How to Be More Creative

It's happened to all of us: We're in the shower, or on a walk, and boom — a big idea or a brilliant solution appears out of nowhere. These sorts of insights often seem to arise without explanation. But researchers increasingly find there is a science to cultivating creativity. This week, social psychologist Sheena Iyengar shares research and case studies of innovation, and discusses what these examples tell us about the alchemy of creative breakthroughs.

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  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

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  Otto Lilienthal was a 19th century design engineer who was fascinated by the idea of flying machines. He meticulously studied the shape of the wings of birds and invented a flying apparatus that allowed him to glide short distances.

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  On Sunday, August 9, 1896, Otto went to a hilly region about 50 miles from where he lived in Berlin. He strapped into his glider like a human stork and took three successful flights.

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  But on his fourth attempt, a strong gust of wind launched Otto up about 50 feet and then careened him toward the earth.

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  He tried to wrestle the glider out of a crash, but failed to do so.

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  The plunge broke Otto's neck. He died shortly afterwards.

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  A few years later, two bicycle mechanics in Ohio realized what was wrong with Otto's glider. It required the pilot to move his body to change the center of gravity of the machine. This system gave the pilot limited balance and control. It would be like trying to maneuver a bicycle only by leaning to one side or another.

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  Orville and Wilbur Wright knew a great deal about balance and control from their work on bicycles. While idly twisting a cardboard box one day, the brothers realized they could warp the shape of a fixed wing through a set of wires. In effect, they could provide a pilot with a handlebar. Tests confirmed that this system provided significantly more control than Otto's glider. The rest, of course, is history.

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  Otto Lilienthal had built a machine that mimicked the mechanics of birds. He was an actual engineer. The Wright brothers borrowed from the much more unlikely source of bicycle physics. The history of invention is full of stories like this. People who have knowledge and training and skills can find themselves stuck. And then someone comes out of left field and solves the problem. Today, we take a close look at the process of creativity. Insights and epiphanies often seem to arise without explanation. But researchers increasingly find there is a science to generating them.

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  The alchemy of invention, this week on Hidden Brain. Support for Hidden Brain comes from Pacific Life Insurance. You make promises throughout your life. For nearly 160 years, Pacific Life has been helping you keep them by protecting those who matter most. Pacific Life, the power of a promise. Ask a financial professional how Pacific Life can help you create a more confident financial future.

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  We all have problems. Whether it's trying to solve a complex issue at work or figuring out how to get your toddler dressed in the morning, all of us grapple with challenges, big and small. On the bright side, these problems often come with aha moments. You're on a walk or in the shower when, boo, a big idea or a brilliant solution appears out of nowhere. Where do epiphanies come from? And what can we do to make them appear more frequently, more predictably? At Columbia University, social psychologist Sheena Aangar has spent many years studying the surprising origin of powerful ideas. Sheena Aangar, welcome to Hidden Brain.

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  Thank you for having me.

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  Sheena, on September 13, 1940, a large steamship named the SS City of Benares left the United Kingdom on a 2,500-mile voyage. Who was on board, Sheena? And where was the ship headed?

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  There were about 400 people on this ship. They were Britishers, and they were headed to Canada.

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  Why were they leaving the United Kingdom in the middle of World War II?

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  Well, this was at a point of British history during the war where they were really in a bad situation. It looked like they were going to lose. And so they were very quickly trying to evacuate a large number of particularly children. The original plan was to evacuate around 210,000 children.

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  Wow.

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  But they were just trying to get the children out of the way before bombing started so that the adults would be ready to fight.

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  So around this time, the Germans had drawn something of a chokehold around shipping lanes to and from England. How had they done this, Sheena?

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  Well, essentially, no food or military supplies or fuel could come in and out of England. Because the Germans had these U-boats, which were boats that could be on top, but could also go underwater, at which point they could very stealthily, you know, torpedo the Allied ships. And they were just very good at this.

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  The Allies had better accuracy in being able to launch torpedoes, but that every time they would launch a torpedo, their communications would get jammed because the Germans had really good technology at that time for jamming the communications, since they would essentially intercept the torpedoes. So they wouldn't get hurt, but they would manage to take down many Allied ships.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  So, four days into this voyage, a panic breaks out on the ship. It's been torpedoed by a German U-boat. Do we have any accounts of what that was like on the ship that night, Sheena?

• 7:46Speaker 01

  It was pretty terrible. It was a rough weather that night as well. And so even the people that did manage to get into those lifeboats, even those, many of them did still die because the waters were quite rough. You know, somewhere around 80 children potentially died. It's, we don't have the exact numbers, but an upwards of about 250 people died in total.

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  So this tragedy makes news all over the world, and it catches the attention of a woman named Hedy Lamarr. We may need a minute to back up and explain who Hedy Lamarr was. I understand she has an interesting backstory that starts in Vienna, Austria?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm, yes. Hedy Lamarr was born in 1914. She was a very famous actress. And when she's about seventeen, eighteen years old, maybe nineteen years old, she is married to an Austrian arms provider, who becomes her first husband. And so she, a Jew, becomes the wife of somebody who provides arms to the Germans and the Italians. And so at these dinners that her husband would host, she would learn a lot about weaponry that was being used by the Nazis.

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  Wow.

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  And so even though she wouldn't be allowed to speak at these dinners, she was actually absorbing all of that information. And it's said that she even helped advise her husband at night, you know, when people were gone, about his business dealings. Now, of course, over time, it's obviously becoming more and more anti-Semitic. She's feeling more and more uncomfortable with this. And so she runs away. She's obviously beautiful. She already is known as an actress, so she does get picked up by Hollywood producers, MGM, and takes a ship from London and goes to Hollywood.

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  Wow. So she's now working in Hollywood. She's widely seen as a star and sometimes described as the most beautiful woman in the world. But because of her backstory, she also wants to help defeat Nazi Germany. She hears about the sinking of the SS City of Benares, and she talks about it with her friend, George Antheil. Was George Antheil also an entertainer, Sheena?

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  Well, he was a composer and piano player. He was the son of German immigrants, so he was an American, but he certainly had a German heritage. They both learn about what just happened. They're both distressed. They're friends. And they are also people that happen to, as a hobby, play duets together on the piano. Because she was also an accomplished pianist when growing up in Vienna.

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  Legend has it that Hetty and George were sitting at the piano one day when they got an idea that would appear to be well outside their area of expertise. How to keep the Nazi U-boats from jamming Allied radio signals and sinking their ships.

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  So, let's keep in mind that Hetty does know something about the German technology and how it was able to jam the communications between the Allies.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  She's now doing a duet, so she also knows about music, and so does George. And as they play, they both have this inspiration, or flash of insight, you might say. Hey, look, we're both playing different keys, and yet, we're in tune, and we know what we're doing, and it's flowing seamlessly.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  And that's because we both know what song we're playing. Even though we are using different chords, we're holding on to the same rhythm. And so we're able to do this with great synchrony. And so the question is, wait, if we could do that with music, is that something we could do with communications that would travel via radio?

• 12:20Speaker 00

  And how would this work? So you have these two musicians now who are now playing the same song. And because they know they're playing the same song, even though they're in different keys, they can stay in sync with one another. How would this work with torpedoes and communications between Allied ships?

• 12:35Speaker 01

  So the way the Allied ships would send communications, right? So you're an Allied ship, and you're sending a torpedo to do damage to this U-boat that's headed your way. And as you're sending the communication for this torpedo to head towards the U-boat, what does the U-boat do? It intercepts and jams that communication. And that's because the communication between the Allies and the torpedo are going along one frequency, or we could say like, one, you know, one chord.

• 13:13Speaker 01

  And so their insight was, what if, what if we were to transmit the message from one radio to an, from a transmitter to a receiver in a way that it keeps moving?

• 13:32Speaker 01

  Just like music can keep moving, so it's essentially hopping, while it would appear like garbage to somebody else, to the people who know what the message is and, and what it's trying to do, they would be able to follow it along. So it'll keep hopping in synchrony.

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  So in other words, instead of transmitting just on one frequency, if I keep changing my frequency as I'm sending my message, but you know the order in which I'm going to be changing frequencies, you can keep up, the message comes through, but someone trying to jam any one frequency is not going to have any success jamming my message.

• 14:13Speaker 01

  That's right, it's like a constantly changing symphony, and they referred to it as frequency hopping.

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  Now, it's worth pointing out, of course, that George Antyle was the son of German immigrants, as you said, and Heddy Lamar was from Austria. When they go to the US Navy to say, "We've come up with a way to fight Nazi U-boats", what happens, Gina?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Well, they get a patent, and then they take it to the Navy, and the Navy actually decides that they're spies, and, and they didn't do anything with it. It could have actually saved a lot of lives, but they didn't do anything with it. They just didn't trust it.

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  So Heddy Lamar's invention is not used during the Second World War, but I understand that 20 years later, the military sort of wises up?

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  Yeah, they used it during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And it is an amazing invention. I mean, it is the basis behind Bluetooth, GPS. Wouldn't have been possible without this.

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  Hari Lamar died in 2000. She was 85 years old. Along with George Antheil, she was inducted posthumously into the National Inventors Hall of Fame in 2014. Solutions to complex problems sometimes come out of nowhere. Who would think two people playing a piano have anything useful to say about halting Nazi submarines? When we come back, the science and the psychology behind lightbulb moments. You're listening to Hidden Brain.

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  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. When we think of aha moments, we tend to think of them as miracles. Isaac Newton watched an apple fall from a tree, and bam, he came up with a theory of gravity. The Greek mathematician Archimedes lowered himself into a relaxing bath and came up with insights about density and buoyancy. He's said to have jumped out of the bath and run naked through the streets, exclaiming, "Eureka, or I have found it." At Columbia University Business School, psychologist Sheena Ainger has studied the steps that lead to lightbulb moments. Sheena, I want you to walk us through some of the components that you say are behind big ideas, and I want to use an iconic example.

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  Many of us today marvel at the Statue of Liberty. We think it's meaningful, that it represents a powerful vision of the United States of America. We think of it as being a beacon of hope and freedom. But the story of the Statue of Liberty actually starts in a small town in France in the middle of the 19th century. A young man named Frederick August Bartoldi seems to have had artistic talent, so his mom moves the family to Paris to give him more opportunities. Can you tell me Frederick Bartoldi's story?

• 19:01Speaker 01

  So Frederick Bartoldi was born in the countryside of France. When he was two, his father passed away, and shortly thereafter, his mom moved them to Paris because she noticed that Frederick had some real artistic talent, and she wanted to give him those opportunities. And so he was raised in Paris, and he learned the skills of art, and in particular, sculpting. When he was a young man, he was among a group of artists that was selected, and they were sent to Egypt. And he was mesmerized by the colossal sculptures that were guarding the ancient Egyptian tombs.

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  So some years later, after he returns to France, he hears about an interesting project involving the Suez Canal. Tell me a little bit about this. The Suez Canal was being built, and they put out a call for sculptors.

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  Well, they put out a call for proposals so that people could suggest a sculpture that would be put there. And you know, the idea was this was going to be at the opening of the Suez Canal. They invited lots of different proposals. And Frederick Bartholdy submitted a proposal for a colossal woman, dressed in robes, carrying a light. He called it "The Light to Asia." Now, despite having collected multiple proposals, in the end, they decided to just build a small lighthouse there, which is what stands there today.

• 20:44Speaker 00

  So, the Suez Canal project goes nowhere, but Frederick Bartholdy returns to Paris, and he gets in touch with a friend of his. And this friend of his has an idea about a statue that he wants built in America. Why America, Sheena?

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  Well, as we know, you know, the French have this way of creating republics and then dissolving them.

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  He wants to try to restore the faith of the French people in freedom and democracy. And so at this point, you know, the United States is actually proving to be a much better success story than the French. So he has this idea that in order to restore the French people's faith in freedom and democracy, he's going to build a statue and give that as a gift to the United States honoring the 100 years of the Declaration of Independence. And then he asks Frederick Bartholdy to build the statue.

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  And what is the idea that Frederick Bartholdy comes up with?

• 21:57Speaker 01

  Well, we all know what Lady Liberty looks like. And so the question is, where did Frederick Bartholdi get the idea of Lady Liberty? Well, certainly, the idea of this colossal statue comes, you can see that in his initial proposal that he submitted for the Suez Canal. While he's building this sculpture, getting the idea, at that time, there was a very famous painting that was hanging in Museo de Orsay. And it was this painting called La Verité by the famous painter Lévev. Now, La Verité means "The Lady of Truth", and if you were to see this painting,

• 22:42Speaker 01

  the Lady of Truth has some similarities. So the positioning is very similar to La Verité.

• 22:53Speaker 01

  Now comes the crown. Now, the French were really enamored of concepts like liberty, right? And so the seal for the Second Republic was Libertas, the Roman goddess. And that was actually probably a jingling in Bartholdi's pocket in the form of a five-franc coin, which had Libertas on it.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  And then finally, you know, when you look at the face of Lady Liberty, many people have commented on the likeness between the face of Lady Liberty and the face of the most important woman in Bartholdi's life, and that was his mother. And when he was asked whether that was the face of his mother, he did not deny it.

• 23:48Speaker 00

  Wow. So to summarize, a French artist draws on Egyptian sculptures to design something for the Suez Canal. When that plan falls through, he teams up with a friend in France to raise money for a sculpture in America. He draws on a local coin and his mother's face to design the sculpture, but the story doesn't end there. Today, we see the statue, especially with its location in New York Harbor, as a symbol of hope for immigrants and refugees. How did that transformation come about, Sheena?

• 24:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's interesting, right? Because certainly, when you look at Lady Liberty, there is a broken shackle at her feet, which is supposed to commemorate the abolition of slavery. But yet, as you're correct, it came to become a symbol of freedom that was more than freedom from slavery. Now, at the unveiling, there was a woman by the name of Emma Lazarus.

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  Emma was a descendant of Spanish and Portuguese refugees.

• 24:51Speaker 01

  They were Jews. They were escaping the Inquisition. And she's asked to write something for the opening. Now, she draws on her family's experience and essentially writes that famous poem that we all associate with Lady Liberty, who welcomes the yearning masses to her golden threshold. She writes that poem, and that is read at the time of the unveiling. So you have Lady Liberty, and now you have a poem that is giving it an interpretation, a meaning. Now, the poem actually, you know, may not have gone anywhere,

• 25:34Speaker 01

  but years later, around early 1900s, the great-grandchild of Alexander Hamilton, you know, wants to sort of give even more meaning and more attention to Lady Liberty. She finds the poem written by Emma Lazarus, collecting dust in an old bookstore. And she then essentially was responsible for having the poem hung on the pedestal upon which Lady Liberty now stands. And I think if you put those pieces together, right, the story of the sculpture, the poem,

• 26:16Speaker 01

  then its association with the original forefathers. And as you know, Hamilton himself was an immigrant who came here for refuge. And so if you put these pieces together, you have what becomes a very powerful symbol of hope and freedom. And certainly, her location ends up welcoming the yearning masses that come from all across the globe seeking refuge in New York's harbor.

• 26:47Speaker 00

  You know, it's striking, Sheena. I've seen the Statue of Liberty a few times. And it's really, you know, so dramatic, so iconic. And of course, when I think of it, I have all these associations already in my head. But really, what you're showing here is that this was less of one, you know, magic moment of epiphany, and more about a series of recombinations of past ideas and past events.

• 27:13Speaker 01

  Sure, one person has one combination, and then the next person creates a new combination. And then the next person takes those combinations and recombines it again. And that's how you get a really big idea.

• 27:27Speaker 01

  A big idea is not just one person. The one person might has the inspiration. They create the initial combination. But in order for that initial combination to go places, you essentially need other people to be able to see that idea and reimagine the potential of that idea. And that's how it scales.

• 28:02Speaker 00

  Now, of course, lots of people had seen giant Egyptian sculptures before Frederick Bartholdy. But he did not just look. He actually noticed something. He filed it away in his memory. You tell another wonderful story about the power of observation. In the late 19th century, a physical education teacher in Springfield College, Massachusetts, was dealing with a problem. James Naismith students played football, baseball, lacrosse, rugby, and soccer. But in the winter, they were all cooped up. How did he solve this problem, Sheena?

• 28:31Speaker 01

  So he, he was basically a teacher, a gym teacher, and he was given a task by his boss to do the following. He had a whole bunch of teenagers, we all know what teenagers are like, and he had to get rid of their energy. And so, he needed to make sure that he created a sport that could be done indoors, because this was in the winter and it's Massachusetts. You needed to make a sport that would have the same amount of, require the same amount of speed and effort and would tucker them out, like, you know, soccer, lacrosse, or rugby. You also needed to make sure that it wasn't so rough that they could get hurt.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  And he wanted to make sure that it was a team sport. Okay, so those were his tasks. So first, he drew on pieces that he could sort of essentially steal from sports that already existed. And so, sports like football, soccer, he says, okay, what we'll do is we'll have two teams, and they have to get a ball into some kind of a goal. But, you know, he said, look, we can use the ball like a, like what you would use in soccer, but you know, they can't use, they can't use their feet and all that, they gotta pass the ball. So he was able to get a lot of his pieces

• 29:56Speaker 01

  just by stealing from things like soccer and lacrosse and rugby. But the main hurdle that he had to then cross is, how do I create a game that can be played indoors that's competitive? That's gonna feel really competitive and hard to achieve, but at the same time, safe? And so now, his experience with another sport, which most people hadn't heard of, it was like a, you know, a sort of hobby sport that very few people played at the time, which was called Duck on the Rock, where you would have to throw a stone and topple a stone off of a bigger stone such that it would fall into the water.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Now, in his case, what he's thinking, okay, well, what if I use a peach basket, and that is exactly what he used in the original game? And what we're gonna do is, we're gonna, you know, use the soccer ball and throw the soccer ball such that it has to fall into this peach basket. And essentially, thus was born basketball.

• 31:01Speaker 00

  One thing this suggests, though, and it's striking you as you talked about his process. His process was not just, you know, I have a task, I've been set a challenge, I'm just going to sit inside my head and try and figure out this challenge on my own. He actually looked at everything that he knew from his past life. He looked at examples from soccer, from rugby, from lacrosse, and he recombined them. And it's worth pointing out that in some ways, I think, we have this illusion that the inventor is the person who sits in a room by himself or herself and comes up with a genius idea. This paints a very different picture of it, Sheena.

• 31:36Speaker 01

  There's only so much you can do with the pieces that you have in your head, right? You can take the pieces and you can scan your mind for all kinds of prior experiences and, you know, and you might get lucky and remember something that you hadn't earlier thought to use. But chances are, if you're repeatedly stuck, it means there's a piece you're missing. And that means you've got to start searching outside of yourself to find that missing piece.

• 32:10Speaker 00

  You say that besides a capacity to observe the world carefully, multiple studies have found that creative people tend to have one personality trait in common. Can you talk about the power of curiosity?

• 32:22Speaker 01

  Well, curiosity is the trait that is most associated with creativity. And the reason why it's such a powerful force is because when you're curious, you start searching in lots of little corners for things and you discover all kinds of unique bits of information that can be helpful when you're trying to get a new idea.

• 32:52Speaker 00

  I returned myself recently from a visit to Paris, where I went to the Louvre, and I fought through crowds to get a look at the Mona Lisa. You say that the painter Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most iconic examples of curiosity driving creativity. How so?

• 33:09Speaker 01

  So this was a guy who, you know, clearly is most famous for things like the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. But what he did was he just kept studying stuff. I mean, it's like back in the 1500s, right? And yet, you know, he's studying everything. He even would take dead bodies and try to examine the anatomy. He, if you look at his notebooks, he essentially was so interested in all kinds of things that he began to make rough drafts of drawings that sort of are like robots and helicopters, a driverless car. In fact, the first driverless car that was showcased in New York City, in Manhattan,

• 33:54Speaker 01

  in fact, in the early 1900s, it was a failure at the time. But it was building off of some of the original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. So he was very much a polymath.

• 34:06Speaker 00

  Hmm. And in some ways, I think one of the things you're pointing to, Sheena, is that when we're searching for a solution, it might not be sufficient just to look in the domain in which the problem exists. Part of what made Leonardo da Vinci so successful was he was voracious in terms of where he was looking for ideas. He didn't care about, you know, limiting himself to one particular domain.

• 34:28Speaker 01

  Yes. Now, you want to be careful about something, which is that we often think that all we have to do is just expose ourselves to lots and lots and lots of information bits, particularly in the modern age. Mindlessly consuming lots of random bits of information without having any understanding of the why, the what, isn't going to make you more creative. It does have to be driven by your curiosity. And your curiosity, the reason why it's so important, is because when you're curious, you know what question is leading you to search wherever you've searched.

• 35:10Speaker 01

  And that then means that you now know why you're looking at this information, why it matters, which then enables you to organize and categorize that information in your brain in a way that you can later access it.

• 35:27Speaker 00

  You say that persistence turns out to be another driver of creativity, and you and others demonstrate this through the use of an exercise called the toothpick test. What is this test, Sheena?

• 35:38Speaker 01

  It's a beautiful illustration of a very basic insight about human creativity. If I ask you to come up with as many different uses as you can think of for how to use a pile of toothpicks, and I give you two minutes, and you'll come up with a whole bunch of ideas, typically anywhere from, you know, two to, I've seen somebody get as many as 30 different ideas in two minutes. And then I ask you, you know, look, if I gave you another two more minutes, how many more ideas would you come up with? You know, some people might say five, six, seven, but most people will say, I've run out of ideas.

• 36:19Speaker 01

  But it turns out they do come up with more ideas than they expected to in the second round of two minutes. And then if I ask them again, hey, how many more ideas do you think you would be able to come up with if I gave you another two minutes? At this point, they really feel like they've burnt out. They've run out of ideas, they're down to zero. They still come up with more ideas than they originally predicted. Now, what's interesting here is that in the very beginning of a, let's call it mind-wandering or creativity exercise, ideas do come to you fast and furious, and it feels amazing. You're in the zone, you're in the flow, you love it.

• 37:02Speaker 01

  However, that's actually when you're most likely to have your most redundant ideas with others.

• 37:09Speaker 01

  So you're least likely to be your most creative, because you're just coming up with the same ideas that everybody else is coming up with. As you're forced to persist, or as you force yourself to persist, even though the ideas will come out in less volume, the quality of the ideas is going up. And as the quality goes up, it means you're more likely to have ideas that are less redundant with others that are the true pearls.

• 37:46Speaker 00

  From medical breakthroughs to great works of art, we like to believe that creativity, invention, and innovation happen in an instant, that artists and inventors draw from a mystical source of creativity, and then inspiration strikes.

• 38:02Speaker 00

  But moments of inspiration do not necessarily strike in an instant. It's more accurate to say they are a process of gradual cultivation and recombination.

• 38:12Speaker 00

  When we come back, how to plant the seeds of inspiration to cultivate your own eureka moments. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam.

• 38:33Speaker 00

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• 40:15Speaker 00

  This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. The famous French sculptor, Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, got his inspiration for the Statue of Liberty from ancient Egyptian sculptures, a silver coin, and his mother's eyes. The actress Hedy Lamarr came up with a way to target torpedoes while playing the piano with a friend. Nancy Johnson invented the hand-cranked ice cream freezer using spatulas in her kitchen and a bathroom tub. In many stories of human invention, there are common threads. Innovators take inspiration from outside sources, and they remember these sources as they are combining ideas.

• 40:57Speaker 00

  At Columbia University, Sheena Aangar says all of us can learn from these insights. She's the author of Think Bigger: How to Innovate.

• 41:07Speaker 00

  Sheena, we've talked about how even the most prolific artists borrow from others and take inspiration from the outside world. But very often, inspiration doesn't come from the familiar, but the unfamiliar. In 2007, the researchers Lee Fleming, Santiago Mingo, and David Chen made a list of over 35,000 inventors who had worked on patents with at least one other person. Tell me about the study and what they found.

• 41:33Speaker 01

  You know, usually when you have a patent, it's not usually by yourself. And in fact, they isolated those patents that were collaborations. And so then they asked the question, which patents are most likely to be more creative, meaning cut across multiple boundaries? And they looked at the patents between individuals that had, you know, known each other for a lifetime, maybe even been working together for many, many years, versus patents that were between individuals that we say have weak ties, meaning they don't know each other very well. And it turned out that it was the weak ties, meaning they didn't know each other very well, typically came from different worlds, they were the ones who were most likely to

• 42:15Speaker 01

  come up with patents that cut across different boundaries, different categories, and were most creative. They were also more successful.

• 42:25Speaker 00

  I understand there was a similar study that looked at the television series Doctor Who?

• 42:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a cool, one of the longest-running sci-fi shows, right? And so what the scientists did with Doctor Who is, you know, so the producer of shows like that typically remain constant. But what'll happen from, you know, different, across different series is that the directors and the writers might change. And it turned out again that when you have weak ties, those shows just did better, they were, you know, got, they were more interesting.

• 43:07Speaker 00

  Why would this be the case, Sheena?

• 43:09Speaker 01

  Well, when you and I know each other for a while, we just create our own little, you know, echo chamber. And so unless we are actively going out to collect different experiences, you know, you're just going to keep producing similar variations of the same stuff. And so if you want a new way of framing a problem or new information, it really does come from somebody that just sees the world in a different way and they have different experiences.

• 43:47Speaker 00

  I want to talk about another component of innovation, and that is about identifying the right problem. In 2020, Stacy Boland was an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. She was working on a project that had her tracking different types of air pollution. At that point, COVID struck and her office shut down. And like many of us, Stacy went home. Can you tell me the story of what happened next, Sheena?

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Well, that's a really inspirational story. This was a team that was on the campus of Caltech, but they worked for NASA. They go home and they're bored and they feel like they should be doing something to make themselves more useful. And every afternoon on Zoom, they're saying, okay, well, let's think about all the problems that we're seeing in the newspaper. And they would just make a list, you know? They were reading the same thing you and I were reading. You know, how do we get more masks? How do we get people to stop touching their face? How do we deal with the ventilator crisis? How do we deal with the supply chain crisis? There were all kinds of crises going on at the time. And every day, they would make a list.

• 44:55Speaker 01

  And then they would say, well, which of these problems do we think we might be able to help with? And I think that's a really important question, right? Because we all want to help on lots of things. But they asked, which one would we have the ability to help with? And so they're saying, okay, well, we do know something about breathing, right? Because they dealt with breathing in outer space.

• 45:19Speaker 01

  And so they say, well, is it possible that we might be able to help with the ventilator crisis? And so Stacy Boland was the one who led that. And, you know, it's very impressive. I mean, she didn't have any medical degrees. She did have family members who were in medicine, and she took advantage of that. And so she began to, first, they collected a lot of information from the doctors, what parts of the ventilator were really necessary, you know, what were the stumbling blocks as to why we didn't have more ventilators available to people. And so little by little, in the space of 37 days, they were able to create a miracle.

• 46:03Speaker 01

  They created a briefcase-sized ventilator to Mount Sinai, and that was their first test case. And it turned out that it worked. Now, you and I both know that ultimately, it turned out the ventilator wasn't as important as they originally thought. But it's still in circulation, this ventilator. It's still used in remote parts of Africa.

• 46:34Speaker 00

  Sheena says that one of the keys to the NASA team's success was that they picked the right problem. The researcher Paul Naught at Ohio State University has done research on this issue. He and others have found that half of the ideas and strategies that companies come up with fail.

• 46:51Speaker 01

  And the reason why their new strategic visions fail is most often because they end up creating a solution to the wrong problem. And they often only discover that when it's kind of too late, after they've started the implementation. Then they'll realize, wait, this isn't what we were trying to do. And so it is, I mean, we underestimate the importance of really taking that time to understand and define your problem well. I mean, Einstein put it succinctly when he said that if I have an hour to save the planet, I would spend the first 55 minutes thinking about the problem and the last five minutes

• 47:35Speaker 01

  thinking about the solution. You really have to understand that problem well.

• 47:44Speaker 00

  Inspiration often involves bringing together different ideas from our past. It involves learning and memory. But things often come together in novel forms in unexpected moments. Researchers call this mind wandering, which is basically a fancy term for daydreaming.

• 48:01Speaker 01

  Overall, we as humans do need to do some amount of it. That's when we do a lot of our problem solving. That's why you often have flashes of insight in the shower, when you're taking a nap, or when you're doing some other sort of routinized task like exercise or cooking. It's when our minds are wandering that we're more likely to sort of naturally try out different combinations of information bits to try out different solutions. Again, your ability, though, to come up with a really good solution with what you have in your head depends on what you've got up there. If you don't have the relevant pieces, then no amount of mind wandering

• 48:46Speaker 01

  is going to magically give you the answer.

• 48:49Speaker 00

  So me just hanging out in the shower and waiting for inspiration to strike, that's not going to do it, Sheena?

• 48:54Speaker 01

  I mean, you might get some ideas for a story, but if it's something you know nothing about, then yeah, no, I don't think so.

• 49:03Speaker 00

  One of the curious things about creativity is that we often believe that the more options and tools we have at our disposal, the better off we're going to be. Can you talk a moment about how constraints might not be the enemy of creativity?

• 49:18Speaker 01

  Well, it's well-known that, you know, artists, even jazz musicians, will say that you don't want to give people complete freedom. That creates noise. What you want is to give constraints. And so that even when people break boundaries and go against them, they still just end up erecting new boundaries. Now, when you do studies and you give people unlimited options versus just a few options. So, for example, there's a very famous set of studies that were done by colleagues at NYU.

• 50:00Speaker 01

  And you have them make paintings or scarves. It turns out that if they're given, you know, a few materials to work with, like six different materials versus like 12 to 15 materials, it turns out that the ones who were given fewer materials end up making things that are far more creative. And, you know, of course, there's a long history of research that I've been a part of that shows that in general, giving people more options doesn't actually lead to all the benefits that we often associate or think it will give us.

• 50:36Speaker 00

  Yeah, I have to ask you to tell me again about that study you ran many years ago at a gourmet grocery store in Northern California. We've talked about it the last time you were on Hidden Brain. But can you tell me again about your famous jam study, Sheena?

• 50:53Speaker 01

  Oh, sure. It was done in this store called Drager's, which is located in Menlo Park, California. It's still there if you're a Californian and want to visit. And this store in the 90s was really special because it offered people an unusual amount of variety. So like 250 types of mustards, vinegars, mayonnaises, over 500 different types of fruits and vegetables. And so I did what has now been dubbed as the, quote, "jam study."

• 51:27Speaker 01

  So at that time, they had 348 different types of jam in the jam aisle. We created a tasting booth where we either put out six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam. And we looked at two things. First, we looked at in which case were people more likely to stop and taste some jam. More people stopped when they were 24, 60%, than when they were six, 40%. And then we looked at in which case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. And it turned out that of the people who stopped when they were 24 on display, only 3% of them bought. Whereas of the people who stopped when they were six,

• 52:12Speaker 01

  30% of them bought.

• 52:16Speaker 01

  So people were clearly more attracted to more options. But when it came down to making a choice, they were more likely to make a choice when they encountered less than when they encountered more.

• 52:30Speaker 01

  There's been over 1,000 studies now that have looked at the consequences of offering, not just people, actually, even non-humans, more and more choice. And it turns out that the more choices, you have all kinds of interesting negative consequences associated with it. You know, like even crickets and frogs, the more mate options they have, the less likely they are to mate.

• 53:01Speaker 00

  And they don't even have tinder and grinder?

• 53:04Speaker 01

  No.

• 53:16Speaker 00

  What do you think it is about the multiplicity of choices that has negative effects on our minds? And in the context of creativity, what do you think it is about constraints that actually might aid us, Sheena?

• 53:29Speaker 01

  Well, OK, so let's start with the premise, right, that in general, we have cognitive limitations, right? And the thing is, for you to be able to be creative, think about the exercise of creativity. It requires you to have a bunch of pieces and to not only be able to have them in your memory bank in a way that you can kind of say what they are, but to be able to keep manipulating them in lots of different ways. And that means, you know, in order for your mind to be able to be facile enough to do that, it is going to need fewer pieces.

• 54:15Speaker 00

  It makes me think, as you're saying that, Sheena, that there are, in some ways, two problems. One is, we might not have enough information, especially perhaps, you know, non-domain information in domains that we're not less familiar with. We might not have all the information we need in unfamiliar domains. So that's a story about a lack of pieces that we can manipulate in our heads. But there's also a twin problem, which is we may have too many. And if we have too many, they all end up swirling around in our heads, and we don't know which ones to pick to actually recombine.

• 54:46Speaker 01

  That's right. And in fact, when you look at the marketplace of products, there is something that's now been dubbed as "featureitis", which is that products that have too many features are actually less likely to be bought.

• 55:04Speaker 00

  Sheena Aangar is a psychologist at Columbia University. She's the author of Think Bigger: How to Innovate. Sheena, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

• 55:14Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 55:20Speaker 00

  Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristin Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. For more ideas about creativity and many other topics, please consider joining our podcast subscription, Hidden Brain Plus. You can access a free seven-day trial of Hidden Brain Plus, including episodes that you won't hear anywhere else, by going to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, you can find Hidden Brain in that app or by going to apple.co/hiddenbrain.

• 56:05Speaker 00

  Your subscription helps us to bring you this show week in and week out, and we truly appreciate your support. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.

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