Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer Read Free Book Online Page A

ve-billion-dollar-a-year platform that allows Internet publishers to run Google ads on their sites. Marissa Mayer, Google’s VP of search products and user experience, estimates that at least 50 percent of new Google products begin as Innovation Time Off speculations.)  “It’s a little amusing that people think Google invented this idea,” Wendling says. “We’ve been doing it here forever. At first, people thought we were crazy. They said employees need to be managed. They said the scientists would just waste their free time, that we’d be squandering all our R and D money. But here’s the thing about the fifteen percent rule: it works.”
    The science of insight supports the 3M attention policy. Joydeep Bhattacharya, a psychologist at Goldsmiths, University of London, has used EEG to help explain why interrupting one’s focus — perhaps with a walk outside or a game of Ping-Pong — can be so helpful. Interestingly, Bhattacharya has found that it’s possible to predict that a person will solve an insight puzzle up to eight seconds before the insight actually arrives. “I never expected that we’d find such a remote precursor,” he says. “It seems really strange that I can anticipate someone else’s moment of insight before they are even aware of the answer. But that’s what we found.” What is this predictive brain signal? The essential element is a steady rhythm of alpha waves emanating from the right hemisphere. While the precise function of alpha waves remains mysterious, they’re closely associated with relaxing activities, such as taking a warm shower. In fact, alpha waves are so crucial for insight that, according to Bhattacharya, subjects with insufficient alpha-wave activity are unable to utilize hints provided by the researchers. “I can give these people really obvious clues, but it still won’t help,” he says. “They will never get it.” One of Bhattacharya’s favorite insight puzzles goes like this: A man has mar-ried twenty women in a small town. All of the women are still alive and none of them are divorced. The man has broken no laws. Who is the man? Bhattacharya will let people struggle for up to three minutes before he starts giving them hints. He’ll suggest possible analogies and fill his sentences with thinly veiled references to religion. However, unless the subjects are thinking in the exact right way — unless those alpha waves are visible on the EEG monitor — they will never have the insight: the man is a priest.
    Why is a relaxed state of mind so important for creative insights? When our minds are at ease — when those alpha waves are rippling through the brain — we’re more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inward, toward that stream of remote associations emanating from the right hemisphere. In contrast, when we are diligently focused, our attention tends to be directed outward, toward the details of the problems we’re trying to solve. While this pattern of attention is necessary when solving problems an-alytically, it actually prevents us from detecting the connections that lead to insights. “That’s why so many insights happen during warm showers,” Bhattacharya says. “For many people, it’s the most relaxing part of the day.” It’s not until we’re being massaged by warm water, unable to check our e-mail, that we’re finally able to hear the quiet voices in the backs of our heads telling us about the insight. The answers have been there all along — we just weren’t listening.
    This also helps explain the power of a positive mood. German researchers have found that when people are happy, they are much better at guessing whether or not different words share a remote associate. Even when the subjects in the German study did not find the answer — they were forced to guess after looking at words for less than two seconds — those in a positive mood were able to accurately intuit the possibility of an insight. In contrast, those