The Innovation Factor: Your Brain on Innovation
Want to know what makes a creative genius tick? Neuroscience gives us some clues.
Published September 2002
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COMMENT ON THIS ARTICLEInnovation: Part II
You're giving a presentation to your board of directors, and your pants fall down. Mortified, you hightail it out of the room, only to fall on your face, trousers in a tourniquet around your ankles. As you lie splattered on the carpet, something clicks: You can fly out of there! You take wing, exiting through a chimney that materializes out of thin air.
That is, of course, the stuff that dreams are made of. Freud could have had a field day with the symbols: Naked. Flying. A chimney. But does it have anything to do with innovation?
Quintessential innovator Ray Kurzweil thinks so. For 37 of his 54 years, Kurzweil, who's founded nine companies, has been inventing revolutionary products, among them a print-to-speech reading machine for the blind and a music synthesizer capable of re-creating the sounds of orchestral instruments. For the past 20 years, he's been quite literally dreaming up the solutions to his creative dilemmas in the dead of night.
Every evening before bed, Kurzweil plucks out a vexing problem -- perhaps a business strategy, a technical conundrum, or even an interpersonal issue. First he posits the characteristics of a potential solution. Take, for example, the extraskeletal walking system for paraplegics that he's considering developing. He wants it to be simple enough for a user to put on without help. Lying in bed, Kurzweil begins to fantasize about such a system, sometimes imagining that he's giving a speech about how he reached his conclusions. "This has the purpose of seeding your subconscious to influence your dreams," he says. Then he drifts off to sleep.
All night, snippets of the solution filter in and out of his dreams. At the first glimmer of consciousness, Kurzweil returns to the problem. It is then, during the brief quasi-conscious state known as "lucid dreaming," that he merges the logic of his conscious thought with the relaxation of inhibition engendered by his dreams to arrive at many of his most startling insights. "The most interesting thing about dreams is that you don't consider it unusual when unusual things happen, like a room floating away," says Kurzweil. "You accept this lack of logic. And that [irrational] faculty is needed for creative thinking. But you also need to be able to apply a critical faculty, because not every idea that's different and out of the box will work."
Kurzweil has plenty of proof that the method works. Lucid dreaming helped him visualize a new stock-predictor system and nearly verbatim sections of his latest book, The Age of Spiritual Machines. Which makes one wonder: What is occurring in his brain during that half hour of luminously creative thinking? What is the look of Ray Kurzweil's -- or any innovator's -- brain during innovation? And are the brains of innovative individuals structurally or functionally different from other people's -- that is, are they larger than average, do their synapses operate differently, or is their wiring denser or perhaps more sparse but faster?
"What you're really doing in the process of creating is choosing one thing over another, not necessarily because it is factually more positive but because it attracts you more. Emotion is literally the alarm that permits the detection."
The 21st century may be the golden age of neuroscience. But when it comes to understanding precisely how creativity works in the brain -- and whether an innovator's brain is indeed different from yours and mine -- the experts still have to rely more on conjecture than on fact. Yes, it's known that most higher brain functions (such as perception, memory, and intelligence) are centered in the cerebral cortex, that 0.1-inch-thick infolding of neuron-rich gray matter overlaying both the right and the left hemispheres that would cover some 1.5 square feet if it were laid out like a tablecloth. And it's accepted that the neurons in the gray matter -- as in other, more subterranean sections of the brain -- use branchlike projections called dendrites and axons to transmit information to one another across the gaps, or synapses, that separate them. The information -- instructions, say, to store memories -- is transferred along the daisy chains of neurons by chemicals called neurotransmitters, forming charged networks, or circuits, in the process. (The average brain has 100 billion to 1,000 billion neurons, each of which makes 100 to 10,000 connections with other neurons.)
The brain has a remarkable ability to create new circuits, a phenomenon known as plasticity. That capacity for regeneration means that the cerebral wiring for our own store of knowledge and memories, which grows as we do, is as unique as a thumbprint. It also means that if one chunk of gray matter is destroyed by, say, a stroke, new circuits may be laid in another location to compensate, essentially rewiring a person's store of knowledge and memories.
