A More Beautiful Question (17 page)

While many recombinations are not particularly “smart,” the ones that stand out take preexisting elements and remix them to form something original, surprising, interesting, and useful. That seems to happen when we combine ideas or influences that, on the surface, have no logical or natural connection—yet, once combined, form something powerful.

David Kord Murray, a former rocket scientist
⁴²
who worked on projects for NASA and later became the head of innovation at Intuit, made a study of connective creativity in his book
Borrowing Brilliance
. According to Murray, “The nature of innovation [is that] we build new ideas out of existing ideas.” Murray cites Einstein, Walt Disney, George Lucas, and Steve Jobs as prime examples of innovators who “defined problems, borrowed ideas, and then made new combinations.” They did it, Murray says, by combining things that didn’t seem to go together and by borrowing ideas “from faraway places.”

Innovators who are good at connecting are inclined to take something they’re working on—say, Walt Disney’s planning a new amusement park—and begin to think analogously:
What if this amusement park could be like a movie, brought to life?
“In doing this,” Murray explains, “Disney takes his original subject, an amusement park, and lays a metaphor on top of it and begins to see the whole thing through that ‘movie’ metaphor—so he creates it with storyboards, and the employees become cast members, and so on.” Creating theme parks now seems like an obvious combination—but it was a fresh, surprising, and compelling mixture when Disney introduced it.

If, as Murray notes, the most creative ideas result from “long distance” connections (bringing together ideas that seem unrelated and far apart), then that means the most promising connective inquiries do not merely ask,
What if we combine A and B?
, but rather,
What if we combine A and Z?
(Or better yet,
A and 26?
) To forge those illogical connections, Murray advises, “You must quiet the logical mind.” This is confirmed by the latest neurological research, which suggests that the human brain is a connective-inquiry machine that never sleeps. It is constantly sorting through seemingly unrelated bits and pieces and inquiring,
What if I put this together with that?

What if your brain is a forest, thick with trees? (And what if the branches touch?)

When we entertain challenging questions—
Why does X have to be the way it is? What if I try to think of a different way of doing it?
—it’s a form of divergent thinking,
⁴³
and it triggers some interesting activity in the brain, says Dr. Ken Heilman, professor of neurology at the University of Florida’s College of Medicine.

To get a picture of what’s going on, Heilman says, start by thinking of the brain as a forest full of trees. “Think of a neuron, or a nerve cell, as one of those trees,” he says. In this analogy, the cell body forms the tree trunk; there are major branches, known as axons, and smaller branches, dendrites, that extend out to the farthest reaches. “In the brain, some of those trees are closer together than others, and the branches communicate with each other.” As this happens, “neural connections” are formed, which can produce new thoughts, ideas, and insights.

Not all connections are equal, in terms of yielding creative insights. More obvious mental connections and associations
⁴⁴
—as when we associate a table and a chair—are more commonplace and tend to occur in the brain’s left hemisphere, notes the neurology professor John Kounios of Drexel University. But remote associations—“like when we think of ‘table’ and the idea of ‘under the table’”—require more of a neural reach. The brain’s right hemisphere, made up of cells with longer branches, is better suited for this task.

Heilman, Kounios, and others have found that mental breakthroughs, the big insights that can solve problems or come up with highly creative new ideas, often involve those remote connections that happen in the right hemisphere. We arrive at originality because the dendrites have reached out and made contact with the branches of faraway “trees,” thereby enabling us to combine thoughts, bits of knowledge, and influences that normally do not mix.

Just asking Why and What If will not necessarily cause these neural connections to occur—but questioning can help nourish the trees and extend the reach of those branches. Chen-Bo Zhong, a professor at the
⁴⁵
University of Toronto’s Rotman School, has done extensive research on connective or associative thinking—why it can produce insights and creative ideas, what encourages the brain to engage in this type of thinking, and so forth. Zhong’s research has found that we can’t necessarily control the brain’s search for remote connections—much of which happens in the unconscious mind—but we can provide impetus and help guide that search by focusing on a problem to be solved, a challenging question to be answered. “Having that goal or that question you’re working on is very important,” Zhong confirms. If your conscious mind puts a big question out there, chances are good that your unconscious mind will go to work on it.

What if dots and dashes could sort the world?
⁴⁶

In 1948, a Philadelphia supermarket executive visited Drexel University’s campus to see if students could develop an efficient means of encoding product data. As the
New York Times
recounts, two grad students tried but were stymied at first. Then one of them spent the winter at his grandparents’ place in Miami Beach, thinking about the challenge. To represent information visually, he realized he would need a code. Being a former Boy Scout, Joseph Woodland wondered,
What if Morse code, with its elegant simplicity and limitless combinatorial potential, could be adapted graphically?
That connective inquiry took on life at the beach when he raked his fingers through the sand and had the revelation that wide lines and narrow lines could work instead of dots and dashes. Woodland and his fellow student developed and patented the idea, which eventually led to creation of the bar code.

Moreover, if you have a curious mind—and if you actively ask questions and gather knowledge to sate that curiosity—this also can aid in connective inquiry by providing “a plethora of raw materials to be connected,” as Zhong puts it. In particular, if your curiosity has been focused on a particular problem, and you’ve been doing deep thinking, contextual inquiry, questioning the problem from various perspectives and angles, asking your multiple Whys—it all becomes fodder for later insights and smart recombinations.

So even though it can initially be beneficial to approach a problem with a beginner’s mind, as you progress to imagining What If solutions, it’s useful to have some acquired knowledge on the problem—preferably gathered from diverse viewpoints. It also helps to have a wide base of knowledge on all sorts of things that might seem to be unrelated to the problem—the more eclectic your storehouse of information, the more possibilities for unexpected connections. (Heilman points out that people who are well read and well traveled, those who have diverse interests and a broad liberal arts education, are developing “a whole series of different modules that can enable more connectivity and more creativity.”)

That storehouse of eclectic knowledge can help you begin to brainstorm What If ideas; and various exercises can help you do that. But before undertaking conscious efforts to spark connective inquiry, bear in mind that it seems to thrive when we’re distracted or even unconscious. So the best thing may be to take your question for a walk. Or take it to the museum. Or, if you’re feeling lucky, take it to bed.

What if you sleep with a question?

(Will you wake with an answer?)

Long before he delved deep into the forest of neuron trees and their dendrite branches, Dr. Heilman, while still a student, made a firsthand discovery about creativity and brain function. “When I used to take tests in college, I would be very anxious,” he told me. “So I came up with a process whereby I would always answer the more obvious questions first. Then, as my anxiety would lessen, I’d start to answer more of the questions that required real thinking.”

Heilman didn’t know it at the time, but his approach made sense for a biological and chemical reason. When you’re anxious, he learned later in his professional research, your brain tends to be less creative and imaginative. “You want to attend to the outside world, not the inside,” he said. “And you’re trying to get to answers that are the simplest. But when you’re relaxed, you go the other way—you’re able to go to the inside world.” In the more relaxed state, neural networks open up and connections of all kinds form more freely.

For a questioner, it’s important to spend time with challenging questions instead of trying to answer them right away. By “living with” a question, thinking about it and then stepping away from it, allowing it to marinate, you give your brain a chance to come up with the kinds of fresh insights and What If possibilities that can lead to breakthroughs.

A growing body of research, including Zhong’s studies, finds that people often come up with more novel ideas or solutions when they’re relaxed or distracted—in what Zhong calls a state of inattention. This prompted Zhong to ask,
“Should artists or scientists simply engage in daydreaming to produce groundbreaking discoveries or trailblazing creations?”

Obviously, as Zhong acknowledges, daydreaming alone is not the answer. More likely, it can help in the in-between stages of creative problem solving. Zhong theorizes that it may be best to move back and forth between focused attention and inattention. As an example of this, consider the teenager Jack Andraka as he came up with his idea for an innovative cancer-screening test.

Andraka first became focused on early cancer detection after a family friend died from pancreatic cancer. He did some research and learned that a hundred people a day were dying from that same disease—and that many people were not even finding out they had it until it was too late. Given the scope of the problem and the importance of early detection in potentially saving lives, Andraka wondered,
Why isn’t there a fast, inexpensive test for pancreatic cancer?

Andraka was not a trained scientist, but he was a serious buff who devoured science journals. He understood, early on, that a better screening test would probably require combining ideas from different branches of science—and Andraka was well suited for this task because he was constantly connecting bits of information picked up in one place to something discovered in another place.

“What I do is, I’ll pick up, for example, the
Cancer Journal
and then I’ll pick up a physics article and then some random chemistry article, and I’ll read them all,” Andraka told me. At some point after doing all of his research, Andraka says, “I’ll just relax on the couch or walk around and do a lot of thinking:
What if I combine these different ideas to solve this one problem?
I just let it incubate and see if I can connect these different ideas somehow.”

As Andraka was doing his culling, connecting, and occasional “chilling on the couch,” he began making connections with carbon nanotubes—he had been learning about them in various articles. He was fascinated to discover that “carbon nanotubes have this one property that, when you pull them apart, they change their electrical properties. There’s an antibody that grows inside when you attach a protein module to it.” This led Andraka to his big What If question (which was a mouthful):
“
What if I exposed a single-wall carbon nanotube with an antibody to a protein overexposed in pancreatic cancer?
”

His epiphany was not quite an aha moment; it was a hypothetical question, albeit a promising one, with, he figured, “about a fifty-fifty chance of being right.” Then, as he started doing more research into antibodies and their properties, “everything was matching up and my confidence was growing. Of course, my parents thought I was crazy.” He then checked with his brother, a chemist. “I said to him, ‘Hey, does this sound right?,’ and he said, ‘Oh, no, that would never work!’”

Andraka then e-mailed two hundred professors, and one was interested enough to give him access to a lab. That’s when Andraka had to figure out,
How am I going to make this thing real . . . and affordable . . . and reliable?
Those answers didn’t come easily, but he developed (at age fifteen, mind you) a paper sensor that detected cancer a hundred times faster than anything on the market, with four hundred times the sensitivity. It was also twenty-six thousand times less expensive than current tests . . . and 100 percent accurate. Andraka’s innovation earned him an international science fair award and an invitation to be a special guest at President Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address.

Hearing Andraka describe his thought process—including closing his eyes and allowing all those various bits of information he’d absorbed to coalesce—reminded me of something Google’s scientist-in-residence Ray Kurzweil
⁴⁷
revealed in an interview. He said that when he is working on a difficult problem, he sets aside time, right before going to bed, to review all the pertinent issues and challenges. Then he goes to sleep and allows his unconscious mind to go to work.