Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (6 page)

The brain is fundamentally a lazy piece of meat. It doesn’t like to waste energy. This is not too surprising given that all animals must conserve energy, so the brain, like every other organ, has evolved to be as efficient as possible for what it does. There’s a myth that we only use 10 or 15 percent of our brains. Although only a fraction of the brain is active at any moment in time, the real truth is that we use all of our brains—just not all at the same time. At any instant, a battle wages between the different parts of the brain. Each piece of the brain serves its own particular set of functions, but in order to carry out these functions, it needs energy. The parts of the brain that accomplish their tasks with the least amount of energy carry the moment. The neuro-scientist Gerald Edelman, called this
neural Darwinism
, meaning that the brain has evolved, and continues to evolve, by principles of resource competition and adaptation.
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Energy is precious; so efficiency reigns above all else.

The efficiency principle has major ramifications for the visual system. It means the brain takes shortcuts whenever it can. In the last chapter, we saw how one shortcut, categorization, streamlines visual perception. In this chapter, we will take a closer look at where these categories come from and how iconoclasts break out of them. Novelty will play a key role.

Another side effect of the efficiency principle is that the brain uses circuits like the visual system for multiple purposes. Visual creativity—imagination—utilizes the same systems in the brain as vision itself.
Imagination comes from the visual system
. Iconoclasm goes hand in
hand with imagination. Before one can muster the strength to tear down conventional thinking, one must first imagine the possibility that conventional thinking is wrong. But even this is not enough. The iconoclast goes further and imagines alternative possibilities. But imagination is a fickle process, and most iconoclasts have good days, when the ideas flow freely, and bad days, when their thinking is stale and cliché. The good days hold nuggets of insight into the imaginative process, and in this chapter, I will examine the conditions in the brain that foster imagination and creativity. This is the story of the search for the holy grail of creativity, an almost childlike imagination and willful abandonment to dream crazy thoughts.

Perhaps it is a result of the way we are educated, or perhaps it is simply a reflection of the biological maturation of our brains, but creativity seems to become more difficult for many people as they get older. The efficiency principle, coupled with the consolidation of large amounts of information and experience as we get older, means that the brain needs to categorize. And yet, imagination stems from the ability to break this categorization, to see things not for what one thinks they are, but for what they might be.

Walt Disney—The Iconoclast of Animation

One of the greatest innovators of the entertainment industry, Walt Disney, was also an iconoclast because he did something that nobody thought could be done. He changed the animated cartoon from being a movie trailer to a main feature. Disney had always been interested in drawing as a child, and Disney became a competent, if enthusiastic, illustrator while he was stationed in France at the end of World War I. He drew sketches for the canteen menu featuring a doughboy character he had invented. He also developed a small business selling caricatures of his fellow soldiers to send back to their families.
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After returning home to Kansas City, Disney began earning money by drawing advertisements
and letterheads. He was a decent illustrator, but because he was so gung ho about drawing, his reputation as a hard worker grew, and business owners liked him. In short order, the Kansas City Slide Company, which produced promotional slides shown in movie theaters, hired the nineteen-year-old to illustrate its ads.

Disney was clearly taken with the idea of combining drawing with movie technology. Disney wasn’t working on movies per se, but his work, even though it still consisted of single cartoons, was being projected onto a big screen. These visual images, cartoons that would normally be viewed on a piece of paper, now appeared larger than life. These images had a profound effect on Disney’s visual perception. The exposure to film technology gripped Disney’s imagination. What if he could turn his cartoons into a movie? In his free time, he set up his own studio in a garage his father had built, even paying him $5 a month for rent. With his earnings as an illustrator, Disney bought an overhead camera stand and some studio lights. He borrowed a glass negative camera and began experimenting with taking pictures of his drawings. Nobody seemed to notice at the time, but Disney’s photographic experiments changed his visual perception of his drawings, and even his perception of himself, to the point that he quickly saw himself not as an illustrator, but as an animator.

Disney did not invent animation, but he took it further than anyone thought possible. When he got into the business, animations were only used for the advertisements before the main feature. Disney became an iconoclast when he decided to make his animation the main feature. What is interesting about Disney’s story is that although he had drawn since he was a child, the accomplishments that he is best known for had their origin in a change in visual perception. Disney didn’t wake up one day suddenly thinking he was going to create animated feature-length films. The ability to imagine this possibility first required a novel visual stimulus in the form of seeing a static cartoon projected on a movie theater screen. These images changed Disney’s categorization of drawing
from one of static cartoons to that of moving ones—drawings that told stories in a narrative sense.

The Evolution of Perception

Disney’s epiphany had its roots in a perceptual shift, and this change in perception opened the floodgates of his imagination. Perception and imagination are closely linked because the brain uses the same systems for both functions. You can think of imagination as nothing more than running the perceptual machinery in reverse. The reason that it is so difficult to imagine truly novel ideas has to do with how the perceptual system interprets visual signals from the eyes. Whatever limits the brain places on perception naturally limit the imagination. So let’s take a closer look at how the perceptual system works.

For over one hundred years, the predominant view of how the brain constructs a mental image has been one of progressively higher-order feature extraction. Indeed, when we follow the flow of visual information through the brain, whether it is through the high road or the low road, we see a gradual transition from local processing based on the retinal grid to global processing where objects and their locations are extracted. The traditional view of this process has been one of progressively greater integration of lower-level features in a sort of pyramid approach vision. Experience was thought to play only a small role in this process. Recent advances in neuroscience, however, have shown just how big a role experience plays in perception.

Dale Purves, a neuroscientist at Duke University, has been the most vocal proponent of what can be termed an evolutionary approach to perception. As Purves points out, the images that strike your retina do not, by themselves, tell you with certainty what you are seeing. As we saw in the last chapter, there are at least two interpretations of the Kanizsa triangle: floating triangle or Pac-Man attack. The historical, bottom-up theory of visual perception would say that you see a triangle
because of local interactions of contrast edges in the figure. Purves offers a different explanation: you see a triangle because that is the most likely explanation for what your eyes are transmitting. Purves believes that visual perception is largely a result of statistical expectations. Perception is the brain’s way of interpreting ambiguous visual signals in the most likely explanation possible, and the likelihood of these explanations is a direct result of past experience.
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This is a radical theory of perception that has major implications for thinking like an iconoclast. If you have never played
Pac-Man
, then the preceding paragraph will make no sense because you will surely see a triangle floating above the background, and so the Pac-Man interpretation will not even enter your consciousness, and you’ll have no possibility of perceiving an army of hungry little Atari creatures.

Consider this famous illusion, shown in figure 2-1, devised in 1913 by the Italian psychologist Mario Ponzo. In the illusion, the upper horizontal line is perceived to be longer than the lower one, even though both are actually the same length. The bottom-up theory of perception says this occurs because the lower line has more empty space on either side, which the brain interprets as shorter. The evolutionary theory says that the difference in perceived line lengths comes from your past experience. In the real world, lines that converge toward each other at the top generally mean that the lines are parallel but are receding into the distance. Railroad tracks, roads, and skyscrapers (viewed from street level) all look like this. These views are so commonplace that your brain has become accustomed to transforming lines that look like pyramids into their parallel equivalents. In the Ponzo illusion, this transformation drags along the upper line so that your brain thinks that it is bigger than the lower one. If this were a sketch of a skyscraper, then you would naturally come to the conclusion that the upper line is longer because it stretches close to the edges of the building, while the lower one does not. To prove this, turn the figure upside down. In the real world, you almost never see lines that converge toward each other at the bottom
and certainly not lines that recede into the distance. The illusion that the upper and lower lines are different lengths disappears.

If experience plays such a profound role in shaping our perceptions, then it should be possible to test this theory by giving people controlled experiences and seeing how their perceptions change. In a recent neu-roimaging experiment, neuroscientists at Georgetown University did exactly this.
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Instead of converging lines, the researchers presented subjects with pictures of fictitious cars that they had generated on a computer. The cars were designed along a continuum such that at one end of the continuum, the car was deemed type A, while at the other end of the continuum, it was type B. Using computer morphing, the researchers were able to generate versions of the car that were intermediate between A and B. The researchers used functional MRI (fMRI) to measure neural activity while they presented the various versions of the car to their subjects. Following the initial scanning, the researchers trained their subjects, through trial and error, to differentiate type A from type B cars. They then rescanned their brains’ responses to the cars, looking specifically for parts of the brain that changed their firing pattern after training. Because of the efficiency principle, they knew to
look for regions that had a decreased response to the cars. A decreased response on repeated viewings meant that a particular part of the brain had adapted to that type of information and served as a fingerprint for neural processing along a particular cognitive dimension.

FIGURE 2-1

The Ponzo illusion

The researchers found that a specific part of the brain’s visual system called the lateral occipital (LO) area differentiated the types of cars after training but not before. The LO area is located in the earliest part of the low road. What was interesting was that after training, the LO area had higher activity when two cars of different categories were presented, compared to when two cars of the same category were presented. Before training, the LO area displayed no such changes in activity.

These results are important because they demonstrate two principles. First, the way we perceive something, which is a function of the low road, depends on the way in which we categorize objects. Without categories, we do not have the ability to see features that differentiate objects. In other words, we cannot see that which we don’t know to look for. Second, the ability to see these subtle differences depends on experience. And this means that perception can be changed through experience.

Florence Nightingale and the Perception of Death

Take the horrors of war. The usual perception, fueled by images of bodies mangled by bombs, is that casualties occur from war injuries. That has been the perception for millennia. But until the last century, the reality has been that most soldiers did not die from their wounds. They died from disease. Not until Florence Nightingale came on the scene in the 1850s did this perception change. Her name is synonymous with the art and science of nursing. Also an iconoclastic feminist, she transformed the image of the nurse from a woman of low social status to a professional with technical contributions on a par with doctors of the
era. And, to top it off, she was no less a pathbreaker in the emerging field of mathematical statistics. Nightingale was an iconoclast three times over.