14

The third wall: physiology

Take a handful of coins (if your have no coins, then buttons, raisins or whatever is at hand will do just as well). Throw them onto the table. Look at them for two seconds and then close your eyes. How many were there?

You probably failed at this counting exercise. If you succeeded, it was probably because there were far too few coins/buttons/raisins or whatever it was you threw onto the table. If there were five or less, then the problem is too easy. If you threw down more than five coins/buttons/raisins and managed to count them, then you are to be congratulated on being one of a minute fraction of the world population who are blessed with unusually good physiology in the form of a slightly more hard-working brain.

This simple exercise tests your ability to use both halves of your brain simultaneously. The left half of the brain can count, but only up to seven plus or minus two units at a time. The right half of the brain can deal with considerably more than these seven plus or minus two units, but, on the other hand, it cannot count. If you only threw down five units or less, then the left half of the brain could easily count them (the minimum number of units a person can count at a time is seven minus two), therefore the task was too easy. If you threw down more than five units, preferably more than nine (the maximum number a person can count at a time is seven plus two), then the left half of the brain could not manage the job on its own and needed the help of the right half. The problem is that the two halves of your brain are not very good at collaborating.

It is frightening how limited is our capacity to use our brains. Since it is still a matter of argument what using the brain involves, the estimates of how large a part of our brain we actually use differ greatly. The figures usually land somewhere between 3% and 30% of the brain. Even at 30%, this reveals that there is a very large part of the brain that we do not manage to use (at ‘best’ 70%). It is worth mentioning that the unused part of the brain is not disconnected and idle, of course. Instead it is a question of not being able to control it consciously or use it for a purpose we have formed.

You might think that using only 3–30% of our brain is rather a small amount. Let us therefore do a sum, which can at the same time serve to illustrate what is in fact meant by using the brain. The seven plus or minus two units mentioned above is a representation of our working memory; we can call it our focused attention. Our working memory can handle on average about seven bits of information at the same time. (This limitation explains almost everything we do, and it explains phenomena such as why telephone numbers look the way they do and why we choose between a certain number of competing brands in a purchase context. In addition, it is a contributory factor in rigid markets as we discussed at the beginning of the book.) Neurological research shows that our senses need at least an eighteenth of a second to perceive a piece of information. This means that theoretically we could focus on 7 × 18 = 126 pieces of information per second. Or 126 × 60 = 7650 pieces of information per minute. How many thoughts do you have in a minute? Without counting them (feel free to try), it can be seen that our working memory works far below its physiological capacity.

Why is our working memory so under-used and why do we find it so difficult to use the greater part of our brains in a focused way? We have touched on the answer a few times earlier in the book. The brain works like a muscle and its main development consists of increasing its density, that is to say, packing it full and making it as dense as possible by constantly creating new connections between its different parts. The potential is enormous. The brain contains over 10 billion neurons (an unimaginable number). In order to make it all a little easier to understand we can imagine that we lay all the dendrites – the threads that connect the neurons – in a line. Our line would be more than 150 million kilometres long, which is the equivalent of stretching 3750 times round the earth. But this is still a tiny fraction of what we would have if we were to connect all the 10 billion neurons in the brain to each other. This is the same principle as we observed in the section on shaking the box, where we saw how every piece of the puzzle gave an explosion of new combinations. Go back if you wish to page 111 and imagine that the number series continues to 10 billion – then you will understand.

These very abstract numbers are difficult to grasp properly, but they illustrate the enormous number of components that must be activated to enable us to think. (Bearing this in mind it might no longer seem so surprising that the brain is lazy and that we do not have the energy to use large amounts of it simultaneously.) They also indicate that the potential is enormous if we can increase the number of connections; particularly if we can increase the connections between the two halves of the brain. If, for the sake of simplicity, we assume that there are an equal number of neurons in each half, then we would jump from 5 billion to 10 billion in the extended number series on page 111. There is not enough paper on Earth to write down such numbers.

In experimental studies, it has been found that the products and the marketing that appeal most to people activate both halves of the brain when we experience them. People were asked to look at advertisements or information about various products and brands, and then assess their value. At the same time, the electrical activity of the brain was measured to see which parts of it were activated. In the cases where both halves of the brain were activated, their assessments were clearly more positive. The reason is that people understand the products and the marketing in a better way, because the collaboration between the two halves of the brain makes us observe them both logically and emotionally, and we can see how they work both in detail and as a part of a larger context.

Collaboration between the two halves of the brain can give the same power to creative thinking. The right side of the brain sees a larger context and can identify new angles of approach and detail that the left side can then work out in more detail. Without help from the right side of the brain, the left side tends to get stuck in habitual ‘logical’ paths. The right side of the brain for its part cannot break down the whole into parts and develop thought. Even increased collaboration between the neurons in one of the halves gives great creative power, because a thought can be developed in more logical steps in the left half of the brain or it can capture a larger context with more parts in the right half.

The most restricting wall of the box, and the one that has the greatest effect when it is pushed out, comprises physiology: our inability to make use of the capacity of the brain. This is reflected in the fact that the fastest growing field within the measurement of creativity is the testing of the metabolism of glucose in the brain, which is a measure of how hard the brain works (how much energy it uses). The more the brain works, the more thoughts we can have and the more problems we can work on. The more the brain works, the less it has to compensate with riverbeds and thought tunnels to reduce the burden of work.

The paradoxical thing about the physiology wall is that while it is the most concrete and measurable (the figures above are only a selection and speak for themselves), the methods for pushing out the wall are by far the vaguest and most abstract. Expressed in simple terms, it is a matter of constantly thinking and behaving differently. The psychologist with the difficult name, Mihály Csíkszentmihályi, has discovered for example that an excellent way to increase the complexity and capacity of the brain to focus attention and tackle problems is – to daydream. When we daydream, brain activity is along the borders of the working memory's ‘focused attention’, and impulses jump between the halves of the brain. Because the brain does not have a problem to solve, it is in no hurry to focus and therefore has no need of riverbeds or thought tunnels. In this way, new parts of the brain can become connected.

Csíkszentmihályi also mentions studies that show that when we are in a state, it is the opposite of daydreaming, where a challenge exactly matches our skills (go back to the figure on page 43 if you want to refresh your memory), the total electrical activity of the brain decreases. This state is usually termed flow and is characterized by maximum performance capacity and focus on the task (think, for example, of the best tennis match of your life or when you have had an incredible flow in an examination or solved a crossword in next to no time). The decrease in the total electrical activity of the brain is a sign that you have managed to release energy from those parts of the brain that you cannot control and moved some of it over to your focused attention.

In other words, when you are in this state, you control a larger part of the brain than you do normally. Moving our thought processes out to the extremities – at one extreme (almost) unconscious daydreaming and at the other focused flow – are two ways of increasing the connections in the brain and making better use of the physiological potential of the brain. One method of stimulating daydreaming is to expose yourself to more impressions. Instead of sitting in peaceful surroundings it can be a good idea to surround yourself with people and activities, which allow your thoughts to wander off for short intervals. As an interesting parallel, a Swedish study of children has found, contrary to what one would expect, a positive correlation between TV watching and intelligence. The explanation seems to be that watching TV gives many quick impressions, which stimulate a daydream-like state.

A simple method of heightening the challenge and increasing the flow is to put yourself on a deadline. In the study which forms the basis of this book's introductory test of your potential as a successful business innovator, it was found that the old expression ‘necessity is the mother of invention’ is in fact true in this respect: people working to a deadline achieve more creative results. Another way to achieve flow is to introduce some form of restriction that decreases your ability to use acquired skills – as, for example, not using graphic tools to analyse and develop a product (something that most people are fairly good at).

Yet another way to increase the use of the brain is to give oneself new and unusual tasks that the brain is not used to tackling. It then has to create patterns and routines for the new task without being able to rely on riverbeds and thought tunnels, and can therefore make new connections between different parts of the brain. Some exercises of this kind follow later in the chapter.

Let us now return to the comparison of the brain with a muscle. A muscle not only needs training to become stronger, it also needs the right conditions to benefit from the training. It is usually claimed that less than half of the increase in strength is a direct result of the training; the rest is dependent on rest and nutrition. In a similar manner creativity research has shown that it is, for example, important to avoid high levels of stress. While a reasonable stress level increases the challenge and can lead to flow, the result of high stress is that the brain starts to take shortcuts and avoids making new connections and creating new lines of thought.

One way to increase creativity is therefore to trivialize the problems you face, to simplify them to make them appear less complex. In this way, you can gain a great deal from the exercises in this book as metaphors: ‘It is not all about developing new processor techniques in order to meet converging demands in the market under pressure from neighbouring product categories. It's about joining the dots or improving scissors!’ In their capacity as metaphors, the exercises can reduce stress by making the work more fun – a factor that recurs in almost all the literature on creativity.

Not all the exercises in this particular chapter are suitable as metaphors or as warm-up exercises for group work. This is mainly because they are not as immediately effective as the earlier exercises. New connections in the brain develop over time and eventually increase the possibilities of solving problems of the kind we dealt with in the previous chapters. Nor is it possible to experience the result in the same way as in the earlier exercises. (Compare ‘I can break with convention and pee in the steel pipe’ with ‘I have opened up for new flow in the brain’.) But the exercises are not therefore less important. On the contrary, they are most fundamental to our thinking and well worth the effort. Just wait and see.

The monk

A monk follows an overgrown and winding path up a mountain to seek wisdom. He starts off at 9 o'clock in the morning and stops a few times to catch his breath. At 5 in the afternoon he reaches the top of the mountain. The next morning he wakes up eager to get home to his friends. He starts his descent at 9 o'clock in the morning and follows the same path as the previous day. The downhill slope and the monk's eagerness allow him to keep going the whole way without stopping and he reaches the foot of the mountain at 2 o'clock.

Take a minute to think about whether or not the monk at some point in time will be in exactly the same place on the path as he was the day before. And if so, how can you determine the place and time?

Did you solve the problem? Presumably you made some more or less advanced calculations and discovered that you lacked sufficient information. This is because the left half of the brain cannot manage to solve the problem with the information available. But the right half of the brain can answer quickly that the monk is going to be in exactly the same place at some time on both days by simultaneously envisaging the monk's climb up and his walk down. Somewhere on the path they must meet. And at best you can, through collaboration between the two halves of the brain, follow the monk visually and estimate the time and place.

This exercise points to our automatic inclination to use the left half of the brain when we have a problem to solve. But the left half of the brain is sensitive to incomplete information and uncertainty, which is precisely what often characterizes creative contexts such as business innovation. Therefore it is invaluable to be able to use the right half of the brain also for logical thinking. How else could Einstein have thought out the laws of the universe, which could only be measured and tested later? The right half of the brain can fill in many gaps in the work of the left half by visualizing and analysing the whole picture.

The monk is useful as a way of opening one's eyes to the limitations of the left half of the brain and as an illustration of the value of collaboration between the halves. It can also function as a metaphor to remind us or others to change our ways of thinking when solving problems that are difficult to grasp: ‘Think of the monk.’

The folded paper exercise

Imagine that you have a large sheet of paper, A2 format, lying beside a telephone directory and that the thickness of the paper in both cases is the same. Then imagine that you fold it in half 50 times (this is not easy, in fact it is impossible to fold it so many times because in the end the paper will be too small and too thick to grasp, but let us assume that it can be done). Will the folded paper be thinner than the telephone directory, equally thick, or thicker? Think about it for a moment and write down your answer.

The answer is that the paper will be thicker than the telephone directory. Did you answer correctly? Most people usually guess that the paper will be about as thick as the telephone directory by imagining how the paper is folded again and again and conjuring up a mental image of the growing accordion of paper. But in fact the paper will be appreciably thicker than the telephone directory. If you move the problem from the right to the left side of the brain and calculate logically it is considerably easier to make an accurate estimate.

First consider that when you fold the paper it becomes twice as thick (the two halves are positioned on top of each other). When you fold the paper for a second time it again becomes twice as thick (the double halves are placed on top of each other as four quarters of the paper). And so it goes on. Logically it can be summarized with numbers:

2 × 2 × 2 × 2 … or 2⁵⁰, which is to say 1 100000000000000.

If we estimate that the paper is a tenth of a millimetre thick, then after being folded 50 times the paper is 110 billion metres, or 110 million kilometres, thick.

This exercise complements the previous exercise with the monk by demonstrating the value of altering one's way of thinking in the opposite direction, from the right half of the brain to the left. It is quite easy to imagine a piece of paper being folded, and we therefore tend automatically to activate the right half of the brain. But as we have stated earlier, the right half cannot think. The left half can easily perform the calculation by collaborating with the right half and visualizing how the paper is folded again and again and constantly doubles in every folded part. The above mathematical calculation is not really difficult, and it seems quite obvious when it is explained from the right brain's holistic and visual perspective, although you might never have worked out how to do the calculation.

The folded paper exercise opens our eyes to how the logical left half of the brain can solve a problem that the right half cannot handle, but which it would not have been able to solve without the right half as the starting-point. It is the actual shift from one half to the other that generates the thinking power, when you make the left half of the brain more effective by starting from the right half. Folding paper is a good metaphor for jumping backwards and forwards between the halves of the brain in order to find new angles of approach when you are stuck on a problem.

Answering the telephone with the ‘wrong’ hand

Try using the ‘wrong’ hand next time you answer the telephone. If you usually hold the receiver in your right hand, change to your left; and if you usually use your left hand, change to your right. You will probably find that it feels stranger than you would expect to make such a small change in routine. At worst you may find it harder to concentrate on the conversation, and you will at least feel ‘merely’ handicapped because you cannot write at the same time or eat fruit or whatever you usually do when talking on the telephone.

The reason for the surprisingly noticeable consequences of answering the telephone with the wrong hand is that the brain does not want to make unnecessary effort. It therefore activates precisely those connections that are necessary when you go through different routines. To a certain extent, routines are reminiscent of flow, in the sense that brain activity is reduced by the use of a minimum number of connections. But for the brain to become stronger, it must as we know work exactly like a muscle and make new connections. When you break the routine by taking the receiver in the wrong hand, the brain is forced to make new connections. The situation becomes particularly problematic for the brain when the problem does not involve only logical mental activity or only feelings and impressions. It is therefore also particularly beneficial, because new connections can then arise between the halves of the brain. Answering the telephone is a simple combination of tasks for both halves of the brain which must work simultaneously. You must conduct the conversation and think logically, and also deal with impressions from your surroundings while you speak, and perhaps write, draw or something similar.

It is difficult to detect any immediate improvement in your thought capacity after having answered the telephone once with one hand, but when you answer the telephone equally readily with either hand you can also try completing one of the other, more direct exercises in the book and observe that you will, in all probability, do better. By then it is also time to break a new routine.

Answering the telephone with the wrong hand may appear trivial and perhaps even unrelated to developed thought, but history is full of evidence of its effectiveness. Take one of the creative people we examined earlier as an example, Leonardo da Vinci. Naturally he could not in his time answer the telephone, but he constantly devoted himself to challenging life's simple routines, by writing backwards or using both hands alternately for every sort of task. One reason that creative people have come to be regarded as a bit strange over the years is precisely that they develop odd talents. As a more current example, we can note that for a while it was popular among business executives to have juggling balls in the office to use while they were thinking.

Yet another exercise on the theme of breaking routines is to get out of bed in a new way every day. Put down the other leg first, get out on the other side, bounce up, do a somersault, walk on your hands and so on. Everyone who has done this exercise has testified that they have had a real kick in the development of their thinking after a few weeks. Firstly, the exercise fills the same function as the wrong hand on the receiver – that is, the brain must make new connections. Here mind and body must be even more coordinated: partly because rather more coordination is needed than lifting a receiver, and partly because you must think of and imagine new ways both conceptually (over the bed head) and at the level of practical detail (‘grip the frame and swing over the right leg first’). Secondly, you are in a malleable state close to sleep (when the brain, just like all the muscles of the body, builds and repairs itself) which is favourable for creating new connections. Thirdly, as your first action of the day, it sets your attitude to the challenges that show up later. Finally, the demand for constantly new solutions involves breaking conventions, rules and common sense.

Professor Balthazar

Try walking backwards and forwards in your office next time you have to solve a problem. Or go down town, run or cycle. You should see both a direct result in that you come up with a better solution and an indirect result that appears over the long term – that you have improved your thinking capacity.

There was a character called Professor Balthazar on children's TV in the 1980s. There was a recurring segment in every episode where the professor had to think of a new and revolutionary solution. He did it by walking back and forth, back and forth and thinking until the solution hit him. Whether or not you saw the children's programme, you are sure to recognize the picture of the great thinker walking backwards and forwards, deeply occupied with his thoughts. This is because creative people have long been associated with movement. Perhaps you have had the impression that they find it difficult to keep still because they get so much energy from their creativity and powers of thought, but in fact the connection is the reverse: it is movement that gives energy to power thought and creativity.

We can again state that the brain works like a muscle; and it works better with good blood circulation. Just as you can increase your physical performance, can bench press heavier weights, can putt the shot further or can run faster if you have warmed up beforehand, the brain also works better when the supplies of blood and oxygen increase. All sorts of amusing psychological experiments have measured how people's ability to make associations and draw conclusions increases when they are physically active. The physical activity increases the degree of consciousness and the ability to focus and make new connections.

‘Doing a Professor Balthazar’ makes you directly more effective in your thinking by creating favourable conditions in which the brain can work. This is another reason why it was a good idea for business executives to have juggling balls at hand. From a physiological point of view, it is optimum to be focused and use the physical energy for concentrated thinking, but doing a Professor Balthazar by moving about (for example, walking around town) can also increase your consciousness and introduce new impulses. We will discuss this further in the next chapter.