Why we don't believe in science

Jonah Lehrer.

Last week, Gallup announced the results of their latest survey on Americans and evolution. The numbers were a stark blow to high-school science teachers everywhere: forty-six per cent of adults said they believed that “God created humans in their present form within the last 10,000 years.” Only fifteen per cent agreed with the statement that humans had evolved without the guidance of a divine power.

What’s most remarkable about these numbers is their stability: these percentages have remained virtually unchanged since Gallup began asking the question, thirty years ago. In 1982, forty-four per cent of Americans held strictly creationist views, a statistically insignificant difference from 2012. Furthermore, the percentage of Americans that believe in biological evolution has only increased by four percentage points over the last twenty years.

Such poll data raises questions: Why are some scientific ideas hard to believe in? What makes the human mind so resistant to certain kinds of facts, even when these facts are buttressed by vast amounts of evidence?

A new study in Cognition, led by Andrew Shtulman at Occidental College, helps explain the stubbornness of our ignorance. As Shtulman notes, people are not blank slates, eager to assimilate the latest experiments into their world view. Rather, we come equipped with all sorts of naïve intuitions about the world, many of which are untrue. For instance, people naturally believe that heat is a kind of substance, and that the sun revolves around the earth. And then there’s the irony of evolution: our views about our own development don’t seem to be evolving.

This means that science education is not simply a matter of learning new theories. Rather, it also requires that students unlearn their instincts, shedding false beliefs the way a snake sheds its old skin.

To document the tension between new scientific concepts and our pre-scientific hunches, Shtulman invented a simple test. He asked a hundred and fifty college undergraduates who had taken multiple college-level science and math classes to read several hundred scientific statements. The students were asked to assess the truth of these statements as quickly as possible.

To make things interesting, Shtulman gave the students statements that were both intuitively and factually true (“The moon revolves around the Earth”) and statements whose scientific truth contradicts our intuitions (“The Earth revolves around the sun”).

As expected, it took students much longer to assess the veracity of true scientific statements that cut against our instincts. In every scientific category, from evolution to astronomy to thermodynamics, students paused before agreeing that the earth revolves around the sun, or that pressure produces heat, or that air is composed of matter. Although we know these things are true, we have to push back against our instincts, which leads to a measurable delay.

What’s surprising about these results is that even after we internalize a scientific concept—the vast majority of adults now acknowledge the Copernican truth that the earth is not the center of the universe—that primal belief lingers in the mind. We never fully unlearn our mistaken intuitions about the world. We just learn to ignore them.

Shtulman and colleagues summarize their findings:

When students learn scientific theories that conflict with earlier, naïve theories, what happens to the earlier theories? Our findings suggest that naïve theories are suppressed by scientific theories but not supplanted by them.

While this new paper provides a compelling explanation for why Americans are so resistant to particular scientific concepts—the theory of evolution, for instance, contradicts both our naïve intuitions and our religious beliefs—it also builds upon previous research documenting the learning process inside the head. Until we understand why some people believe in science we will never understand why most people don’t.

In a 2003 study, Kevin Dunbar, a psychologist at the University of Maryland, showed undergraduates a few short videos of two different-sized balls falling. The first clip showed the two balls falling at the same rate. The second clip showed the larger ball falling at a faster rate. The footage was a reconstruction of the famous (and probably apocryphal) experiment performed by Galileo, in which he dropped cannonballs of different sizes from the Tower of Pisa. Galileo’s metal balls all landed at the exact same time—a refutation of Aristotle, who claimed that heavier objects fell faster.

While the students were watching the footage, Dunbar asked them to select the more accurate representation of gravity. Not surprisingly, undergraduates without a physics background disagreed with Galileo. They found the two balls falling at the same rate to be deeply unrealistic. (Intuitively, we’re all Aristotelians.) Furthermore, when Dunbar monitored the subjects in an fMRI machine, he found that showing non-physics majors the correct video triggered a particular pattern of brain activation: there was a squirt of blood to the anterior cingulate cortex, a collar of tissue located in the center of the brain. The A.C.C. is typically associated with the perception of errors and contradictions—neuroscientists often refer to it as part of the “Oh shit!” circuit—so it makes sense that it would be turned on when we watch a video of something that seems wrong, even if it’s right.

This data isn’t shocking; we already know that most undergrads lack a basic understanding of science. But Dunbar also conducted the experiment with physics majors. As expected, their education enabled them to identify the error; they knew Galileo’s version was correct.

But it turned out that something interesting was happening inside their brains that allowed them to hold this belief. When they saw the scientifically correct video, blood flow increased to a part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, or D.L.P.F.C. The D.L.P.F.C. is located just behind the forehead and is one of the last brain areas to develop in young adults. It plays a crucial role in suppressing so-called unwanted representations, getting rid of those thoughts that aren’t helpful or useful. If you don’t want to think about the ice cream in the freezer, or need to focus on some tedious task, your D.L.P.F.C. is probably hard at work.

According to Dunbar, the reason the physics majors had to recruit the D.L.P.F.C. is because they were busy suppressing their intuitions, resisting the allure of Aristotle’s error. It would be so much more convenient if the laws of physics lined up with our naïve beliefs—or if evolution was wrong and living things didn’t evolve through random mutation. But reality is not a mirror; science is full of awkward facts. And this is why believing in the right version of things takes work.

Of course, that extra mental labor isn’t always pleasant. (There’s a reason they call it “cognitive dissonance.”) It took a few hundred years for the Copernican revolution to go mainstream. At the present rate, the Darwinian revolution, at least in America, will take just as long.

Illustration courtesy of Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

The Self Illusion: An Interview With Bruce Hood

Jonah Lehrer.


In 1920, after writing two novels with a conventional Victorian narrator (the kind that, like an omniscient God, views everything from above), Virginia Woolf announced in her diary: “I have finally arrived at some idea of a new form for a new novel.” Her new form would follow the flow of our consciousness, tracing the “flight of the mind” as it unfolds in time. “Only thoughts and feelings,” Woolf wrote to Katherine Mansfield, “no cups and tables.”

The mind, however, is not an easy thing to express. When Woolf looked inside herself, what she found was a consciousness that never stood still. Her thoughts flowed in a turbulent current, and every moment ushered in a new wave of sensation. Unlike the “old-fashioned novelists,” who treated our being like a static thing, Woolf’s mind was neither solid nor certain. Instead, it “was very erratic, very undependable—now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now in a daffodil in the sun.” At any given moment, she seemed to be scattered in a million little pieces. Her brain was barely bound together.

And yet, it was bound together. Her mind was made of fragments, but it never came undone. She knew that something kept us from disintegrating, at least most of the time. “I press to my centre,” Woolf wrote in her diary, “and there is something there.”

Woolf’s art was a search for whatever held us together. What she found was the self, “the essential thing.” Although the brain is just a loom of electric neurons and contradictory impulses, Woolf realized that the self makes us whole. It is the fragile source of our identity, the author of our consciousness. If the self didn’t exist, then we wouldn’t exist.

But one must never forget just how flimsy the self is. In her modernist novels, Woolf wanted to simultaneously affirm our existence and expose our ineffability, to show us that we are “like a butterfly’s wing…clamped together with bolts of iron.”

Bruce Hood, a psychologist at the University of Bristol, picks up where Woolf and the modernists left off. In his excellent new book, The Self Illusion, he seeks to understand how the singularity of the self emerges from the cacophony of mind and the mess of social life. Dr. Hood was kind enough to answer a few of my questions below:

LEHRER: The title of The Self Illusion is literal. You argue that the self – this entity at the center of our personal universe – is actually just a story, a “constructed narrative.” Could you explain what you mean?

HOOD: The best stories make sense. They follow a logical path where one thing leads to another and provide the most relevant details and signposts along the way so that you get a sense of continuity and cohesion. This is what writers refer to as the narrative arc – a beginning, middle and an end. If a sequence of events does not follow a narrative, then it is incoherent and fragmented so does not have meaning. Our brains think in stories. The same is true for the self and I use a distinction that William James drew between the self as “I” and “me.” Our consciousness of the self in the here and now is the “I” and most of the time, we experience this as being an integrated and coherent individual – a bit like the character in the story. The self which we tell others about, is autobiographical or the “me” which again is a coherent account of who we think we are based on past experiences, current events and aspirations for the future.

The neuroscience supports the claim that self is constructed. For example, Michael Gazzaniga demonstrated that spilt-brain patients presented with inconsistent visual information, would readily confabulate an explanation to reconcile information unconsciously processed with information that was conscious. They would make up a story. Likewise, Oliver Sacks famously reported various patients who could confabulate accounts to make sense of their impairments. Ramachandran describes patients who are paralyzed but deny they have a problem. These are all extreme clinical cases but the same is true of normal people. We can easily spot the inconsistencies in other people’s accounts of their self but we are less able to spot our own, and when those inconsistencies are made apparent by the consequences of our actions, we make the excuse, “I wasn’t myself last night” or “It was the wine talking!” Well, wine doesn’t talk and if you were not your self, then who were you and who was being you?

LEHRER: The fragmented nature of the self is very much a theme of modernist literature. (Nietzsche said it first: “My hypothesis is the subject as multiplicity,” he wrote in a terse summary of his philosophy. Virginia Woolf echoed Nietzsche, writing in her diary that we are “splinters and mosaics; not, as they used to hold, immaculate, monolithic, consistent wholes.”) In your book, you argue that modern neuroscience has confirmed the “bundle theory” of the self proposed by Hume. Do you think they have also confirmed these artistic intuitions about the self? If so, how has science demonstrated this? Are we really just a collection of “splinters and mosaics”?

HOOD: Yes, absolutely. When I was first asked to write this book, I really could not see what the revelation was all about. We had to be a multitude – a complex system of evolved functions. Neuroscientists spend their time trying to reverse engineer the brain by trying to figure out the different functions we evolved through natural selection. So far, we have found that the brain is clearly a complex of interacting systems all the way up from the senses to the conceptual machinery of the mind – the output of the brain. From the very moment that input from the environment triggers a sensory receptor to set off a nerve impulse that becomes a chain reaction, we are nothing more that an extremely complicated processing system that has evolved to create rich re-presentations of the world around us. We have no direct contact with reality because everything we experience is an abstracted version of reality that has been through the processing machinery of our brains to produce experience.

I think Nietzsche’s nihilism and Woolf’s depression could have been reflections of their intuitive understanding that the richness of experience must be made up of a multitude of hidden processes and that the core self must be an illusion – and maybe that upset them. But I don’t think appreciating that the self is an illusion is a bad thing. In fact, I think it is inescapable. My critics often dismiss my position as too reductionist or too materialist. Well, if the human condition it is not materialist, then an alternative good explanation must be non-materialist. Show me good evidence for souls and spirits and then I will be forced to change my view. But so far there has been no reliable evidence for souls, ghosts or supernatural entities that inhabit bodies. They are conspicuous by their absence. In contrast, we know that if you alter the physical state of the brain through a head injury, dementia or drugs, each of these changes our self. Whether it is through damage, disease or debauchery, we know that the self must be the output of the material brain.

LEHRER: If the self is an illusion, then why does it exist? Why do we bother telling a story about ourselves?

HOOD: For the same reason that our brains create a highly abstracted version of the world around us. It is bad enough that our brain is metabolically hogging most of our energy requirements, but it does this to reduce the workload to act. That’s the original reason why the brain evolved in the first place – to plan and control movements and keep track of the environment. It’s why living creatures that do not act or navigate around their environments do not have brains. So the brain generates maps and models on which to base current and future behaviors. Now the value of a map or a model is the extent to which it provides the most relevant useful information without overburdening you with too much detail.

The same can be said for the self. Whether it is the “I” of consciousness or the “me” of personal identity, both are summaries of the complex information that feeds into our consciousness. The self is an efficient way of having experience and interacting with the world. For example, imagine you ask me whether I would prefer vanilla or chocolate ice cream? I know I would like chocolate ice cream. Don’t ask me why, I just know. When I answer with chocolate, I have the seemingly obvious experience that my self made the decision. However, when you think about it, my decision covers a vast multitude of hidden processes, past experiences and cultural influences that would take too long to consider individually. Each one of them fed into that decision.

LEHRER: Let’s say the self is just a narrative. Who, then, is the narrator? Which part of me is writing the story that becomes me?

HOOD: This is the most interesting question and also the most difficult to answer because we are entering into the realms of consciousness. For example, only this morning as I was waking up, I was aware that I was gathering my thoughts together and I suddenly became fixated by this phrase, “gathering my thoughts.” I felt I could focus on my thoughts, turn them over in my mind and consider how I was able to do this. Who was doing the gathering and who was focusing? This was a compelling experience of the conscious self.

I would argue that while I had the very strong impression that I was gathering my thoughts together, you do have to question how did the thought to start this investigation begin? Certainly, most of us never bother to think about this, so I must have had an unconscious agenda that this would be an interesting exercise. Maybe it was your question that I read a few days ago or maybe this is a problem that has been ticking over in my brain for some time. It seemed like a story that I was playing out in my head to try and answer a question about how I was thinking. But unless you believe in a ghost in the machine, it is impossible to interrogate your own mind independently. In other words, the narrator and the audience are one and the same.

As the philosopher Gilbert Ryle pointed out, when it comes to the mind you cannot be both the hunter and the hunted. I think that he is saying that the brain creates both the mind and the experience of mind. So you can become aware of a thought, but you are not independent to that thought. Now that is a very unsatisfactory answer for most people because it simply does not accord with mental experience. We entertain thoughts. We consider options. We gather our thoughts together. We play out scenarios in our mind. However, unquestionable as that mental experience might seem to all of us, there can be no one inside our head considering the options. Otherwise, you would then have the problem of an infinite regress – who is inside their head, and so on, and so on.

LEHRER: I get the sense that not all of your colleagues agree with your deconstruction of the self. Some argue, in fact, that the self is a bit like a wristwatch. Just because a watch is a bundle of different parts doesn’t mean it is an illusion. How do you respond to these critiques?

HOOD: For me, an illusion is not what it seems and for most of us, we consider our self as some essential core of who we are. Most of us feel our self is at the center of our existence responding to everything around us – that notion of an integrated entity is what I am challenging, not the experience of self. Must of us, including myself have that experience but that does not make it real. For example, most us think that we see the world continuously throughout the waking day when in fact we only see a fraction of the world in front of us, and because the brain blanks out our visual experience every time we move our eyes in a process called saccadic suppression, we are effectively blind for at least 2 hrs of the day. This is why you cannot see your own eyes moving when you look in a mirror! So conscious experience is not a guarantee of what’s really true.

As for the comparison with a wristwatch…CLearly, it is composed of many parts and the sum of the parts is the wristwatch. However, a wristwatch is only a wristwatch by convention. An alien or a Neanderthal would just consider it to be some form of complex composite object. You could even use the wristwatch as a weapon to kill small animals. It’s a bizarre use of this object I grant you, but there is nothing inherent or essential to the watch that defines what it is. And even then, a microbe living on the watch face may not consider it an object. So a wristwatch is a wristwatch because of a recognized function and to some extent, a convention – both of which do not confer an independent reality to the mind that is considering it. It depends on how you look at it.

When people talk about the reality of the self as the culmination of its constituent parts, I think that they are falling for the trap of thinking that the self exists independently to its parts, which it doesn’t. In the book, I argue that because we have evolved as social animals, those around us construct a large part of our mental life that we experience as our self. We can see the influence of others but often fail to recognize how we too are shaped. I am not denying the role of genes and temperaments that we inherit from our biology. After all, children raised in the same environment can end up very different but even these intrinsic properties of who we are play out in a social world which defines us. If you think about it, many of the ways we describe each other, such as helpful, kind, generous, mean, rude or selfish can only make sense in the context of others. So those around us largely define who we are. I hope this book will remind us of this obvious point that we so easily forget.

The Cost Of Creativity

Jonah Lehrer.


The best part of book tours are the questions. After spending years with the same ideas and sentences – they become old friends – it’s invigorating to see how people react, to keep track of which concepts spark their curiosity. It’s also fun to consider questions that never occured to me while writing the book. For instance, I was recently stumped by a seemingly obvious query that I hadn’t really considered. It was asked by a 4th grader: “What,” he wanted to know, “is the downside of creativity? Isn’t it possible that humans are too creative?”

I muttered something incoherent about nuclear weapons and human ingenuity creating the seeds of its own destruction. I’m pretty sure I quoted Einstein. But I could tell he wasn’t satisfied, that my answer struck him as facile and trite, which it was. So here’s my attempt to give him a better answer, because I think the absurd success of human creativity comes with a real cost.

One of the scientists I spend a lot of time with in Imagine is Geoffrey West, a brilliant theoretical physicist at the Sante Fe Insititute. (He has done a lot of intriguing work on cities, trying to figure out why cities are “the most important invention in the history of human civilization” and why some cities are so much more innovative than others, at least measured by per capita production of patents.) Although West celebrates the inventiveness of cities – all those knowledge spillovers leads to new knowledge – he is quick to point out that our creativity has its disadvantages. New ideas, after all, have a disturbing tendency to become new things, and things aren’t free.

West illustrates the problem by translating the modern human lifestyle – and we live surrounded by our own inventions – into watts. “A human being at rest runs on 90 watts,” he told me. “That’s how much power you need just to lie down. And if you’re a hunter-gatherer and you live in the Amazon, you’ll need about 250 watts. That’s how much energy it takes to run about and find food. So how much energy does our lifestyle [in America] require? Well, when you add up all our calories and then you add up the energy needed to run the computer and the air-conditioner, you get an incredibly large number, somewhere around 11,000 watts. Now you can ask yourself: What kind of animal requires 11,000 watts to live? And what you find is that we have created a lifestyle where we need more watts than a blue whale. We require more energy than the biggest animal that has ever existed. That is why our lifestyle is unsustainable. We can’t have seven billion blue whales on this planet. It’s not even clear that we can afford to have 300 million blue whales.”

The historian Lewis Mumford described the rise of the megalopolis as “the last stage in the classical cycle of civilization,” which would end with “complete disruption and downfall.” In his more pessimistic moods, West seems to agree: he knows that nothing can trend upward forever, that eventually our creativity will make life utterly unsustainable. In fact, West sees human history as defined by this constant tension between expansion and scarcity, between the relentless growth made possible by our creativity and the limited resources that hold our growth back.

Of course, the only solution to the problem of human innovation is more innovation. After a resource is exhausted, we are forced to exploit a new resource, if only to sustain our craving for growth. West cites a long list of breakthroughs to illustrate this historical pattern, from the discovery of the steam engine to the invention of the Internet. “These major innovations completely changed the way society operates,” West says. “It’s like we’re on the edge of a cliff, about to run out of something, and then we find a new way of creating wealth. That means we can start to climb again.”

But the escape is only temporary, as every innovation eventually leads to new shortages. We clear-cut forests, and so we turn to oil; once we exhaust our fossil-fuel reserves, we’ll start driving electric cars, at least until we run out of lithium. Although human creativity has generated a seemingly impossible amount of economic growth, it has also inspired the innovations that allow the growth to continue. So here’s the paradox: creativity is the only solution to the very real problem of creativity.

There is a serious complication to this triumphant narrative of cliff edges and innovation, however. Because our lifestyle has become so expensive to maintain, every new resource now becomes exhausted at a faster rate. This means that the cycle of innovations has to constantly accelerate, with each breakthrough providing a shorter reprieve. The end result is that our creativity isn’t just increasing the pace of life; it is also increasing the pace at which life changes. “It’s like being on a treadmill that keeps on getting faster,” West says. “We used to get a big revolution every few thousand years. And then it took us a century to go from the steam engine to the internal-­combustion engine. Now we’re down to about 15 years between big innovations. What this means is that, for the first time ever, people are living through multiple revolutions.”

Needless to say, such revolutions aren’t fun. They’re unsettling and disruptive. But they appear to be the inevitable downside of our ceaseless ingenuity, for creativity comes with a multiplier effect: new ideas beget more new ideas. The treadmill is going fast. And it’s getting faster.

Cómo ser creativo

Jonah Lehrer. (Diez consejos para potenciar el ingenio)

La creatividad puede parecer cuestión de magia. Nos fijamos en personajes como Steve Jobs y Bob Dylan y concluimos que tienen poderes sobrenaturales que nos fueron denegados al resto de los mortales, un don que les permite imaginar lo que nunca existió. Son "tipos creativos". Nosotros no.

La creatividad, sin embargo, no es magia y no existen los tipos creativos. No es una característica que heredamos en nuestros genes, ni una bendición concedida por los ángeles. Es una habilidad. Cualquiera puede aprender a ser creativo y mejorar. Nuevos estudios arrojan luz sobre los factores que permiten a las personas inventar productos revolucionarios y resolver los problemas más complejos. Como resultado, ha surgido una serie sorprendentemente concreta de lecciones sobre lo que es la creatividad y cómo estimularla en nosotros mismos y en el trabajo.

La ciencia de la creatividad es relativamente nueva. Hasta la Ilustración, los actos de imaginación quedaban relegados a los poderes superiores. Ser creativo significaba canalizar a las musas y darles voz a los dioses. Incluso en tiempos modernos, los científicos prestaron poca atención a las fuentes de la creatividad.

En la última década, no obstante, eso ha empezado a cambiar. Las últimas investigaciones sugieren que la presunción de que la creatividad es un tipo de conocimiento independiente es falsa. En realidad, usamos el término de "creatividad" como una etiqueta que abarca una variedad de herramientas cognitivas, cada una de las cuales aplica a tipos concretos de problemas.

El desafío que afrontamos, ¿necesita de un momento de lucidez? ¿O puede resolverse gradualmente? La respuesta a menudo determina si debemos tomarnos una cerveza para relajarnos o quedarnos hasta tarde en la oficina.

Los nuevos estudios también sugieren la mejor manera para abordar los problemas más peliagudos. Solemos dar por sentado que los expertos son genios creativos en sus respectivos ámbitos. Pero los grandes descubrimientos a menudo dependen de inocentes osadías de personas de fuera.

Partamos por los problemas más difíciles, aquellos que a primera vista parecen imposibles. Éstos suelen resolverse (si es que se resuelven) con un momento de lucidez.

Consideremos el caso de Arthur Fry, un ingeniero del departamento de productos de papel de 3M. En 1974, Fry asistió a una presentación de Sheldon Silver, un ingeniero que trabajaba con adhesivos. Silver había desarrollado un pegamento extremadamente débil que apenas servía para pegar dos trozos de papel. No parecía que el compuesto tuviera aplicaciones prácticas. Después de todo, ¿para qué sirve un pegamento que no pega?

Sin embargo, una gélida mañana de domingo, Fry se acordó del pegamento en un contexto insólito. El ingeniero cantaba en el coro de la iglesia y solía poner pequeños pedazos de papel en su cantoral para marcar las piezas del día. Los papeles a menudo se caían, obligándolo a buscar frenéticamente la página correcta. Parecía un problema insoluble, uno de esos fastidios ordinarios con los que no nos queda otra que convivir.

Pero durante el sermón, Fry tuvo una epifanía. Se le ocurrió que podía aplicar el pegamento débil al papel para crear un marcador de libros reutilizable. Al ser tan débil, se adheriría a la página pero no la rompería al retirarlo. Esa revelación finalmente se convirtió en uno de los artículos de oficina más usados en el mundo: el Post-It.

La invención de Fry fue un clásico momento de lucidez. Si bien esas ocurrencias parecen surgir de la nada, los científicos han empezado a estudiarlas. Lo hacen administrando rompecabezas lógicos y observando lo que ocurre en el cerebro. Las investigaciones de Mark Beeman y John Kounios identificaron de dónde venía la chispa de inspiración que observaban cuando a los participantes se les ocurría la respuesta al enigma planteado.

En los segundos previos al hallazgo, un área del cerebro llamada la circunvolución temporal superior (aSTG por sus siglas en inglés) exhibe un salto en su actividad. Esta región, ubicada en la superficie del hemisferio derecho, se especializa en conectar información muy vagamente relacionada, precisamente lo que hay que hacer a la hora de resolver un problema de creatividad.

Beeman y sus colegas descubrieron que ciertos factores aumentan las probabilidades de uno de esos momentos de lucidez. Por ejemplo, mostrar un breve video humorístico mejora las probabilidades de acierto en un promedio de 20%.

El alcohol también funciona. Investigadores de la Universidad de Illinois, en Chicago, compararon el desempeño en esta clase de rompecabezas entre estudiantes sobrios y ebrios. Éstos últimos resolvieron casi 30% más problemas de palabras que sus compañeros que no estaban intoxicados.

¿Qué explica los beneficios creativos de la relajación y el alcohol? La respuesta involucra la sorprendente ventaja de no prestar atención. Si bien vivimos en una era que le rinde culto a la concentración, este enfoque puede inhibir la imaginación. Puede que estemos concentrados, pero en la respuesta incorrecta.

La relajación ayuda. No es hasta que nos relajamos en la ducha o nos distraemos viendo el video de un humorista que logramos girar el foco de la atención hacia adentro, revisando todas esas asociaciones al azar en el hemisferio derecho del cerebro. Cuando necesitamos un momento de lucidez, esas asociaciones suelen darnos la respuesta.

Los estudios también explican por qué tantos grandes descubrimientos se hicieron en lugares insólitos, como Arquímedes en la bañera o el físico Richard Feynman que garabateaba ecuaciones en clubes de strip-tease. Igualmente validan la lógica de Google de colocar mesas de ping-pong en el vestíbulo y confirman las ventajas prácticas de soñar despierto. Tal como dijo Einstein: "La creatividad es el residuo del tiempo desperdiciado".

Desde luego, no todos los desafíos requieren una epifanía ni una ducha caliente resolverá todos los problemas. A veces, necesitamos seguir trabajando y resistirnos a la tentación de una siesta inducida por la cerveza.

Esa clase de creatividad es menos divertida. Consiste básicamente en sudor y fracasos. Es el lapicero rojo en la página y el boceto arrugado. Nietzsche se refirió a esto como el "proceso de rechazo", señalando que si bien a los creadores les gusta jactarse de sus grandes epifanías, la realidad cotidiana es mucho menos romántica. "Todos los grandes artistas y pensadores son grandes trabajadores", escribió.

Pero si diferentes clases de problemas creativos se benefician de diferentes clases de pensamiento creativo, ¿cómo podemos asegurarnos de que estamos pensando de la manera adecuada en el momento indicado? ¿Cuándo deberíamos fantasear y dar un paseo o cuándo deberíamos seguir dibujando y jugando con las posibilidades?

La buena noticia es que el cerebro humano tiene una sorprendente capacidad natural para evaluar la clase de creatividad que la situación requiere. Numerosos estudios demostraron que, cuando se topa con problemas que no necesitan inspiraciones repentinas, la mente es sorprendentemente hábil para calibrar la probabilidad de que el problema sea resuelto, sabiendo si está cerca o no, aunque desconozca la solución.

Otra clase de problema creativo, sin embargo, es cuando uno carece de la materia prima en la cabeza. Si está tratando de ser más creativo, una de las cosas más importantes que puede hacer es aumentar el volumen y la diversidad de la información a la que se expone.

Steve Jobs dijo que "la creatividad consiste simplemente en conectar cosas". Pese a que creemos que los creadores inventan algo de la nada, Jobs asegura que incluso los conceptos más remotos surgen usualmente de combinaciones de cosas que existen. Bajo su batuta, Apple no inventó los reproductores MP3 ni las computadoras tipo tableta, sino que se limitó a mejorarlos, incorporando elementos de diseño.

¿Cómo puede mejorar la gente a la hora de establecer esas conexiones? Jobs sostiene que los mejores inventores buscan "experiencias diversas", recopilando muchos puntos que luego pueden ligar.

La creatividad es una chispa. Puede ser exasperante frotar las dos piedras y no conseguir nada. Y puede ser increíblemente satisfactorio cuando sale la llama y una nueva idea conquista el mundo. Por primera vez en la historia, empieza a ser posible ver cómo crear más chispas y asegurar que prendan. Con todo, debemos ser honestos: el proceso creativo siempre será difícil, independientemente de cuánto aprendamos sobre él.

— Adaptado del libro "Imagine: How Creativity Works", de Jonah Lehrer.

How Do We Identify Good Ideas?

Jonah Lehrer.

I’ve always been fascinated by the failures of genius. Consider Bob Dylan. How did the same songwriter who produced Blood on the Tracks and Blonde on Blonde also conclude that Down in the Groove was worthy of release? Or what about Steve Jobs: What did he possibly see in the hockey puck mouse? How could Bono not realize that Spiderman was a disaster? And why have so many of my favorite novelists produced so many middling works?

The inconsistency of genius is a consistent theme of creativity: Even those blessed with ridiculous talent still produce works of startling mediocrity. (The Beatles are the exception that proves the rule, although their subsequent solo careers prove that even Lennon and McCartney were fallible artists.) The larger point is that mere imagination is not enough, for even those with prodigious gifts must still be able to sort their best from their worst, sifting through the clutter to find what’s actually worthwhile.

Nietzsche stressed this point. As he observed in his 1878 book Human, All Too Human:

Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration … shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects…. All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.

Notice the emphasis on rejection. Nietzsche eloquently describes the importance of not just creating but recognizing the value of what has been created.

But this raises the obvious question: How can we sort our genius from our rubbish? The bookshelves groan with how-to guides for bolstering the powers of the imagination. But how can we become better at self-criticism? How can we get excel at the rejection process? Because nobody wants to release Self-Portrait.

A new study led by Simone Ritter of the Radboud University in the Netherlands sheds some light on this mystery. In the first experiment, 112 university students were given two minutes to come up with creative ideas that might alleviate a mundane problem: improving the experience of waiting in line at a cash register. The subjects were then divided into two groups: Half of them went straight to work, while the others were first instructed to perform an unrelated task for two minutes. (They played a silly little videogame.) The purpose of this delay was to give the unconscious a chance to percolate, to let that subterranean supercomputer invent new concepts for the supermarket queue.

There was no difference between the groups in terms of creative output — both the conscious and unconscious/distracted subjects came up with the same number of new ideas. Although previous studieshave found an impressive link between unconscious incubation and the imagination — it really is better to sleep on it — that result was not replicated here, perhaps because two minutes of distraction wasn’t long enough. (True creativity takes time.)

Here’s where things get interesting. After writing down as many ideas as they could think of, both groups were asked to choose which of their ideas were the most creative. Although there was no difference in idea generation, giving the unconscious a few minutes now proved to be a big advantage, as those who had been distracted were much better at identifying their best ideas. (An independent panel of experts scored all of the ideas.) While those in the conscious condition only picked their most innovative concepts about 20 percent of the time — they confused their genius with their mediocrity — those who had been distracted located their best ideas about 55 percent of the time. In other words, they were twice as good at figuring out which concepts deserved more attention.

How can the rest of us get better at identifiying our best ideas? One key lesson from this research is that distraction and dilettantism come with real benefits, as they give the unconscious a chance to assess its new ideas. This reminds me of a wise piece of advice from Zadie Smith, which she dished out to aspiring novelists:

When you finish your novel, if money is not a desperate priority, if you do not need to sell it at once or be published that very second — put it in a drawer. For as long as you can manage. A year or more is ideal — but even three months will do…. You need a certain head on your shoulders to edit a novel, and it’s not the head of a writer in the thick of it, nor the head of a professional editor who’s read it in twelve different versions.

Smith, in other words, is telling writers to forget about their work, to give the mind some time to weigh the worth of all those words. And that’s because we have no idea which ideas are worthwhile, at least at first. So the next time you invent something new, don’t immediately file a patent, or hit the “publish” button, or race to share the draft with your editor. Instead, take a few days off: Play a stupid videogame, or go for a long walk, or sleep on it. Unless you take a brief break, you won’t be able to accurately assess what you’ve done.

But waiting isn’t the only approach. A few years ago, a team of German researchers gave several dozensubjects a variety of word puzzles known as remote associate problems. The puzzles feature three words (such as “pine,” “crab” and “sauce”) that share a common compound word. (In this case, the answer is “apple.”) Here’s the clever part: Only some of these remote associate problems had an actual answer. The rest were impossible. Interestingly, the scientists found that subjects in a positive mood were far better at figuring out which remote associate problems could be solved and which were a waste of effort. In fact, even when they didn’t end up finding the solution, those who were happy were much better at figuring out which problems had solutions. As a result, they wasted much less time searching for epiphanies that didn’t exist, or chasing down possibilities that didn’t pan out.

So yes: Taking a break is important. But make sure you do something that makes you happy, as positive moods make us even better at diagnosing the value of our creative work. After a few relaxing days of vacation, you’ll suddenly know which new ideas deserve more time and which need to be abandoned. Because even Bob Dylan wrote a few songs he probably shouldn’t have sung.

P.S. For more, check out this excellent Tom Jacobs summary of the research.

Image: Greg Westfall/Flickr

Do Nice Guys Finish Last?

By Jonah Lehrer.

In 1948, the legendary baseball manager Leo Durocher declared that “nice guys finish last.” Although Durocher would later deny the quote, his pithy line summarizes a popular and pessimistic take on human nature. When it comes to success, we assume that making it to the top requires ethical compromises. Perhaps we need to shout and scream like Steve Jobs, or cut legal corners like Gordon Gekko: the point is that those who win the game of life don’t obey the same rules as everyone else. And maybe that’s why they’re winning.

Well, it turns out Durocher and all those pessimists were right: nice guys really do finish last, or at least make significantly less money. According to a new study in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Beth A. Livingston of Cornell, Timothy A. Judge of Notre Dame, and Charlice Hurst of the University of Western Ontario, levels of “agreeableness” are negatively correlated with the earnings of men.

Let’s begin by defining our terms. There are six facets to aggreeableness: trust, straightforwardness, compliance, altruism, modesty and tender-mindedness. Those are all nice character traits, right? Why would someone lacking those traits have a competitive edge in the workplace?

To understand why niceness might be a disadvantage, it helps to understand the essence of disagreeableness. Because being disagreeable doesn’t mean you behave like Ari Gold. It doesn’t mean you are a sociopath or intentionally inflict pain on others. Instead, those on the disagreeable spectrum are generally pretty decent folks, described by their peers as mostly amiable. However, these disagreeable people do consistently exhibit one special trait: They are willing to “aggressively advocate for their position during conflicts.” While more agreeable people are quick to compromise for the good of the group — conflict is never fun — their disagreeable colleagues insist on holding firm. They don’t mind fighting for what they want.

To tease apart the relationship between agreeableness and income, the researchers began with a data set consisting of nearly 9,000 people who entered the labor force over the last decade. The subjects were repeatedly interviewed about their career and given a battery of cognitive and personality tests. Levels of agreeableness, for instance, were measured with a standard set of questions, such as, “Do you feel that agreeable describes you as a person, where 1 means quarrelsome and 5 means agreeable?” or “How much do you feel that difficult describes you as a person, where 1 means cooperative and 5 means difficult?” These ratings were then compared to income data.

The results were bleak. The first thing the researchers discovered is that women entering the workforce earn much less than men. Even after controlling for education, marital status, hours worked per week and workforce continuity, young women still earned $4,787 less than their male colleagues, an average loss of nearly 14 percent. But the news was also dismal for aggreeable men, who earned nearly $7,000 less than their disagreeable peers. (Agreeable women weren’t nearly as bad off, earning only 1,100 less.)

In a series of follow-up studies, the researchers replicated their results, showing that agreeable men earn less even after controlling for a long list of variables, including other personality traits and the possibility that nice people choose less lucrative professions. The researchers summarize their data:

Overall, across the first three studies, men who are one standard deviation below the mean on agreeableness earn an average of 18.31 percent ($9,772) more than men one standard deviation above the mean on agreeableness. Meanwhile, the “disagreeableness premium” for women was only 5.47 percent ($1,828). Thus, the income premium for disagreeableness is more than three times stronger for men than for women.

What’s driving this depressing correlation? In their final study, the researchers conducted an experiment on 460 undergrads in a business management class at a large Southern university. The students were given eight hypothetical job candidates, all of whom were described as smart, insightful and conscientious. However, their levels of agreeableness were varied, so that some candidates were described as much more trusting, altruistic and humble than others. The undergrads were then asked which of these male and female candidates should be fast-tracked for management.

Once again, the results were unforunate: Those candidates with higher levels of agreeableness were much less likely to get fast-tracked, especially if they were male. (Women were slightly less likely to get picked for promotion regardless of their personality.)

This suggests that nice guys finish last because people are subtly biased against them. Although agreeable people are less likely to get fired, and are just as likely to supervise others, they appear far less effective at negotiating pay increases, thus suggesting that the main financial benefit of disagreeableness is a willingness to stubbornly fight for what’s wanted, even if it makes others uncomfortable. In addition, the researchers argue that agreeableness is particularly costly for men because it violates our gender expectations. Since we assume men will selfishly pursue their interests — please pardon the lazy generalizations — we tend to look down on those who do not, which leads to a “backlash” against unselfish and altruistic men. In other words, we expect the worst and punish the best.

But the news isn’t all bad for nice guys. A new study points out that kindness is the single most salient variable that women look for when choosing a significant other. (Not surprisingly, those looking for a quick fling care most about looks.) So being agreeable won’t make you rich. But it just might help you fall in love, which will make you much happier than a marginal boost in income.

How Does Prozac Work? Jonah Lehrer

What’s the point of neuroscience? Why do we spend billions of dollars investigating those three pounds of flesh inside the head? Sure, human nature is interesting, and self-knowledge is a virtuous pursuit, but let’s be honest: we study the brain because we don’t want to die. Because we want cures for awful afflictions. Because we’re desperate to avoid depression and addiction and dementia. The only way to justify the terrific expense of biomedical research is medicine.

Here’s the bad news: I think neuroscience has yet to deliver on its therapeutical potential. We’ve learned an astonishing amount about the brain in recent years – a ten year old textbook is totally obsolete – but all this shiny new knowledge has yet to heal us. As a result, we’re still stuck with pills and treatments that are frustratingly ineffective.

Consider depression. Every year, approximately 7 percent of us will be afflicted to some degree by the awful mental state that William Styron described as a “gray drizzle of horror . . . a storm of murk.” This is a big societal problem, which is why 24.4 million prescriptions were filled for fluoxetine (the generic version of Prozac) in 2010 in America.

The first thing to say about fluoxetine is that it’s an old drug, having been introduced in the early 1970s. (Like many medical treatments, it was discovered largely by accident, when researchers realized that a common anti-histamine had anti-depressant properties.) Until recently, scientists assumed they knew how fluoxetine/Prozac worked. The story was simple: depression results from a neurotransmitter imbalance in the brain, in which patients suffer from a shortage of chemical happiness. The little blue pills cheer us up because they give the brain what it has been missing – a dose of serotonin.

There’s only one problem with this theory of anti-depressants: it’s almost certainly wrong, or at the very least woefully incomplete. Experiments have since shown that lowering people’s serotonin levels does not make them depressed, nor does it worsen their symptoms if they are already depressed. And then there’s the “Prozac lag”: although anti-depressants increase the amount of serotonin in the brain within hours, their beneficial effects are not usually felt for weeks.

Continue reading in The Wired.

Need to Create? Get a Constraint. Jonah Lehrer

One of the many paradoxes of human creativity is that it seems to benefit from constraints. Although we imagine the imagination as requiring total freedom, the reality of the creative process is that it’s often entangled with strict conventions and formal requirements. Pop songs have choruses and refrains; symphonies have four movements; plays have five acts; painters still rely on the tropes of portraiture.

Perhaps the best example of this phenomenon is poetry. At first glance, the art seems to be defined by its liberation from ordinary language – poets don’t have to obey the rules of syntax and punctuation. And yet, most poetry still depends on literary forms with exacting requirements, such as haikus, sestets and sonnets. This writing method seems to make little sense, since it makes the creative act much more difficult. Instead of composing free verse, poets frustrate themselves with structural constraints. Why?

A new study led by Janina Marguc at the University of Amsterdam, and published in The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, provides an interesting answer. It turns out that the obstacles of form come with an unexpected psychological perk, allowing people to think in a more all-encompassing fashion. The introduction of the paper sets up the mystery:

Daily life is full of obstacles: A construction site blocking the usual road to work, a colleague’s background chatter interfering with one’s ability to concentrate, a newborn child hindering parents in completing their daily routines, or a lack of resources standing in the way of realizing an ambitious plan. How do people cognitively respond to such obstacles? How do the ways in which they perceive and process information from their environment change when an obstacle interferes with what they want to accomplish? In the present research, we aim to shed light on these questions by investigating the impact of obstacles on global versus local processing. We propose that unless people are inclined to disengage prematurely from ongoing activities, obstacles will prompt them to step back and adopt a more global, Gestalt-like processing style that allows them to look at the “big picture” and conceptually integrate seemingly unrelated pieces of information.

Continue reading in The Wired.

Does Music Change The Taste Of Wine? Jonah Lehrer

All sorts of clever experiments have demonstrated the limitations of the tongue. It turns out that expert wine critics can be tricked into confusing cheap and expensive clarets, that we prefer beer laced withbalsamic vinegar (as long we don’t know it’s been added), that most people can’t tell Coke from Pepsi (but still have strong preferences) or pate from dog food. My favorite, though, comes from the mischievous Frederic Brochet at the University of Bordeaux. In a 2001 experiment, Brochet invited 57 wine experts and asked them to give their impressions of what looked like two glasses of red and white wine. The wines were actually the same white wine, one of which had been tinted red with food coloring. But that didn’t stop the experts from describing the “red” wine in language typically used to describe red wines. One expert praised its “jamminess,” while another enjoyed its “crushed red fruit.” Not a single one noticed it was actually a white wine. Because the tongue is vague in its instructions, we are forced to constantly parse its input based upon whatever other knowledge we can summon to the surface. As Brochet himself notes, our expectations of what the wine will taste like “can be much more powerful in determining how you taste a wine than the actual physical qualities of the wine itself.”

[...]

And this is why the ambience of a restaurant matters. All those rituals of the table are not mere routines. Instead, they help us make sense of the incomplete information coming from the tongue. For instance, when we eat a meal in a fancy place, full of elaborate place settings, fine porcelain and waiters wearing tuxedos, the food is going to taste different than if we ate the same food in a cheap diner. (This helps explain why people spend more money when restaurants play classical music instead of pop tunes.) Because the music matters, but so does everything else. The tongue is easy to dupe.

Read full in The Wired.

Does Inequality Make Us Unhappy? Jonah Lehrer

This labor unrest among monkeys illuminates our innate sense of fairness. It’s not that the primates demanded equality — some capuchins collected many more pebbles than others, and that never created a problem — it’s that they couldn’t stand when the inequality was a result of injustice. Humans act the same way. When the rich do something to deserve their riches, nobody complains; that’s just the meritocracy at work. But when those at the bottom don’t understand the unequal distribution of wealth — when it seems as if the winners are getting rewarded for no reason — they get furious. They doubt the integrity of the system and become more sensitive to perceived inequities. They start camping out in parks. They reject the very premise of the game.


Read full in The Wired.

Why Do People Eat Too Much? Jonah Lehrer

“It seems to me that our three basic needs, for food and security and love, are so mixed and mingled and entwined that we cannot straightly think of one without the others.”
- M.F.K. Fisher

Human beings are notoriously terrible at knowing when we’re no longer hungry. Instead of listening to our stomach – a very stretchy container – we rely on all sorts of external cues, from the circumference of the dinner plate to the dining habits of those around us. If the serving size is twice as large (and American serving sizes have grown 40 percent in the last 25 years), we’ll still polish it off. And then we’ll go have dessert.

Consider a clever study done by Brian Wansink, a professor of marketing at Cornell. He used a bottomless bowl of soup – there was a secret tube that kept on refilling the bowl with soup from below – to demonstrate that how much people eat is largely dependent on how much you give them. The group with the bottomless bowl ended up consuming nearly 70 percent more than the group with normal bowls. What’s worse, nobody even noticed that they’d just slurped far more soup than normal.

Or look at this study, done in 2006 by psychologists at the University of Pennsylvania. One day, they left out a bowl of chocolate M&M’s in an upscale apartment building. Next to the bowl was a small scoop. The following day, they refilled the bowl with M&M’s but placed a much larger scoop beside it. The result would not surprise anyone who has ever finished a Big Gulp soda or a supersized serving of McDonald’s fries: when the scoop size was increased, people took 66 percent more M&M’s. Of course, they could have taken just as many candies on the first day; they simply would have had to take a few more scoops. But just as larger serving sizes cause us to eat more, the larger scoop made the residents more gluttonous.

Continue reading in The Wired.