« My talk at Jane St. Capital | Main | Calorie counts on the menu »
The Eureka Hunt
This stimulating New Yorker essay (right now gated, but worth buying the issue for) focuses on where creative moments come from. Excerpt:
Many stimulants, like caffeine, Adderall, and Ritalin, are taken to increase focus -- one recent poll found that nearly twenty percent of scientists and researchers regularly took prescription drugs to "enhance concentration" -- but, accordingly to Jung-Beeman and Kounios, drugs may actually make insights less likely, by sharpening the spotlight of attention and discouraging mental rambles. Concentration, it seems, comes with the hidden cost of diminished creativity. "There's a good reason Google puts Ping-Pong tables in their headquarters," Kounios said. "If you want to encourage insights, then you've got to also encourage people to relax." Jung-Beeman's latest paper investigates why people who are in a good mood are so much better at solving insight puzzles. (On average, they solve nearly twenty percent more C.R.A. problems.)
Posted by Tyler Cowen on July 23, 2008 at 01:38 PM in Science | Permalink
Comments
Here is a pdf of the article:
http://web.mit.edu/ekmiller/Public/www/miller/Lehrer_Insight_New_Yorker.pdf
Posted by: Seth Roberts at Jul 23, 2008 1:47:10 PM
This line of thinking, suggesting that people accomplish things with the help of drugs, is becoming very popular with the 110 IQ "Who Moved my Cheese" crowd. Just like placing the whole sport of baseball under steroid suspicion, they are starting to place any accomplishment outside their cubicles as drug fueled. It's an unfortunate bogeyman.
Posted by: BoscoH at Jul 23, 2008 2:07:44 PM
"Jung-Beeman's latest paper investigates why people who are in a good mood are so much better at solving insight puzzles."
But that's half the reason why coffee (I've never tried any controlled substances) greatly improves research--it puts you in a good mood.
(BTW, Tyler, you mistranscribed a couple words:
"like" should be "likely" in line 5 and "I" should be "If " in line 9.)
Posted by: Michael at Jul 23, 2008 2:31:19 PM
This would seem to point to marijuana as a better vehicle for insight than caffeine or Adderall. I remember Carl Sagan writing that he would use marijuana as an insight generator, then go back over his notes when sober to see what was useful. In fact, he combined this with two of the ways suggested in the article to increase insight, warm showers and topless women. He wrote about getting high with his partner, getting in a warm shower with her, and writing equations on the wall with soap.
Posted by: Joe at Jul 23, 2008 2:52:17 PM
"I remember Carl Sagan writing that he would use marijuana as an insight generator, then go back over his notes when sober to see what was useful."
That's exactly how I invented the edible Slinky (patent pending).
Posted by: A. Reader at Jul 23, 2008 3:13:17 PM
The most famous of very productive intellectuals who was
notorious for his rather heavy use of amphetamines was the
late mathematician, Paul Erdos, who probably wrote more
coauthored math papers than anybody else in history. He
was also wildly eccentric in many ways, so he may not be
a good datum point, with no way of knowing what his
productivity or innovativeness would have been if he had
abstained from his questionable conduct.
For fans of network theory, he is the guy whom many,
especially mathematicians, worry about having a number
named after. If you have a finite "Erdos number," then
that means you have published with somebody who has published
with...Erdos. Erdos's own number is zero and his coauthors
are Erdos 1. Their coauthors are Erdos 2, and so on. For
anybody who might have published with me or with anybody who
has published with me, etc., I have just learned that my Erdos
number is about to go from 5 to 4.
Posted by: Barkley Rosser at Jul 23, 2008 6:21:13 PM
I actually have experience doing creative work (mathematics) with dextroamphetamine, and this precisely jibes with my experience. Which is not to say that d-amphetamine isn't useful--for example, writing results up, working through details, cleaning and housework, etc. I just find that it does seem to reduce creativity.
Posted by: asd at Jul 23, 2008 7:41:58 PM
Hm, does this mean slackers are more creative?
Do we really need more creativity, rather than follow-up on creative insights. Maybe our creative insights can far outpace our ability to work such insights into some useful form. (Didn't Robin Hanson suggest something along these lines?)
Posted by: Mike Kenny at Jul 23, 2008 7:51:14 PM
perhaps it indicates a tradeoff between focus and creativity.
Posted by: at Jul 23, 2008 10:50:12 PM
As an aside, there's a great folk song about Dodge and the Mann Gulch fire, "Cold Missouri Waters" by James Keelaghan (although I'm more familiar with the version by Cry Cry Cry sung by Richard Shindell).
Posted by: perfectlyGoodInk at Jul 23, 2008 11:22:52 PM
no way of knowing what his
productivity or innovativeness would have been if he had
abstained from his questionable conduct.
He started when he was only a couple years younger than you are now, so I think we have a good sample.
Posted by: Douglas Knight at Jul 24, 2008 12:11:45 AM
Oh there's definitely a tradeoff here. For those of us who have no trouble getting zany ideas while flicking from never-completed task to never-completed task, we probably oughtta be on Ritalin.
For others the curve is located differently so the optimum is elsewhere. Marijuana is probably the better drug for them, and LSD for really severe cases. The interesting thing, though, is that lack of imagination is not seen as a disability while ADHD is.
Posted by: derrida derider at Jul 24, 2008 12:27:13 AM
That lines up with my experience. Whenever I've been chasing a bug for days, to the point where I have all kinds of data but no coherent theory to explain it, I go for a walk.
Posted by: MouseJunior at Jul 24, 2008 12:52:22 AM
It's important to remember that there's often not a single eureka moment. As I like to say, the lightbulb goes off, and then changes colors many times over the life of the idea. The eventual winning idea looks different than that original burst of inspiration.
Posted by: Ben Casnocha at Jul 24, 2008 2:29:57 AM
That's why I balance adderall with marijuana. The extra sensory input makes me think outside the box while I am writing my projects (usually patent applications).
Posted by: sk at Jul 24, 2008 12:49:35 PM
I'm going to disagree a little with Mr. Casnocha. The insight doesn't change. What changes is how you express it to other people. Most of the time, if it's a good insight, nobody else is going to see it. You have to express it in multiple ways to get to the point where other people can have it with you.
Posted by: Michael F. Martin at Jul 24, 2008 2:14:30 PM
Hmmmm. The article opens with a description of the Mann Gulch fire:
"But after several terrifying minutes [Wag] Dodge emerged from the ashes."
further:
"'There's a good reason Google puts Ping-Pong tables in their headquarters,' [John] Kounios said. 'If you want to encourage insights, then you've got to also encourage people to relax.'"
Compare and discuss "terrifying" and "relax".
See "The Big Lebowski."
Posted by: chug at Jul 25, 2008 8:59:14 PM
Heh, well the commonality between the two is not directly focusing on the problem. This can be accomplished by relaxing or by focusing on something else, preferably a task that doesn't require too much analytical thinking.
And while running for your life apparently qualifies as such a task, creating office fires makes it kinda hard to keep turnover down. :)
Posted by: perfectlyGoodInk at Jul 27, 2008 1:26:10 AM
