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CHAPTER 2

THE BRAIN ALTERS WHAT IT ALREADY KNOWS

On January 9, 2007, Steve Jobs stood on the MacWorld stage in his jeans and a black turtleneck. “Every once in a while, a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything,” he declared. “Today, Apple is going to reinvent the phone.” Even after years of speculation, the iPhone was a revelation. No one had seen anything like it: here was a communication device, music player and personal computer that you could hold in the palm of your hand. The media hailed it as trailblazing, almost magical. Bloggers called it the “Jesus phone.” The introduction of the iPhone was characteristic of great innovations: they come at us unexpectedly, with novelty that seems to have come from nowhere.

But, despite appearances, innovations don’t come from nowhere. They are the latest branches on the family tree of invention. Research scientist Bill Buxton has curated a collection of technological devices for decades, and he can lay out the long genealogy of DNA that has forged a path to our modern gadgets.¹ Consider the Casio AT-550-7 wristwatch from 1984: it featured a touchscreen that allowed the user to finger-swipe digits directly onto the watch face.

Ten years later – and still thirteen years before the iPhone – IBM added a touchscreen to a mobile phone.

The Simon was the world’s first smart phone: it used a stylus and had a collection of basic apps. It was able to send and receive faxes and emails, and had a world time clock, notepad, calendar, and predictive typing. Unfortunately, not many people bought it. Why did the Simon die? In part because the battery lasted only one hour, in part because mobile phone calls were so expensive at the time, and in part because there was no ecosystem of apps to draw upon. But just like the Casio touchscreen, Simon left its genetic material in the iPhone that followed “from nowhere.”

Four years after the Simon came the Data Rover 840, a personal digital assistant that had a touchscreen navigated in 3D by a stylus. Contact lists could be stored on a memory chip and carried around anywhere. Mobile computing was gaining its footing.

Looking through his collection, Buxton points to the many devices that paved the way for the electronics industry. The 1999 Palm Vx introduced the thinness we’ve come to expect in our devices today. “It produced the vocabulary that led to the super thin stuff like today’s laptops,” Buxton says. “Where are the roots? There they are, right there.”²

Step by step, the groundwork was being laid for Steve Jobs’ “revolutionary” product. The Jesus phone didn’t come from a virgin birth after all.

A few years after Jobs’ announcement, the writer Steve Cichon bought a stack of timeworn Buffalo News newspapers from 1991. He wanted to satisfy his curiosity about what had changed. In the front section, he found this Radio Shack advertisement.

Cichon had a revelation: every item on the page had been replaced by the iPhone in his pocket.³ Just two decades earlier, a buyer would have spent $3,054.82 for all this hardware; they were now taken care of by a five-ounce device at a fraction of the cost and material.⁴ The ad was a picture of the iPhone’s genealogy.

Groundbreaking technologies don’t appear from nowhere – they result from inventors “riffing on the best ideas of their heroes,” as Buxton observes. He likens Jonathan Ive, the designer of the iPhone, to a musician such as Jimi Hendrix, who often “quoted” other musicians in his compositions. “If you know the history and pay attention to it, you appreciate Jimi Hendrix all the more,” Buxton says.

In a similar vein, science historian Jon Gertner writes:

We usually imagine that invention occurs in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads an inventor towards a startling epiphany. In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin. At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people or ideas converge, until over the course of months or years (or decades) they gain clarity and momentum and the help of additional ideas and actors.⁵

Like diamonds, creativity results from pressing history into brilliant new forms. Consider another of Apple’s breakthroughs: the iPod.

In the 1970s, piracy was a major issue in the record industry. Retailers could return unsold albums to a record company for a refund; many took advantage of this to send back counterfeit copies instead. In one case, two million copies of Olivia Newton-John’s album Physical were printed, and in spite of the album topping the charts, an astounding three million copies were returned.

To stop the rampant fraud, British inventor Kane Kramer came up with an idea. He would develop a method to transmit music digitally across phone lines, and an in-store machine would custom print each album. But then it occurred to Kramer that a cumbersome machine might be an unnecessary step. Instead of producing an analog record, why not keep the music digital and design a portable machine that could play it? He developed the schematics for a portable digital music player, the IXI. It had a display screen and buttons for playing the tracks.

Kramer not only designed the player, he foresaw a whole new way of selling and sharing digital music with unlimited inventory and no need for warehouses. Paul McCartney was one of his first investors. The main drawback of Kramer’s music player was that, given the hardware available at the time, it only had enough memory to hold one song.

Seizing on Kramer’s promising idea, Apple Computer’s engineers incorporated a scroll wheel, sleeker materials and, of course, more advanced memory and software. In 2001 – twenty-two years after Kramer’s idea – they debuted the iPod.

Steve Jobs would later say:

Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it. They just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while; that’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things.

Kramer’s original invention

Apple’s subsequent iPod

Kramer’s idea did not come out of nowhere, either. It followed in the footsteps of the Sony Walkman, a portable cassette player. The Walkman was made possible by the invention of the cassette tape in 1963, which was itself made possible by reel-to-reel tapes in 1924, and so on back through history, everything emerging from the ecosystem of innovations before it.

Human creativity does not emerge from a vacuum. We draw on our experience and the raw materials around us to refashion the world. Knowing where we’ve been, and where we are, points the way to the next big industries. From studying his collection of gadgets, Buxton concludes that two decades typically pass before a new concept dominates in the marketplace. “If what I said is credible,” he told the Atlantic magazine, “then it is equally credible that anything that is going to become a billion dollar industry in the next ten years is already ten years old. That completely changes how we should approach innovation. There is no invention out of the blue, but prospecting, mining, refining and then goldsmithing to create something that’s worth more than its weight in gold.”

***

To rescue the crippled Apollo 13, the engineers at NASA mined and refined what they already knew. The craft was hundreds of thousands of miles away, so any solution had to draw on materials within the astronauts’ reach. The NASA engineers had an inventory of everything on board the craft, they had the experience gained in earlier Apollo missions, and they had the experience of running many simulations. They drew on all that knowledge while crafting their rescue plans. Gene Kranz wrote afterwards:

I was now grateful for the time we had spent before the mission … developing options and workarounds for all conceivable spacecraft failures. We knew that when the chips were down we could use the command module survival water, condensed sweat and even the crew’s urine in place of the [lunar module] water to cool the systems.

The engineers’ collective experience gave them the raw materials they needed to solve problems. Working round the clock, they brainstormed ideas and tested them out on replicas of the spacecraft used for training: under immense time pressure, they ad-libbed on their data.

Across the spectrum of human activities, pillaging existing ideas propels the creative process. Consider the early automobile industry. Before 1908, building a new car was laborious. Each vehicle was custom built, with different parts assembled in different places and then painstakingly brought together. But Henry Ford came up with a critical innovation: he streamlined the entire process, putting the manufacture and assembly under one roof. Wood, ore, and coal were loaded in at one end of the factory, and Model Ts were driven out the other. His assembly line changed the way the cars were built: “Rather than keeping the work on assembly stands and moving the men past it, the assembly line kept the men still and moved the work.”⁶ Thanks to these innovations, cars drove off the factory floor at an unprecedented rate. An enormous new industry was born.

But just like the iPhone, Ford’s idea of the assembly line had a long genealogy. Eli Whitney had created munitions with interchangeable parts for the US Army in the early nineteenth century. This innovation enabled a damaged rifle to be repaired using parts salvaged from other weapons. For Ford, this idea of interchangeable parts was a boon: rather than tailoring parts for individual cars, parts could be made in bulk. Cigarette factories of the previous century had sped up production using continuous flow production – moving the assembly through an orderly sequence of steps. Ford saw the genius in this, and followed suit. And the assembly line itself was something Ford learned about from the Chicago meatpacking industry. Ford later said, “I invented nothing new. I simply assembled into a car the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work.”

The mining of history happens not only in technology, but in the arts as well. Samuel Taylor Coleridge was the consummate Romantic poet: passionate, impulsive, with a feverish imagination. He wrote his poem “Kubla Khan” after an opium-induced dream. Here was a poet seemingly in conversation with the Muses.

But after Coleridge died, the scholar John Livingston Lowes painstakingly dissected Coleridge’s creative process from his library and diaries.⁷ Poring over Coleridge’s notes, Lowes found that the books lining the poet’s study “rained … their secret influence on nearly everything that Coleridge wrote in his creative prime.” For instance, Lowes traced lines in Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” about sea creatures whose every track / Was a flash of golden fire to the doomed explorer Captain Cook’s account of fluorescent fish creating an artificial fire in the water.8 He attributed Coleridge’s depiction of a bloody Sun to a description in Falconer’s poem “The Shipwreck” of the sun’s sanguine blaze. In passage after passage, Lowes found influences living on Coleridge’s shelf; after all, when Coleridge wrote the poem, he had never even been on a boat. Lowes concluded that Coleridge’s fiery imagination was fueled by identifiable sources in his library. Everything had a genealogy. As Joyce Carol Oates has written, “[The arts], like science, should be greeted as a communal effort – an attempt by an individual to give voice to many voices, an attempt to synthesize and explore and analyze.”

As Kramer’s schematics were to Jonathan Ive, and Whitney’s rifle was to Henry Ford, Coleridge’s library was to him: a resource to digest and transform.

But what about an idea, invention or creation that represents a leap forward unlike anything in seven hundred years? After all, that is how Richardson described Picasso’s painting Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Even in a work as original as that, we can trace its genealogy. A generation before Picasso, progressive artists had started to move away from the hyperrealism of the nineteenth-century French establishment. Most notably Paul Cézanne, who died the year before Les Demoiselles was painted, had broken apart the visual plane into geometric shapes and blotches of color. His Mont Sainte-Victoire resembles a jigsaw puzzle. Picasso later said that Cézanne was his “one and only master.”

Paul Cézanne’s Mont Sainte-Victoire

Other features of Les Demoiselles were inspired by a painting owned by one of Picasso’s friends: El Greco’s seventeenth-century altarpiece Apocalyptic Vision. Picasso made repeated visits to see the altarpiece and modeled the clustered grouping of his prostitutes on El Greco’s crowding of his nudes. Picasso also modeled the shape and size of Les Demoiselles on the altarpiece’s unusual proportions.

El Greco’s Apocalyptic Vision

And Picasso’s painting incorporated more exotic influences. A few decades earlier, the artist Paul Gauguin had flouted convention by abandoning his wife and children and moving to Tahiti. Living in his private Eden, Gauguin incorporated indigenous art into his paintings and woodcuts. Picasso noticed.

Paul Gauguin’s Nave Nave Fenua

Picasso was fascinated by indigenous art, especially from his native Spain. One day, a friend of Picasso’s slipped past a sleeping guard in one of the Louvre galleries and walked off with two Basque artifacts, which he then sold to Picasso for fifty francs. Picasso later pointed out the similarity between the stolen Iberian sculptures and the faces he had painted, noting that “the general structure of the heads, the shape of the ears and the delineation of the eyes” are the same. Richardson writes, “Iberian sculpture was very much Picasso’s discovery … No other painter had staked a claim to it.”

An Iberian sculpture

A detail from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

An African mask

A detail from Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon

While Picasso was working on Les Demoiselles, there was an exhibition of African masks at a nearby museum. In a letter to a friend, Picasso wrote that the idea for Les Demoiselles came to him the very day he visited the exhibit. He later changed his story, claiming that he had visited the museum only after Les Demoiselles was complete. Nevertheless, there is an unmistakable resemblance between the African masks and one of the most radical features of Les Demoiselles: the mask-like visages of two of the prostitutes.

Picasso mined the raw materials that surrounded him, and by doing so he was able to bring his culture somewhere it had never been before. Excavating Picasso’s influences in no way diminishes his originality. His peers all had access to the same sources that he did. Only one lashed these influences together to create Les Demoiselles.

Just as nature modifies existing animals to create new creatures, so too the brain works from precedent. More than four hundred years ago, the French essayist Michel de Montaigne wrote, “Bees plunder the flowers here and there, but afterward they make of them honey, which is all theirs … Even so with the pieces borrowed from others; he will transform and blend them to make a work of his own.”⁹ Or as modern science historian Steven Johnson puts it, “We take the ideas we’ve inherited or that we’ve stumbled across, and we jigger them together into some new shape.”¹⁰

Whether inventing an iPhone, manufacturing cars, or launching modern art, creators remodel what they inherit. They absorb the world into their nervous systems and manipulate it to create possible futures. Consider graphic artist Lonni Sue Johnson, a prolific illustrator who designed covers for the New Yorker. In 2007, she suffered a nearly-fatal infection that crippled her memory.¹¹ She survived, but found herself living in a fifteen-minute window of time, unable to recall her marriage, her divorce, or even people she’d met earlier in the day. The basin of her memories was largely emptied, and the ecosystem of her creativity dried up. She stopped painting because she could think of nothing to paint. No internal models swirled inside her head, no new ideas for the next combination of things she’d seen before. When she sat down in front of her paper, there was nothing but a blank. She needed the past to be able to create the future. She had nothing to draw upon, and therefore nothing to draw. Creativity relies on memory.

But surely there are eureka moments, when someone is suddenly struck by an idea that materializes from nowhere? Take, for example, an orthopedic surgeon named Anthony Cicoria, who in 1994 was speaking to his mother on an outdoor payphone when he was struck by a bolt of lightning. A few weeks later, he unexpectedly began composing. In subsequent years, introducing his “Lightning Sonata,” he spoke of his music as being given to him from “the other side.” If ever there were an example of creativity originating out of the thin air, this might be it: a non-musician suddenly starting to compose.

But, on closer inspection, Cicoria also turns out to rely on the raw materials around him. He recounts that, after his accident, he developed a strong desire to listen to nineteenth-century piano music. It is difficult to know what the lightning strike did to Cicoria’s brain, but it is clear that he rapidly absorbed that musical repertoire. Although Cicoria’s music is beautiful, it shares the same structure and progression as the composers he was listening to – composers such as Chopin, who preceded him by almost two centuries. Just like Lonni Sue Johnson, he required a storehouse of materials to mine. His sudden desire to compose may have come from out of the blue, but his basic creative process did not.

Many people have figuratively stood in thunderstorms, waiting for the creative lightning to strike. But creative ideas evolve from existing memories and impressions. Instead of new ideas being lit aflame by lightning bolts, they arise from the interweaving billions of microscopic sparks in the vast darkness of the brain.

HOW WE REFASHION THE WORLD

Humans are continually creative: whether the raw material is words or sounds or sights, we are food-processors into which the world is fed, and out of which something new emerges.

Our innate cognitive software, multiplied by the massive population of Homo sapiens, has produced a society with increasingly faster innovation, one that feeds upon its latest ideas. Eleven millennia transpired between the Agricultural Revolution and the Industrial Revolution. Then it only took a hundred and twenty years to get from the Industrial Revolution to the light bulb. Then merely ninety years until the moon landing. From there it was only twenty-two years until the World Wide Web, and a mere nine years later the human genome was fully sequenced.¹² Historical innovation paints a clear picture: the time between major innovations is shrinking rapidly. And this is exactly what you’d expect from a brain that bootstraps, absorbing the best ideas on the planet and making them better.

In refashioning the world, Apple, NASA engineers, Ford, Coleridge and Picasso all worked from precedent. But at first blush, it might seem that they must have done so in very different ways – after all, remaking electronics, cars, poetry and paintings must surely involve vastly different kinds of mental undertakings. One might be tempted to think that creative minds use a dizzying array of methods for refashioning the world around us. But we propose a framework that divides the landscape of cognitive operations into three basic strategies: bending, breaking and blending.¹³ We suggest these are the primary means by which all ideas evolve.

In bending, an original is modified or twisted out of shape.

Szotynscy and Zaleski’s Krzywy Domek (‘Warped Building’) in Sopot, a Polish sea resort

In breaking, a whole is taken apart.

Yago Partal’s Defragmentados

In blending, two or more sources are merged.

Thomas Barbèy’s Oh Sheet!

Bending, breaking and blending – the three Bs – are a way of capturing the brain operations that underlie innovative thinking. Alone or in combination, these mental operations allow humans to get from the IBM Simon to an iPhone, or from native artifacts to the birth of modern art. The three Bs brought home Apollo 13 and enabled Ford’s factories. We’ll show how imagination takes flight on the wings of these cognitive mechanisms. By applying this cognitive software to everything around us, we generate an ongoing tidal wave of novel worlds.

These mental operations are basic to the way we view and understand the world. Consider our memory: it’s not like a video recording, faithfully transcribing our experiences; instead, there are distortions, shorthand and blurring together. The inputs that go in aren’t the same ones that come out, which is why we can all witness the same car accident but recall it differently, or participate in the same conversation but have a different telling of it later. Human creativity emerges from this mechanism. We bend, break and blend everything we observe, and these tools allow us to extrapolate far from the reality around us. Humans are terrible at retaining precise, detailed information, but we have just the right design to create alternative worlds.

We’ve all seen models in which the brain is presented as a map with clear territories: this region does this while that region does that. But that model ignores the most important aspect of human brains: neurons connect promiscuously, such that no brain region works alone; instead, like a society, regions work in a constant hubbub of crosstalk and negotiation and cooperation. As we’ve seen, this widespread interaction is the neurological underpinning of human creativity. Even while particular skills can be restricted to local brain regions, creativity is a whole-brain experience: it arises from the sweeping collaboration of distant neural networks.¹⁴ As a result of this vast interconnectedness, human brains apply the three Bs to a wide range of our experiences. We constantly absorb our world, crunch it up, and release new versions.

Our versatility in applying these creative strategies is a great asset, because a mind-boggling variety can result from compounding a limited number of options. Think of what nature is able to make by rearranging DNA: plants and fish that live in the deepest recesses of the ocean, animals that graze and prowl on land, birds that soar through the sky, organisms that thrive in hot or cold climates, at high or low altitude, in rainforests or the desert – all created from different combinations of the same four nucleotides. Millions of species have come into being on our planet, from microscopic amoeba to building-size whales, all by reorganizing precedent. In the same way, our brains innovate thanks to a small repertoire of basic operations that alter and rearrange inputs. We take the raw materials of experience and then bend, break and blend them to create new outcomes. Set loose in the human brain, the three Bs provide an unending spring of new ideas and behaviors.

Other animals show signs of creativity, but humans are the standout performers. What makes us so? As we’ve seen, our brains interpose more neurons in areas between sensory input and motor output, allowing for more abstract concepts and more pathways through the circuitry. What’s more, our exceptional sociability compels humans to constantly interact and share ideas, with the result that everyone impregnates everyone else with their mental seeds. The miracle of human creativity is not that new ideas appear out of thin air, but that we devote so much brain real estate to developing them.

OVERT AND COVERT CREATIVITY

Your brain is running its creative software under the hood all the time. Every time you exaggerate, tell a lie, make a pun, create a new dish from leftovers, surprise your partner with a gift, plan a beach vacation or think about a relationship that might have been, you’re digesting and rebuilding memories and sensations that you’ve absorbed before.

As a result of human brains stampeding around the planet and running this software for millions of years, we are surrounded by creative output. Sometimes this refashioning of the world is easy to see – when, for example, a manufacturer proclaims a new model or you hear a remix of your favorite song. But more often, in the modern world, the ceaseless repurposing of inventions, ideas and experiences isn’t readily apparent.

Take YouTube. The site revolutionized how video was shared online. But it wasn’t easy to maintain that pole position. YouTube discovered early on that if they wanted to hold on to eyeballs, the videos had to stream without interruption. It’s no fun watching a video that stalls: when that happens, users click away.¹⁵ The emergence of high definition (HD) video aggravated the problem. HD files are large and require a lot of bandwidth to stream properly. If the bandwidth gets too narrow, the bytes get backed up and the video you’re watching freezes. Unfortunately, bandwidth fluctuates; that is under the control of your internet service provider, not YouTube. So the more users chose HD videos, the more their video experience was locking up. The company’s engineers faced a seemingly insurmountable difficulty. Without the ability to directly influence the bandwidth, how could they give their viewers reliable streaming?

Their solution was surprising and clever. YouTube videos are typically stored in three resolutions: high definition, standard and low. So the engineers devised software that broke the files of different resolutions into very short clips, like beads on a necklace. As video is being streamed to your computer, other software tracks the moment-to-moment fluctuations in bandwidth and feeds your computer the resolution that will make it through. What seems to you like an uninterrupted video is actually made up of thousands of tiny clips strung together. As long as there are enough high definition clips in your stream, you don’t notice that lower resolutions – pebbles among pearls – are mixed in. All you notice is that your service got better.

To improve HD streaming, YouTube engineers spliced and mixed the videos on hand, challenging the assumption that a high picture quality had to be one 100 percent HD. But here’s the rub: you cannot see the creativity that underlies the streaming. It is undetectable.

YouTube streaming is an example of covert creativity: it is designed not to call attention to itself. It is creativity with a poker face. Across business and industry, creativity is often shielded from view, because all that matters is that a tool does its job: the video streams properly, the app updates your traffic route, the smartwatch monitors how many stairs we’ve climbed. Innovation often conceals itself.¹⁶

Exterior of the Pompidou Center in Paris, France

Consider the buildings that surround us. In most, all the technology that makes them work is hidden behind walls: the air ducts, pipes, electrical wiring, support beams and so on. The Pompidou Center in Paris turns that architectural mold inside out. The functional and structural elements are displayed on the outer facade, for the world to see. When the design is exhibited on the surface rather than concealed, the creativity is overt.

Overt creativity exposes the wires and ducts of invention; it enables us to see the internal mental processes that make innovation possible.

Across diverse cultures, the most bountiful sources of overt creativity are found in the arts. Because the arts are intended to be exhibited, they are the open-source software of innovation. Take Christian Marclay’s installation The Clock: in this twenty-four-hour-long video montage, each minute of the day is represented by scenes from movies in which that exact time appears on screen. At precisely 2:18 p.m., Denzel Washington is glancing at a clock that reads 2:18 in the thriller The Taking of Pelham 123. Over the course of the installation’s twenty-four-hour cycle, thousands of clips from films such as Body Heat, Moonraker, The Godfather, A Nightmare on Elm Street and High Noon are screened, incorporating a dizzying array of timepieces – including pocket watches, wristwatches, alarm clocks, punch clocks, grandfather clocks, and clock towers – in analog and digital, in black-and-white and color.¹⁷

What Marclay is doing is not dissimilar from the YouTube engineers: he splices existing footage into short clips and stitches them together. But while the engineers’ creativity remains hidden, Marclay enables us to observe the bones of the creative process. We can see that he has broken and blended films to make his timepiece of movies. In contrast to the YouTube engineers, he puts his dicing on display.

For tens of thousands of years, the arts have been a constant in human culture, giving us an abundance of overt creativity. In the same way that a brain scan enables us to see the brain at work, the arts allow us to study the anatomy of the creative process. So how can putting the arts and sciences side by side enable us to better understand the birth of new ideas? What does free-verse poetry have to do with the invention of DNA sequencing and digital music? How is the Sphinx related to self-repairing cement? What does hip-hop music show us about Google Translate?

For answers, we now turn to each of the three Bs.