Great quote yesterday on the New York Times website (www.nytimes.com)
“It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control. Some problems in the world are not bullet-izable.” – American Army Brigadier General H. R. McMaster on the growing use of PowerPoint presentations among military commanders.
This from my new book, the responses of 999 people to the question: “Where and when do you do your best thinking?
The Top Ten most frequent answers (ranked 1-10 in descending order)
1. When I’m alone
2. Last thing at night/in bed
3. In the shower
4. First thing in the morning
5. In the car /driving
6. When I’m reading a book/newspaper/magazine
7. In the bath
8. Outside
9. Anywhere
10. When I’m jogging/running
OK all you egg heads out there. What’s wrong with this list?
Ten ways that our minds are currently different to our machines
1. The basis of human intelligence is experience and is based on sensory awareness of information coming in as well as our response to it. It might be tempting to think that a computer can take the place of an expert but it depends on the type of problem at hand. Computers are great at solving low-freedom, rule-based problems, such as credit scoring or medical diagnosis. Experts can out perform computers when given high freedom, rules-based problems, such as innovation, strategy formulation, and troubleshooting.
2. Machines cannot think about their own thinking — they are not self-aware or free. For instance, machines can solve some man-made problems but they cannot create problems or go beyond the rules or make connections between thoughts the way people do.
3.Human beings possess generalised intelligence — machines are programmed for specific tasks. The chance of seeing a generalised intelligence residing in a machine is low in the foreseeable future.
4. A machine lacks true senses — it can ‘know’ it is cold, but it cannot ‘feel’ cold. Thus machines cannot currently display any true level of empathy and cannot use their feelings to create artistic works or social policy.
5. Machines do not have empathy or morality and they cannot feel love, joy, hate or any other emotion. In some instances this may be highly beneficial but in others the idea of amoral machines it a cause of great concern.
6. Electronic devices are not capable of creativity, intuition or imagination.
7. People currently have mental privacy, but the workings of machines are transparent. Transparency is good in many levels but too much transparency could be harmful. Expect mental privacy to become a major battleground.
8. We can download information into a machine, but not yet into the human brain.
9. Machines do not possess a subconscious mind, yet this, more than the conscious mind, may be the basis of most human thought and behaviour.
10. The human brain has evolved over thousands of years so it is highly resilient and adaptive to changing circumstances.
Research by BMRB for the East of England Development Agency says that our brains are at their most creative when they’re not in the office or working on a specific problem. 23% of men and 37% of women have their best ideas in bed compared to 17% and 6% at work respectively. Other favourite places include outside (19% and 18%), in the bath or shower (10% and 15%) and in the car (14% and 9%). This research is broadly similar to other research carried out a few years ago by the Roffey Park Management Institute but also highlights the differences between men and women.
Have you ever wondered why depression is commonly associated with creative genius? According to Paul Wolf, a clinical pathologist at the University of California. Einstein, Van Gogh, Cézanne, Ravel, Goya, Michelangelo and Warhol all suffered from diseases that are now thought to have contributed to their greatness. Melancholy, in particular, seems to be common amongst great sculptors, painters, writers and composers and Asperger’s syndrome has been linked with extreme perseverance, perfectionism and a disregard for the opinions of one’s peers — exactly the behaviour one needs to create masterpieces that defy prevailing logic or make no immediate or logical sense to the outside world.
The idea of artistic genius being related to madness goes back centuries but recent discoveries in neuroscience are beginning to explain why this might be the case. Ravel wasn’t mad in today’s terms but he was almost certainly suffering from Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD) when he composed ‘Bolero’ at the age of 53. FTD is a disease whereby the frontal lobe of the brain, and possibly the temporal lobe of the brain, shrinks. The brain is made up of various areas and networks, which control or inhibit other areas, so when one area or circuit is damaged other areas or circuits can come to the fore. Indeed, when certain circuits are injured or damaged beyond repair the result can be a re-wiring of the brain whereby other brain functions become stronger. A parallel here, perhaps, is blindness. If sight is removed other senses such as smell or hearing can become stronger, so perhaps release of artistic talent is in some way dependent in some people on the loss of one or more of the senses, which is in turn related in some way to the release of inhibitions. I have no experience of this but from a purely personal standpoint I do seem to be able to think better when I remove certain stimuli and it is perhaps no accident that some people close their eyes when they are thinking because this taps into certain parts of their brains.
In Ravel’s case brain disease meant that he had difficulty writing musical scores and there are examples of other artists that either lose the urge or the skill to paint or to compose when the right side of the posterior brain is damaged. Conversely, there are examples where severe brain damage is a catalyst for creativity. One such case involved a scientist called Dr Anne Adams who suffered from a condition identical to that of Ravel. In her late middle age Dr Adams gave up science and began painting. And at the age of 53 she started to paint the Bolero.
Now I’m obviously not saying that organisations should go in search of employees with bi-polar disorder, autism or dyslexia but I am saying that as societies we should be less negative about some of these conditions because as well as pain they can bring forth great things. The general point here is that individuals and organisations put too much emphasis on finding the right sort of person and discount anyone that does not fit their mental model of what an ideal
Offices have historically been thought of as places for clerical work and therefore the focus has been on the efficiency of the physical space. In other words, if what an employee is doing is mindlessly repetitive then physical comfort is important. However, if you pay people to create ground breaking insights, discoveries and inventions then surely there is an opportunity here? Surely employers should be spending a bit more time thinking about how people react to physical spaces and what makes people alert and mentally productive?
According to Jeffrey Pfeffer, a Professor of organisational behaviour at Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, construction costs represent a mere 2% of costs for a building over a 30-year operating period. Operating expenses come to another 6% but a whopping 92% of costs over this period come from people. Surely some deeper thought, and a bit more expenditure, on getting peoples’ heads in the right mental spaces might pay dividends?
Interesting article in the Nikkei Weekly (Japan) about a University of Tokyo Professor, Toru Nishigaki, who claims that the collapse of Lehman Brothers can be attributed to an over reliance of logical left brain thinking. In other words, we have created a society that puts too much trust in computers and mathematical models over and above human intuition and experience.
To quote the Prof: “We are excited about the digital age that has just begun :but we haven’t learned how to deal with IT. Since the digital left-brain field has expanded rapidly, the right-brain field has been neglected, and various problems have arisen.”
I couldn’t agree more. Moreover, I think this over-reliance on machines and machine-like thinking is going to cause even more problems in the future (e.g Flight safety critical software). The other thing that he says, which I personally find fascinating, is that it is only really the right side of the brain that has the ability to connect with things that bring about true happiness.
PS – Possible linkage here with Susan Greenfield who said that the GFC was partly caused by sensation seeking young men who failed to appreciate real risk due to a diet of screen based entertainment in which a re-set button could always be used (i.e. the link being the digital era causing unforeseen problems).
I’ve been reading something in a newspaper about Edward de Bono, who is suggesting that schools should teach children how to think. I agree but with a few additions.
We need to rebalance how people are taught to think and recognise that new ideas respond best to certain kinds of tools and environments. This means that we need to relax a bit and build flexibility into whatever systems we use. It also means that diverse inputs should be valued and that serendipitous situations should be encouraged. Education clearly has a fundamental role to play with this but we shouldn’t forget that education is only one part of the puzzle. Schools should teach children (and their parents) that formal education is important, but it is less critical than many people realise. The family unit is far more important. At least that used to be the case.
Parental influence is waning these days, partly because the family unit is less fixed than it used to be (i.e. families are more likely to split up) but also because parents now have to compete with a host of other influencing factors. This has obviously always included peer groups but it also now includes things such as mobile phones and websites that compete for finite attention and potentially drain the brain of concentration.
The old adage that you become like those you are with would seem to hold true for technology and architecture. We instinctively know this but we somehow ignore it. We know, for instance, that landscapes, music, art and so on influence how we think but the effects are so subtle that in most instances we are oblivious to it. We therefore continue to build and inhabit spaces that appear superficially efficient without stopping to think deeply about what these places are doing to our minds. We hear demands from employers for ‘out of the box’ thinking aimed squarely at employees that are themselves placed inside row upon row of identical cubicles.
If you have a problem to solve you should think about it right? Not necessarily.The conscious human mind has a very limited processing capacity. The traditional solution to this problem is to limit incoming information to only the most relevant data. It is also conventional wisdom that the longer you think about something the better your response. However, a recent experiment found quite the opposite. The more that people thought about something the more inclined they were to assemble irrelevant information and the less accurate their predictions became as a result. The implication is obviously that we should think about things less, either meaning that we should rely more on instant feelings and intuition or else defer to our unconscious mind. In other words sleep on it.
The power of intuition is of course nothing new. The question here though is whether extensive unconscious thought can make our intuition more reliable. It’s still early days (and nights) but the initial research seems to be saying yes. So what’s the takeaway here? Simply that we should use our conscious mind to collect data but then not think about it. We should allow our unconscious mind to digest the information and then follow our gut feeling.
Here’s a great example of the power of small ideas/customer service. I was in the Asiana lounge in Icheon (Seoul) airport the other day and picked up a copy of the Financial Times. Not only were the pages stapled together (to stop the pages falling out) but they had placed small bits of tape over the staples to prevent scratches. Imagine stopping to think about these kinds of detail? I ‘m tempted to say “only in Asia!” but maybe that’s a generalisation. A saw something similar in the JAL lounge in Narita airport once too.
On the subject of quality thinking please keep your suggestions coming in about “where and when you do your best thinking?” I suspect there are differences by age, sex and profession so a little detail on these areas really helps too.