Uneven book with certain useful discussions of the neuropsychology of creativity and insight. Competently written with short chapters, some pithier and better focused than others.
Drawbacks:
* the book is filled with unreplicated "studies show science" (admittedly unavoidable in any soft science like psychology),
* many of the insights from the authors border on common knowledge, and
* the book loses the thread at times (for example from Chapter 8 onward the book becomes unfocused and unrigorous, and the authors lapse into speculative leaps far outside their circle of competence).
Readers who want to increase their ability to generate ideas and insights would be better served reading Don Norman's tremendously useful book The Design of Everyday Things. The Eureka Factor can be safely skimmed, or skipped.
Notes:
Preface1) Good one sentence summary of the book: "Our goal is to explain what insights are, how they arise, and what the scientific research says about how to have more of them."
2) The authors publish a paper on what happens in the brain during a flash of insight and the media ran with it, calling it "the discovery of the brain's E-spot."
Chapter 1: New Light, New Sight
3) Helen Keller with a flash of insight on what a "word" was, discovering an entire taxonomy of metaknowledge this way. [Imagine learning a metaconcept as foundational as this while at the same time having the mature cognitive capacity to understand the implications of that metaconcept! We always think it's best to learn things when we're young--often it is--but when we learn things like what a "word" is we are too young to understand metaconcepts and implications while learning the underlying thing. Hadn't thought about this before.]
4) "Insightfuls" (the authors' neologism for people who have a lot of eureka type insights) versus "analysts" (more methodical thinkers).
5) What precisely do we mean by insight? Two features, they pop into your awareness, they yield a different way of looking at things.
6) This chapter is oddly organized, it ends with a conclusion that creativity is in decline.
Chapter 2: Insight Illustrated
7) Immersion--> impasse--> diversion--> insight
8) On the cancer researcher having a flash of insight about why the removal of a primary cancerous tumor somehow stimulates growth of smaller, secondary tumors; it has to do with angiogenesis-inhibiting chemicals that are removed when the primary tumor is removed.
9) A forest firefighter discovering the idea of "escape fire" with a flash of insight during a fire. A type of "conceptual restructuring" in this case an inversion (or flipping/flip it) of the idea of a fire.
10) "Analogical insights": revealing a deep relationship between two things that nevertheless appear very different from each other on the surface.
11) Insights coming from incubation. [I've heard versions of this idea in the creative writing community, for example Natalie Goldberg's concept of "composting", letting ideas kind of percolate in your mind; also The Artist's Way by Julia Cameron talks about "artist's dates" were you expose yourself to random different stimuli to cultivate insights and ideas, etc. Thus the idea that you're looking for pops into your head in an unexpected moment triggered by seemingly irrelevant stimulus. Note also there's an insight on top of this insight: be aware that this happens, and therefore try to trigger things with irrelevant stimuli!]
12) The so-called classic insight framework: inverting, flipping and arranging an idea, then doing something totally different (which incubates the insight), then being well rested and open so the insight might arrive.
Chapter 3: The Box
13) "The difficulty lies, not in the new ideas, but in escaping from the old ones." --John Maynard Keynes
14) Columbus's egg, an idea that is obvious only in hindsight.
15) The nine dot problem where we artificially put a box beyond which we don't draw (we are lured into thinking of the square as the limiting the area in which we can draw) thus making it hard to reach the solution. Thus the concept of "thinking outside the box," where the box represents knowledge and assumptions that artificially constrain your thinking.
16) Likewise, see the "two string problem" where we have to think of a pair of pliers as a pendulum weight rather than as a "pair of pliers" (avoiding "functional fixedness"). The insight here is that we assume "there are rules, boundaries, or restrictions where there aren't any."
17) Note also the belligerence of subjects in another experiment as the subjects confabulated reasons why they used something. [One meta-idea here is to identify your or a person's "belligerence" as a signal for telling you that you're caught inside a box, and that you need to relax and change your paradigm, this is not with the authors are saying but this is one takeaway that occurs to me.]
18) "Everything you do has the potential to limit what you do next." You're in a box without knowing you're in a box and this limitation happens beneath your level of awareness.
19) The N400 EEG response, a cortical response to any kind of meaningful stimuli that doesn't fit its context. What this represents is how the brain builds, continuously, mental models of the world around us, and deviation from this expected mental model (which we don't actually know that we're expecting because we're not aware of this mechanism as it happens) causes a group of neurons to fire in synchrony that something is different or unexpected or wrong. "Without expectations, there can be no surprise."
20) "If you step back and look at the big picture, it's clear that much of the work that a person's cerebral cortex does involves constructing, maintaining, checking, and, if necessary, modifying its mental models of the world... Thus the human brain is, at its core, an anticipation machine."
21) The frontal lobe, which is underdeveloped in children, is what plays a key role in executive function but also in limiting "the range of behaviors a person will consider in a given situation." The frontal lobe manages impulse control but also acts a sort of cognitive jailer that keeps us in a conceptual box.
22) But don't sign up for damage to your frontal lobe! Even though people with frontal lobe damage have less imprisonment of their thinking, there's plenty of other trade-offs in adult life that they suffer from, lack of impulse control, lack of a strategy layer, loss of executive function, etc. The idea is to put this tool down or pick it up when necessary, when you want to avoid "interpretive constraint."
23) On expertise, a form of thinking inside the box, but in a much larger box; the expert has a larger box than the non-expert, is familiar with a wider range of scenarios.
24) Interesting expertise-related quote from Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger on his handling of Flight 1549: "One way of looking at this might be that for forty-two years, I've been making small, regular deposits in this bag of experience; education and training. And on January 15th the balance was sufficient so that I can make a very large withdrawal." Note that this doesn't look like anything, until it does.
25) Running "scripts" in our brain: e.g.: "the restaurant script"; a tremendously helpful cognitive shorthand to navigate general situations, showing how functional fixedness is tremendous tool.
Chapter 4: All of a Sudden
26) One of the authors has a moment of clarity integrating all the ideas of calculus rather than seeing it as a disparate set of procedures.
27) Differentiating between our subjective experience of a flash of insight versus the actual phenomenon that happens in our brains.
Chapter 5: Outside the Box, Inside the Brain
28) "Remote associates problems" which can be solved either analytically or with insight, then comparing brain activity with people solving and using one or the other strategies
29) Occasionally the authors sing out with a well-phrased nugget of wisdom. "Analytic problem solving is amenable to deadlines; creative insight is not." Thus don't try to have epiphanies on a timetable or on a deadline!
30) The moment a solution pops into someone's awareness as an insight you'll see gamma waves (indicates cognitive processing) picked up by electrodes just above the right ear in an EEG. fMRI shows blood flow in the anterior superior temporal gyrus, part of the brain involved in making connections between distantly related ideas like jokes and metaphors. Later, the researchers found that there was a network of brain areas involved, not just this lobe.
Chapter 6: The Best of Both Worlds
31) Different types of language aphasia: there's left hemisphere aphasia and then right hemisphere aphasia which involves apparent language competence but yet problems like not getting jokes, not perceiving sarcasm or other subtleties, inferences or implied facts in language. Thus we get an insight into the right hemisphere's role in insight.
32) Note that the left hemisphere is primarily associated with language but the right hemisphere has some language processing too, as well as remote association capabilities, thus it's critical for insight.
Chapter 7: Tuning Out and Gearing Up
33) "I close my eyes in order to see." --Paul Gauguin. Good quote!
34) On extracting yourself from day to day world, isolating yourself to allow new ideas to surface.
35) On different visual processing events when you're working your brain: you look away when someone asks you a difficult question, you may even close your eyes to focus your brain; the brain also temporarily takes in less visual information.
36) See also having insights in the shower, the modern equivalent of Archimedes' bath.
37) It's worth making a few comments on the likely validity of these authors' studies: it's one thing to measure EEG and fMRI activity when a subject is studying a ludic word problem or artificially stylized brain teaser, but it's another thing to study true generative, creative insight. This is analogous to how behavioral finance researchers would carefully construct word problems that allegedly unearth "biases" in human behavior.
38) The anterior cingulate: active in insight thinking, but relatively inactive when you're doing analytical thinking.
Chapter 8: The Incubator
39) Examples of insights that happened during or right after sleep: Paul McCartney, Otto Loewi (who discovered the chemical aspect of synapses), etc.
40) "Sleep brings out the remote associations that are embedded in memories."
41) On the dispute among scientists by what unconscious thought actually is--or that it even exists. (!) Is it some kind of problem solving that is taking place outside of awareness?
42) On producing "incubator-like" circumstances for yourself: get out of your regular environment, take long walks, take breaks, get away (even thinking about getting away helps), do something totally different, expose yourself to a variety of unusual experiences or thoughts.
43) [The book has become less focused and a lot less interesting here, this was the weakest and least insight-producing chapter so far.]
Chapter 9: In the Mood
44) Developing ideas when you are relaxed and having fun, on how mood influences creative insight.
45) "Mood congruency" your mood informs how you interpret your reality and surroundings, happy/sad moods drive happier/sadder interpretations of reality.
46) See the "triangle squares" experiment on p.118-119 from Karen Gasper and Gerald Clore, where they asked subjects "to recall happy or sad personal events to put them in a positive or negative mood" which caused subjects to base their judgments on overall patterns or on more specific parts of patterns. From this the study, the authors of this book instantly leap to the narrative that "a happy mind is free to roam the forest, while an anxious mind prefers to hide in a tree." A risible narrative on a risibly unrigorous study. Worse, it's hard to see how this entire passage is even relevant to the overall book.
47) Insight is hampered by anxiety, not by sadness.
48) "We've seen how a positive mood improves a person's ability to think with remote associations. Surprisingly, thinking with remote associations also improves a person's mood. This is why people crave puzzles, detective stories, and the like."
49) The authors now leap to a weird unsubstantiated speculation about how Freudian therapy improves a person's mood because of the free association involved.
Chapter 10: Your Brain Knows More Than You Do
50) On the subjective idea that we have an idea lurking just below the threshold of awareness; what cognitive psychologists call "intuition"; an awareness of the presence of information without awareness of the information itself.
51) On having intuition about patterns and rules without actually knowing those patterns and rules, and yet being able to make deductions or conclusions about reality without really knowing the underlying rules.
52) Also the idea of an "inkling": understanding that you are on the right path (even though it may not feel like it) and knowing somehow that it's worth continuing on your path even though it doesn't seem like you're getting closer to a solution; this is in contrast from analytic problem solving where you have a better understanding of where you are relative to your solution, and a better idea of the progress you're making towards that solution.
53) Some of the "just so" stories in this chapter strike me as rare examples that convey nothing beyond their rareness: that they are strange coincidences and little more. See the woman who got a sick feeling in her stomach and discovered a murderer; or the young man who had the feeling that he was forgetting something but because he was in a good mood decided to act on that feeling and return home; these are anecdotal examples that (while they might illustrate some role of emotion in the reliability of a hunch) they really convey nothing other than they're just stories that happened to have happened. Giving examples, particularly examples that involve highly unlikely coincidences, is not proof of anything and it shows no mechanism or causal chain. The reader is left unconvinced by the author's claims that emotion plays a role in the quality of an intuition.
54) Also, unfortunately, most of the experiments in this chapter involve "stated preferences" not "revealed preferences": this is yet another tremendous structural problem in the "studies show science" of psychology, economics and other soft science domains. This is scientistry, not science.
55) This is another one of the book's weaker and less compelling chapters.
Chapter 11: The Insightful and the Analyst
56) "Whoever cannot seek the unforeseen sees nothing, for the known way is an impasse." --Heraclitus, Fragments (another good quote here)
57) "[W]hy do people differ at all in their styles of thought and ways of approaching a problem?"
58) The thin line between insanity and creativity/insightfulness.
59) A discussion of schizophrenia genes and why they haven't been bred out of existence; likewise sickle cell anemia; in both cases one needs two genes to get the disease but one can be a "carrier" with simply the sickle cell trait or the schizophrenia trait. This has nothing to do with the book's topic itself (it would be more relevant to a book like Richard Dawkin's The Selfish Gene), but it is an interesting point to think about: it's just another borderline disturbing example of how your body is really just a survival machine for your genes, and the schizophrenia gene and the sickle cell gene have as much of a wish to survive as you do!
60) Note the hereditary advantage (perhaps) to having schizophrenia (at least in low levels) because of the creative benefits: see for example John Nash, Beethoven, or other schizotypes who have maybe a watered-down version of the full diagnosed condition.
61) See the advantages of a schizotypes flexible and creative thought process, [these can be perhaps imitated... ideally without the underlying condition!]
62) "Negative priming": the fact that when you purposely ignore something it becomes difficult to pay full attention to that something. You inhibit something that your brain labels as irrelevant and then it's easier for your brain to avoid reconsidering it or being stimulated by it, your brain keeps rejecting the stimuli.
63) Schizotypes show little or no negative priming, thus they're susceptible (in both good or bad ways) to distracting or odd thoughts, this can cause them to lose focus or it can empower creative leaps.
64) On knowing your peak and low "inhibitory time of day": this indicates when your best creative times and your best analytical times will be.
Chapter 12: Carrots and Sticks
65) On improving your insightfulness even though much of it "may be rooted in genetics." Improving your mood; extended vacations or entering a different environment which can tweak your cognitive style; also do things to avoid functional fixedness.
66) One quite striking 1962 experiment by Sam Glucksburg showed that monetary incentives actually reduced creativity; it's possible both enticements and threats "degrade creative insight because they constrict attention." However, "motivation seems to have paradoxical effects," sometimes broadening the mind and sometimes narrowing it. This gets down to the nature of the motivation: is it for a specific thing, a concrete object (this constricts the mind) or is it a broadening thing itself like self enhancement (which would broaden and energize creative insight)?
67) On deadlines, which can have paradoxical effects on creative thought; likewise monetary rewards, also the authors argue that "creative insight will be enhanced after a prize is won, not in anticipation of one."
Chapter 13: Far, Different, Unreal, Creative
68) This chapter contains a number of examples of "studies show science" with questionable conclusions, and with the added problem of the author's layering on their own speculative ideas about what these studies suggest.
69) See for example this object example of a self-parodying "studies show science" study: allegedly lightening a room with an incandescent bulb produces more insightful creative behavior than lightning a room with a fluorescent bulb, apparently because of the symbolic value of an incandescent bulb. I'll be looking forward to seeing this study reproduced!! (see photo)
70) On prospection, on mental time traveling and effects on your cognition style; near-term or near-future mental time traveling is analytic, whereas distant-future time traveling is insight-based; also on counterfactual thinking: "additive counterfactual thinking" (if I'd won a million dollars or if I'd had an umbrella) prime people for creativity, while "subtractive counterfactuals" (if I had not had an umbrella) prime people for analytic thinking. One expands awareness, the other contracts awareness (possibly).
71) Putting yourself in radically different environments (living abroad for example) as a spur for creativity and insight, see Paul Gauguin, Picasso, Handel, Stravinsky, Hemingway, etc.
Chapter 14: The State
72) On various liabilities of insightful behavior: it provokes jealousy, suspicion, anxiety; creative people can be difficult to comprehend because they leap over many steps of reasoning; they can be seen as disruptive, even subversive, a threat to the status quo; many people don't want their comfortable cognitive world upended; thus Insightfuls can be blocked by others.
73) Methods to harness the Eureka Factor:
a) Train your mind to step out of conceptual boxes
Make yourself aware of your assumptions so you can examine and possibly eliminate them, or dismantle an incorrect perspective about a problem; always scrutinize your assumptions; broaden your attention or the parameters around the perceived problem (see the example of slowness of elevators being fixed by putting mirrors in them so the people didn't complain!) [Note also that there's a lot of discussion of "solving the problem the client doesn't complain about" in the Design of Everyday Things as well]; also make sure you eliminate functional fixedness--be aware of this as a standard problem.
b) Directly stimulating areas of the brain involved in insightful thought, transcranial direct current stimulation tDCS.
c) adjusting your environment:
Expansive spaces, large rooms, high ceilings, open, airy, soft and calm environments; mood management; surround yourself with unusual people; have incubation breaks, take a break from a difficult problem and then expose yourself to wide range of places or people or change your activities; insight triggers may come from analogies or other connections; sleep well; meditation/introspection; also keep track of problems or solutions that you've come up with and see if there's any change or improvement based on the changes you make.
74) Interesting example of Greg Swartz, Director of Innovation for Ping (the golf club maker), and his method for innovation in golf clubs: he gives himself background music at night time, kind of puts himself in a sensory deprivation or relaxation mode, then lets his brain become relaxed, he stares into the night sky, staring into infinity, and then pursues his thoughts deliberately, letting them meander and collide--thinking by analogy about the problem but avoiding fixation on any idea; this guy had developed his own method of producing a brain state that's receptive to insights.
75) Finally enemies of the "state"; things that put you out of a creative insightful mode: essentially modernity and all of its connectedness and hyperactivity is an enemy of the insightful state; modern life saps one's attention, creativity, focus and discipline if you're not careful.
To Read:
Helen Keller: The Story of My Life
Graham Wallas: The Art of Thought, 1926 (public domain copy here: https://archive.org/details/theartofthought )
Robert Cooke: Dr. Folkman's War: Angiogenesis and the Struggle to Defeat Cancer
Evelyn Fox Keller: A Feeling for the Organism: The Life and Work of Barbara McClintock
Jerry Weintraub: When I Stop Talking, You'll Know I'm Dead
Richard S. Westphall: Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton