Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently Page 6

  But whether externally or internally guided, the parietal cortex plays the crucial role of integrating the effects of attention. Recall that the visual cortex maintains representations of the world on a local, grid-based system, which is a direct result of being closest to the retina. As we move toward the front of the brain on both the high and the low roads, the neural systems switch over to more global and object-based representation systems. By the time the information gets to the frontal lobes, the representations are quite abstract and bear no resemblance to the retinal grid. But we immediately see the problem when it comes to attention. If we wish to direct our attention to something, we need to know where to look. And this is where the parietal cortex comes in. The parietal cortex serves as the crucial intermediary between local representations in the visual cortex and global representations in the frontal cortex. The parietal cortex allows for the seamless transition between these two very different representations. It performs this function from the bottom up, and it also performs it from the top down. It can enhance activity in the visual cortex under the direction of the frontal cortex.11

  Although attention enhances activity in the visual cortex and other visual areas, the exact nature of this enhancement is not known. There are some clues in the nature of the distributed processing that occurs in these neural networks. Because the brain does not rely on grandmother cells, it uses networks of neurons to perform several different functions and represent many different objects. These networks, then, must be reconfigured every time you look at something different. Although this is highly efficient from an energy perspective, it also means that there are limitations on how many things you can process at once. Attention, under the direction of the frontal cortex and the parietal cortex, switches the nature of the representations in these distributed networks. This reconfiguration of neural networks is also where imagination comes from. Sometimes the reconfiguration can occur under internal guidance, but most of the time, a novel external stimulus is required to jump-start the process.

  Branch Rickey—The Iconoclast Who Hired Jackie Robinson

  In 1942, the baseball commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, famously remarked, “There is no rule, formal or informal, or any understanding—unwritten, subterranean, or sub-anything—against the hiring of Negro players by the teams of organized ball.”12 It was, of course, a lie. The owners of the Major League Baseball teams adhered to the rigid segregation of blacks and whites, despite the fact that the vast majority of players themselves would have welcomed the opportunity to play with members of the Negro League. Many already did in barnstorming exhibitions.

  Enter Branch Rickey. Even before entering the debate on racial segregation, Rickey had distinguished himself among baseball managers. His Midwestern roots led to a work ethic that became legendary in his career. He had put himself through law school at the University of Michigan by coaching college baseball. But rather than heading into the law profession, he allowed his passion for baseball to ultimately carry the day, and in 1913, he started working for the St. Louis Browns. After the Browns were sold, Rickey shifted to the St. Louis Cardinals as a field manager. On the field, Rickey created some remarkable innovations, including sliding pits and batting tees, both of which are standard fare today. Although he was innovative on the field, his real talent lay in the front office. In 1925, he was hired as general manager of the Cardinals.

  During his time with the Cardinals, Rickey’s greatest innovation was the creation of the minor league farm system. It was Rickey who devised the system by which the owners controlled a chain of minor league teams that were used to groom the best players for promotion to the majors. As a side effect, those players who weren’t good enough for the majors were sold, at a profit, to other teams. Rickey had a long run with the Cardinals, but by 1941, Rickey had come to irreconcilable differences with the owners. As luck would have it, the Brooklyn Dodgers were in the market for a new general manager.

  The Brooklyn fans did not receive Rickey well. The Dodgers fell to seventh place in 1944, and the rising chorus of calls to fire Rickey was fueled by a hostile local press. Rickey began to trade away some popular but aging players in an attempt to build up his team. But the uncertainties of the war were making it difficult. He couldn’t count on a young player making it through a season without being drafted into the army.

  It was the war itself that prompted Rickey to change his perception of blacks. Although much later he remarked, “I couldn’t face my God much longer knowing that His black creatures are held separate and distinct from His white creatures in the game that has given me all I own,” Rickey’s motives were also economic.13 He needed talent, and the Negro League was the last source. As the historian, Jules Tygiel, wrote, “Rickey clearly perceived that being the first to sign blacks would propel the Dodgers to pennants.”14 Maybe it was more than that. Rickey, known as “the Mahatma” among sportswriters, also aspired to be an agent of social change. Here was an opportunity to really change the social landscape of America.

  Despite the commissioner’s statement, the unwritten rule was that blacks could not play for a major league team. The dogma was that the fans would rebel. Rickey became a true iconoclast the moment he set plans in motion to topple this dogma. But Rickey didn’t get to be the head of a baseball team without knowing something about owners. The year after arriving in Brooklyn, he started planting seeds in the owners’ minds about recruiting black players. The timing was right. Despite the unwritten rule of segregation, they responded favorably and swore each other to secrecy. Keeping a secret like that wasn’t going to be easy. Rickey knew that whoever he recruited would have to be a special type of person. Yes, he would have to have the talent to play with the whites, but he would also need something more. Rickey needed someone who could play at a high level for a long period of time while simultaneously being subjected to intense public abuse. By May 1945, Rickey’s scouts had focused his attention on the twenty-six-year-old shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs, Jackie Robinson. But that is a story for later chapters.

  Years later, Rickey remarked, “The utter injustice of it always was in my mind—in St. Louis a negro was not permitted to buy his way into the Grandstand—and it has only been in recent years that he has been permitted to go into the Grandstand and of course there was no negro player in baseball—I felt very deeply about that thing all my life and within a month after I went to Brooklyn I went to Mr. George McLaughlin [one of the owners] and had a talk with him about it and found he was sympathetic with my views about it.”15

  Although Rickey had always had a talent for management, it is the Robinson story that propels him into the ranks of iconoclasts. Here, we see the iconoclast’s imagination in action. In fact, it was the war itself that triggered Rickey’s perception of blacks to run in reverse and imagine the possibility of a black playing for the Dodgers. No doubt, part of this was motivated by the desire for a pennant. Rickey also had deep-seated feelings about integration that he traced to his Midwestern upbringing. It simply took the catalyst of the war and the need to recruit talent to unleash his perceptual system from the shackles of segregation in baseball and imagine how to do it.

  Breaking Out of Categories

  The relationship between perception, insight, and imagination goes well beyond basic psychology or historical debates. To recap the neuroscience view, imagination comes from using the same neural circuits used to perceive natural objects. In this way, imagination is like reverse perception. Perception, however, is constrained by the categories that an individual brings to the table. Although categories may not be absolute, they are learned from past experience, and because of this relationship, experience shapes both perception and imagination. In order to think creatively, and imagine possibilities that only iconoclasts do, one must break out of the cycle of experience-dependent categorization—or what Mark Twain called “education.” For most people, this does not come naturally. Often the harder one tries to think differently, the more rigid the categories bec
ome. There is a better way, a path that jolts the brain out of preconceived notions of what it is seeing: bombard the brain with new experiences. Only then will it be forced out of efficiency mode and reconfigure its neural networks.

  One of the most important scientific discoveries in the last thirty years had its origins in exactly these types of novel circumstances. Kary Mullis came up with the basic principle of the polymerase chain reaction, or PCR, while driving up the northern California coast in 1983. PCR is the fundamental technology that allows any type of genetic test to be performed. PCR is used in genetic fingerprinting, crime scene investigations, paternity testing, and detection of hereditary diseases and cancer. PCR is also used widely in cloning and genetically engineered products such as vaccines. Mullis won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1993 for his discovery, and the circumstances of his discovery also make him an iconoclast.

  A chemist by training, Mullis had been conducting experiments on small fragments of DNA for Cetus Corporation, a biotech start-up in the Bay Area. DNA is composed of only four types of nucleotides, and they are strung together in long double chains. These chains may contain thousands of nucleotides, and the specific sequences contain the code for producing all the proteins that make up an organism. Although the code had been cracked decades before, DNA existed in only minute quantities in the body, which made it difficult to purify and study, even in the 1980s.

  Cetus and several other biotech companies had developed technology to make short sequences of DNA, called oligonucleotides, but these were only ten base pairs long. Nothing close to human genome length. Conventional wisdom said there was no way to synthesize DNA strands anywhere near the length of what exists in nature. And although the machines at Cetus were efficient at cranking out oligonucleotides, they still weren’t very long and were not useful for much. With the machines making buckets of oligonucleotides, Mullis turned his attention to denaturing natural DNA. Although DNA strands will separate at 95°, they will also come together again if the temperature is dropped back down. Mullis began to play around with programming computers that could control the denaturing and annealing processes, and realized he could automate much of it.

  The breakthrough idea came to Mullis not in the Cetus laboratory, but on a spring evening while he was driving up the northern California coast.

  As I drove through the mountains that night, the stalks of the California buckeyes heavily in blossom leaned over into the road. The air was moist and cool and filled with their heady aroma.

  How about this, I thought? What if I mix the DNA sample with the oligonucleotides, drop in the [DNA] polymerase and wait? After this was complete I could heat the mixture, causing the extended oligonucleotides to be removed from the target, then cool the mixture allowing new, unextended oligonucleotides to hybridize.

  EUREKA!!!! The result would be exactly the same only the signal strength [DNA] would be doubled.

  And again, EUREKA!!!! I could do it over and over again. Every time I did it I would double the signal. For those of you who got lost, we’re back! I stopped the car at mile marker 46.7 on Highway 128. In the glove compartment I found some paper and a pen. I confirmed that two to the tenth power was about a thousand and that two to the twentieth power was about a million, and that two to the thirtieth power was around a billion, close to the number of base pairs in the human genome.16

  Mullis realized that he could amplify a piece of DNA exponentially by simply repeating the cycle of denaturing DNA, adding an oligonucleotide to get the process started, and dumping in a bunch of naked nucleotides with some DNA polymerase. After only twenty cycles, he would have amplified a single piece of DNA a million times. Although it took him about six months of trial and error back in the laboratory, ultimately he was successful and proved wrong every other biochemist about synthesizing DNA.

  The interesting part of the story, however, is how Mullis came to the crucial insight. All the pieces of the puzzle had been known for several years, and so he didn’t discover a new process per se, but instead figured out how to link several existing technologies in a way that would have far-reaching ramifications. The insight did not occur as he was hunched over his laboratory bench. Instead, the eureka moment came at mile marker 46.7 on Highway 128. As with Lauterbur in the Big Boy restaurant, or Disney in the movie theater, the insight came in a novel environment.

  Novelty as a Trigger for Running the Perceptual System in Reverse

  In the previous chapter, we saw how novel experiences trigger new ways of seeing the world. Because imagination comes from the perceptual system, the same principle applies to imagination. Imagination is like running perception in reverse.

  The wrinkle, however, is that the brain operates under the efficiency principle, which means that it will do its job in a way that takes the least amount of energy. It is lazy. The efficiency principle dictates that the brain will take shortcuts based on what it already knows. These shortcuts, although they save energy, lead to perception being shaped by past experience. How you categorize objects determines what you see. And because imagination comes from perception, these same categories hobble imagination and make it difficult to think differently.

  The brain is extraordinarily efficient in using its resources. Too efficient. While in familiar surroundings, whether Mullis’s laboratory or Chihuly’s hotshop, the brain perceives things in ways that it has become accustomed to. Only when the brain is confronted with stimuli that it has not seen before, does it start to reorganize perception. This reorganization spills over and influences the internal images that can be held in the mind’s eye. So even though Mullis had been thinking about DNA and oligonucleotides for months, something happened in his car that evening that triggered a new perception of the problem that was previously unavailable to him in familiar surroundings.

  For the same reason, Disney didn’t imagine the possibilities of animation until he saw the novel juxtaposition of projected illustrations with moving pictures. Only then did his perception of drawing change from a static one to a dynamic one that could tell a narrative. And it took the realities of war to trigger the imagination of Florence Nightingale to change the sanitary conditions that were killing soldiers.

  Fortunately, the networks that govern both perception and imagination can be reprogrammed. The frontal cortex, which contains rules for decision making, can reconfigure neural networks in the visual pathways so that an individual can see things that she didn’t see before simply by deploying her attention differently. But it is difficult to do this under business-as-usual conditions. It typically takes a novel stimulus—either a new piece of information or getting out of the environment in which an individual has become comfortable—to jolt attentional systems awake and reconfigure both perception and imagination. The more radical and novel the change, the greater the likelihood of new insights being generated. To think like an iconoclast, you need novel experiences.

  As in the last chapter, the surest way to evoke the imagination is to confront the perceptual system with people, places, and things it hasn’t seen before. Categories are death to imagination. So the solution is to seek out environments in which you have no experience. The environments may have nothing to do with the individual’s area of expertise. It doesn’t matter. Because the same systems in the brain carry out both perception and imagination, there will be crosstalk.

  Novel experiences, especially big changes such as relocations, figure prominently in the imagination of an iconoclast. Without losing sight of why novel experiences are so effective at unleashing the imagination (because they force the perceptual system out of categories), the real target is categorization. The tendency of the brain to take shortcuts through categorization means that the iconoclast maintains a state of vigilance over the use of categories.

  An effective strategy to fight categorization is to confront categories directly. Whether it is categorizing a person or an idea, write out the categories. Jot down some words that categorize an idea. Use analogies. You will naturally f
all back on things that you are familiar with. Allow yourself the freedom to write down gut feelings, such as stupid or hot. Only when you consciously confront your brain’s reliance on categories will you be able to imagine outside of its boundaries.

  THREE

  Fear—The Inhibitor

  of Action

  I have learned over the years that when one’s

  mind is made up, this diminishes fear; knowing

  what must be done does away with fear.

  —Rosa Parks

  IF BRANCH RICKEY WAS AN iconoclast for hiring Jackie Robinson to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers, Robinson was equally an iconoclast for having the courage to do so. It is hard to overestimate the symbolic importance of Jackie Robinson. Born in Cairo, Georgia, in 1919, a grandson of a slave, Robinson seemed an unlikely candidate to become an icon. His father left when he was six months old, and Robinson’s mother picked up the family and moved to Southern California. Although he grew up in a somewhat more integrated environment in Pasadena, Robinson still knew the pains of discrimination from an early age. But he didn’t let fear get in the way of what he did.