Читать книгу The Runaway Species - David Eagleman - Страница 6

INTRODUCTION

WHAT DO NASA AND PICASSO HAVE IN COMMON?

Several hundred people scramble in a control room in Houston, trying to save three humans ensnared in outer space. It’s 1970 and Apollo 13 is two days into its moonshot when its oxygen tank explodes, spewing debris into space and crippling the craft. Astronaut Jack Swigert, with the understatement of a military man, radios Mission Control. “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”

The astronauts are over 200,000 miles from Earth. Fuel, water, electricity and air are running out. The hopes for a solution are close to zero. But that doesn’t slow down the flight director back in NASA Mission Control, Gene Kranz. He announces to his assembled staff:

When you leave this room, you must leave believing that this crew is coming home. I don’t give a damn about the odds and I don’t give a damn that we’ve never done anything like this before … You’ve got to believe, your people have got to believe, that this crew is coming home.¹

How can Mission Control make good on this promise? The engineers have rehearsed the mission down to the minute: when Apollo 13 would reach the moon’s orbit, when the lunar module would deploy, how long the astronauts would walk on the surface. Now they have to shred that playbook and start over. Mission Control had also prepared abort scenarios, but all of those assumed that the main parts of the spacecraft would be healthy and the lunar module expendable.² Unfortunately, the opposite is now true. The service module is destroyed and the command module is venting gas and losing power. The only working part of the craft is the lunar module. NASA has simulated many possible breakdowns, but not this one.

The engineers know that they have been dealt a nearly impossible task: save three men locked in an airtight metal capsule, hurtling at 3,000 miles an hour through the vacuum of space, their life support systems failing. Advanced satellite communication systems and desktop computers are still decades away. With slide rules and pencils, the engineers have to invent a way to abandon the command module and turn the lunar module into a lifeboat bound for home.

The engineers set about addressing the problems one by one: planning a route back to Earth, steering the craft, conserving power. But conditions are deteriorating. A day and a half into the crisis, carbon dioxide reaches dangerous levels in the astronauts’ tight quarters. If nothing is done the crew is going to suffocate within a few hours. The lunar module has a filtration system, but all of its cylindrical air scrubbers have been exhausted. The only remaining option is to salvage unused canisters from the abandoned command module – but those are square. How to fit a square scrubber into a round hole?

Working from an inventory of what’s on board, engineers at Mission Control devise an adaptor cobbled together from a plastic bag, a sock, pieces of cardboard and a hose from a pressure suit, all held together by duct tape. They tell the crew to tear off the plastic cover from the flight plan folder, and to use it as a funnel to guide air into the scrubber. They have the astronauts pull out the plastic-wrapped thermal undergarments that were originally meant to be worn under spacesuits while bouncing on the moon. Following instructions relayed from the ground, the astronauts discard the undergarments and save the plastic. Piece by piece, they assemble the makeshift filter and install it.

To everyone’s relief, carbon dioxide levels return to normal. But other problems quickly follow. As Apollo 13 draws closer to re-entry, power is growing short in the command module. When the spacecraft was designed, it had never crossed anyone’s mind that the command module batteries might have to be charged from the lunar module – it was supposed to be the other way around. Fueled by coffee and adrenaline, the engineers in Mission Control figure out a way to use the lunar module’s heater cable to make this work, just in time for the entry phase.

Once the batteries are recharged, the engineers instruct crew member Jack Swigert to fire up the command module. On board the craft, he connects cables, switches inverters, maneuvers antennas, toggles switches, activates telemetry – an activation procedure beyond anything he’d ever trained for or imagined. Faced with a problem they hadn’t foreseen, the engineers improvise an entirely new protocol.

In the pre-dawn hours of April 17, 1970 – eighty hours into the crisis – the astronauts prepare for their final descent. Mission Control performs their final checks. As the astronauts enter the Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft radio enters blackout. In Kranz’ words:

Everything now was irreversible … The control room was absolutely silent. The only noises were the hum of the electronics, the buzz of the air conditioning, and the occasional click of a Zippo lighter snapping open … No one moved, as if everyone were chained to his console.

A minute and a half later, word reaches the control room: Apollo 13 is safe.

The staff erupts into cheering. The normally stoic Kranz breaks down in tears.

***

Sixty-three years earlier, in a small studio in Paris, a young painter named Pablo Picasso sets up his easel. Usually penniless, he has taken advantage of a financial windfall to purchase a large canvas. He sets to work on a provocative project: a portrait of prostitutes in a brothel. An unvarnished look at sexual vice.

Picasso begins with charcoal sketches of heads, bodies, fruit. In his first versions, a sailor and male medical student are part of the scene. He decides to remove the men, settling on the five women as his subjects. He tries out different poses and arrangements, crossing most of them out. After hundreds of sketches, he sets to work on the full canvas. At one point, he invites his mistress and several friends to see the work in progress; their reaction so disappoints him that he sets aside the painting. But months later he returns to it, working in secret.

Picasso views the portrait of the prostitutes as an “exorcism” from his previous way of painting: the more time he spends on it, the further he moves from his earlier work. When he invites people back to see it again, their reaction is even more hostile. He offers to sell it to his most loyal patron, who laughs at the prospect.³ The painter’s friends avoid him, fearing he’s lost his mind. Dismayed, Picasso rolls up the canvas and puts it in his closet.

He waits nine years to show it in public. In the midst of the First World War, the painting is finally exhibited. The curator – worried about offending public taste – changes the title from Le Bordel d’Avignon (The Avignon Bordello) to the more benign Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Ladies of Avignon). The painting has a mixed reception; one reviewer quips that “the Cubists are not waiting for the war to end to recommence hostilities against good sense …”⁴

But the painting’s influence grows. A few decades later, when Les Demoiselles is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the New York Times critic writes:

Few paintings have had the momentous impact of this composition of five distorted nude figures. With one stroke, it challenged the art of the past and inexorably changed the art of our time.⁵

The art historian John Richardson later writes that Les Demoiselles was the most original painting in seven hundred years. The painting, he says,

enabled people to perceive things with new eyes, new minds and awareness … [It is] the first unequivocally twentieth-century masterpiece, a principal detonator of the modern movement, the cornerstone of twentieth-century art.⁶

What made Pablo Picasso’s painting so original? He changed the goal that European painters had subscribed to for hundreds of years: the pretense of being true to life. In Picasso’s hands, limbs appear twisted, two of the women have mask-like faces, and the five figures seem to have been painted in five different styles. Here, ordinary people no longer look entirely human. Picasso’s painting undercut Western notions of beauty, decorum and verisimilitude all at once. Les Demoiselles came to represent one of the fiercest blows ever delivered to artistic tradition.

NASA’s Mission Control

Picasso’s prostitutes

What do these two stories have in common? At first glance, not much. Saving the Apollo 13 was collaborative. Picasso worked alone. The NASA engineers raced against the clock. Picasso took months to commit his ideas to canvas, and nearly a decade to show his art. The engineers weren’t seeking points for originality: their goal was a functional solution. “Functional” was the last thing on Picasso’s mind – his goal was to produce something unprecedented.

Yet the cognitive routines underlying NASA’s and Picasso’s creative acts are the same. And this is not just true of engineers and artists – it’s true of hair stylists, accountants, architects, farmers, lepidopterists or any other human who creates something previously unseen. When they break the mold of the standard to generate novelty, it is the result of basic software running in the brain. The human brain doesn’t passively take in experience like a recorder; instead, it constantly works over the sensory data it receives – and the fruit of that mental labor is new versions of the world. The basic cognitive software of brains – which drinks in the milieu and procreates new versions – gives rise to everything that surrounds us: streetlights, nations, symphonies, laws, sonnets, prosthetic arms, smartphones, ceiling fans, skyscrapers, boats, kites, laptops, ketchup bottles, auto-driving cars. And this mental software gives rise to tomorrow, in the form of self-healing cement, moving buildings, carbon-fiber violins, biodegradable cars, nanospacecraft and the chronic refashioning of the future. But, just like the massive computer programs running silently in the circuitry of our laptops, our inventiveness typically runs in the background, outside of our direct awareness.

There’s something special about the algorithms we’re running under the hood. We are members of a vast family tree of animal species. But why don’t cows choreograph dances? Why don’t squirrels design elevators for their treetops? Why don’t alligators invent speedboats? An evolutionary tweak in the algorithms running in human brains has allowed us to absorb the world and create what-if versions of it. This book is about that creative software: how it works, why we have it, what we make, and where it’s taking us. We’ll show how the desire to violate our own expectations leads to the runaway inventiveness of our species. By looking at a tapestry of the arts, science, and technology, we’ll see the threads of innovation that link disciplines.

As important as creativity has been in our species’ recent centuries, it is the cornerstone for our next steps. From our daily activities to our schools to our companies, we are all riding arm-in-arm into a future that compels a constant remodeling of the world. In recent decades, the world has found itself transitioning from a manufacturing economy to an information economy. But that is not where this road ends. As computers become better at digesting mountains of data, people are being freed up to work on other tasks. We’re already seeing the first glimpses of this new model: the creativity economy. Synthetic biologist, app developer, self-driving car designer, quantum computer designer, multimedia engineer – these are positions that didn’t exist when most of us were in school, and they represent the vanguard of what’s coming. When you grab your morning coffee ten years from now, you may be walking into a job that looks very different from the one you’re working now. For these reasons, corporate boardrooms everywhere are scrambling to figure out how to keep up, because the technologies and processes of running a company are constantly changing.

Only one thing allows us to face these accelerating changes: cognitive flexibility. We absorb the raw materials of experience and manipulate them to form something new. Because of our capacity to reach beyond the facts we’ve learned, we open our eyes to the world around us but envision other possible worlds. We learn facts and generate fictions. We master what is, and envisage what-ifs.

Thriving in a constantly changing world requires us to understand what’s happening inside our heads when we innovate. By unearthing the tools and strategies that drive the creation of new ideas, we can set our sights on the decades that lie ahead instead of the ones that lie behind.

This mandate for innovation is not reflected in our school systems. Creativity is a driver of youthful discovery and expression – but it becomes stifled in deference to proficiencies that are more easily measured and tested. This sidelining of creative learning may reflect larger societal trends. Teachers typically prefer the well-behaved student to the creative one, who is often perceived as rocking the boat. A recent poll found that most Americans want children to have respect for elders over independence, good manners over curiosity, and would prefer them to be well behaved rather than creative.⁷

If we want a bright future for our children, we need to recalibrate our priorities. At the speed the world is changing, the old playbooks for living and working will inevitably be supplanted – and we need to prepare our children to author the new ones. The same cognitive software running in the minds of the NASA engineers and Picasso runs in the minds of our young, but it needs to be cultivated. A balanced education nurtures skills and imagination. That kind of education will pay off decades after students throw their mortarboards in the air and step into a world that we, their parents, can barely foresee.

One of us (Anthony) is a composer, and the other (David) is a neuroscientist. We’ve been friends for many years. A few years ago, Anthony composed the oratorio Maternity based on David’s story The Founding Mothers, which traces a maternal line back through history. Working together led to an ongoing dialogue about creativity. We’d each been studying it from our own perspectives. For thousands of years, the arts have given us direct access to our inner lives, offering us glimpses not only of what we think about, but also how we think. No culture in human history has been without its music, visual art and storytelling. Meanwhile, in recent decades, brain science has made leaps forward in understanding the often unconscious forces that underlie human behavior. We began to realize that our views led to a synergistic vision of innovation – and that’s what this book is about.

We will rifle through the inventions of human society like paleontologists ransacking the fossil record. Combined with the latest understanding of the inner workings of the brain, this will help us uncover many facets of this essential part of ourselves. Part I introduces our need for creativity, how we think up new ideas, and how our innovations are shaped by where and when we live. Part II explores key features of the creative mentality, from proliferating options to brooking risk. Part III turns to companies and classrooms, illustrating how to foster creativity in our incubators for the future. What follows is a dive into the creative mind, a celebration of the human spirit, and a vision of how to reshape our worlds.