequences the experimenters expected the jazz musicians to play while improvising. The number of notes, the fingers used, the transitions between the notes, and so on were expected to approximate those in the “improv.” This expectation was borne out, so Limb and Braun went on to compare the brain activity of the pianists in the play-from-memory condition and in the “improv” condition.

Consistent with the researchers’ expectations, they found that different areas of the brain were active when the pianists recalled or improvised. One area of the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex, which is associated with self-expression, became more active in the improvisation condition than in the play-from-memory condition. The other area of the brain, the lateral prefrontal cortex, which is associated with conscious self-monitoring and inhibition of one’s own behavior, became
less
active in the improvisation condition than in the play-from-memory condition.

Limb and Braun’s results are consistent with the inner-jungle perspective in that some neural creatures turned out to be better suited for some tasks than others. Nonetheless, that finding is far from the full set of results needed to trace all the steps needed to go from the origin of a musical idea to its full musical expression. More work is needed on this difficult problem, including checking whether the results of the Limb and Braun study really got at invention
per se
. It could be that these scientists picked up brain differences related to the
attitudes
needed for musical invention versus musical recall but not for the spawning of new note sequences versus the recall of old ones.

Whether there is or could be a site for the spawning of new musical sequences is an open question. According to the perspective offered in this book, there needn’t be (and probably isn’t) a specific site where new ideas are formed. Rather, the formation of new ideas (and the destruction of old, not-very-useful ideas) is likely to occur everywhere in the neural jungle and, for that matter, all the time.

Just as it is hard to tell where ideas come from in the neural population of a brain, it is hard to tell where an idea comes from in the population of people on the planet. In this context, a fair question is this one: How original am I, the author of this book, in advocating a Darwinian view of creativity? My unabashed answer is not very. Other authors have seen this connection before. One who did so a little more than half a century ago was the American social scientist, and once president of the American Psychological Association, Donald Campbell. He argued that creative thought relies on Darwin’s mechanisms of random variation and selective retention.
²²
Other authors have made similar arguments.
²³

Some who have pursued this approach have used sophisticated computational methods to test and refine their claims. One such method relies on
genetic algorithms
. The idea is to recombine rule elements to produce new “offspring” and to continue to do so the more adaptive the offspring turn out to be.
²⁴
This approach has been used in a wide range of applications, including the development of new commercial products by computers.
²⁵
Researchers who have worked on these systems have explicitly likened them to evolutionary processes. I’ve said only a few words about this approach here because the approach gets computationally intensive very quickly, and this book is not a technical treatise.

Another author who has likened creativity to Darwinian selection is Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis.
²⁶
Simonton wrote a book,
Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity
. My mention of Simonton’s book is meant to show that I feel, as concerns creativity, that I have merely continued the tradition established by Simonton and others. Where I have tried to go a bit further is to focus on a broader range of cognitive phenomena, many from the lab.

Building on Simonton’s insights, however, I would venture to say that all cognitive phenomena can be profitably analyzed in Darwinian terms, not just those associated with problem-solving, whether done at the genius or ordinary-person level.

Speaking of geniuses, there is, at the end, someone who fully anticipated the point about problem-solving offered here. That genius was none other than Charles Darwin. His writings, it turns out, hint at his appreciation that his own theory might apply to thinking itself, including his own.
²⁷

It would be stunning if Darwin had not seen this connection, for in hindsight it is obvious. Once Darwin cleared the path for this simple way of understanding thinking, it takes considerably less genius, I believe, to see that just as species or series of species manage to solve the problems they face through trial and error in environments where they compete and cooperate, so inner (mental) species or series of species do the same.

As I wrote in the Preface, the first time I used the phrase “It’s a jungle in there,” I was teaching Introduction to Cognitive Psychology at Penn State University. It occurred to me one day in the midst of a lecture that the phrase “It’s a jungle in there” might convey the essence of what I was trying to say about a particular cognitive phenomenon. When I mentioned the phrase, not sure how it would go over, I was surprised to see how well it was received. It aroused more interest than I usually got, so I felt encouraged to repeat it. Soon the saying took on a life of its own. As the course went on, before I got to the explanation of an experimental result, some students would call out, “It’s a jungle in there, right?”

I told this story about the birth of this book’s title in the Preface and repeat it here in case you didn’t read the Preface or don’t remember it. My added reason for mentioning the origin of the phrase is to set the context for another phrase I often use in my teaching. It’s a phrase that establishes the tone for this final chapter. Besides saying “It’s a jungle in there,” I often say, with my arms outstretched and with a beseeching expression on my face, “I stand before you intellectually naked.”

When I refer to my intellectual nakedness, I don’t mean to arouse images of nudity. Being a professor with a classic “professor body,” one formed by hours of sitting and writing rather than by hours of running and lifting weights, I don’t have a physique most people pine for. So when I say, “I stand before you intellectually naked,” I mean to express humility, not hubris.

My humility applies to the explanation given for the cognitive phenomenon I happen to be describing in the lecture I am giving. At such times, whatever research problem I’ve just broached begs for a solution. I explain that I have no true solution to the problem, and neither does anyone else.

Here’s an example. When I introduce language production, I invite my students to stop and think about how remarkable it is that they can form thoughts and express those thoughts with words produced through the movements of their tongues and lips. “How on earth do you do this?” I ask them. I confess that no one has any idea how thoughts originate. No one
really knows what thoughts are, at least at the neural level. At such times, I offer my confession, standing before the students palms up, admitting my intellectual vulnerability. I then go on to say, “Maybe, one of you will solve this deep problem.”
¹

It is with this same frame of mind that I must tell you now, as I begin the last chapter of this book, that I stand (or sit) before you intellectually naked, humbled by all that remains to be done with the idea offered here. What I have suggested—the so-called jungle principle—is more a sketch than a complete theory. Were I to proclaim that the jungle principle fully explains all that needs to be explained, I would be stretching things too far. “The emperor wears no clothes,” you might rightly proclaim.
²

I wish I could say in detail how the jungle principle makes us who we are, how it explains our creativity, our joviality, our agility. In truth, I can’t provide such a detailed account. Nor can I map out in detail how the jungle principle yields hostility, avarice, or jealousy—emotions that are less fun to think about but define us just as much. Neither can I say precisely how mental illness arises from the competitive and cooperative processes in the brain. Why schizophrenia, paranoia, or autism beset some people are topics I can’t really answer. The jungle principle allows for these syndromes, but how it does so, or why it does to different degrees in different people, is something I can’t answer.