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. Looking for a last-minute holiday gift for a fellow fan of Hidden Brain? Consider giving them a gift subscription to Hidden Brain+!
Chapter 1: What is the main topic of this episode?
This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. 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. 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. But on his fourth attempt, a strong gust of wind launched Otto up about 50 feet and then careened him toward the earth. He tried to wrestle the glider out of a crash, but failed to do so. The plunge broke Otto's neck. He died shortly afterwards.
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.
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. Tetz confirmed that this system provided significantly more control than Otto's glider.
Chapter 2: What can we learn from Otto Lilienthal and the Wright brothers?
The rest, of course, is history. 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. The Alchemy of Invention, this week on Hidden Brain.
Chapter 3: How do insights and epiphanies occur?
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 boom, 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 Iyengar has spent many years studying the surprising origin of powerful ideas. Sheena Iyengar, welcome to Hidden Brain.
Thank you for having me.
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?
There were about 400 people on this ship. They were Britishers and they were headed to Canada.
Why were they leaving the United Kingdom in the middle of World War II?
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 everything. 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.
Wow.
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Chapter 4: What historical event inspired Hedy Lamarr's invention?
Well, they get a patent, and then they take it to the Navy, and the Navy actually decides that they're spies, 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.
So Hedy Lamarr's invention is not used during the Second World War. But I understand that 20 years later, the military sort of wisens up.
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.
Hedy Lamarr 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. I'm Shankar Vedantam.
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 is 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 Iyengar 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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Chapter 5: How did Hedy Lamarr and George Antheil innovate communication?
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 Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi seems to have had artistic talent, so his mom moves the family to Paris to give him more opportunities. Can you tell me Frédéric Bartholdi's story?
So Frédéric Bartholdi 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.
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.
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 and they invited lots of different proposals. And Frederick Bartholdi 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.
So the Suez Canal project goes nowhere, but Frederick Bartholdi 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 once built in America. Why America, Sheena?
Well, as we know, you know, the French have this way of creating republics and then dissolving them. He wants to try to restore the faith of the French people in freedom and democracy. So at this point, you know, the United States is actually proving to be a much better success story than the French.
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Chapter 6: What is the story behind the Statue of Liberty?
Well, curiosity is the trait that is most associated with creativity. And 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.
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?
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, 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.
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 limiting himself to one particular domain.
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.
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.
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Chapter 7: How did Lady Liberty become a symbol of hope?
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.
Sheena says that one of the keys to the NASA team's success was that they picked the right problem. The researcher Paul Knott 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.
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. 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 thinking about the solution. We really have to understand that problem well.
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.
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 activity. sort of routinized tasks 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 is going to magically give you the answer.
So me just hanging out in the shower and waiting for inspiration to strike, that's not going to do it, Sheena?
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Chapter 8: What role does observation play in creativity?
No.
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?
Well, okay, 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 in order for your mind to be able to be facile enough to do that, it is going to need fewer pieces.
Yeah. 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 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 an 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.
That's right. And in fact, when you look at the marketplace of products, there is something that's now been dubbed as featuritis, which is the products that have too many features are actually less likely to be bought.
Sheena Iyengar 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.
Thank you.
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