CONTENTS

Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Epigraph
Introduction: The Lab of Misfits

1: Being in Color
2: Information Is Meaningless
3: Making Sense of the Senses
4: The Illusion of Illusions
5: The Frog Who Dreamed of Being a Prince
6: The Physiology of Assumptions
7: Changing the Future Past
8: Making the Invisible Visible
9: Celebrate Doubt
10: The Ecology of Innovation

A Beginning: Why Deviate?

Notes
Praise for Deviate
Copyright
To perceive freely…
Through tempest…
Violence un-cast…
With courageous doubt…
A tilted self…

Dedicated to those who walk tilted.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

All knowing begins with a question. And a question begins with a “quest” (to
state the obvious), as does life. At the core of living, then, is the courage to
move, to step with doubt but step nonetheless (sometimes off a cliff, which is a
less good step). Fortunately, no one steps alone (except that last one). My
shuffles expressed here were and are enabled by the courage of others who in
different ways enable me to live: My deviant Mum and Padre and Janet, my four
mad sisters, my gorgeous gremlins Zanna, Misha and Theo, and my essential
and beautiful (co-)explorer and creator Isabel. All incredibly colorful people
who have shown me new ways of seeing, sometimes against my will (sorry),
always to my benefit eventually. They are “my why,” my foundation for
attempting to see freely, and the motivation to support others in their attempt to
do so.
I thank my teachers (and all teachers more generally). Most of our life
happens without us there, since most of our perceptions were seeded by, if not
out-right inherited from, others. Of particular importance to me have been the
perceptions of one of the world’s leading neuroscientists Dale Purves, who was
the initiator and distiller of my way of thinking and being in science and the
science of perception. A mentor in the truest sense. Dale, along with Richard
Gregory, Marian Diamond, Joseph Campbell, Houston Smith and Carl Sagan
and their deviating-ilk reveal in action that true science (and creatively-critical-
thinking in general) is a way of being that can transform. They are teachers who
show us how to look (not what to look at). Teachers like Mrs Stuber at Interlake,
Mrs Kinigle-Wiggle and Marshmellow, Mr Groom and Orlando at Cherry Crest,
thank you. I also thank my core collaborators (teachers of a different kind):
Isabel Behncke, who has expanded, opened and grounded my knowledge
personally and academically in essential ways (including the different grounds of
Chile the kelp-beds to lake-beds), Rich Clarke, who has been core to the lab’s
activities and ideas since its inception, Lars Chittka, who taught me how to train
bees, Dave Strudwick, who was essential to creating the lab’s science education
programme… and my diversity of PhD and Masters students in neuroscience,
computer science, design, architecture, theatre, installation art, and music, such
as David Maulkin, Daniel Hulme, Udi Schlessinger and Ilias Berstrom, who
became experts in areas that I was not, and in doing so complexified the lab and
my thinking in essential ways.
I also thank my highly engaged editors Mauro, Bea and Paul, my brilliant
agent and friend Doug Abrams (whose ambition and impact in publishing is
inspiring), and my tremendous support-writer Aaron Shulman without whom
this 20-year project would never have been seen by me, much less anyone else.
Together we struggled to innovate; i.e., to balance creativity and efficiency (or
more accurately, they struggled to balance me patiently).
And I thank you. One of the most challenging things we can do is to step into
uncertainty. I conceived of Deviate as an experiment in book-form, a place to
share my necessarily limited understanding of perception as well as my
speculations and opinions (inherited and seeded) in the hope—and I can only
hope—that you would know less at the end than you think you know now, and in
doing so understand more. In nature form (or change) comes from failure, not
success. The brain—like life—does not search to live, but to not die. Which
makes success an accident of what failure leaves behind when one is
thoughtfully deluded enough to walk tilted (long) enough.
The only true voyage of discovery…
[would be] to possess other eyes, to behold the universe
through the eyes of another.
—Marcel Proust
INTRODUCTION

The Lab of Misfits

When you open your eyes, do you see the world as it really is? Do we see
reality?
Humans have been asking themselves this question for thousands of years.
From the shadows on the wall of Plato’s cave in The Republic to Morpheus
offering Neo the red pill or the blue bill in The Matrix, the notion that what we
see might not be what is truly there has troubled and tantalized us. In the
eighteenth century, the philosopher Immanuel Kant argued that we can never
have access to the Ding an sich, the unfiltered “thing-in-itself ” of objective
reality. Great minds of history have taken up this perplexing question again and
again. They all had theories, but now neuroscience has an answer.
The answer is that we don’t see reality.
The world exists. It’s just that we don’t see it. We do not experience the
world as it is because our brain didn’t evolve to do so. It’s a paradox of sorts:
Your brain gives you the impression that your perceptions are objectively real,
yet the sensory processes that make perception possible actually separate you
from ever accessing that reality directly. Our five senses are like a keyboard to a
computer—they provide the means for information from the world to get in, but
they have very little to do with what is then experienced in perception. They are
in essence just mechanical media, and so play only a limited role in what we
perceive. In fact, in terms of the sheer number of neural connections, just 10
percent of the information our brains use to see comes from our eyes. The rest
comes from other parts of our brains, and this other 90 percent is in large part
what this book is about. Perception derives not just from our five senses but
from our brain’s seemingly infinitely sophisticated network that makes sense of
all the incoming information. Using perceptual neuroscience—but not only
neuroscience—we will see why we don’t perceive reality, then explore why this
can lead to creativity and innovation at work, in love, at home, or at play. I’ve
written the book to be what it describes: a manifestation of the process of seeing
differently.
But first, why does any of this really matter to you? Why might you need to
deviate from the way you currently perceive? After all, it feels like we see reality
accurately… at least most of the time. Clearly our brain’s model of perception
has served our species well, allowing us to successfully navigate the world and
its ever-shifting complexity, from our days as hunter-gatherers on the savannah
to our current existence paying bills on our smartphones. We’re able to find food
and shelter, hold down a job, and build meaningful relationships. We have built
cities, launched astronauts into space, and created the Internet. We must be
doing something right, so… who cares that we don’t see reality?
Perception matters because it underpins everything we think, know, and
believe—our hopes and dreams, the clothes we wear, the professions we choose,
the thoughts we have, and the people whom we trust… and don’t trust.
Perception is the taste of an apple, the smell of the ocean, the enchantment of
spring, the glorious noise of the city, the feeling of love, and even conversations
about the impossibility of love. Our sense of self, our most essential way of
understanding existence, begins and ends with perception. The death that we all
fear is less the death of the body and more the death of perception, as many of us
would be quite happy to know that after “bodily death” our ability to engage in
perception of the world around us continued. This is because perception is what
allows us to experience life itself… indeed to see it as alive. Yet most of us don’t
know how or why perceptions work, or how or why our brain evolved to
perceive the way it does. This is why the implications of the way the human
brain evolved to perceive are both profound and deeply personal.
Our brain is a physical embodiment of our ancestors’ perceptual reflexes
shaped through the process of natural selection, combined with our own reflexes
as well as those of our culture in which we are embedded. These in turn have
been influenced by the mechanisms of development and learning, which results
in seeing only what helped us to survive in the past—and nothing else. We carry
all of this empirical history with us and project it out into the world around us.
All of our forebears’ good survival choices exist within us, as do our own (the
mechanisms and strategies that would have led to bad perceptions are selected
out, a process that continues to this day, every day).
Yet if the brain is a manifestation of our history, how is it ever possible to
step outside the past in order to live and create differently in the future?
Fortunately, the neuroscience of perception—and indeed evolution itself—offers
us a solution. The answer is essential because it will lead to future innovations in
thought and behavior in all aspects of our lives, from love to learning. What is
the next greatest innovation?
It’s not a technology.
It’s a way of seeing.
Humans have the wild and generative gift of being able to see their lives and
affect them just by reflecting on the process of perception itself. We can see
ourselves see. That is what this book is fundamentally about: seeing your see or
perceiving your perception, which is arguably the most essential step in seeing
differently. By becoming aware of the principles by which your perceptual brain
works, you can become an active participant in your own perceptions and in this
way change them in the future.
Down the Rabbit Hole

Alice follows a white rabbit down a hole and ends up in a world in which
fantastical things happen. She grows in size; time is eternally stopped for the
Mad Hatter at 6 p.m.; the Cheshire Cat’s grin floats in the air, sans the cat. Alice
must navigate this bizarre new environment and at the same time maintain her
sense of self, no easy task for anyone, let alone a child. The book Alice in
Wonderland underscores the virtue of being adaptive when confronting shifting
circumstances. From the perspective of neuroscience, however, there is a much
more powerful lesson: We’re all like Alice all the time—our brains must process
strange new information arising from unpredictable experiences every single
day, and provide us with useful responses—except that we didn’t have to drop
through the rabbit hole. We’re already deep inside it.
My goal in Deviate is to reveal the hidden wonderland of your own
perception to you as my more than 25 years of research have revealed it to me.
You don’t have to be a so-called “science person.” Although I’m a
neuroscientist, I’m not just interested in the brain only, since neuroscience is so
much bigger than just the brain. When neuroscience is applied outside the
disciplines it is traditionally associated with—such as chemistry, physiology,
and medicine—the possibilities are not just immense, but fantastically
unpredictable. Neuroscience—when defined more broadly—has the potential to
impact everything from apps to art, web design to fashion design, education to
communication, and perhaps most fundamentally, your personal life. You’re the
only one seeing what you see, so perception is ultimately personal.
Understanding of the brain (and its relationship to the world around you) can
affect anything, and lead to startling deviations.
Once you begin to see perceptual neuroscience this way, as I did several
years ago, it becomes hard to stay in the lab… or at least the more conventional,
staid conception of what a “lab” is. So, a decade ago I began redirecting my
energies toward creating brain-changing, science-based experiences for the
public: experiment as experience… even theater. The theme of one of my first
installations at a leading science museum was Alice in Wonderland. The exhibit,
much like Lewis Carroll’s strange, topsy-turvy novel, took visitors through
illusions intended to challenge and enrich their view of human perception. This
first exhibit—which I created with the scientist Richard Gregory, a hero in
perception who shaped much of what I (and we) think about the perceiving brain
—grew into many other settings, all of them based on the belief that to create
spaces for understanding we need to consider not only how we see, but why we
see what we do. To this end, I founded the Lab of Misfits, a public place open to
anyone where I could conduct science “in its natural habitat,” a playful and rule-
breaking ecology of creativity. This was most dramatically the case when we
took up residency in the Science Museum in London.
My Lab of Misfits has enabled me to bring together primatologists, dancers,
choreographers, musicians, composers, children, teachers, mathematicians,
computer scientists, investors, behavioral scientists, and of course
neuroscientists in a place where concepts and principles unite, where the
emphasis is on innovation, and where we passionately investigate things we care
about. We’ve had an official “Keeper of the Crayons” and “Head Player” (not
that kind of player—as far as we know). We’ve published papers on nonlinear
computation and dance, bee behavior and architecture, visual music, and the
evolution of plant development. We’ve created the world’s first Immersive
Messaging app that enables gifting in physical space using augmented reality,
which allow people to re-engage with the world. We’ve initiated a new way to
interact with the public called NeuroDesign, which combines those who are
brilliant at telling stories with those who understand the nature of the stories the
brain desires. We have created an education platform that, with the raison d’être
of encouraging courage, compassion, and creativity, doesn’t teach children about
science but makes them scientists, and has resulted in the youngest published
scientists in the world (and the youngest main-stage TED speaker). Many of the
ideas in Deviate were created, prototyped, and embodied through experience in
this physical and conceptual “Lab of Misfits” space. This means the book is also
a product of all these misfits, the interactions between them, and even more
significantly, our interactions with historic and contemporary misfits outside the
lab.
This brings me to a key theme in the pages ahead: that perception isn’t an
isolated operation in our brains, but part of an ongoing process inside an
ecology, by which I mean the relation of things to the things around them, and
how they influence each other. Understanding a whirlpool isn’t about
understanding water molecules; it’s about understanding the interaction of those
molecules. Understanding what it is to be human is about understanding the
interactions between our brain and body, and between other brains and bodies, as
well as with the world at large. Hence life is an ecology, not an environment.
Life—and what we perceive—lives in what I call “the space between.” My lab,
and all my research on perception, draws on this inherent interconnectedness,
which is where biology, and indeed life itself, lives.
Now I have started all over again and built my lab into a book—hopefully a
delightfully misfit one, shot through with deviations. This creates a sense of
danger, not just for me but for you as well, since together we will need to
question basic assumptions, such as whether or not we see reality. Stepping into
such uncertainty isn’t easy or simple. On the contrary, all brains are deathly
afraid of uncertainty—and for good reason. To change a historical reflex will
have unknown consequences. “Not knowing” is an evolutionarily bad idea. If
our ancestors paused because they weren’t sure whether the dark shape in front
of them was a shadow or a predator, well, it was already too late. We evolved to
predict. Why are all horror films shot in the dark? Think of the feeling you often
have when walking through a familiar forest at night as compared to during the
day. At night you can’t see what’s around you. You’re uncertain. It’s
frightening, much like the constant “firsts” life presents us with—the first day of
school, first dates, the first time giving a speech. We don’t know what’s going to
happen, so these situations cause our bodies and our minds to react.
Uncertainty is the problem that our brains evolved to solve.
Resolving uncertainty is a unifying principle across biology, and thus is the
inherent task of evolution, development, and learning. This is a very good thing.
As you will have observed from experience, life is inherently uncertain because
the world and the things that constitute it are always changing. And the question
of uncertainty will become an increasingly pressing issue in all parts of our lives.
This is because, as we and our institutions become more interconnected, we
become more interdependent. When more and more of us are connected to each
other, the effects of the metaphorical butterfly flapping its wings on the other
side of the world are more quickly and more powerfully felt everywhere,
increasing the pace of change (which is at the heart of a nonlinear, complex
system). An increasingly connected world is also inherently more unpredictable.
This creates fundamental challenges for living today, from love to leadership.
Many of the most sought-after jobs today, from social media expert to web
designer, weren’t even around twenty years ago. A successful company, a
thriving relationship, an environment free of dangers—the existence of these
things today doesn’t guarantee their continued existence tomorrow. You are
never truly “untouched” in a connected, flux-filled world. There will always be
events that blindside you, that you didn’t predict, from the unforeseen change in
weather spoiling your BBQ in London on a Saturday afternoon to those in
London suddenly finding themselves living outside the European Union. This is
why our brain evolved to take what is inherently uncertain and make it certain…
every second of every day. The biological motivation of many of our social and
cultural habits and reflexes, including religion and politics, and even hate and
racism, is to diminish uncertainty through imposed rules and rigid
environments… or in one’s vain attempt to disconnect from a world that lives
only because it is connected and in movement. In doing so, these inherited
reflexes—by design—prevent us from living more creative, compassionate,
collaborative, and courageous lives. With the making of this kind of certainty,
we lose… freedom.
At Burning Man in 2014, I had an experience that has stayed with me—
actually quite a few, but I’ll share this one here. It was a profound—and
profoundly simple—example of how deviating can radically change one’s brain.
As many know, Burning Man is a weeklong festival every August in the Nevada
desert that brings together art, music, dance, theater, architecture, technology,
conversation, and nearly 70,000 human beings. Costumes are ubiquitous—and at
times a complete lack thereof (though often with body paint). It is a city-sized
circus of free-form creativity… picture a giant pirate ship sailing along on
wheels… that explodes on the desert floor, then vanishes seven days later,
leaving absolutely no trace… an essential part of the Burning Man ethos.
On a windy day midway through the week, my partner Isabel and I were
riding our bikes and getting to know the “city.” Desert dust swirled, silting us
and our goggles in a fine layer of beige. We ended up in a camp of people from a
town on the southern edge of the Midwest and met a guy I’ll call Dave. This was
Dave’s first year at Burning Man, and he said it was turning out to be a
transformative experience for him. At first I internally rolled my eyes at this.
Being “transformed” at Burning Man has become not just a cliché but almost an
imposed aspiration. If you don’t transform there, then you have somehow failed.
But what is transformation? Of course, no one really knows because it is
different for every person, which is why so many people at Burning Man
hungrily chase signs of it all week, going around asking: “Have you been
transformed?”
The more we talked to Dave, though, the more I realized he really was
undergoing a deep shift in his perceptions of self and other. He was a computer
programmer from a place with fundamentalist religious values and a narrow
outlook on what was socially acceptable. In his town, you either learned to fit in
or you were ostracized. Dave had learned to fit in… the business casual attire he
wore at Burning Man reflected this. But it had clearly curtailed the possibilities
of his life, curiosity, and imagination. Yet here he was, at Burning Man! It was
the decision to be there that mattered. It was his choice… his intention
enacted… to come, and the questioning manner he had brought with him.
As we stood there in his camp, he told us that the little green plastic flower
that I saw stuck behind his ear—perhaps the least flamboyant adornment in
Burning Man history—had provoked an epic struggle inside him. He had sat in
his tent for two hours that morning weighing whether or not to wear the flower.
It had forced him to confront a complex host of assumptions in his mind—about
free expression, masculinity, aesthetic beauty, and social control. In the end, he
gave himself permission to question these assumptions symbolically manifested
in a plastic flower, and stepped out of his tent. He seemed both pleased and
uncomfortable, and in my eyes far more courageous than most of the people out
there in the Nevada desert that day in search of something powerful.
As a neuroscientist, I knew that his brain had changed. Ideas and actions
previously out of his reach would now be available to him if he was willing to
question his assumptions, and in doing so create a new, unknown terrain of
wondering. As a person, I was moved.
This is what transformation looks like: Deviation toward oneself. So simple.
So complex.
Nothing interesting ever happens without active doubt. Yet doubt is often
disparaged in our culture because it is associated with indecision, a lack of
confidence, and therefore weakness. Here I will argue exactly the opposite. That
in many contexts, to “doubt yet do… with humility,” like Dave, is possibly the
strongest thing one can do. Doubt with courage and your brain will reward you
for it through the new perceptions this process opens up. To question one’s
assumptions, especially those that define ourselves, requires knowing that you
don’t see the reality—only your mind’s version of reality—and admitting this,
not to mention accepting the possibility that someone else might know better. In
the pages-based lab of Deviate, not knowing is celebrated. The word “deviant”
has all sorts of negative connotations, yet it comes from the verb “deviate,”
which simply means not to take the established route. Whereas politicians
emphasize unchanging routes, in our cultures we also idolize people who are
deviators, from Rosa Parks and Oscar Wilde to William Blake, because we
admire and are thankful for the unestablished routes they took… usually in
hindsight, much more rarely in the present (indeed, like so many others, Blake’s
work only came to be understood for its true value long after his death). The vast
majority of Hollywood superhero movies are predicated on deviance. Have you
ever met an average hero?

Doubt is the genesis of powerful, deviating possibilities. In this way, the

human brain is able to shed constricting assumptions and see beyond the utility
with which the past has trained it to see. As I like to say, the cash is in the
questions.
Be Delusional

The doubt-driven ride this book will take you on is going to physically change
your brain. This isn’t braggadocio, but a fact-based understanding of everything
from the electric patterns of your thoughts to the neurons of your emotions. The
simple act of reading can change your brain because two and a half decades of
research have led me to one indisputable conclusion: what makes the human
brain beautiful is that it is delusional.
I’m not talking about insanity. What I’m getting at has to do with the brain’s
imaginative powers of possibility and how richly they interact with behavior. We
can all hold mutually exclusive realities in our minds at the same time, and “live”
them out imaginatively.
Human perception is so layered and complex that our brains are constantly
responding to stimuli that aren’t real in any physical, concrete sense, but are just
as vitally important: our thoughts. We are beautifully delusional because internal
context is as determinative as our external one. This is verifiable at the neural
level: fMRIs (functional magnetic resonance imaging, a technique for tracking
brain activity through blood flow) show that an imagined scenario lights up brain
regions the same way the real-life equivalent scenario does. In other words, ideas
and thoughts and concepts have lives inside of us. They are our history, too, and
directly feed our current and (maybe more importantly) future behavior. As
such, our perception is much more plastic and subject to influence than we’re
often aware of or comfortable admitting. The stock market tends to go up when
it’s sunny, and down when it’s not. The seemingly rational decisions we make,
then, are actually guided by “invisible” forces of perception that we’re not even
conscious of.
Another example: In 2014 the Lab of Misfits organized our first party/study,
an initiative we call The Experiment, which is designed to do many things. One
is to improve the quality of scientific research by taking it out of the artificial
situation of a lab and into authentic human situations. The situation we
engineered was a true social gathering in which people ate and drank and talked
in an old crypt with strangers with a larger theatrical context. For the participants
it was designed to be purposefully ambiguous as to whether it was science, a
nightclub, an interactive theater and/or cabaret, but it was a memorable
experience in which they also served as subjects in an experiment-as-experience.
The goal of The Experiment is to discover, challenge and raise awareness
through “empirical embodiment” of what it is to be human. One of our
experiences sought specifically to see whether people group themselves
depending on how they perceive themselves as either powerful or not.
After the food, once everyone was full, relaxed, and enjoying themselves, we
had people do a brief writing exercise to prime them into a perceptual state.
Depending on the memory they were prompted to recall, they were primed into
either a low-power state, a higher-power state, or a neutral-power state. What
this means is that their recollection prompted them to unconsciously perceive
themselves to be either less or more in control. We then had them walk in a large
concentric circle within a big underground crypt space in a Victorian jail in East
London. Next, we asked them to segregate themselves under two lights at
opposite ends of the room—in short, to stand next to the people who “feel like
you.” That’s all we said.
What happened shocked the guests as much as it did us scientists. Without
knowing who had been primed in which way, the people organized themselves
according to their power-state with two-thirds accuracy. This means that well
over half the people in each corner were with other people “like themselves.”
This was astounding for two reasons: One, it showed how strongly the
participants’ simple thoughts about themselves changed their own behavior; that
is, their imagining changed their perceptual responses. Two, the people
somehow perceived the imaginatively primed perceptions of others. What a
wondrous example of how delusions affect not only our behavior, but the
ecology in which we interact as well. In the chapters ahead, you will learn how
to make your brain’s delusional nature enhance your perception.
I want to create a fresh layer of meaning in your brain that will be as real as
anything else that has affected your perception—and your life. The narrative of
this book embodies the process I’m going to teach you. I constructed it so that
reading from first page to last is seeing differently. It will allow you to
experience what creativity feels and looks like from the inside. Think of it as a
software solution for your perception. When you’re done with the book, you
simply change the context and reapply the software. Perhaps the most
encouraging part is that you don’t have to acquire a new base of knowledge.
To fly a plane, you first have to train as a pilot, which involves a tremendous
amount of specialization and practice. But in order to deviate into new
perceptions, you already have the basics. You don’t have to learn to see and
perceive. It’s an essential part of who you are, if not the essential part. In this
sense, you already have a firsthand account of the subject of this book.
Furthermore, the process of perception is the same process by which you change
perception. This means you are your own pilot (in the context of your larger
ecology). My task is to use the science of your brain to teach you a new way to
fly, and to see anew what you thought you had already seen.
One of the ways I will do this is by applying my knowledge of perception to
your reading experience. For example, the brain thrives on difference… on
contrast, since only by comparing things is it able to build relationships, which is
a key step in creating perceptions. This is why you will find deviant design
elements, such as varying font sizes and occasionally puzzling images. On the
page you will also find exercises, tests, and self-experiments that require your
participation. (They won’t be tedious; in one I’m going to make you hold your
eye open and momentarily “go blind.”) When I began Deviate, I wanted to
challenge assumptions about what a science book could be—my own step into
uncertainty. What better space to do this than in a work about innovation and the
brain, using the brain as my guide? This book is different in other ways as well.
In my view, as soon as you’ve told something to someone, you’ve taken the
potential for a deeper meaning away from them. True knowledge is when
information becomes embodied understanding: We have to act in the world to
understand it. This is why Deviate will not give you recipes. Instead of a how-to
guide that offers task-specific formulas, I will give you principles that transcend
any single context. Just because you are able to make one fantastic meal by
following a recipe doesn’t mean you are now a great cook; it means you are
good at following the instructions of a great cook. While it may have worked
once, it hasn’t given you the wisdom to make your own fantastic meal, as you
have no idea why the recipe is a good one. Understanding why the recipe is a
good one (and how) is one key aspect of what makes a chef a chef.
Deviate is designed to innovate your thinking by giving you new awareness,
which creates the freedom to change. The first half will explore the mechanics of
perception itself, making you reconsider the “reality” you see and helping you to
know less than you think you know now. Yes: that is my aim, for you to actually
know less overall, while understanding more. The second half will then make
this understanding practical by giving you a process and technique to deviate in
your life.
When you finish this book, I have only one true hope: that you will embrace
the perceptual power of doubt. This book is about celebrating the courage of
doubt, and the humility that comes with understanding your own brain. It’s about
why we see what we do, and how recognizing that we don’t have access to
reality leads us to get more things right. Which is all just another way of
explaining why I wrote this book: so that you too will be a misfit.
CHAPTER 1

Being in Color

When you woke up this morning and opened your eyes for the first time, did you
see the world accurately, the way it really is? If you said no, let me ask the
question a different way: Do you believe in illusions? Most of us do. If so, then
by definition you believe that the brain evolved to see the world accurately, at
least most of the time, given that the definition of illusion is an impression of the
world that is different from the way it really is. And yet we don’t see the world
accurately. Why? What is going on inside our complex brains (or more
precisely, in the complex interaction between our brain and its world) that makes
this so? First, however, we must address an urgent empirical question and satisfy
that human need to “see it with my own eyes”: Where is the proof that we don’t
see reality? How can we see that we don’t see it? The answer to this question is
where we begin to dismantle our assumptions about perception.
In February of 2014, a photo posted on Tumblr went viral on a global scale
and inadvertently spoke to just this issue of the subjectivity of perception—and
spoke loudly. The questions it raised about what we see generated thousands
more questions across Twitter and other social media and on TV, as well as in
the minds of people who kept their astonishment private. You may or may not
have encountered the photo, but if you did you’ll remember the image itself gave
the phenomenon its name—The Dress.
It all started with a wedding in Scotland. The mother of the bride had sent a
photo of the dress she was going to wear to her daughter: a straightforward gown
of blue fabric with stripes of black lace running across it. Yet the photo itself
was anything but straightforward for perception. The bride and groom couldn’t
agree on whether it was white with gold stripes or blue with black stripes.
Baffled by their disagreement, they forwarded the image to people they knew,
including their friend Caitlin McNeill, a musician who was performing at the
wedding. She nearly missed her stage call because she and her bandmates (who,
like the couple, didn’t see the dress the same) were arguing about the image.1
After the wedding, McNeill posted the slightly washed-out photo on her Tumblr
page with this caption: “guys please help me—is this dress white and gold, or
blue and black? Me and my friends can’t agree and we are freaking the fuck
out.” Not long after she published this short commentary, the post hit viral
critical mass and, as the saying goes, the photo “broke the Internet.”
Over the following week The Dress ran its course as most viral phenomenon
do, with the explosive, out-of-nowhere virality becoming as much the story as
the item—in this case a simple photo of a piece of clothing—that instigated it.
Celebrities tweeted and feuded about it, reddit threads proliferated, and news
organizations covered it. Those of us who research color were suddenly
inundated with requests for interviews, as it seemed everyone wanted to know
why they saw the colors differently. Even the usually sober Washington Post
published the sensationalist headline: “The Inside Story of the ‘White Dress,
Blue Dress’ Drama That Divided a Planet.”2 Yet in spite of the overheated
excitement and debate, people were having an important conversation about
science—to be precise, perceptual neuroscience.
I found this remarkable on several levels, but most profoundly in that it
hinted at the way meaning is a plastic entity, much like the physical network of
the brain, which we shape and reshape through perceptual experiences.
Understanding this, as we’ll see in later chapters, is the key to “re-engineering”
your perceptual past to liberate unforeseen thoughts and ideas from your brain
cells. The Dress phenomenon was a perfect example of how meaning creates
meaning (as news agencies around the world started reporting a story largely
because it was being reported elsewhere and therefore assumed to be
meaningful, and thereby making it meaningful), which is a fundamental attribute
of perception itself. But I was also struck by the fact that it wasn’t the illusion
per se that was grabbing people’s attention, since we are accustomed to them
(though usually as simple “tricks”). What seemed to grab people was that they
were seeing it differently from each other. We are very familiar with having
different conceptual views about things, though. So how and why was this
different? It came down to this: it was because it was color.
We are OK with speaking a different language than another person, but when
my friends, loved ones, and others whose perception and grasp of reality I trust
differ at such a fundamental level as color, this raises… for a beautiful moment,
albeit too brief… deep, largely unconscious existential questions about how I see
the world around me. It unnerved something at the core of how people
understood their very consciousness, selves, and existence. As the actor and
writer Mindy Kaling tweeted on February 25th, in the midst of the frenzy of
#TheDress (one of her many impassioned tweets about it): “I think I’m getting
so mad about the dress because it’s an assault on what I believe is objective
truth.”
This is the crux about perception and self that The Dress brought up for so
many: there is an objective “truth” or reality, but our brains don’t give us access
to it. We got a shocking “look” at the cracks in our highly subjective reality
through the photo of the dress—and it was a bit upsetting, or at least unsettling.
The key for understanding how to enhance creativity through an understanding
of perception… as you will soon see… is the following: this brief step into the
most fundamental of uncertainties was also exciting for people. It freaked them
out a bit yes, but it thrilled them, too.
For me personally, it was even more exciting, since I got to observe in real-
time as millions of people took a dramatic step forward in understanding. Yet
some people also wrote off The Dress: “OK, my perception didn’t see reality this
time, but it usually does.” “No!” I wanted to shout. “You never, ever see
reality!” Unfortunately, this essential point never became the central “story” of
The Dress, though some in the scientific community took advantage of the
opportunity to engage a broader audience with a topic that in any other cultural
moment would have seemed abstruse and irrelevant. In May 2015, for example,
Current Biology simultaneously published three studies of The Dress. One found
that the distribution of colors of the dress corresponded to “natural daylights,”
which makes it harder for your brain to differentiate sources of light from
surfaces that reflect light (more on this in the next chapter). Another study made
a discovery about how the brain processes the color blue, revealing that things
have a greater probability of appearing white or gray to the human eye when
“varied along bluish directions.” The last study, which surveyed 1,401
participants, found that 57 percent see the dress as blue/black, while the
white/gold perception of the dress was more common in older people and
women. Additionally, on a second viewing, participants’ perception sometimes
switched white/gold to blue/back, or vice versa. In short, the viral photo proved
to be an ideal experimental object to further the study of visual perception.3
Still, none of this answers the question of why the hell people saw that dress
differently.
#TheDress tapped into not only how perception works, but why it matters so
much to us. It illustrates the extremely counterintuitive nature of our brain. If we
saw the world as it really is, then things that are the same should look the same.
Likewise, things that are different should look different… always, to everyone.
This seems sensible and correct, something we can count on from our perception
(or so we thought). After all, seeing different intensities of light is the simplest
task the visual brain performs, so simple that even some jellyfish can do it—and
they don’t even have a brain.
Yet perceiving light is not actually as straightforward as it may seem, despite
the fact that we do it every waking millisecond. The billions of cells and their
interconnections devoted to it are evidence of its difficulty. We rely on this
perceptual skill to make instinctive decisions that serve us as we move through
the world. The Dress, however, revealed that just because we sense light, we
don’t necessarily see the reality of it.
In the first of the images that follow, each circle is a different shade of gray.
It’s easy to perceive the varying gradations. Things that are different should look
different, and they do.
In the second image we are looking at two circles of identical shades of gray.
Now look at the third image. The gray circle on the left inside the dark box
looks lighter than the gray circle on the right inside the white box. They appear
to be two distinct shades of gray.
But they’re not. They are the exact same gray.
 This is the objective reality—which is fundamentally different from our
perceptional reality. What’s more, every reader of this book will perceive these
three images the same way you did, with the same departure from the physical
reality of what is printed on the page. What is more, it is not simply that dark
surrounds make things look lighter than light surrounds. The opposite can also
be true: light surrounds can make things look lighter and dark surrounds can
make things look darker as shown in the fourth image, where the central regions,
which look like circles obscured by four squares, appear differently light in the
way just described.
But the most powerful message here is one that never came up during the
viral Dress phenomenon. What is true for vision is indeed true for every one of
our senses. What people realized about the subjectivity of their sight also goes
for every other facet of their “reality”: there are illusions in sound, touch, taste,
and smell, too.
A very well-known example of tactile “gaps” between perception and reality
is called the “Rubber-Hand Illusion.” In this so-called trick, a person is seated at
a table with one hand resting in front of them, while the other is out of sight
behind a divider. A fake hand is set down in front of the person in place of the
outof-sight hand, so they have what looks more or less like their two hands
resting on the table, except that one of them isn’t theirs (which of course they’re
aware of). Then the “experimenter” begins lightly brushing the fingers of the
hidden real hand and the fake visible hand at the same time. Sure enough, the
person immediately starts identifying with the fake hand as if it were theirs,
feeling as if the brushing sensation is happening not behind the hidden divider,
but on the fake hand they suddenly feel connected to. For the purpose of
perception, that hand becomes real!
The Rubber-Hand Illusion is what’s called a body transfer, but our brain’s
way of processing reality… rather than giving it to us directly… also opens us
up to other slightly freaky “mix-ups” of the senses. Researchers have shown, for
example, that we are capable of hearing “phantom words.” When listening to
nonsense sounds, our brains pick out clear-seeming words that aren’t actually
there in the audio. There is also the “Barber’s Shop Illusion,” in which a
recording of snipping scissors gives the impression of the sound getting closer or
farther depending on the volume rising or lowering, when the sound isn’t
changing position at all. Or think of the common experience of sitting in a
stationary car or plane, and when the car or plane next to you begins to move, at
first you think you are the one in motion. There are many, many more
phenomena like these.

One of the first people to pick up on what seemed a “kink” in visual

perception was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the eighteenth-century man of
letters we know today as the father of modern German literature. In his day he
was famous (though also slightly infamous, as you’ll see) as an omnivorous
dabbler across disciplines, as likely to throw his energies into osteology (the
study of bones) as he was to immerse himself in botany. While literature was his
first love, Goethe was above all else a man of passion, often described as being
wild in nature, so much so that as a young man his friends referred to him as the
“wolf ” and the “bear.”4 (In his college days in Leipzig, his out-of-fashion
Frankfurt dress style also amused his peers.) But he was able to tame this
wolfish unruliness into a high-society charisma as he became a literary celebrity
in his twenties, the Duke Karl August soon appointing him to several state roles,
including Director of the War Department. Goethe’s headstrong and even
reckless hunger for new intellectual experiences returned in full force in the late
1780s when his “manysidedness,” as a biographer once labeled it, led him to
study light and color.
Goethe had recently spent a very happy two years in Italy. There he had
become acquainted with the German painter Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein
while also exploring his own talents in the fine arts. He eventually accepted that
he had none, but he returned to Germany with a reignited interest in the natural
world artists sought to capture. “No one acquainted with the charm which the
secrets of Nature have for man, will wonder that I have quitted the circle of
observations in which I have hitherto been confined,” he wrote in an
unpublished essay. “I stand in no fear of the reproach that it must be a spirit of
contradiction which has drawn me from the contemplation and portraiture of the
human heart to that of Nature. For it will be allowed that all things are intimately
connected, and that the inquiring mind is unwilling to be excluded from anything
attainable.”
This declaration led to one of history’s most legendary examples of a literary
personage disastrously elbowing his way into the halls of science. Depending on
who you ask, what transpired was either a rewardingly poetic misadventure into
a realm the belletrist innocently misconstrued, or an arrogant and willfully
wrongheaded foray into a field where he did not belong. In reality it was a
mixture of the two—neither and both. Goethe’s passionate way of being wasn’t
well suited to the cold-hard-facts approach of science, yet his writerly eye for the
revelatory moment did play a key role in his scientific forays when he had his
own moment, albeit a falsely revelatory one.5
Drawn to optics, Goethe had borrowed a prism to test Newton’s
groundbreaking work that refracted white light into its constituent colors, a
discovery that today would have likely won Newton a Nobel Prize.6 Executing
the experiment incorrectly, and far from fully versed on the theory behind it,
Goethe expected to beam the full spectrum of color on the wall of his home, only
to beam nothing. The wall remained a white blank on which he could project his
rapidly growing conviction: “Newton’s theory is false!”
Ardently sure that contemporary science was terribly off course in
understanding light, he took leave of his diplomatic responsibilities to devote
himself to physics. Scientists of the time ridiculed him while littérateurs and
nobles cheered him on, certain that the wild wolf of a poet would dethrone
Newton. The Duke of Gotha gave him a laboratory; a prince sent him new, better
prisms from abroad. Then in 1792, while conducting his inquiry, Goethe noticed
that a white light could produce shadows with colored hues. Likewise, colored
lights changed hues depending on the “opaque,” or semi-transparent, medium
they passed through. A yellow light could redden all the way to ruby through the
opaque. This too appeared to violate Newton’s physical laws purporting to
explain light, and the disconnect created a still deeper chasm in Goethe’s
understanding of Newton’s theories that purported to explain reality. So he
narrowed his focus to work out this problem and was sucked into a twenty-year
obsession with color and perception.
In works like The Sorrows of Young Werther, the tumultuous story of a
young man’s unrequited love, Goethe proved himself to be a poet of the human
interior, so perhaps it’s no surprise that when it came to color he at first wasn’t
always able to step outside the cave of his own perception to see that the
disjuncture was inside. Like most of us, he took for granted that he saw reality;
after all, his prodigious mind had allowed him to “see” human realities so clearly
in his writing, not to mention that perception was well over a century away from
growing from a concept into a locus of science. Soon enough, however, he gave
up the idea that the seemingly mismatched hues were due to some physical
quality of light that science had yet to explain. Instead, he gradually realized that
the colored appearance of certain shadows was a result of human perception’s
interaction with its environs—not a mystery of the world but a mystery of the
mind.7 Yet he could only uselessly paw at the reasons behind this strange
mystery inside his own brain, so he became a scrupulous recorder of every
phenomenon of light he observed.
The subject of color consumed Goethe to the point that, in 1810, he published
a massive tome on his investigations called Zur Farbenlehre, or Theory of Color.
The “science” of the book has long since been dismissed, most notably his
attacks on Newton. Goethe’s taxonomic opus did, on the other hand, incite
intense philosophical discussion, leading Wittgenstein to pen Remarks on Color
and Schopenhauer to write On Vision and Colors. Yet Goethe’s encyclopedic
descriptions of color, like all his work, still make for lyrical, pleasing reading
today: “These colors pass like a breath over the plate of steel; each seems to fly
before the other, but, in reality, each successive hue is constantly developed
from the preceding one.”8 His sense of wonder is an invaluable trait we can still
learn from. And this obsession in Goethe’s life may explain the origins of the
famous line from his masterpiece Faust, when Mephistopheles, a standin for the
devil, says to the easily corruptible Student: “Grey is, young friend, all theory.”9

It is worth taking a moment to dwell on the word reality as Goethe used it at the
time of writing Theory of Color, as the eighteenth century became the
nineteenth. This was still the heyday of the Enlightenment, a revolutionary
period in which Western societies were trading in the superstitions of the
medieval age for a newly cemented belief in the rationality of man. If “man” was
a being of capital-R Reason, then wouldn’t it have been a contradiction to
suggest that the very sine qua non of reason—perception—prevented humans
from seeing reality accurately? Humans were rapidly conquering their time and
place with political theory, criminal law, and mathematical proofs, so how could
the minds producing such important changes in reality not see reality itself ? At
its core the story of Goethe’s glorious boondoggle with color says less about him
(though it certainly does say a lot about him) than it does about the assumptions
that reigned at a time when so much about the brain was still unknown—the very
same assumptions about “seeing reality” that inflamed so many people online
two centuries later with The Dress. Because when it comes to understanding
perception, the correct assumption is deeply counterintuitive.
Most people assume we see the world accurately as it really is, even many
neuroscientists, psychologists, and cognitive scientists, because, well, why
wouldn’t we? At first “glance,” it seems a wholly bad idea to see it in any other
way. The seemingly logical premise that we see reality, however, doesn’t take
into account a fundamental fact about ecology and how our minds actually
operate therein, thus missing the essential truth that our brains didn’t evolve that
way. But then what did our brains evolve to do? They evolved to survive—and
that’s it.
A key nuance to understand is this: Despite the fact that your brain doesn’t
perceive reality, your senses aren’t in any way “weak.” The human brain was
shaped by the most rigorous, exhaustive research and development and product-
testing process on our planet—evolution (and subsequently development and
learning). As such, the test with the gray circles wasn’t meant to demonstrate
how easy it is to play tricks on the senses. Quite the opposite (though we’ll wait
until Chapter 4 to learn why the illusion you saw wasn’t actually an illusion).
For now, just rest assured that evolution (and development and learning) doesn’t
produce fragile systems, which is why changing the way you perceive is possible
—because “fragile” isn’t at all the same thing as “malleable” and “adaptable.”
Evolution’s “aim” is resilience, robustness and to be, well, evolvable. The
human species is a superb example of this process at work. Which means when
you look out into the world, you’re actually looking through millions of years of
history.
So you didn’t evolve to see reality… you evolved to survive. And seeing
reality accurately isn’t a prerequisite to survival. Indeed, it could even be a
barrier to it. Without this as your founding premise about perception, you will be
stuck in old ways of seeing, since if you attack a problem with the wrong
assumption, there is nowhere to go but deeper into that assumption, whether you
know you’re getting further from the truth or not.
 There is so much in the stories of Goethe and The Dress that is at the heart of
seeing differently: the ability to challenge the prevailing assumption
(accidentally or otherwise) that constrains the brain’s search for the answer to
the wrong place. Goethe became so frustrated, much like Mindy Kaling, because
he took it for granted that his perception gave him direct access to reality, not
that his brain was simply a very sophisticated interpreter. The wonderfully
epigrammatic Goethe nevertheless produced a memorable phrase that he likely
used to console himself when his perception failed him: “The man with insight
enough to admit his limitations comes nearest to perfection.” Perhaps this is true,
but even the insight of knowing and admitting that you don’t know can be a
challenge. This reminds me of a well-known joke in science:
Imagine a very dark street. In the distance is a single streetlight illuminating a
small circle of the sidewalk (all other lights along the road are for some reason
off). Within this circle of light is someone on their hands and knees. You walk
up to them and ask them what they’re doing. They reply: “Looking for my
keys.” Naturally you want to help as they seem really quite desperate. It’s late
and cold and surely two people looking in the same space is better than one. So
for reasons of efficiency—to help you guide your search—you ask: “By the way,
where did you drop them?”
The answer: “I dropped them way over there,” says the person, pointing to a
place in the dark a hundred meters behind you.
“Then why in the hell are you looking here?” you ask.
“Because this is the only place I can see!”
Our assumptions create the light in which we are able to see differently—or
not, depending on how strongly we avoid exploring the shadows where keys to
new paths may be hiding. Which is why I love this story so much. It’s a parable
of sorts, a story-as-warning that forces you to reflect about your ways of looking.
And it perfectly sets up the starting point for this book. If we try to “decode”
how perception works based on the assumption that we evolved to see reality
accurately, we will not only fail to explain the brain, but we’ll never be able to
have a more direct approach to seeing differently. If, however, we start with a
different assumption… even one that may challenge deeply personal
assumptions about the world and ourselves… then this book will “translate” a
new way of thinking, seeing, and perceiving. But it’s essential that our new
assumptions are founded on the startling discoveries of neuroscience and not
preconceptions about what feels real and what doesn’t. Only by accepting these
strange truths can we open a new world of perception.
 But a question remains: If our brains are so highly evolved, then why don’t
we have access to reality? In the next chapter I’ll answer this question by
showing you that all information means absolutely nothing in and of itself,
including these very words you’re reading. From there, we will explore the brain
mechanics behind not deviating and seeing reality… because only then can you
begin to perceive what becomes possible.
CHAPTER 2

Information Is Meaningless
We live in the Wiki Age, an era in which information moves and grows more
freely than anyone could have imagined even in the futuristic-sounding year of
2001, back when the Internet was beginning to reshape our lives. When we
argue over a point with friends at a meal we pull out our phones and resolve the
question in seconds. We don’t get lost because it’s very hard to be lost these
days with GPS. Our social networks span far beyond the people we truly know
(or even care to know). Information is overflowing and we’re hungrily drinking
in each terabyte… mapping every street, archiving every tweet, capturing every
passing moment with our phones. It is the Age of Reason pushed into the new
frontier of the Digital Age. This unprecedentedly accessible, ever-expanding
web of data has altered our daily existence, and yet very little of it is translating
into new understanding. This is because when it comes to creativity, success,
and even personal happiness, information isn’t itself power. This is true even—
or especially—at the level of our senses.

To
understand human perception, you must first understand that all information
in
and of
itself is

meaningless.

The reason for this is simple: The information from the world that falls onto
our different senses could literally mean anything. It is nothing more than energy
or molecules. The photons entering our eyes, the vibrations through the air that
enter our ears, the breaking of the bonds of molecules that creates friction across
our skin, the chemicals that land on our tongues, and the compounds that enter
our noses—all are just electro/chemical energy of one kind or another. These are
the elements that emanate from our physical world—real reality, as it were. Yet
we don’t have direct access to those sources of energy, only to the waves of
energy and gradients of chemicals that they produce. We sense the changes in
stuff, not the stuff itself. It would be useless to have direct access to the “stuff ”
because in isolation it would mean absolutely nothing… much in the same way
that a single water molecule doesn’t tell us about whirlpools. Information
doesn’t come with instructions.
Instead, the “reality” that our perceptions see is the meaning of the
meaningless information that your brain receives… the meaning your ecology
gives it. It is critical to understand that the meaning of the thing is not the same
as the thing itself. In other words, perception is similar to reading poetry: you are
interpreting what it means, because it could mean anything.

Y U
MA E

TH

EANI G
by interacting with the world (i.e. your ecology). This is true from the color of
stoplights to the smiles (or frowns) of strangers you pass on the street. Your
brain is such a fast, prodigiously skilled machine of meaning: A certain light
means a certain surface color, a certain smell means a certain food, a certain
voice means a certain person, a certain touch means a certain emotion, and a
certain sight means a certain place. But note that the surface is not in fact colored
in any literal sense. The seeing of the color red is itself the seeing of a past
narrative of meanings. Such perceptions make it feel like the mosaic of reality
lands on your senses with meaning already built in, but in fact no meaning is
ever predetermined. Equally, no meaning is meaningless… only the raw
information is. Now let’s learn why information is meaningless, and why our
species (and indeed any living system) evolved to have a brain that creates a
perception of a world, rather than just relays it.
Reality, according to the eighteenth-century Irish philosopher and Anglican
bishop George Berkeley, is simply “ideas… imprinted on the senses.”10 Was he
correct about this?
Born in 1685, Berkeley was a metaphysician and religious man, though from
the vantage of history we could think of him as a theoretical neuroscientist
before the field ever existed. He was a product of the early Enlightenment, a
thinker for whom faith and science weren’t in conflict; critical reason was the
vehicle of his belief in God and not an impediment to it. Yet because of his
divisive views on human perception, with which he was obsessed, Berkeley has
never attained the historical stature of, say, a Nietzsche or Hegel. Nevertheless,
Berkeley’s insights into the human mind are profound, and his life was one of
industrious dignity. Alongside his work in philosophy and theology, he
concerned himself with social causes, establishing programs to help children and
vagrants, combating unemployment, supporting local artisans, and planting
myrtle and flax. Berkeley was, as one biographer put it, “a bishop in his shirt
sleeves.”11
Berkeley’s lifelong philosophical project was an impassioned defense of
subjective idealism or empirical idealism—the belief that things exist only as a
function of the mind. Back in Berkeley’s day, most conceived of the brain as a
standalone, ready-made entity that wasn’t shaped and reshaped by its
interactions inside and outside itself. Yet his works arguing his position on what
the human mind perceives manage to hit a truly intuitive space of being both
spiritually centered and instinctively scientific.
A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge is one of
Berkeley’s best-known works and in it he sets down his beliefs on perception. “It
is indeed an opinion STRANGELY prevailing amongst men,” he writes, “that
houses, mountains, rivers, and in a word all sensible objects, have an existence,
natural or real, distinct from their being perceived by the understanding. But,
with how great an assurance and acquiescence so ever this principle may be
entertained in the world, yet whoever shall find in his heart to call it in question
may, if I mistake not, perceive it to involve a manifest contradiction. For, what
are the fore-mentioned objects but the things we perceive by sense? and what do
we PERCEIVE BESIDES OUR OWN IDEAS OR SENSATIONS?”
His all-caps emphasis may read like an email or text from an overenthusiastic
friend, but three hundred years later we know that he was right: We don’t see
reality—we only see what our brain gives through what the “space between”
yields.
Berkeley went further than neuroscience does and claimed that in fact
nothing could have an “existence independent of and without the mind.”
As a metaphor for subjective human perception, this is a compelling way of
framing the issue, since we don’t experience the existence of anything outside
ourselves except through our brain’s (and body’s) meaning of it. But taken at
face value, Berkeley’s “immaterialism” is wrong, since clearly the world exists
whether we are there to perceive it or not. When a tree falls in the woods, it does
indeed create energy in the form of vibrations in the air. But without anyone/
anything there to hear it, that transition in the energy state of the air makes no
“sound,” though it does have an objectively physical effect. Yet by recasting
Berkeley’s ahead-of-his-time insights through the apparatus of modern
neuroscience, we can identify the four reasons why we don’t have access to
reality.
1. We Don’t Sense All There Is to Sense

Our perception is like being inside of a mobile home (not a terribly glamorous
metaphor, admittedly, but useful for our purposes). Our senses are the windows
of our home. There are five: sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste. From each
window, we obtain different kinds of information (i.e., energies) from the world.
Critically, we can never step outside the trailer, though we can move it. But even
when we move it around, we’re still constrained by the windows. So, clearly, we
are limited in our ability to sense the world around us, and you may be surprised
to discover that these windows of sensing are actually smaller than you think.
Let’s look at light. Light is the narrow range of electromagnetic radiation that
is visible to the human eye; it is only a fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum.
Light has many properties and one is its range, or quantity. The light we see
travels at the wavelengths (frequencies) that our retinas and visual cortex are
sensitive to. We don’t see ultraviolet (UV) light, and we don’t see infrared
either. We are sensitive to only an incredibly small percentage of the
electromagnetic radiation that is out there to sense. New technologies like night-
vision goggles are “broadening” our senses, but they don’t change our biology.
In contrast, the biology of other species embodies much more advanced
technologies, enabling them to perceive a far, far more diverse range of light
than we can.
Reindeers are best known for their noses, but it is their eyes that are most
fascinating. While reindeer aren’t able to fly across the night sky pulling Santa
Claus’s sleigh, they did evolve a superhuman power of sorts (relative to us): they
can see ultraviolet light. Why do reindeer have this advantage? It relates to the
harsh logic of survival in the inhospitable arctic landscape they inhabit. Being
able to sense which surfaces reflect UV rays allows them to perceive which
surfaces don’t. Lichen, a main source of food for reindeer, doesn’t, so what’s
really at stake here is dinner.12
Reindeer’s UV vision is essentially a homing device for locating food,
similar to a bloodhound’s highly developed sense of smell. Beyond reindeer,
insects, birds, and fish also visually sense much more than we do. Bumblebees,
for instance, have a highly sophisticated color vision system that enables them to
sense radiation in the UV. Interestingly, their ability to see color evolved even
before the pigmentation of flowers did, which means flowers evolved to look the
way they do because they wanted to be “beautiful” (attractive) to bees. Contrary
to our highly human-centric view of the world in general, flowers aren’t there for
our benefit, to inspire, say, the English romantic poets in the hills of the Lake
District. Their colors and colorations evolved to be attractive to almost
everything but us. Birds, too, have twice the number of color receptors in their
retinas that we do. In relative terms, we’re vastly color-deficient compared to
them.
Range isn’t the only aspect of light we don’t see in its full reality. There is
also its quality or orientation, called polarization. All light is either polarized
(the waves of vibrating energy charges occur on a single plane) or unpolarized
(the vibrations occur on multiple planes). You and I don’t perceive polarity, even
if you may own polarized sunglasses that help reduce glare by ensuring that only
vertical waves, not reflected horizontal waves, come through. Many animals do,
however. Take the stomatopod, or mantis shrimp.

The stomatopod is a quirky, shallows-dwelling crustacean with a body

like a lobster tail and eyes swaying on stalks. It has the most complex eyes
scientists know of, with what some call “stereo vision,” or tuneable sight with
eight channels, although even this doesn’t capture the staggering power of its
vision.13 Stomatopods have sixteen visual pigments—the substance that turns
light into electricity for nerve receptors in our brains—whereas humans have
only three. In the killed-or-be-killed world of underwater life in which
appearances are fatally deceptive, such a highly developed sense gives the
stomatopod an edge when it is hunting (or being hunted). Birds also perceive
polarization, which allows them to see the electromagnetic structure of the sky,
and not just shades of blue. When they fly through the air, birds (presumably)
see tremendous patterns that are constantly changing depending on the angle of
the sun relative to their position. These patterns enable them to navigate, since
the structure of the sky changes according to the angle of the sun. The birds use
this information to decide where to go to next. In other words, to “find their
way,” they often look up, not down.
So just imagine… Looking out onto the world through a bird’s perception.
When we look up on a clear sunny day we see nothing but a uniform blue. But to
birds and bees, the beautiful, cloudless blue sky that we see is never uniform.
They see it as an ever-changing complex pattern, a meaningful navigational
landscape composed of shape and structure. What form does this take in their
perception? What do they actually see? To try to “envision” it is impossible, as it
is a different perceptual reality altogether, like someone without eyes imagining
color itself. That is amazing!
To come back to our metaphor of the mobile home, our vision window is
tiny, like a miniature porthole, while other species have a wall’s worth of glass
for their sight, like a floor-to-ceiling window. Of course, this goes for other
senses as well. After all, what is a dog whistle but yet another layer of reality we
don’t have access to?
The differences between us and other animals don’t mean we are less evolved
for perceiving less. It just means that our evolutions naturally selected differently
for survival. We humans have our legendary opposable thumbs, an advantageous
evolutionary happenstance that helped us flourish, while stomatopods are
happily thumbless, since they evolved in a context with a different set of
necessities.
The point is this: We’re getting only what our senses give us through the
inherently limited windows of our mobile home. While energy is realistic, it is
not the reality of objects, distance, etc., even if it is created from fragments of
that physical world. But this is only the first of the reasons why information is
meaningless.
Our vision window is tiny, like a miniature porthole
2. The Information We Take in Is in Constant Flux

The world and everything in it is always

changing. In other words, nothing outside
our house of perception is fixed or stable.
Looking out our windows, we might spot
a deer standing on the front lawn. But
sooner or later (most likely sooner) that
deer will move. Likewise, day will turn to
night, seasons will change, and this will
create new opportunities—and also new
threats. Not to mention that if we are true
to the nature of our bodies, then we are
always moving as hence the mobile in
mobile home. Our “reality” is in a state of
endless transformation, so even if our
brain did give us direct access to reality,
 as soon as we perceived that reality it
would already have changed. Indeed, this
is why our brains evolved to sense change
… movement. They quickly adapt in a
world that is unchanging… one that lacks
contrast in space and/or time, and
stagnates.
3. All Stimuli Are Highly Ambiguous

Think about all the ways you have smiled, or been smiled at, in your life. You’ve
smiled as an expression of joy, but have you ever smiled to convey sarcasm, or
malice even? What about condescension? Romantic interest? And what about
smiling to mask pain? My guess is that you have experience with all of these. So
does a dog when it puts its ears back, which it does when both growling and
greeting.
So, a smile for us… like the ear movement for a dog… is meaningless in and
of itself because in principle it could mean anything. All stimuli are behaviorally
meaningless in and of themselves because the information that falls on the
senses, or indeed that is created by our senses, can mean absolutely anything.
Everything that passes through the windows of our perception is open to infinite
interpretations because the sources of the information are multiplicative—
meaning the information arising from multiple sources in the world is effectively
multiplied together, creating information that is ambiguous.
A few years ago, the BBC Coast program asked me to explain the quality of
the light in the county of Cornwall, specifically the town of St. Ives. The quaint
coastal town with beaches and dramatic bluffs is known for its eminently
Instagrammable pastel skies, so I happily accepted and told them I would only
need a year to measure the light at different times of day throughout the different
seasons. “That’s great!” said the BBC producer. “Except we only have a day.”
So I got to work right away, and it turned out that the solution to this hurry—and
the answer to Coast’s question—was very simple.
If the light in Cornwall looked different, the issue wasn’t just that it was
different, but what it was different from. So we decided to conduct a
comparative study and examined the air of Cornwall in relation to the air in
London outside my office at the Institute of Ophthalmology. I bought an air filter
and put a pump on it that worked in reverse, sucking air in. I was a strange sight
hunched on the sidewalk pumping away, but after just an hour of this pumping
(at a normal human respiratory rate), we had a clear idea of what was in the air
in London—a tremendous amount of particulate matter from air pollution. When
we did the same thing in Cornwall, you can probably guess what happened. The
filter contained considerably less pollution. My conclusion: There wasn’t any
special quality about the light in Cornwall. The air was just cleaner. This,
combined with the town’s seaside setting in which light reflected off the water,
created the magical effect. The source of Cornwall’s beautiful skies was unclear,
making it difficult to “see” the common-sense explanation.

To truly grasp the essential ambiguity of the stimuli we perceive, let’s “look”
at the ultimate life-giver of our existence—the sun. As shown in the illustration,
although we think of daylight as a simple journey from the sun to our eyes, the
quality of the light that eventually hits our eyes is determined by three different
sources. Of course the first is the sun itself. The second is reflectors, the billions
of surfaces that surround us at any moment in time. And finally, the third source
is transmitters—the space between you and objects, like the air in London or
Cornwall. Without air, the sky would be black and the sun would look white. If
one of these sources varies, then so too does the stimulus: the light coming
through the windows of your mobile home. As we have no direct access to the
illuminant or the reflectors or the space in between, we don’t know which one
has changed. The reality of what is occurring with the light is unknowable to our
perception.
What’s true for the quality of light is also true for the size at which objects
project onto our retina. To illustrate this, try placing your pointing finger in front
of you and line it up against a larger object at a distance, but of the same
projected height as your finger. Notice that the two objects… your relatively
short finger up close and the much larger object far away… give rise to the same
angular subtense on your retina. How is your brain to know which is which, as
your brain is never processing just a single piece of information? It is sensing the
multiplication of multiple things simultaneously, which creates a goulash of
potentially never-ending, open-to-interpretation meanings.
It’s like being given the simple formula x • y = z. Now, you’re given the
solution: z (the stimulus), and your task is to solve x without knowing y. Because
there are an infinite number of possible combinations of x and y that could
generate any z (except for 1), the challenge is mathematically impossible. As a
shorthand, think of this as “Many to One”: many objects in the world creating
the same piece of information. Hence, our brains developed not to see reality but
just to help us survive the constant flood of intermixed stimuli that would be
impossible to process as discrete pieces of information, if it were even possible
for them to appear that way.
4. There Is No Instruction Manual

Perception doesn’t occur inside a vacuum. We evolved to perceive in order to

survive, which presupposes action on our part… the need to do something. This
is another way of saying perception isn’t an end in and of itself. Our brain
evolved perception to allow us to move. A fundamental part of being human…
of being alive for any biological, organic system… is responding. Our lives are
inescapably enmeshed in our environment and all the sundry things, both living
and inanimate, that fill it. Which means we are only ever reacting, acting, and
reacting, then acting again (never pro-acting). The problem is that information
has no instructions about how to act. Reality doesn’t tell us how to behave.
Nouns don’t dictate a verb.
Even if Berkeley were wrong and you could sense the reality of the world
directly, peoples, places, and situations don’t come with how-to guides for
responding usefully, and neither do objects. Objects constrain behavior; they
don’t dictate it. Take a rock, for example. A rock doesn’t tell you what to do
with it. It could be a tool, it could be a weapon, it could be a paperweight. The
rock doesn’t have any inherent meaning, purpose, or application (though it does
offer physical constraints like relative weight, relative size, etc.). What’s true for
a rock is fundamentally true for all the information hitting your senses…
including the light itself. Hence, information is meaningless without some kind
of analysis. As such, your brain must create the meaning which engenders a
response—not the response, but a response. This is part of “One to Many,” the
inverse of “Many to One.” There are many ways to respond to any one moment.
Then your brain will judge the usefulness of your response for the next moment.
The culminating example of this is the most important object in our lives, since
the most important things are also always the most ambiguous: other human
beings.
Imagine thinking a friendly smile at a bar is a flirtatious one and making a
pass at someone who had no such intentions. Or imagine accusing your friends
or partner of a lack of loyalty only to find out that they have been distant lately
because they were busy planning a surprise for you. We do this continually in
relationships with others. We are constantly processing ambiguous information,
and then our brain narrows down a variety of responses to one. We’re often
wrong about other people because we incorrectly project meaning on to them
(more on our “projections” later in the book). From our brain’s point of view,
fellow human beings are nothing more than sources of highly complex,
meaningless sensory information. And yet they are “objects” we have the
greatest interest in, passion for, and engagement with. But they continually
befuddle us.
Despite our best efforts at communication, the people we know, meet, or
interact with in passing don’t come with detailed diagrams. As helpful as it
would be, our fellow humans are not like IKEA furniture with instructional
booklets. To reiterate,
 another person is like any other physical object: namely, a source of
inherently meaningless information. Indeed, we are the creators of our own
meaningless stimuli. Hence, knowing the “best” way to respond in each context
to another person, much less to oneself, with complete certainty is impossible a
priori.
If there are four insuperable barriers to perceiving the world as it actually is,
and seeing reality is a mathematical impossibility, then we have to sit down, take
a deep breath, and look at ourselves differently. We have to look at human life
itself differently.
Then comes the weirdest part of all.
We have to accept that not seeing reality isn’t a bad thing.
Science is about getting to the source of physical phenomena, pushing past
the information to arrive at understanding. Neuroscience specifically tries to
understand how the brain gets past information… to meaning, which is what
Dale Purves and I previously called the “empirical significance” of information.
This is what the brain does, and this is why humans have survived and
flourished. Our species has been so successful not in spite of our inability to see
reality but because of it. We see our past ecology’s interpretation, and this helps
our brain respond in a way that is behaviorally useful.
In the end, the meaninglessness of information doesn’t matter. It’s what we
do that matters, since at the root of human existence is the question: What’s
next? To answer that question well (or more accurately, better) is to survive, and
our assumption—until now—was that we had to know reality in order to answer
it. But we don’t. How else would we have survived for millennia? How have we
built cities, societies, and skyscrapers? How have we created so much meaning
out of the meaninglessness? Simple. Through the modus operandi of evolution,
development, and learning that we carry inside us: trial and error. Which means
we must engage with the world… empirically.
This is how we construct (and thus change) the architecture of our brains:
through experimentation… by actively engaging with the sources of ambiguous
information. This is what we will look at in the next chapter.
CHAPTER 3

Making Sense of the Senses

We don’t ever have access to reality because the information our brain receives
through our senses is meaningless in and of itself, so what is the next step to
seeing differently? How is this truth about perception the path toward… and not
an impediment to… powerful deviations in thought? First, it is critical to
understand that there is always meaning everywhere in our perceptions; it is just
not in the information we have immediately at hand. Rather, the ecological
brain constructs meaning out of the only other piece of information it does have
access to… past experience.
Ben Underwood was born in 1992 in Sacramento, California, with
retinoblastoma, a rare form of cancer that attacks the retina. The disease is most
common in children and more often occurs just in one eye, but in Ben’s case it
was present in both. If not treated, it can spread quickly, so doctors had to
remove first one of Ben’s eyes, then the other. At just three years old he was left
blind. His mother, Aquanetta Gordon, remembers vividly this heart-wrenching
time, but says she knew he would be fine. She had been close to a blind boy
growing up and seen how people over-helping him had disabled him further.
“Ben was going to experience his childhood,” she recalls, “and whatever it took
for him to be that kid, I wanted him to be that kid. I had complete confidence in
him.” She made him practice jumping up and down steps and do other
challenging spatial tasks that sometimes upset him. But sure enough, by age four
Ben began to adapt… by clicking.14
Using his tongue as a percussive instrument against the roof of his mouth,
Ben clicked in his bedroom, in the living room, in the kitchen, even the
bathroom. “He would go into the bathroom and just listen,” Aqua says. “To the
sink, the trashcan, the shower curtain, everything.” She encouraged this,
understanding that it was his new way of “seeing” his world. “‘Make the sound,
baby,’ I told him. ‘No matter what you do, just make the sound.’ It would’ve
been so unfair for me to tell him what he couldn’t see because he didn’t have
eyes.” Ben himself was likely too young to understand what he was doing—
which was simply the instinctive way his brain reacted to his newly sightless
world. Through intuitive experimentation, he was learning to interpret the clicks
that bounced back off of the world around him. He called his new sense his
“visual display.”
Ben’s clicking soon allowed him to sense his visual environment as a kind of
acoustic landscape, and by the time he entered kindergarten he was able to
navigate with confidence (and presumably a great deal of courage). He could
differentiate a parked car from a parked truck, and once he even recognized a
particular neighbor by the sounds of her sandaled feet walking on the sidewalk
five houses down the street.
Of course, Ben’s odd technique has existed in nature for millions of years:
echolocation, the same highly evolved sonic navigation system bats use. Ben’s
way of seeing differently allowed him to transcend the loss of his sight and live
like a normal boy. Remarkably, he rode his bike around his neighborhood,
played basketball and tetherball, and even beat his brother at video games by
learning the significance of the different sounds. There were challenges, not just
in the light injuries he occasionally sustained, but in the minds of others. In
contrast to his mother, his school administrators didn’t want him to play on the
monkey bars, and later on, his refusal to use a cane infuriated a school counselor.
But he had already overcome blindness, so these were just small obstacles for
him.
Ben died at sixteen of his cancer, but he lived a life of enormous possibility
and relative freedom to which we can aspire. He made tremendous layers of
meaning out of meaningless information.
Ben’s story is a testament to human resilience and indeed innovation. His
process of developing echolocation exemplifies how the brain innovates. Thus,
from the perspective of neuroscience, his experience is not surprising (though it
is exceptional). His life proves that we have the ability to physically change our
brain… not in spite of its inherently interpretive, reality-removed nature but
because of it. Ben’s brain found an answer to that essential question… What’s
next?… because he cared to. He also needed to if he was to have a “normal” life,
and his brain was evolvable toward this end. Instead of shutting down in the face
of a profound subtraction from his senses, his perception found a new way to
process his environment… at Ben’s initiative.
This is why trial and error, action and reaction (feedback)… namely, the
“response cycle”… is at the center of perception. Engaging with the world gives
our brain a historical record of experiential feedback that sculpts the neural
architecture of the brain. That architecture, and the resulting perceptions that
ensue, are our reality. In short, our brain is history and little else… a physical
manifestation of your past (individually, culturally and evolutionarily) with the
capacity to adapt to a new “future past.”
Here is how it works at a cellular level. Neurons, or nerve cells, and the
trillions of connections between them, make up the integrative network of your
brain, serving as a breathtakingly complex “back office” supporting and
generating the… we hope… smooth functioning of the main enterprise, you. The
different sensory receptors receive all the information from the environment that
you give them and then forward it, or send it backwards, to all the right places.
Inside each neuron is yet another complex network consisting of membranes
(lipids), proteins (ribosome), deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA), and enzymes. Every
time a new pulse of information ripples in, your internal neural network alters
according to the time, frequency, and duration of the new “data.” This in turn
affects the composition of all those membranes, proteins, acids, and enzymes,
and ultimately the actual physical and physiological structure of the neuron.
Since these neurons and the evolving structure of the network are the basis on
which you make decisions in relation to your body and the world around you,
this process shapes you.
The brain embodies experience during its lifetime from the last millennium to
the last second, from our ancestors’ successes and failures to our own. Since this
past determines the physical makeup of your brain, it also determines how you
will think and behave now and in the future. This means that the more you
engage with your world, the richer your history of response will be for helping
you respond usefully. This is another way of saying that it is not just important
to be active, it is neurologically necessary. We are not outside observers of the
world defined by our “essential properties.” Like the whirlpool, we are defined
by our interactions; we are defined by our ecology. It is how our brains makes
sense of the meaninglessness.
Promoting activity over passivity might sound like familiar advice, but when
speaking about the brain this is more than just canned wisdom. By physically
changing your brain, you directly influence the types of perceptions you can
have in the future. This is “cellular innovation”, which leads to innovation at the
lived level of the things you think to do and the ideas you have. You adapt your
hardware and it adapts you, making your brain and body own their own ecology.
 To understand passive versus active engagement at work, we can look to a
classic experiment I’ve nicknamed “Kitten in a Basket,”15 conducted in 1963 by
two professors at Brandeis University, Richard Held and Alan Hein. The study’s
influence was such that the term “Heldenhein”—a combination of their last
names—became a popular shorthand in the field of experimental psychology.16
The two were interested in investigating how the brain’s interaction with its
environment during development affected spatial perceptual skills and
coordination. The experiment couldn’t be performed on humans, so, building on
previous research, they chose kittens instead.

The study commenced with a brief period of deprivation. Ten pairs of kittens
were kept in darkness from birth, but after a few weeks Held and Hein began
exposing them two at a time to light during three-hour sessions on a rotating
carousel. Both kittens were connected to the same carousel, yet there was a key
difference: one could otherwise move freely, while the other’s movements were
restricted by a yoked gondola, or basket, inside which it had been placed and
from which it could view the world. Whenever Kitten A, the mobile one, made a
motion, this caused Kitten P, the immobile one, to move in response. As the
sessions progressed, this setup gave the two kittens’ brains nearly the exact same
visual past, along with a similar history of movements through space. The ways
in which they engaged with their brave new world of seeing, however, were
completely different.
Kitten A experimented with its paws, feeling what happened when it moved
to the edge of the carousel. It stepped toward and then away from a “visual
cliff,” the deeper end of an open space above which it stood. It showed pupillary
reflex—contraction of the pupil—when Held and Hein shone a penlight across
its eye. And it lifted its head to follow their hand movements. In short, Kitten A
got acquainted with its world, like an ordinary kitten or an ordinary child. It
engaged actively with sight and space, learning to make visual meaning.
Meanwhile, Kitten P only seesawed helplessly and passively in its basket,
sensing but not doing, and thus its emerging past experiences offered its brain a
much more limited history of trial and error than Kitten A’s. It couldn’t “make
sense” of its senses and see the empirical significance of information—its
behavioral value or meaning.
After the carousel sessions ended, Held and Hein tested the two kittens’
responses. Their findings were dramatic. Kitten A could use its paws to position
itself, blinked when objects neared, and avoided visual cliffs. Kitten P, in
contrast, was ungainly when placing its paws, didn’t blink, and had no instinct to
skirt the cliff. Kitten A had developed the skills needed to succeed in its
environment, learning to respond to its reality by engaging with it through trial
and error. Kitten P, on the other hand, had not. It was effectively blind. The
difference came down to active versus passive engagement in interpreting
ambiguous, limited information, and how this shaped their brains.
The kittens were later released from the experiment and able to roam freely
in light and space. The happy ending is that after 48 hours moving freely in an
illuminated space, Kitten P was soon as proficient in its spatial perception and
coordination as Kitten A, an outcome very similar to what happens to people
after cataracts surgery. Its brain was able to quickly create the necessary enacted
history it had previously been deprived of by the imposed limitations of the
basket.
Held and Hein’s Kitten in a Basket experiment explains how the remarkable
life of “Bat Boy” Ben Underwood was possible, and shows the two options he
had: (1) he could have let his blindness act as a metaphorical basket that
constrained him from engaging with his world, as Kitten P’s gondola did to it; or
(2) he could actively engage with his other senses and in doing so reshape his
brain, creating useful (if wonderfully unconventional) perceptions of the world
around him. Ben chose the second option—which is not an obvious decision to
make for most of us. He was stubbornly intent on making sense of the sea of
unseen, meaningless information around him, even though—or because—he had
one less sense than most of us.
Echolocators like Ben Underwood (there are a growing number, with training
seminars occurring around the world) build meaning through what does and
doesn’t work, but really they are no different from you or me or anyone else.
Just like the rest of us, echolocators aren’t able to perceive reality accurately.
Instead, they perceive it usefully (or not).
We all have experiential realities that form our brains, so we’re really all just
kittens pawing at a perceptual past that allows us to make sense of the present.
Each and every one of us has the same two choices: to engage hungrily with our
world… or not. This is because we are adapted to adapt in order to continually
redefine normality.
Adapting is what our species (and all other species) has been doing since day
one. Our brain simply looks for ways to help us survive, some banal (find food,
eat it), others wildly innovative (use your ears to see). This is why active
engagement is so important: it taps into a neurological resource that is core to
you and your biology, and thus can lead to innovations in perception that have a
physical basis in the brain, if you know how to exploit it. Such hands-on
experimentation is the cutting edge of neural engineering.
For nearly a decade, the Magnetic Perception Group, a research initiative at
the University of Osnabrück, Germany, has been studying “the integration of
new sensory modalities using a novel sensory augmentation device that projects
the direction of the magnetic north on the wearer’s waist,” as the group describes
it on their website. While this may perhaps sound like a veiled product blurb for
a newfangled sex toy, it absolutely isn’t (at least not yet, as “vibrotactile
stimulation” is indeed involved). It is a description of the feelSpace belt, an
experimental device expanding the frontier of human perception and behavior.
The belt is rigged with a compass set to vibrate toward earth’s magnetic
north, giving the wearer an enhanced sense of sorts, and an opportunity for
adaption. (Remember how birds use magnetic fields to navigate? The belt is like
being given this avian power.) For their most recent study, published in 2014,
the Group had participants wear the feelSpace belt for every entire waking day
over the course of seven weeks.17 This meant they wore it while out walking,
working, driving, eating, hiking, spending time with friends and family—in
short, during daily life, though they were allowed to remove it during extended
periods of static sitting. The goal was to study sensorimotor contingencies, a
theoretical set of laws governing actions and the related sensory inputs. “I was a
subject in one of the first studies,” says Peter König, the head of the Magnetic
Perception Group in Osnabrück, “and for me it was [a] very playful time.”18
The results of the feelSpace studies conducted by König and his team offer
an exclamation point supporting the innate adaptability of the brain. The people
who wore the belt experienced dramatic changes in their spatial perception. They
developed a heightened sense of cardinal directions and an improved “global
ego-centric orientation” (knowledge of where they were). But for a more vivid
sense of what wearing the belt was like, it’s best just to read the accounts of the
participants, which are both concrete and poetic: “The information from the belt
refines my own mental map. There are for instance places where I thought to
know where north is and the belt gave me another picture.”… “Now that my
maps have all been newly realigned, the range of the maps has been much
increased. From here I can point home—300 km—and I can imagine—not only
in 2D bird’s eye perspective—how the motorways wind through the
landscape.”… “Space has become wider and deeper. Through the presence of
objects/landmarks that are not visually apparent, my perception of space extends
beyond my visual space. Previously, this was a cognitive construction. Now I
can feel it.”… “It happens more and more often that I know about the relations
of rooms and locations to each other, of which I was not previously aware.”…
“In a lot of places, north has become a feature of the place itself.”
In addition to spatial perception, the participants’ navigation style and
performance also changed. Again, their experiences speak for themselves: “I am
literally less disoriented.”… “Today I stepped out of the train and I immediately
knew where I have to go.”… “With the belt one does not have to always care so
much whether there is a turn (in the way you go), one simply feels it without
much thinking!” Quite interestingly, there were even “belt-induced feelings and
emotions” as well (the non-belt control participants rarely ever mentioned
emotions): joy of use, curiosity, and security (mirrored by insecurity without the
belt), though also plenty of irritation with the device itself, which is very
understandable considering that it’s a foreign object vibrating on your waist all
the time. Yet in spite of these transporting accounts by the experiment
participants, König explains that verbalizing their experience was very
challenging, often leading to contradictions, as if the words to describe it didn’t
exist. “My conjecture,” König says, “is that if you go to a secluded little village
in the Alps and equip all one hundred inhabitants with a belt they will modify
their language. I’m pretty positive about that.”
The feelSpace belt has the potential to have meaningful real-world
applications. It could be used to help people navigate disorienting landscapes
(deserts, Mars), and it could help the blind better navigate their environment (in
lieu of echolocation). But the big-picture takeaways from the belt are more
exciting than anything else, since they are an example of the applied viability of
seeing differently. I don’t mean this in the futurist, transhumanist sense that fifty
years from now we’ll all be wearing feelSpace belts and other body
modifications that will make us proto-superhumans. I’m excited for what the
feelSpace belt says about what you and I can do without the belt right now.
The work of König and his team shows that we can augment our perception
and thus our behavior by “playing” with the contingencies of our brain’s neural
model.19 For this to happen, it means that physiologically the participants’ brains
changed—in less than two months. They engaged with the world in a new way
and created a new history of interpreting information. As König puts it, “Your
brain is big enough that you can learn anything. You can learn sense six, seven,
eight, nine, and ten. The only limitation is the time to train the senses. But in
principle your capabilities aren’t limited.” Does the belt have any lasting effect
after it has been taken off ? “The memory of how it felt, the perception, is
abstract,” König says, laughing at how this question always arises. “But I feel
that my type of navigation has changed. Some small effect remains. It’s hard to
quantify, but there is a permanent effect. For a public exhibition I was wearing
the belt again after a break of two years and it was like meeting with an old
friend and you’re chatting at a high speed in order to catch up. So some
structures remain, even if they’re not permanent, and can be easily reactivated.”
During their time wearing (and perceiving with) the feelSpace belt, people
still didn’t have access to reality, but they easily adapted to a new way of making
meaning. All they were doing was only what humans have always done: make
sense of their senses. But you don’t need a laboratory-designed belt or other
apparatus to do this. Your own daily life, personal and professional, provides
abundant opportunities for meaning-making. We have the process of evolution
in our heads.
We are products and mirrors and creators of evolution as evolution evolved
to evolve (called evolvability), like a book written by evolution that is also about
evolution. As such, our brain is a physical manifestation of that ecological
history, yet not only our cumulative human history. We also share a past with the
living things around us, since each one has had to evolve in the same
environment in which we evolved, while at the same time forming part of that
environment in which we are evolving… and in doing so, transforming it. Birds,
dolphins, lions; we’re all just brains in bodies and bodies in the world with one
goal and one goal only: to survive (and in the case of modern-day humans,
flourish!). Here’s the thing: survival (and flourishing) requires innovation.
We evolved to continually redefine normality. We have mechanisms of
adapting that are all doing the same thing, just with different timeframes for trial
and error. Evolution is one, and it is the lengthiest frame, a kind of long-distance
runner of adaptability/transformation covering an enormous span in which some
species disappear while others flourish.
The characteristics of fish at different depths in the ocean illustrate evolution
at work in the nonhuman realm. Fish in the deep sea inhabit an environment with
no light, surviving in a landscape of darkness in which the only source of
illumination they encounter is bioluminescence (light emitted by creatures that
have evolved lamp-like qualities). Fish at this depth have only one receptor for
light, since evolutionary innovation… or any type of innovation for that
matter… doesn’t just mean gaining useful new attributes but shedding useless
ones as well, like having more light receptors than is necessary. But the higher
you get in the ocean, and the closer to the surface where sunlight penetrates, the
more visual receptors the fish have, with an orientation toward blue. Right near
the top is where you get the most complex vision, and this is naturally where our
old friend the stereophonic-eyed stomatopod lives… in the shallows. The neural
system reflects gradual, advantageous adaptation.
The complexity of the ecology is matched by the complexity of the sensing
apparatus.
If evolution is long-term trial and error, then what are the other timeframes?
Think about the feelSpace belt and countless other perceptual activities of
varying intensities—for example, getting the hang of Angry Birds, driving a car,
or becoming a wine connoisseur. Gaining skill in such activities demonstrates
how the brain is adapted to adapt, but along the shortest timeframe. This is
learning.
You learn minute-to-minute and even second-to-second how to do
something, and in doing so you build a short-term individual past of what works
and doesn’t work. Yet this brief history has the potential to change your brain,
since it clearly influences outcomes from your behavior (how good were you the
first time you played Angry Birds and how good are you now?). More dramatic
physiological changes, however, occur during another timeframe, one in which
growth periods play a key role: development.
The kittens in Held and Hein’s famous Kitten in a Basket experiment were in
a highly developmental stage in their lives, which is why their ability or inability
to adapt produced such a powerful contrast. But developmental changes in the
brain don’t just occur in formative early periods; there are other “critical
periods” too, and in fact certain regions of the cortex can change throughout
your life. For example, it has been shown that speaking two languages on a daily
basis can delay the onset of dementia.20 As a researcher of neural development,
it’s clear to me that development takes place over the course of a lifetime.
The work of the neurobiologist Dale Purves is a case in point. Dale is a
brilliant scientist who has positively impacted neuroscience for decades (and
who I’m fortunate enough to call a true mentor in both work and life). He started
one of the world’s most important neurobiology departments (at Duke
University) and was the director of Duke University’s Center for Cognitive
Science. His work examines adaptive malleability along the development
timeframe with regard to not only our brains but also our muscles. Much of his
earlier research explores the neuromuscular junction, the meet-up point for the
nervous system and the muscle system. One of Purves’s breakthroughs was
showing that this junction is in essence a sort of crowded dating game for muscle
cells and nerve cells, in which the muscle cells that don’t find a nerve cell to pair
up with get shown the door. What’s happening on a less tongue-in-cheek,
metaphorical level is this: Creating the mechanics of your body is such a
massively complex biological undertaking, with so much genetic information to
encode, that your brain can’t know where to place every cell, much less the
connections between them. So it takes a practical approach and says, “Alright,
we kind of know we want nerves to go to that muscle, and other nerves to that
other muscle, but we can’t know exactly how it’s going to all play out. What
we’ll do is we just make a bunch of muscles and a bunch of nerves and let them
innervate (i.e., supply the muscles with nerves). There’ll be lots of extras but,
hey, they’ll figure it out.”21
 The neuromuscular junction indeed does figure out what to do with the
redundant nerve-muscle cells. Since there are too many, they auto-select and
prune each other, the body creating competition for the “neurotrophic factors,”
the proteins responsible for the nurture and upkeep of neurons. The goal is to
have one nerve cell for one muscle activity, so the muscles select by saying,
“OK, I’m going to create enough food for only one of you, and the one that gets
it is the one that’s going to stay active.” Or, to bring it back to the singles game,
if you miss your one chance to find a mate, then you’re gone. This is, of course,
very similar to the deep-sea fish eliminating excess light receptors, the muscle-
nerve cell pruning acting like a sped-up, localized microcosm of evolution. Once
they have been pruned to a single nerve cell innervating a single muscle fiber,
then another essential process happens: growth. The single nerve fiber starts
branching, creating more and more connections along the same muscle cell. The
more active it is, the more branches it makes, enabling finer and finer control of
the muscle cell that it innervates.
Purves’s research on the neuromuscular junction has been instrumental in my
own work, as well as that of many others, because it made me ask myself if a
process similar to the one that takes place at the neuromuscular junction takes
place inside the brain too. Could a similar protocol of auto-selection and
pruning… followed by activity-dependent growth… govern the central nervous
system, the command post from which we do our thinking? I centered my
research on studying the cortex and thalamus in mice during a late embryonic
stage, and discovered that the answer was an emphatic… yes.
The cerebral cortex is the outer part of the brain where our “gray matter” is
located. It is the place where our senses and motor abilities meet, containing the
brain tissues that allow us to have consciousness. In mice it is also what allows
them to “think,” just on a scale different from that of humans (and in some
instances actually at the same scale, and even at a higher scale when it comes to
olfaction and certain other abilities). The thalamus is a deeper aggregation of
cells in the middle of the brain straddling the two cerebral hemispheres, and it
plays an integral role in sensory perception, serving as an extremely assiduous
executive assistant to the high-powered CEO that is the cortex. What David
Price and I discovered in my in vitro experiments with mice, however, revealed
that this relationship is actually much more important. The cortex and the
thalamus represent one of the less common phenomena inside the brain: a love
story.
My goal was to study the mechanisms of brain plasticity, so I removed cells
from both the cortex and the thalamus. I found that in early development, the
cells could survive in isolation, since the relationship between the two still
wasn’t firmly established or important… they hadn’t yet gotten to know each
other. This is because they actually hadn’t formed interconnections. But later,
further on in development, when I separated the cells from the two after they had
connected, this caused heartbreak: in isolation, both the cells from the cortex and
the cells from the thalamus withered and died.
From early development to late development, the cortical cells and thalamic
cells had adapted to each other and had, in essence, “fallen in love” and so could
no longer live without the other (like a lot of real-life relationships, some
functional, some not). What’s even more fascinating is that their codependence
begins at exactly the same time that they would have formed connections. Thus,
when I removed thalamic cells three days before they would meet a cortical cell,
and kept them in isolation, three days later they would start dying unless I
starting adding growth factors released by the cortex, a substance required for
cell growth. In other words, their “love” is fated. This means their relationship
changes as development progresses, and these two parts of the brain become
codependent and extremely social, each relying on the other to bathe it with
growth factors. So if Purves’s work showed that the neuromuscular junction is a
no-frills matchmaker, the cortex and the thalamus demonstrate the neural
equivalent of all-consuming, can’t-live-without-you love.22
Now we know that the timeframes for neurological adaptability are as
follows: short term (learning), medium term (development), and long term
(evolution). All three offer opportunities for adaption of perception through the
shaping and reshaping of the network that underpins behavior, which is a
fundamental principle that unites all three and opens the way toward seeing
differently: Minds match their ecology!
Ecology simply means the interactive relationship between things and the
physical space in which they exist. It’s a way of saying environment that better
captures the fluid, inextricably connected nature of the things that occupy it.
Since our ecology determines how we adapt and, in adapting, innovate; and
since adapting means our brains physically change, the logical conclusion is that
your ecology actually shapes your brain (and that your reshaped brain results in
a change in behaviors that in turn shape your environment). It creates an
empirical history of trial and error that molds the functional architecture of your
cerebral tissues, and your neural tissue molds the world around it through the
physical interaction of your body. You and all your subsequent perceptions are a
direct, physiological manifestation of your past perceptual meanings, and your
past is largely your interaction with your environment, and thus your ecology. It
is precisely because… and not in spite… of the fact that you don’t see reality
that you are able to so fluidly adapt and change. Sit with this idea: Not seeing
reality is essential to our ability to adapt.
Since your brain is constantly occupied with the task of making sense of
inherently meaningless information, this interpretative process means your
neural process is a never-pausing tool of engagement. This is what accounts for
the miraculously plastic, protean, and evolvable nature of your mind.
So: change the environment and change your brain.
That is the consequence/importance of engaging with the world.
(Just don’t change it too much, since in evolutionary, natural-selection terms,
too much unfamiliarity can lead to a failure in properly adapting, which is bad.
To change things too much is a relative function. What is too much for a novice
would be nothing for an expert. Consider the difference that a mile makes for a
person who is sedentary versus a trained athlete. Two experiences that are
objectively the same are completely different in practice, depending on one’s
brain and body. Finding where you are, and measuring the properly incremented
modifications, is one of the challenges of life, which we will further consider
later in the book.)
Learning to deviate innovatively requires you to embrace the glorious mess
of trial and error, and much of this engagement grows out of the obstacles of
your surroundings. Every great artistic movement is precisely that… a
movement, meaning a highly stimulating context replete with escalating
challenges and uninhibited experimentation that pushes things ‘forward’. The
same goes for technology. We are living in a time of accelerated, nearly daily
changes in the creation of devices and apps that unite and augment the virtual
and physical worlds we live in, helping to create one contiguous world. This is
happening because of the tremendous, sometimes headlong culture (read: social
ecology) of engagement that defines the workings of tech and startup hubs. For
every success there are epic stories of trial and error, and that goes for every
failure as well. (But more on our hyped-up cultural fetish with “failure” later.)
The centrality of engagement as a tool for seeing differently goes beyond just
narratives of triumph in art and commerce. It is borne out by neuroscience as
well.
As an undergrad at the University of California, Berkeley, my mentor was a
fantastic, brilliant woman named Marian Diamond. She’s the reason I became a
neuroscientist instead of just continuing to skip class to play soccer, which
nearly got me kicked out of college. As the first woman to obtain a Ph.D. in
anatomy from UC Berkeley, she had clearly had deviant, pioneering tendencies
since the 1950s. When I was at the school, Marian was famous on campus for
bringing a human brain to the lecture hall on the first day of each semester, and
this is exactly what happened to me. As she does in a documentary about her,
with her white hair, stylish blue suit, glasses, and surgical gloves, she took the
stage with a large hatbox, out of which she lifted… a human brain. To the
laughter and amazement of the crowded lecture hall, she quipped, “When you
see a lady with a hatbox, you don’t know what she’s carrying.” Then she held up
the moist, yellowish-gray mass for all to see. “This is what you hope you look
like inside.”
Marian inspired me, as she is a true teacher who focuses not on what to see,
but on how to look. In her own looking, she was one of the first people to
research the brain’s material adaptiveness. For the first half of the twentieth
century, the dominant thinking in science was that the brain was a static
proposition… you got the brain your genes gave you, and that was that. Good
luck! But Marian and others showed through their research and experiments that
this was wrong. The brain matches its environment, both for good and for bad.
The cerebral cortex becomes more complex in an “enriched” environment—or
less complex in an “impoverished” environment.
Marian’s interest in brain morphology vis-à-vis its environment led her to
study this “enrichment paradigm” in rats. The experiment went like this: One set
of rats were kept in large cages that functioned as an enriched environment, with
“exploratory objects” that were changed regularly to add novelty and variation;
another set of rats were kept in small cages that functioned as an impoverished
environment, without stimulating toys. After a month in these conditions the rats
were put down and their brains removed for observation and analysis. Marian
found definitive proof that the brain is shaped not just during development but
throughout life, allowing for great changes in perception.23
If you give your plastic human brain a dull, unchallenging context, it will
adapt to the lack of challenge and let its dull side come out. After all, the brain
cells are expensive, so this is a useful strategy to conserve energy. On the other
hand, if you give the brain a complex context, it will respond to this complexity
and adapt accordingly. Marian and others discovered that this matching ability
enriches the physical makeup of the brain through the release of growth factors
that lead to the growth of brain cells and the connections between them.
A dark, devastating side of the brain’s matching nature can be seen in cases
when an impoverished environment is imposed on a human. In the late 1980s
and early ’90s, the living conditions of Romanian orphanages shocked the rest of
the world as images of the children reached the West from this previously
sealed, Ceaus¸escu-ruled corner of the communist bloc. Many of the children
were underfed, abused, and handcuffed to beds; they were kept in overcrowded
living quarters, forced to go to the bathroom where they lay, and sometimes even
straitjacketed. These dramatically unenriched, unimaginably terrible environs in
which the children grew up, which included very little human contact and
forceful confinements, caused the children to have reduced cognitive abilities,
not to mention more emotional and psychological problems. A study examining
neurodevelopment in children after they had left impoverished foster institutions
found that some “brain-behavioral circuitry” did eventually reach normal
benchmarks. Their memory visualization and inhibition control, however, still
lagged behind.24
This relates directly to parenting, and many wrong strategies present in child-
rearing on both the individual and collective levels. While we are used to hearing
hot-button phrases like coddling and helicopter parenting, and I do believe these
cultural trends are problems, my concerns as a neuroscientist go beyond just
engaging in current debates; I want us to better understand what the brains of our
kids need, so that, working together, we can create ecologies better suited to the
needs of their development. Consider heavy-handed health and safety
regulations in our communities. I’m a father and you’re probably thinking that
the next sentence will begin something like, “When I was a boy we used to walk
a mile in the snow to school buck naked!” That’s not what I’m getting at. Kids
fundamentally need kindness and love in all its laughing and screaming glory.
But for me kindness and love aren’t about never taking a rough dismount off a
slide, tripping on the pavement, or bashing into a pole. It precisely is giving
children the space to do those things (and the confidence that they will be
comforted afterward), and not just because these experiences build character.
This is the neurological empirical process in action and we should celebrate it,
especially knowing that Romanian orphans and other unfortunate children
around the world are deprived of the benefits of this topsy-turvy engagement.
The brain doesn’t always want soft foam toys. It needs to learn that it can stand
back up after having been knocked down, and in doing so become more resilient
both immediately and in the long term. (When Ben Underwood used to hurt
himself on the playground and the school had him call his mother, she would tell
him just to keep clicking.) If we don’t stop mitigating immediate risk at the
expense of long-term risk, we’re going to produce an “adaptively challenged”
generation, because if you’re raised in cotton you become cotton… fluffy, soft,
and easily burned.
 We need kids who are kids in nature!
But it’s not just our kids who need to embrace risk… it’s our culture as well.
Your brain’s past also includes the ecology of your culture. After all, culture
itself is simply another product of the brain, a collective manifestation of thought
and behavior, so it too grows and adapts through challenges. This enrichment
often comes in the form of art, and there is no better example of “matching” as a
cultural process than the story of experimental Russian composer Igor
Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. The hugely influential work had perhaps the
most legendary premiere in music history, in Paris in the spring of 1913.
Stravinsky was the one-man Sex Pistols of his time, and his daring new score
for Rite was full of radical experiments with melody and meter. As the orchestra
began playing that May night, and the Ballets Russes dancers started to move,
the jarring sound of the music shocked and soon upset the audience. “The theatre
seemed to be shaken by an earthquake,” a report from the time recounts. The
music agitated the increasingly restive public to the point that they began acting
in a way we don’t at all associate with classical music concerts. They shouted
out, hurled insults, and whistled. People began punching each other and brawls
broke out. The police promptly appeared, and even though the show did indeed
go on, the scene eventually devolved into a riot.25 A review of the time wrote:
“This is the most dissonant music ever written… never has the cult of the wrong
note been practiced with such zeal and persistence as in this score; that from the
first bar to the last whatever note one expects is never the one that comes, but the
note to one side, the note which ought not to come; that whatever chord is
suggested by the previous harmony, it is always another which arrives.” And this
was a rave review!
A few months later, however, in July, Rite of Spring was performed again,
this time in London, and the audience liked what they heard. They received it
without resistance or whistling, let alone rioting. In just two months (nearly the
same amount of time—coincidentally—that it took for the feelSpace belt
wearers to start perceiving space differently), the cortex of culture was reshaped
by its novel environment. Today The Rite of Spring is considered one of the
most important compositions of the twentieth century. In short, not only does the
human brain change—the collective cultural brain does as well. Both are
constantly redefining “normal” and creating a new normal every second. As
such, we now literally hear the same piece of music differently than the first
audience did.
Not only must we adapt, but ironically, sometimes the best change is learning
how not to change, which in itself is a challenging exercise for your brain. Since
we evolved to continually redefine normality, what was once unique becomes
ordinary (normal). Thus, in relationships, what once attracted us to someone
(e.g., generosity, sense of humor) eventually ceases to feel miraculous and
becomes the norm. In becoming the norm, it becomes expected. The cost is that
we no longer see the person in terms of their wonderful deviance or uniqueness,
but in terms of their normality, and in doing so we risk taking them for granted,
or even worse. This of course works in all ways: we become accustomed to their
negative traits as well as their positive (for abused women, violence of various
sorts becomes an “acceptable” normal, rather than an extreme and horribly
deviant behavior). This is an incredibly natural process: the other person’s body
becomes normal, their laugh becomes normal, and suddenly the thrill is gone.
But it doesn’t need to be so!
Each time we see the sunrise we find it beautiful. Waking in the morning
with another needs to be like seeing a sunrise. How do we maintain this sense of
newness? One way is to do new things together. That is external, and helpful.
Yet much of it is internal. So what is a principle that we could apply to maintain
uniqueness in the face of a brain that evolved to habituate? By maintaining a
larger framework (often referred to as a perspective).
As we will see in the next chapter, everything the brain does is relative. If we
base our perceptions of another according to their average, then their behavior
becomes, by definition, average (no matter how wonderful or poor it might be
objectively). If, however, we ground our perceptions of others according to a
more fundamental baseline (as opposed to their own personal normal), we are
able to maintain a perceived uniqueness in who they are and what they do. One
such absolute is death, and the fear thereof. Existential psychologists believe that
everything we do is in one way or another linked to our awareness of death. My
view is that everything we do is grounded in uncertainty, which we will explore
in depth later in the book. For now, know that the brain is also able to “do”
constancy… to continually see the same thing even though the world changes,
but even more important, as perception changes and as the brain adapts.
Ultimately, the brain works like a muscle: “use it or lose it.” Cases of near-
miraculous adaptability, or heightened uses of the senses, often grow out of
situations of adversity, like Ben Underwood’s way of “seeing”… but they don’t
have to. Musicians, for example, hear things that the rest of us don’t. Why?
Because they have put their brains into a different, complex history than non-
musicians, one which began with an uncertainty to which they had to then adapt,
and in doing so enabled their auditory cortex to change. Russians perceive
shades of red with greater discrimination than English speakers because the
word choices available in their language impose more nuances.26 In Germany,
blind women are being trained as “medical tactile examiners” to give breast
exams because they detect more lumps than non-blind gynecologists!27 These
are wonderful examples of innovations that deviate from “normal” and give us
access to new worlds of perception.
But this isn’t the full picture for learning how to most effectively engage your
world and open the doors to creativity. In the next chapter we will unpack our
susceptibility to “illusions” and show that there is in fact no such thing, only
context. This is what connects past perception to the present.
CHAPTER 4

The Illusion of Illusions

We now know that information is meaningless and we make meaning by

engaging. Now we must understand how the context in which perception occurs
determines what it is we actually see. Why is context everything?
It was 1824 and Louis XVIII, the obese and gout-ridden king of France, had a
problem, and one entirely unrelated to his health. Complaints were mounting
about the quality of the fabrics produced at the Manufacture Royale des
Gobelins, the most prestigious tapestry factory in Paris, which was owned and
operated by the crown.28 People claimed that the colored threads on display in
the showroom—rich burgundies, grassy greens, sun-kissed golds—were not the
same ones that customers took home.29 In an earlier time this might not have
been such a pressing matter, but shoring up popular support (and revenue) for
the royal court was among the highest priorities for the centrist King Louis.
Exiled by the guillotining upheavals of the French Revolution, he had returned
to the throne in 1815 after Napoleon’s defeat at the Battle of Waterloo and
during his reign sought to restore the place of the monarchy. Which is why he
needed a scientist to figure out what the hell was going on with the tapestries.
He called on Michel Eugène Chevreul.
Chevreul was a young French chemist who had established himself as a
celebrity in his emerging field thanks to his work on saponification, the making
of soaps from oils and fats.30 This may not sound especially flashy today in an
age in which soap is plentiful, cheap, and effective, even in many
underdeveloped countries. In early nineteenth-century France, however, the use
of penicillin was still a century away, infections could easily kill a person, and
the production of soap on an industrial scale had only just begun. Likewise,
electricity had yet to be harnessed to illuminate people’s lives, so Chevreul’s
creation of a bright, glycerin-free star-candle also had made him a “shining”
innovator of his time.
 While he could have strived to become a millionaire industrialist through his
discoveries, Chevreul was a spartan, if larger-than-life, man of science interested
only in the nitty-gritty of daily work. His students adored him and his colleagues
esteemed him. With a wavy mane of hair that grew more unruly as he aged—his
wild white coif prefigured Einstein’s iconic look—Chevreul ate only two meals
a day, one at seven in the morning and the other at seven in the evening, and
spent the rest of the day in his laboratory. When interviewed about this habit at
the age of 86, he explained, “I am very old and I have yet a great deal to do, so I
do not wish to lose my time in eating.”31
When King Louis appointed Chevreul as the new Director of Dyes at the
Gobelins Factory the chemist wasn’t yet forty, and indeed did have a great deal
to do in order to determine what was happening to the tapestries. After all, it
made no sense: here were supposedly some of the highest-quality fabrics in the
world, yet something totally unaccounted for was damaging and physically
altering them—or so it seemed.
One can imagine Chevreul walking through the grandiose, four-columned
entrance of the factory each day, the rhythmic thrum of the looms washing over
him in the cavernous halls, then closing himself off in his office to attack the
problem he’d been tasked to solve. For a man like him, a problem was a purpose,
and a purpose was much more filling than food. “I had two absolutely distinct
subjects to investigate, in order to fulfil my duties as Director of the Dye
Works,” he later recalled. “The first being the contrast of colors… the second—
the chemistry of dyeing.” In his work on soaps, Chevreul had excelled at
breaking down complex compounds to understand what they were made of and
how they formed. As such, his research entailed boring deeply into things (which
is likely why King Louis thought he would be the right man for the job—to see
past the apparently deceptive surfaces of the threads and unlock the chemistry of
the dyes). He had spent his career among glass and flames, boiling substances
and analyzing their makeup as the fumes of fats and oils filled the air around
him, but for the first time these techniques got him nowhere. The dyes didn’t
contain any secrets. One can only guess at the frustration this caused the
seemingly unstoppable Chevreul. So instead of looking further into the Gobelins
fabrics as his background in organic chemistry might have naturally led him to
do, he turned his gaze outward—onto other fabrics.
He started by tracking down wool samples from factories in different parts of
France and abroad to compare their quality. Yet this was a dead end: he found
that the Gobelins fabrics were indisputably superior. So the complaints
customers had voiced had to somehow go beyond the material nature of the
tapestries. What if, Chevreul wondered, the issue had nothing to do with
chemistry, or even tapestries for that matter? What if the customers themselves
were the problem? Not the fact that they were complaining about the colors, but
that they were perceiving them, and perhaps perceiving them “incorrectly?” So
Chevreul sharpened his gaze and looked “deeper” into the tapestries to focus on
what was around each piece of yarn. The same yarn, yes, but of different colors,
which was different from how the yarn samples were presented individually in
the showroom. This was when (and why) he “unraveled” the mystery.
Chevreul discovered that the crisis of the factory had in fact nothing to do
with quality and everything to do with perception. The physical material of the
differently colored yarns didn’t change, but the context in which customers
looked at it did. Colors looked different on their own than when embedded
alongside other colors (as in the central circles on the two proceeding pages). “I
saw that the want of a vigour alleged against the blacks was owing to the colors
contiguous to them and that the matter was involved in the phenomena of the
contrast of colors,” Chevreul described his realization.32 The color relationships
within the tapestries were what changed the appearance of each color therein.
Not objectively, but for the perception of the observer. People weren’t seeing the
physical reality accurately.
Of course, neither Chevreul nor anyone else understood why. In nineteenth-
century France, the idea that colors could change even though there was no
physical interaction between them would have been radically challenging—and
the explanation we have now would have been even more so. The field of
chemistry itself had only recently left behind the magical beliefs of alchemy.
Nevertheless, it was clear that some biological human quirk was the culprit
behind all the complaints about the Gobelins fabrics.
In 1835, over ten years after he’d begun, Chevreul published a book on the
long strange trip his investigation had become, The Principles of Harmony and
Contrast Colors. In the introduction he wrote, “I beg the reader to never forget
when it is asserted of the phenomena of simultaneous contrast, that one color
placed beside another receives such a modification from it that this manner of
speaking does not mean that the two colors, or rather the two material objects
that present them to us, have a mutual action, either physical or chemical; it is
really only applied to the modification that takes place before us when we
perceive the simultaneous impressions of these two colors.” Chevreul saw that
the change in “reality” took place inside of the mind rather than out—the same
leap of thought that had tripped up Goethe with his colored shadows.
 In the years following Chevreul’s breakthrough, his work on perception
rippled powerfully into other fields, leading to the foundation of color theory
still used by artists today: the study of contrast effects and his famous chromatic
circle, a wheel which shows how the perception of each color is influenced by
the colors that surround it.
For the first time, it gave artists a common language for talking about one of
our most abstract perceptions and their interactions therein, although painters
had been playing with juxtaposition and context for centuries. As Eugène
Delacroix, a contemporary of Chevreul’s, notoriously boasted, “I can paint you
the skin of Venus with mud, provided you let me surround it as I will.” A master
of exploiting the “illusions” that nearly brought down the Gobelins factory,
Delacroix went on to influence a later school of painting that favored an
arguably more “true” but less “realistic” sense of perception—the impressionists.
More recently, contemporary artists like the late light installationist Dan Flavin
and the painter Bridget Riley have taken perception-conscious work to new
extremes. Flavin played with what he called the “incidentals of color,” making a
point not to include colors that the viewer thought they saw. And the colors of
the stripes and waves in Riley’s dizzying, multicolored canvases—a contrast
from her better-known monochromatic works, which also “play” with perception
—change depending on the colors that are adjacent, much like the Gobelins
tapestries.
Michel Chevreul ended up working as the Director of Dyes for thirty years
and died at the age of 102 after one of chemistry’s most illustrious careers, still
maintaining his frugal, work-driven lifestyle. In contrast, the man who had hired
him to investigate the tapestries, Louis XVIII, died in the fall of 1824, the very
same year he appointed Chevreul as his dye-master. The king didn’t live to find
out why the colors changed—which might have been for the better, since he also
missed out on seeing the French monarchy dismantled once and for all a few
decades later. The snafu at the Gobelins factory didn’t affect the history of
France, but it did change the history of art.
When it comes to perception… even at the simplest level of the brain, namely
seeing color (and if it’s true there, then it must be true ‘all the way up’), the big-
picture lesson to take away from the story of Chevreul is that… context is
everything.
But why?
To answer this question is to understand not only how the brain works, but
what it is to be human. (It is also, incidentally, to understand what it’s like to be
a bee—or any other living system—since bees, too, see so-called illusions,
which means that they have evolved perceptual techniques similar to ours.)
The brain is an inescapably connective apparatus… the ultimate hypersocial
system. As such, it deals in relationships. The brain doesn’t do absolutes. This
is because meaning can’t be made in a vacuum. While all the information we
perceive may be meaningless, without a million different simultaneous and
interactive ambiguities, the brain has nothing to feed its vast interpretation
system. Context and the relationships that define it (like the relationships
between the different spectral parts of an image in the case of The Dress) are
always changing, and while we don’t have access to the objective reality of the
source of any particular spectral stimulus, the coincident relationships across
space and time give us the wealth of comparative data our neural processing
needs to construct a useful subjective perceptual response. Detecting
differences (or contrast) is so integral to the functioning of our brains that
when our senses are deprived of different relationships they can shut down. In
other words, we need deviation.
Take the eyes and how they work. Saccades and microsaccades are tiny,
involuntary ballistic movements that your eyes are always making. They are like
a tapestry (to keep our themes consistent) of twitches, and these
neurophysiological movements are what make our smooth-seeming vision
possible. The man who demonstrated this was a Russian psychologist named
Alfred Yarbus. In the 1950s, he created a Clockwork Orange-esque contraption
that fixed a person’s eyes open, pulled their eyelids back for more exposure, and
through a suction “cap” tracked the arcs and lines of the saccades as they roved
over the visual stimuli he showed them. The sketch-like, nearly artistic mapping
of the jittering of the sacaades that Yarbus’s device produced demonstrated that
movement combined with a constant search for difference is the sine qua non for
sight. Indeed, contrast is so essential to vision that we can ask a very simple
question: What would happen if contrast were to be eliminated? The answer: you
would go blind. Without difference in space or time, you would see nothing. See
(or don’t see) for yourself.
Don’t worry, the following self-experiment is painless (and simple): With
one hand, cover one eye. With the other, place your thumb and forefinger gently
on the top and bottom eyelids of the other eye. (If you have calipers, even better,
but why would you have calipers?) Then, keeping this eye open, hold it in place.
The stiller you keep this eye, the quicker you’ll start to see the effect. Look at a
stable scene and try not to move your head.
 What you are doing is restricting the movements of your saccades, and in
turn cutting off the flow of relational, difference-laden information your brain
needs to create vision. In simple terms, you’re eliminating the essence of context
and in doing so blocking your brain’s ability to make meaning, so you briefly go
blind. Very soon your vision will start to blur, blotches will encroach, and your
world will fade away as your field of vision becomes a pinkish-white smear. All
right, it’s time for you to give it a try.
How did it go? Hopefully you now have a better, more visceral sense of all
the unseen processes taking place between your perception and your world, your
senses and your brain. The point is that by stopping your eyes from moving,
what’s really happening is that with no change/difference/contrast in space in
time, the whole world disappears, even though your eyes are open. Hence, your
brain is only interested in change, difference, and contrast—all sources of
information for your brain to interpret. Yet considering the mechanistic quality
of the “freezing eye” experiment I just had you do, you may be wondering what
it is about context that illuminates the essence of being human, as I claimed a
few pages ago. Here is the key: Your brain takes all the relationships it gathers
from context and assigns behavioral meaning to them. This is another way of
saying the key is action… which bridges past perception to the present.
Think back to Bishop Berkeley. We don’t have direct access to the world,
which is why it is so important to engage with the world… because only through
empiricism are we able to make meaning out of the meaningless. The meaning
we make then becomes a part of our past, our brain’s database of perception. As
such, our world and experiences in it give us feedback on how we’re doing. The
brain stores data on which perceptions were useful (i.e., those that helped us
survive/succeed) and which weren’t. We take this history forward with and
apply it to every situation that requires a response, which is pretty much every
single second of our conscious lives. But the trick here is to avoid confusing
usefulness with accuracy. Your brain doesn’t record what was “right” for future
reference. Forget that notion of rightness, because it’s absolutely critical to go
beyond the whole idea of accuracy. Why? Because for perception there is no
such thing as accuracy.
Pretend you’re a hero in an action movie… a male or female spy. You’re
being chased across a rooftop in an adrenalized, music-pumping action
sequence. European steeples poking into the sky, a noisy city below. Your heart
is thudding and the bad guys are close behind as you dart between clotheslines
hung with drying laundry, hop over a wall, and race to the edge of the building.
Shit! You come skidding to a stop and take in the situation. It’s fight or flight.
You choose flight. You’re going to have to jump across a five-story abyss to the
building on the other side. You only have seconds, so you take a few steps back,
sprint toward the edge, leap across… and land! You did it. You gather yourself
and keep running, ready for more daring leaps ahead. The bad guys are still after
you, your blood is still chugging, but you’re going to get away.
After an experience like this, the intuitive way of analyzing what happened is
to think that your brain accurately judged the distance you had to clear and
succeeded. Do you really think that your brain calculated the distance using the
following equation?

Of course not. As we have already seen, much of perception is astoundingly

counterintuitive. Instead, our neural network has run this race millions of times
throughout our evolutionary history. So your brain only usefully perceived the
space so that your (action-hero) behavior would allow you to survive. This is
because for the brain, judging accuracy is in fact impossible.
Context connects the past to the present so the brain can decide on a useful
response, but you never find out if your perception was accurate or not. Your
statistical history of perception doesn’t include whether your perception
reflected reality, because, again, you don’t have unmediated access to the source
of objects or conditions in the real world—the objective reality of the leap you
had to make—since your perception is separated from the source by perception
itself. The only way to know if your perception of the physical world is accurate
is if you’re able to directly compare your perception to the underlying truth of
reality. This is the way some artificial intelligence (AI) systems work. They are
inherently “religious” because they need a godlike figure—the computer
programmer—to tell them whether their outputs are correct or not, and then they
incorporate this new information into future responses. But the human brain
doesn’t function like this. We resemble “connectionist” AI systems that don’t
have a godly programmer and thus never get information about the world
directly. Instead, these systems modify and multiply their networks’ structures
randomly. Those that change in a “useful” way survive and are therefore more
likely to reproduce in the future. (Connectionist artificial intelligence systems
also see effects we call illusions, just like humans.) Like a connectionist system,
our perceptual brains have no access to physical reality… ever. So there is no
way to know if our perceptions were accurate because we never experienced the
world unambiguously.
But this doesn’t actually matter.
Actions take on a meaning only by way of the meaning we give them… our
response (internal or external). So only your response reveals your perceptual
assumptions, or your brain’s idea of usefulness for this situation. The feedback
about your behavior that your brain receives via your senses only helps to
measure the results… that is, whether the behavior it generated was useful or
not. In the case of your building-jumping, it clearly was. Still, you might wonder
how your brain and body were able to produce a useful leap to escape the bad
guys in the first place. Easy: by taking the current stimulus in its current context
and relating it to equivalent situations where you were presented with similar
stimuli in similar contexts. Or, more simply: by using the past to help you with
the present… not in any cognitive way, but in a reflexive way.
Since the information coming from the five senses is ambiguous, our brain’s
process of sense-making is necessarily shaped empirically. (Remember, this
important past of engagement takes places along the three timelines we
discussed in the previous chapter: evolution, development, and learning.) Our
brain’s way of seeing looks to this history—and only there—for what is useful,
in the hopes of increasing the probability of surviving in the future. Indeed, in
almost any situation in life the best predictor of what will happen next is what
happened in the past under similar circumstances. So our perception of any
given situation is only ever a measure of the usefulness of our response,
trumping objective reality. And come to think of it…
Who cares about accuracy when what is at stake is survival?!
 Can you find the predator above? Ninety percent of the information is
available to see it. It is there. If you have not found it yet, then you’re dead. Now
look again:
 Useful interpretation means we survived, and thus archives itself as part of
the history that will inform our future perception. Objective reality is a
coincidence at best.
The challenges of learning a foreign language also show how the brain’s
never-ending search for usefulness plays out in our own ears and mouths. Many
Anglophones experience challenges with the rolled Spanish r. More generally,
pretty much anyone who’s ever tried to learn a foreign language encounters
sounds that are, well, foreign. A well-known example: When speaking English,
Japanese people often say “herro” instead of “hello.” This happens because they
literally do not hear the difference between the r and l sounds. It’s not simply
that their language doesn’t contain these sounds, because it does. Rather, it’s
because their language doesn’t make a distinction between them. They have no
perceptual past in which it was useful to make a distinction, so accuracy (hearing
the sounds as objectively different) doesn’t matter. As a result, their brains have
been trained not to hear the difference because there’s no utility in it.
Our perception of color also embodies the brain’s reliance on usefulness
instead of accuracy. While light physically exists along a linear spectrum, the
way our visual cortex organizes it is by breaking light into four categories that
form a circle: red, green, blue, and yellow. Remember Roy G. Biv from school?
That’s the same thing, just with orange, indigo, and violet added for a bit more
nuance. Since the human brain processes light categorically into redness,
greenness, blueness, and yellowness, this means that we are only able to see
other colors as limited combinations among these four (we can’t see red-greens
or blue-yellows). Our perception takes the two extremes of the line of light—
short wavelengths at one end, long wavelengths at the other—and bends them
back until they touch and form a circle. The consequence is that the two ends of
the continuum are perceptually similar, while they are actually opposite.
 Imagine this scenario: A group of one hundred random people have to
arrange themselves in a line from shortest to tallest. They do so, with a toddler
that is two feet tall at one end and a man who is seven feet tall at the other. The
group keeps its arrangement but closes itself from a line into a circle, with the
toddler ending up next to the seven-footer. This is how we see color; it is logical
considering the conditions the shape of a circle imposes, yet it is not logical in
terms objective organization, since this would be like setting a two-pound weight
next to a one-thousand-pound weight. This is why our perception of a color
matching the actual physical color would be only coincidence. The way our
brain evolved to process means that no matter what, we can’t see the reality of it.
It is also what makes strange mix-ups and discrepancies like #The Dress
possible.
Our brain evolved to perceive light categorically—usefully, but not at all
accurately—because it is an extremely efficient way of perceiving visual stimuli
that allows us to save brain cells to devote to the neuro-processing of our other
senses. (Stomato-pods would have been naturally selected out of any
environment except for the one in which they live and thrive, since their brain’s
heightened vision means they don’t have other resources, like the ones that
allowed us to survive in our environment.) Curiously, as Dale Purves, Thomas
Polger, and I originally pointed out, our four-color breakdown of light is
mirrored in a principle of cartography, or mapmaking: You only need four colors
to create any map and be able to make sure no two bordering countries are ever
colored the same. This fact spawned the famous Four Color Theorem, a storied
problem in mathematics for which mathematicians struggled to find a proof for
over one hundred years, until Kenneth Appel and Wolfgang Haken finally did so
in 1976. They used a computer to iteratively test the theorem, which means that
through trying every conceivable combination—billions—they proved that you
couldn’t disprove the theorem. It was the first instance of a mathematical
theorem being proven in such a fashion, stirring up strong debate about whether
this was truly a legitimate proof.
A map is a useful metaphor when talking about perception because at its
most basic level our brain evolved to be our atlas of sorts, a system of routes
designed to navigate us toward just one destination: staying alive! (Or you could
think of it conversely as not guiding us toward a million other directions, each of
which leads to the same place: death!) Perhaps the “sharpest” example of this
fact and of subjective perception versus objective reality is the universal human
experience of… PAIN.
You fall down a flight of stairs and break your arm. It hurts. You slice your
finger open while dicing a tomato. It hurts. Someone punches you in the nose. It
f*%@^king hurts! (Note that while I’ve used four symbols to replace only two
letters, you still read it as “fucking” because of the past reading contexts your
brain has encoded.) When you get injured physically, you feel the pain of what
has happened. But what truly is pain? Is it something that can be objectively
measured, like light? Does it have physical properties that allow it to exist
outside of perception and experience? Of course not!
Pain is not a physically separate, external phenomenon. Like color and
everything else we experience in our awareness, pain takes place in the brain and
absolutely nowhere else. There isn’t a sensation taking place inside your arm
after your bone snaps, on your skin while your thumb bleeds, or around your eye
as the area purples. Of course, it feels this way, but in fact this is nothing but an
incredibly useful perceptual projection. The pain isn’t taking place anywhere but
in your brain, by way of a complex neurophysiological process, although this
doesn’t make the ex perience any less real. Your nociceptors, a special type of
neuron or nerve ending, register damage and relay a message to your nervous
system, which includes your brain. (Nociceptors aren’t distributed evenly around
the body; fingertips and nipples and other areas that are particularly sensitive to
touch have—by definition—significantly more nociceptors than other parts, like
elbows.) In this sense, something objectively physiological does happen with
pain, but it is the meaning of the cause we perceive, not the cause itself.
Why do we experience pain as a fact when it’s really just a perception? Pain
is a conversation between your mind, body, and the world around you in which a
crisis—and a response—is being discussed. The pain is an emergent
consequence of your success (or lack thereof, in which case it’s more like a
panic button that’s just been hit) in the present context, and a motivator to act.
Pain isn’t “accurate,” because accuracy is both impossible and unimportant to
our brain. Pain is the ringing of alarms, with the urgency of a life-or-death
communiqué—the certainty that we must do something!
So pain is a physiological perception that makes actionable meaning out of
information that is inherently meaningless, causing our brain to interpret it as an
event we must defend ourselves against. Our history of responding this way to
our screaming nociceptors is why our species is still here. This leads us to an
incredibly profound truth, and one that lays bare the truth of every single one of
your behaviors…
 All perception is just your brain’s construction of past utility (or “empirical
significance of information”). This is a scientific fact, and admittedly quite a
strange one. But how does this happen? Where does the construction take place?
The answer becomes clear once you understand how our senses rely very little
on the external world, but more on our internal world of interpretation.
As we saw in the introduction, only 10 percent of the information your brain
uses to see comes from your eyes. The other 90 percent comes from other areas
of the brain. This is because for every one connection from the eyes (via the
thalamus) to the primary visual cortex, there are ten connections from other
cortical regions. Moreover, for every one connection going to the visual cortex
from the eyes (again via the thalamus), there are ten going back the other way,
dramatically affecting the information coming from the eyes. In terms of
information flow, then, our eyes have very little to do with seeing. The seeing is
done by our brain’s sophisticated network making sense of the visual sensory
information. This is why the adage seeing is believing gets it all wrong:

What do you read? Email your answer to info@labofmisfits.com.

The complex process separating you from reality is actually quite staggering,
but at the same time breathtakingly successful. Which brings us to a very
important question: What does it mean to see the meaning of meaningless
information, and how can past meanings possibly limit present ones? To answer
this, let’s relate our perception of color to something we feel is inherently
imbued with more meaning—language.
The task here is simply to read what you see (aloud or in your head).

ca y u rea t is
 ca y u rea t is
Most likely, you read a full and coherent sentence: Can you read this? Let’s
try another. Again, read what you see.

w at ar ou rea in
I’m guessing that you read: What are you reading? Remember the
instructions: read what you see. Instead you read words that don’t actually exist
in the letter-string presented. Why? Because experience has resulted in a brain
that has encoded within it the statistics of co-occurring letters in the English
language. So your brain applied its history of experience with language and read
what would have been useful to read in the past, reading words where there are
none. (Just like the earlier f*%@^king.) Note, however, that even if the sentence
now had letters in place of the actual words, you still would have been reading a
meaning, since none of these letter-strings have an inherent value. They are
constructs of our history and culture. This brings us back to the brain’s need for
relationships: building connections between the different letters.
46% of people read “is seeing believing,” 30% of people read “seeing is
believing,” 24% of people read “believing is seeing.”

But there are other implications here. While your “reading” was valid, it’s not
the only one. Why didn’t you interpret it as…?
 You were responding to context, and this limited you. I created a situation in
which you were engaging in a form of reading, so your brain looked for the most
useful way to fill in the blanks… with the word reading. It makes perfect sense.
But remember, there are no laws of physics that create meaning for you here.
Letters and letter strings are arbitrary in and of themselves. In short, they are
inherently meaningless. They only take on meaning through history. Your brain
gave you what it deemed the most useful response based on your perceptual
history, but it wasn’t the only response.
As we saw in Chapter 1 with the brightness-contrast exercise that showed
that we don’t see reality, our brain creates meaning in relation to light. The gray
squares changed colors in your perception even though objectively they stayed
the same, because your past usefully constructed different “shades” of meaning
in the present. Now that we have a better understanding of why this happened,
let’s revisit the perception of gray.

In the previous image, we have the gray squares again, but this time they are
tiles on the floor of a room in separate, very similar scenes… two barely lit
spaces. Again, they appear to be different intensities of gray because of their
“surrounds,” but in fact they are the same. Now let’s take a look at the two
scenes with the lights on and see what happens.
Ignore the other tiles on the far left and far right in both scenes. In the scene
on the left, look at the tile under the table directly below the vase with the
flowers. It looks nearly white. Now look at its counterpart in the scene on the
right, just to the right of the teacup. It’s a charcoal gray. Yet these two shades are
still exactly the same.
All I did was change the information in the scene, which in turn changes its
probable meaning based on your past experience. In this instance, the “meaning”
of the dark surround under the table was “shadow,” whereas the dark surround in
the image on the right means a “dark surface.” In changing the information, I
changed the meaning of the tiles your brain made using the information from
your senses. Both tiles remained in their original surrounds, but I altered your
interpretation of these surrounds by changing the conditions in the room. What
you see is a statistical representation created by your brain of the likelihood of
the two tiles having a similar empirical significance for your behavior in the
past. This process echoes how you read the earlier letter-string as Can you read
this? Your perception allows you to see the same thing in multiple ways, even if
at first it seems as if there can only be one way. As you will see in the following
two images, what is true for the meaning of words and lightness is also true for
the meaning of form.
 Below, look at the four angles created by the pairing of two rods. In each
case, the rods form a different angle that is not 90 degrees, right? Wrong.
In each of these “illusions” I have taken you through, we have seen how past
usefulness shapes your present perception, and that that past comes from way,
way back in human evolution. Yet, as astoundingly good as we are at navigating
a reality to which we don’t have direct access, we must be wary of the brilliant
method of seeing that our brain has evolved. This is because it has the potential
of the past trapping our perception in the past, which brings us back to Chevreul
and his tapestries.
 Chevreul’s profound insight into human perception and the color wheel he
created have influenced art up to our present day, but not all for good. I don’t
mean in the works of art that his discovery helped produce, but in how art
teaches us to understand ourselves—or misunderstand ourselves, to the detriment
of seeing differently.
Artists are fond of attributing the sometimes disorienting effects they create
to “the fragility of our senses,” as London’s Tate Gallery described the work of
Mark Titchner, a nominee for the 2006 Turner Prize. But this is rubbish, because
our senses aren’t fragile. “Fragility” is a description of the feeling of perception
in certain situations, especially ones engineered to disorient, but it is not an
explanation.
 Perception isn’t randomized and willy-nilly, but rather an incredibly
systematic, even statistical process of linking past to present through behavior.
When Chevreul discovered in France of the 1830s that we don’t always see the
colors that are actually there, this verged on magic in real life, except that with
magic you know the magician is tricking you… so instead it was a kind of
sorcery. However, the weakness of magic (and so-called sorcery for that matter)
is that once you know the trick, it is no longer interesting. The beauty of
phenomena that we refer to as illusions, on the other hand, is that knowing why
they happen makes them even more interesting. Yet even this isn’t the full
picture for understanding these so-called “tricks” of perceptions, since I was
being disingenuous before when I called the exercises I took you through
illusions. Illusions themselves… are an illusion!
If the brain evolved to see things as they truly are, then yes, illusions would
exist. But since the brain didn’t evolve to see accurately, only usefully, they
don’t. Our conventional conception of illusion is flawed, then, since implicit in
the concept is that we evolved to see the world as it actually is. As you know
now, we didn’t. We can’t see reality, so we evolved to see what was useful to
see in the past. Which means it comes down to this: Either everything is an
illusion, or nothing is. And the reality is that nothing is.
In order to see differently, we must first see seeing itself differently. This is
important in a deep, lived sense beyond just the visual. After all, the world is in
constant flux. What was true yesterday might not be true today, and this is truer
than ever, for example, in the world of technology and business, where
developments occur seemingly at warp speeds. Contexts are always changing, so
our perception must change too. Getting a stronger sense of the principles of
your own brain allows you to see how subtly past experience not only biases us,
but creates us. Knowing this, you can learn to take ownership over your brain’s
apparatus and thus make new pasts that will change your brain’s perception of
future possibilities. This is what we will explore in the next chapter.
In essence, living is nothing other than experiencing continual trial and error.
Living is empirical. To succeed, you need to have as many possibilities—and
possible perceptions—at your disposal as your brain will permit. A narrower
outlook gives you fewer paths to take. So to avoid getting trapped, make sure
you’re not just re di g context but dre mi g about it as well. But this won’t be
easy… because you’re a frog… when it comes to perception.
I don’t mean this metaphorically. I mean we are surprisingly like frogs in our
neural processing and behavior, which is why I love a particular viral YouTube
video33 that embodies our similarities. In the 26-second clip, a hungry frog leaps
at digital ants on the screen of a smartphone, trying to lick them up with its
tongue, unaware—we assume (but wouldn’t it be fantastic if it were otherwise?!)
… that it’s playing a game called Ant Crusher. It expectantly tries to eat ant after
ant until it finally fails the level. When its owner goes to tap the reset button, the
angry—or perhaps just hungry—frog bites its owner’s thumb. It’s funny, but
poignant as well, since in so many ways we are this frog. We are just
responding, responding, responding according to what our past perceptions tell
us. Yet if at our core we’re frogs in our perceptions and behaviors, then what
differentiates the human mind and makes it beautiful?
CHAPTER 5

The Frog Who Dreamed of Being a Prince

Life is pretty basic, though as we all know, it’s not simple. At any point in time,
your brain (as well as the brain of any living system) is only ever making one
decision: to go toward or to go away from something. The response we (and
they) choose is based on assumptions grounded in our history, just like that
YouTube frog. As such, all perceptions and behaviors are a direct manifestation
of what was useful for us to see in the past. But: how are our brains different
from frogs’, as they surely must be? What makes the human mind beautiful? (…
The answer may surprise you…) We’re delusional!
The power of delusion is that we can imagine. Our perceptions are an
ongoing, ever-growing, ever-changing story, and our brain allows us to be not
just passive listeners to that story but the storytellers writing it as well. That is
delusion. We are frogs capable of imagining that we are princes or princesses
(and of using frog princes as a metaphor in a book—this book). What’s truly
remarkable is that through imagining, we can actually change our neurons (and
history), and hence our perceptual behaviors. To do this, we need that one highly
evolved instrument of the brain: conscious thought.
None of our perceptions has a one-dimensional meaning. All our perceptions
are multilayered meanings: red is a meaning, and a red apple is a meaning upon
a meaning, and a ripe red apple is a meaning upon a meaning upon a meaning,
and so on. These layers are recursive, since we can then think about our thinking
about our thoughts, not ad infinitum, but for quite a while. This allows us the
ability to mentally explore different scenarios and possibilities, even the
possibility of not being a frog. In a literal sense, we go from frog to prince every
day, using a combination of brain areas that themselves represent different stages
of our evolutionary history, from our reptilian brain structures to our more
recently evolved cerebral ones. Therein lies the source of our greatest creations,
but equally our greatest trepidations. In the words of the fabulous Scottish poet
Robert Burns, addressing a mouse in what is one of my favorite poems (ideally
read with a whisky in one hand):
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!

The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e, On prospects drear!
An’ forward tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

Burns’s mouse is really just a standin for all animals who have less layers of
consciousness than humans, like the YouTube frog I’m so fond of. The fairy-tale
trope of the frog prince has been around for centuries, from the Brothers Grimm
to Disney, precisely because of the way our brains aren’t like that of an
amphibian or other animals. After all, as far as we know, the animal kingdom
doesn’t have poetry, or stories, or Broadway musicals about humans. Unlike
them, our brains allow us to imagine worlds and possibilities. Having said this, it
is worth noting that there are spiders who appear to be able to imagine routes to
a prey, as they follow paths that can take them away from the prey before they
finally move toward it, which is a highly cognitively challenging thing to do.
Many dogs can’t do this, as numerous dog owners will have experienced with
their dogs seemingly “trapped” on the other side of an open fence. Which means
that… as with most things in the animal world… humans are not necessarily
unique, but occupy a point along a continuum.
The key is this: the stories we imagine change us profoundly. Through
imaging stories, we can create perceptions, and thus alter our future
perceptual-based behaviors. This—arguably—is a point of consciousness, if not
the point: to imagine experiences without the risk of enacting them. And not
only in the now, but about events in the past. Which means, parallel to our trial-
and-error, empirical physical engagement in the real world, we can use our brain
to change our brain internally. Further on in this book we will learn the tools for
how to do this and its relationship to where free will actually lives, but for now
we are going to concentrate on acquiring a deeper understanding of our
wonderful delusion, which foments our ability to deviate. We will look at why
we can change our meanings upon meanings, and thus our ways of perceiving—
which also means perception is an art.
On a cold December day in 1915, in the city recently renamed Petrograd,
Russia, the history of art underwent an epoch-making “before-and-after”
moment. The Russian artist Kazimir Malevich, father of the newly christened
Suprematism movement, had organized a group exhibition at the Dobychina Art
Bureau called “Last Futurist Exhibition of Paintings 0.10.” With a wave of black
hair and an intense gaze, the avant-garde Malevich unveiled a collection of
paintings, his own as well as those of others, that rejected convention. Born in
the Ukraine with Polish peasant roots, Malevich passionately believed in art’s
centrality to life, so what was at stake for him was much more than a mere art
show; he was known as a “fanatic pamphleteer” and a “mad monk.”34 He was
right to believe in the vision he had put together for the public. The works he
presented that night would be less notorious than Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain
(an actual toilet) but just as important. They would set a path for abstract art for
the rest of the twentieth century.
Opening on December 19th, the show jettisoned figurative representations of
“real life” in favor of a blunt geometry, a new art of limited forms and colors
that sought to generate stronger emotions than realism ever could. (Delacroix,
with his refined palette, likely would’ve hated it.) The most revolutionary of the
paintings that night was Malevich’s now legendary Black Square, which is just
what it sounds like—a black square. Then three years later, in 1918, he swung to
the other extreme, experimenting with lightness now instead of darkness, and
produced White on White, his most radical work up to that point and yet again
one of the most boundary-shattering paintings of the time. The work is one white
quadrilateral set on top of another white quadrilateral.
 Black Square and White on White were possible—and many would argue
important and necessary—because Malevich wasn’t creating art in a vacuum. He
was conversing with aesthetic history, with the art and ideas that came before,
from the elaborate friezes of antiquity to the still lifes of post-impressionism.
(Naturally, he was in dialogue with Chevreul’s chromatic wheel in his tacit
rejection of it.) Most of all, Malevich was challenging received wisdom about
what was “beautiful” in art.35 He was making a historical statement about
destruction and representation, experimenting with how the human heart and
mind respond to images. In so doing, his aim was to open the way for a new kind
of beauty. “To the Suprematist the visual phenomena of the objective world are,
in themselves, meaningless,” Malevich wrote in a manifesto, unwittingly
speaking a truth not just about the perception of art but also, as you now know,
about how the brain works in creating perception. “The significant thing is
feeling, as such, quite apart from the environment in which it is called forth.”36
The meaning of White on White is not to be found in its pigment chemistry.
Stripped of its history, it’s pretty much point-less—or at least of a fundamentally
different kind of meaning. (Malevich probably didn’t expect his criteria to be
applied to his own work, yet it’s true: his famous canvas is a visual phenomenon
of the objective world.) This is perhaps why haters of abstract art still point to
Malevich as the height of avant-garde emptiness, while others continue to idolize
him and pay superlative sums for his paintings—as much as $60 million, the
amount that White on White fetched at Sotheby’s in 2008. Sixty million dollars
buys the meaning of a moment. It’s the empirical significance that is being
bought, the perceptions layered on it, and not the painting. The painting itself has
no value. What is more, that meaning of that moment is not static, but will
forever change as its future contextual history continues to stretch out in front of
it—just like our own memories change as we layer those memories with future
ones; the meaning of each memory is a representation of the whole, not the
specific.
Considering your perceptual past, what does White on White mean for you?
Objectively, of course, Malevich’s famous painting is exactly what its title
brazenly declares… white on white, or two shades that more or less appear this
way. This is what a frog would see, and it’s also what we see. At the same time,
though, we see much more. Humans live according to the ideas that arise from
their ecology, from their interaction with their environment. These ideas are
what we see, think, and do.
Take a quick “look” around you. We have philosophies, principles, and
opinions. We have heated Twitter debates, we’ve even created an annual world
championship for puns. The “materials” at stake in these phenomena are not
“real” in any physical sense, yet they are in a very important perceptual one.
Such meanings-atop-meanings-atop-meanings that we build profoundly impact
our lives. This is what Malevich was exploring, and he even said so in his 1919
text, “On the Museum”: “A mass of ideas will arise in people, and will be often
more alive than actual representation (and take up less room).”37 This mass of
ideas isn’t real in any literal sense. You can’t hold it in your hand. It’s all just a
cloud of words and concepts. But when it comes to the brain and how perception
works… and how you can change your way of seeing!… this cloud is as
real as any other perception, because it IS perception: the taste of any food you
eat, any injury you sustain, and any person you kiss. It explains why literary
scholars are able to make careers writing about what James Joyce wrote about in
Ulysses and Finnegan’s Wake. It also explains how the American composer John
Cage gained lasting notoriety for 4’33”, a piece consisting of four minutes and
thirty-three seconds of…

Silence.
 You interpreted the white space below the word “Silence” as a form of visual
silence, correct? The experience of “listening” to Cage’s piece forces its
audience to question what silence and music truly are, and if one kind of
listening truly differs from another. It’s easy to imagine scoffing annoyance from
some audience members, believing 4’33” to be a pretentious farce, while it’s
also possible to picture others in the music-less concert hall having a sudden
realization that the rustling sounds present while everyone sits in “silence” might
in fact tell a complex and revealing story about spectation, togetherness,
solitude, expectation, and art. It simply depends on the subjective sense your
brain makes of a situation which is inherently open to interpretation. This is
precisely what I mean by delusion… the human mind’s tremendous ability to
make meaning, not just out of sensory information we perceive, but out of
abstract ideas that have nothing to do with sight, smell, taste, touch, or hearing.
Several years ago, two friends of mine (Mark Lythgoe and Mark Miodownik)
and I had the privilege of being the first scientists to exhibit “art works” at the
Hayward Art Gallery on the South Bank in London. It was part of the Dan
Flavin retrospective, an artist we touched on earlier when discussing Chevreul
and the use of the perception of color in creating art. My friends and I were able
to take over an entire room of the exhibition… in the back. My installation was a
massive piece of clear Plexiglas suspended from the 20-meter-high ceiling, one
meter from the ground. Embedded within this larger piece were small squares of
white Plexiglas pieces that gave the impression of a floating grid of squares. This
hanging piece was set in front of a wall by about 1.5 meters. On that wall was a
tremendous stretched white canvas. When one looked at it from the front, it was
effectively my own version of White on White, as the white blocks were set
against the white canvas behind.
But that wasn’t all. Across the room were suspended five large stage lights,
all but one with different colored gel filters. The middle one was white. A
computer hidden on a ledge above controlled the lighting so that it would
sequence red with white, blue with white, green with white, and yellow with
white. The result was that each suspended white square would cast two shadows
onto the canvas. In one shadow only colored light would be hitting it. In the
other shadow, only white light would be hitting it. Naturally, the colored shadow
appeared the color of its illumination since that was the only light that was
hitting that particular part of the canvas. What was remarkable was that the part
of the canvas that only white light was hitting (i.e., the “white shadow”) did not
appear white at all, but instead appeared opposite in color to the other shadow.
So if the white light and red light were both illuminating the canvas, then the
“white” shadow would appear green! As the white squares hung in relief in front
of the white canvas, this was my 3-D version of White on White, while
simultaneously referring to Goethe’s shadows to play with the notion of white
itself—or, as Dan Flavin called them, the “incidental colors” that would appear
in his pieces where no color was in fact present. (Note that you can recreate this
on your own with two regular desk lamps, a gray gel filter covering one lamp
and a colored gel filter covering the other. Point them at a white wall so that
their illumination is overlapping. Then put your hand in the way of both,
creating two hand-shaped shadows cast on the wall. The colors you see are a
reminder that context is everything.)
The night of the opening was terribly exciting, but it turned into a bit of a
disaster. The people in the Hayward were having terrible issues with the Flavin
bulbs popping and circuits shorting out. My computer ended up crashing, which
meant none of the lights illuminating the piece went on. Hence, no shadows;
indeed no illumination at all. But not only was the failure going to feel bad, it
would also be very public. Hundreds of people were there, the “whole art
world.” And my piece was… well… “out of order.” That is, until people viewed
it—since “not working” is really a matter of opinion (it is an art gallery, after
all).
There I was at the back of the black space, leaning against the back wall,
despondently wondering if I should put up an Out of Order sign. To my right
was a large entrance to our space (which was wholly painted black except for my
white canvas), and seeping through this opening was a gentle light that cast itself
onto my piece. The result was a very, very subtle shadow cast onto the white
canvas. Just then two wonderfully artistic-looking men walked through that door
and stopped in front of my piece. They stayed… and stayed… looking…
moving… thinking. Then one started “explaining” it to the other, and the
description was remarkable: “Notice the subtle play of the light, yet the shadows
creating form in the relief of one against the other, suggesting a representation of
difference in similarity, in the beauty of subtle difference. It’s gorgeous!”
Of course the piece was, in fact, out of order, but their experience of it
wasn’t. Their ability to re-mean the experience redeemed (and indeed re-
meaned) the experience for me. Of course they saw a meaning in the piece. Why
should they assume it was out of order? Their brains created meaning, so they
didn’t see a piece that had malfunctioned.
Delusion saved me.
 As my experience with the Dan Flavin–Goethe–Malevich–Berkeley tribute
demonstrates, delusion is one of the brain’s most powerful and inescapable tools.
It is the very reason why you are understanding this very sentence. As I
mentioned in the introduction, my intent in writing this book is to raise an
awareness in you about the source of your own perceptions, and thus create a
new layer of meaning in your consciousness that will allow you to see your
world and life in a new way in the future. This active mental and emotional
engagement begins the process of seeing differently. Yet beyond the realm of
ideas, you also are quite literally delusional. Not only do you not see reality—
you see things that aren’t there. This is a good thing. Just watch.
You will have noticed by now (probably) that on every right-side page of this
book there is a little diamond in the bottom right-hand corner. It’s not meant as
an adornment—or not just as an adornment. The diamonds are a flipbook.
What I want you to do is use your thumb to flip through the entire length of
the book, in essence creating a small, pared-down animated movie. The diamond
will at first spin to the right, because that is the direction it is drawn to spin in.
After doing this once, I want you to thumb through the diamond flipbook again,
only this time imagine it spinning in the other direction, to the left. It may take a
few attempts, but if you blur your eyes and look around the diamond and
imagine it flipping directions… it will.
You just saw your delusionality in action. The diamond spins back and forth
depending on how you imagine it; if you imagine looking down on the central
plane it will spin to the right; if you imagine you’re looking up at the same
central plane it will now spin to the left. You are changing what you perceive. To
put it another way, since your brain didn’t evolve to see reality, this gives you
direct agency in what you do see.
As you just witnessed firsthand, thinking about your perception has the
ability to alter it. Note that of course the motion you saw in the diamond doesn’t
actually exist either. So you’re not only taking a series of stationary images,
you’re taking the small differences between them and seeing that difference as
movement (a phenomenon called phi-motion). You’re seeing the empirical
significance of the change, not the change itself. This is a delusion without
which the cinema wouldn’t exist. What is more, you’re also switching the
direction of this imagined spinning depending on how you think about it. Sounds
kind of like you’re on drugs!
Remember: we’re just talking about simple motion here. What about
something more complex? The diamond flipbook is only one exceedingly simple
example of our neurological tendency toward delusion. This explains the
“phantom vibrations” many cell phone users report feeling, and why some
hardcore video gamers have auditory hallucination-like experiences days after
unplugging, known as Game Transfer Phenomena.38 Imagine what else is
possible.
Before we see how delusion feeds into seeing differently, it is absolutely
crucial to understand the difference between what is happening inside the brain
when you’re perceiving real things versus imagined things. Why is this so
important?
Because there is little difference… at least not qualitatively so.
Stephen M. Kosslyn is a genial, white-goateed former Harvard professor of
psychology and the founding dean of the Minerva Project, a daring innovation in
American higher education. His groundbreaking research with fMRIs has
fundamentally changed the way scientists across disciplines conceive of
perception, specifically imagined imagery versus visual imagery. His
breakthrough was to prove that for the brain, imagining things visually is no
different from seeing them.
You may be familiar with this concept if you follow sports training
techniques. Many elite athletes, for example, spend serious time visualizing the
sports they play, from Olympic bobsledders to professional golfers to soccer
stars. This isn’t a new approach, but until recently there was no hard science
backing up its effectiveness. Motor imagery is a “mental simulation” or
“cognitive rehearsal” of something you do without actually doing it.39 Yet
research shows this practice can have impacts far beyond sports.
“In psychotherapy, phobias can be treated by using mental images as standins
for the actual object or situation, which then leads one to become ‘habituated’ to
the experience of actually perceiving it,” says Kosslyn. “One can run ‘mental
simulations’ and thereby practice for a future encounter. One can use such
simulations to decide how best to pack objects in a trunk or arrange furniture.
One can use such simulations in problem solving, to discover new ways of
approaching the problem. One can visualize objects or scenes, which will
improve, often dramatically, how well they are remembered.… Both auditory
and olfactory imagery have been investigated, and in both cases considerable
overlap has been found in brain areas that are activated during perception and
mental imagery.” In other words, without risk, you can apply mental imagery in
every realm of your life—to help overcome social anxiety, dispatch a
debilitating workload, or win at your weekly poker night. Likewise, researchers
are bringing mental imagery to bear in diverse areas, such as doctors who are
incorporating it into stroke rehabilitation.40
For the brain, then, “realness” is much more capacious and open-armed than
our more narrow and conventional conception of real as physically experienced
and not-real as imagined. On a neurocellular level, they are both physically
experienced. With this “in mind,” the effects of internal imagery (and delusion)
are really quite intuitive. Think about it in terms of sexual arousal. Fans of The
Big Lebowski may recall when the porn king Jackie Treehorn says, “People
forget that the brain is the biggest erogenous zone.” What he means is that
imagining a naked body can create as much libidinous excitement as that same
body right in front of us. Real sex and imagined sex (and, increasingly, virtual
reality sex) create blood flow in the same parts of our brains—and of course in
other areas of the body as well.
So how does mental imagery play into creative perceptions? The answer
comes down once again to the history of usefulness our brain encodes, and how
this perceptual record determines our future seeing. The fundamental truth about
perception that I explained hasn’t changed: We don’t see reality—we only see
what was useful to see in the past. But the implication of the brain’s delusional
nature is this: The past that determines how you see isn’t just constituted by your
lived perceptions but by your imagined ones as well. As such, you can influence
what you see in the future just by thinking. The link between the two is that
what we see now represents the history of what we saw before, imagined or
otherwise (though not all having the same weight).
This is why we are the experiencers and creators of our own perceptions!
Think back to Ben Underwood and his astonishing ability to echolocate. He
conducted an intense trial-and-error process to adapt and learn how to “see”
through his clicking, and this changed the structure of his brain. A similar
process happens with mental imagery, only the trial and error takes place inside
us instead of outside. Strengthening the “muscle” of your brain means seeking
out not just enriched physical environments, but mentally constructed ones too.
Imagined perceptions shape your future much like lived ones, as both physically
change your neural architecture (though to differing degrees, since lived
experiences generally have a stronger statistical impact), and not always for the
positive. Consider rumination where one becomes “trapped” in cycles of reliving
the negative meaning of an experience (but not the experience itself), thereby
strengthening the wiring accordingly, making its meaning disproportionately
significant.
 If each time we do one of these embodied, low-risk thought experiments they
are being encoded as if they were experiences, then we need to reconsider the
big takeaway from the last chapter: Change your ecology and you change your
brain.
Imagined perceptions are so influential for seeing that they are a part of our
environment. Which is another way of saying that context is still everything, but
an absolutely essential part of that context resides in you. You are your own
context. Your brain matches the complexity not just of its external surroundings,
but of its internal environment as well. If you imagine complex, challenging
possibilities, your brain will adapt to them. Much like a tiger trapped in a zoo
exhibits repetitive displacement behavior, if you cage your imagination within
the bars of the dull and neurotic, which often portray one’s fears more than they
do an empirical “truth,” then your brain will adapt to these imagined meanings,
too. Like the sad tiger pacing back and forth within its puny cage, your brain too
will ruminate cyclically upon destructive meanings, and in doing so make them
more significant than they might need to be. This present perceptual meaning
becomes part of your future history of meanings, together with the meaning (and
re-meanings) of past events, thus shaping your future perception. If you don’t
want to let received contexts limit possibility, then you need to walk in the
darkest forest of all—the one in your own skull—and face down the fear of ideas
that challenge.
You must learn to choose your delusions. If you don’t, they will choose you
(remembering, of course, that not all delusions are choosable).
Your brain is, at its core, a statistical distribution. Thus, your history of
experiences creates a database of useful past perceptions. New information is
constantly flowing in, and your brain is constantly integrating it into this
statistical distribution that creates your next perception (so in this sense “reality”
is just the product of your brain’s ever-evolving database of consequence). As
such, your perception is subject to a statistical phenomenon known in probability
theory as kurtosis. Kurtosis in essence means that things tend to become
increasingly steep in their distribution… that is, skewed in one direction. This
applies to ways of seeing everything from current events to ourselves as we lean
“skewedly” toward one interpretation, positive or negative. Things that are
highly kurtotic, or skewed, are hard to shift away from. This is another way of
saying that seeing differently isn’t just conceptually difficult—it’s statistically
difficult. We’re really talking about math when we say, “The optimist sees the
glass as half full and the pessimist as half empty,” though in my view maybe
true optimists are just glad to have a drink in the first place!

The good news is that kurtosis can work to your advantage (although this
depends on your choosing a useful delusion, since you’re just as capable of
choosing one that is destructive). The linchpin is to exploit your ability to
influence your inner probability distributions. Imagined perception is self-
reinforcing, so by taking control of it you can alter the subjective reality that
your brain’s interpretations create. Think positively today and it’s statistically
more likely you will do the same tomorrow.41 This seemingly “soft” truism has
in fact been borne out by hard science. The psychologist Dr. Richard Wiseman
has pioneered the systematic study of chance and luck, and has found that people
who are consistently “lucky” in life share patterns of believing things will work
out well in the end; being open to experience; not ruminating on disappointing
outcomes; taking a relaxed approach to life; and looking at mistakes as learning
opportunities.42 It will likely come as no surprise that the same self-reinforcing
perceptual and behavioral momentum also applies to negativity.
It is worth noting that in spite of the empowering possibilities of imagery and
the imagination applied in the present, or in re-meaning the past, they do have
constraints. For example, while seeing the color blue is itself a meaning, you
can’t imagine blue to be a different color than it is. That is one perception you
can’t recreate, since it is hardwired into your brain from evolution. So, clearly,
our consciousness operates within bounds. It’s just that those bounds are often
set artificially, usually by others, but even more troubling when set by ourselves.
We’ve all had the experience (kids more than anyone) of asking someone a
question and the answer is no. Hence the question… Why? The question seems
perfectly reasonable, and yet, when challenged, the person answers, “Because
that’s the way it is!” or some other clichéd, ill-thought-out answer. None of
which have anything to do with the physics of the world, and instead have
everything to do with the assumptions encoded in that person’s brain. I call this
the “Physics of No,” since the answer is treated as if it’s a law of nature. How
we learn to overturn the Physics of No will come later in this book. It is not easy,
and it takes courage to imagine, think, and challenge not just other people, but
ourselves.
What’s fascinating is that we are predisposed to different directionalities of
perception… different delusions… at different ages. Recent research shows that
adolescents tend to look at the world so that their seeing confirms their
emotional state. If they are sad or anguished (as many of us will recall from
personal experience is common at this age), they will seek out sad images, and
interpret their environment with a sad/anguished bias. In academic science-
speak, adolescents have a harder time mastering “emotional regulation.”43 This
is the neurological explanation for what we often jokingly call teen angst, and
without it we likely wouldn’t have ripped jeans, the term “emo,” or bands like
Nirvana. While such angst is in many ways a rite of passage, both culturally and
personally, it is critical for young people with a high delusion toward negative
statistical distributions to learn how to develop “regulatory skills,” as suicide is
the third-leading cause of death for males and females aged 10 to 24 in the
United States.
 The good news, however, is that as we get older we tend to look at things that
represent the emotions we want, which is a kind of aspirational probability for
our brain to sculpt future perceptions with. This is why, on a bad workday, we
might find ourselves googling “dream vacation” (and not “closest bridge to jump
off ”). Yet in spite of our behavior tending to get “wiser” with age, this doesn’t
mean we should exert less agency in choosing our delusions. Circumstantial
conditions (the death of a loved one, a divorce, unemployment, a midlife crisis)
can make us vulnerable to useless thinking in the present, which of course leads
to more useless perceptions in the future. Plus, each one of us has our own
distinct statistical “constitution” in our brain. Some people are more prone to be
healthy regulators; others turn out to be non-regulators. But as you’ll recall from
my story of the dinner party experiment in the introduction, we can be easily
primed (or even prime ourselves) into higher (or lower) states that affect our
behavior.
A concept crucially connected to this facet of perception is confirmation bias,
also known as “myside bias,” which likely gives you a hint what it means. It’s
really a rather self-explanatory idea, if not very flattering about the human
propensity to listen to no one but oneself, much less about our collective
deafness to nature itself. Confirmation bias describes the tendency to perceive in
such a way as to confirm your already established point of view. It is present in
everything from the way you argue (and what you take away from arguments) to
how you behave in relationships and at work. It even structures what you
remember, shaping your memories according to your ideas about yourself
(which are often incorrect). The concept need not be restricted to individuals, but
also applies to social groupings. Political parties, jingoism, sports fandom, and
religion all suffer from cognitive bias. Such biases also shape the history of
whole peoples, as is the case with the sexes. Historically, the prominence of
women (educationally, professionally, civically) in Western society was retarded
in several ways not just by the mis/disinformation that men promulgated about
their abilities, but also by women’s own internalization of it.44
Confirmation bias takes us back to the fundamental premise of this book: We
don’t have access to reality… we perceive (or indeed, in this case find) the
version of reality with which we are familiar… and often that makes us look
good. For instance, if you ask a large room of people (especially men) who are a
random sampling of the population at large, “How many here are better than
average drivers?” the vast majority typically raise their hands. Sorry, this isn’t
possible. Not everyone can be above average. By definition, assuming a uniform
sampling, half of the population has to be less than the median. That’s the
essence of a median. Likewise, studies show that we believe ourselves much
more willing to engage in selfless, noble acts than we actually are (while at the
same time underestimating the generosity of our peers).45 We are our own best
heroes!
Yet our blindness to our biases makes it exceedingly difficult to notice them.
In a now-famous study published in 2012, Hajo Adam and Adam Galinsky
found that people who wore a white doctor’s lab coat while executing a series of
mental exercises that tested attention did better than participants who wore street
clothes. They also did better than participants who wore the same lab coat but
were told it was a painter’s coat rather than a doctor’s.46 This area of research is
called “enclothed cognition” and shows that not only do others project
expectations onto us according to what we wear, but we ourselves project similar
expectations that directly influence our perception and behavior—yet another
instance of delusion. Adam and Galinsky’s experiment is a powerful
demonstration of the effects of priming: one stimulus (wearing the lab coat)
influencing behavior and perception when confronted with a subsequent
stimulus (the attention test).47 So not only do we “brand” ourselves for others
and condition how they treat us by what we wear each day, we are also engaging
in potent self-branding.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that priming, or subliminal
stimulation, is of great interest not just to scientists but to marketing researchers
as well. While it’s frightening to think we’re not the masters of our own buying
impulses (let alone a thousand other behaviors), it has been shown that people
are more likely to buy French wine while shopping if French music is playing.48
Outside of artificial settings, in the “wild” of daily life, the same thing happens.
Coins seem bigger to poor children than to children from better-off backgrounds.
People see hills as steeper when already physically tired. Distances appear
longer if one is carrying a heavy load. We generally perceive desirable objects as
closer than they actually are. Obviously, then, something powerful is happening
in the brain on very basic levels of perception—which is why The Lab of Misfits
created an experiment to explore just this at the London Science Museum in
2012, during our club-like open nights for the public we called “Lates.”
The experiment was run by one of the misfits in the lab, Richard C. Clarke,
and in fact you’re already partially familiar with it. Remember the brightness-
contrast “illusion” from Chapter 1, in which you perceived the same shade of
gray differently depending on the color-context that surrounded it? We used the
same “test,” only our aim wasn’t to demonstrate that the participants didn’t see
reality. Instead, we wanted to study how a sense of power affects perception. We
already knew that delusion strongly influences the complex tasks the brain
carries out, such as calibrating one’s self-esteem or deciding what to buy, but
what about more basic low-level perceptions unrelated to a goal? Could delusion
physiologically affect not just the seemingly more highly cognitive process of
frog-princes but the more basic perceptual process of frogs as well? If so, this
would mean that delusion played a pivotal role at every operative level of
perception.
Perceiving brightness is one of the most basic visual tasks the brain performs.
As such, we believed it would be the right tool with which to examine our
hypothesis that one’s state of control or power would indeed determine low-level
perceptions. The first task at hand was to find subjects to volunteer for the
experiment, which meant pulling them away from the variety of scientific
exhibits on display, as well as the live music and the cocktail “Brain Bar.” When
the recruitment was all said and done, we had fifty-four volunteers. We
randomly assigned them to three different groups: the low-power group, the
high-power group, and the control group. Why? So that we could prime them.
We used a common priming technique involving writing and memory. We
told the participants that they were going to take part in an experiment to
investigate their perception of past events. We then asked them to compose a
short narrative essay. The high-power group had to write about a memory in
which they had been stressed but had felt in control. The low-power group also
had to write about a memory where they too had felt stressed, but one in which
they had had very little control. Participants in the neutral control group wrote
about how they had ended up at the Science Museum that day. Three very
different primes, potentially setting up three very different delusions.
Now that the three groups had three distinct “self-biases”… or lack of a bias,
in the case of the control group… we began the brightness-contrast tests (which
the participants thought was unrelated to the supposed memory experiment we
had led them to believe they were a part of). Each subject was shown eight
different gray “targets” embedded in different surrounds. The sequence was
random and the surround sets varied in color, relative location, and shape, while
the spectrometer-measured brightness was constant. The subjects rated the
brightness of each target numerically and in this way allowed us to quantify their
subjective, priming-influenced perception of the “illusory” shades of gray their
brains constructed. We then sent the participants back out into our misfit “Night
at the Museum” lab, as we quietly speculated about what we might learn. Sure
enough, after analyzing the numbers, we had an extremely revealing finding.
While previous research has shown that individuals in low states of power
demonstrate reduced abilities with complex perceptual tasks, we discovered that
the opposite was true for a basic process like perceiving brightness. On average,
the subjects primed into the low-power emotional states used the contextual
visual cues to a greater degree than those in the high-power and control groups.
The ability of the low-power group’s brains to make sense of the senseless
stimuli was sharpened by the delusion we had planted that made them feel less
in control. Their evolutionary need to gain back a sense of power (i.e., control)
and thus construct a useful perception kicked in more strongly than it did for the
other groups, allowing them to see differently than their peers. Which means
they behaved much like children did, who also saw the illusion more strongly.
Children were, in a sense, more willing to “believe.” As such, their perceptions
and realities were significantly, systematically, and statistically altered by their
psychological state. In short, people in a lower state of power generate behaviors
that are an attempt to increase their power.
Power even alters the ways you look at a scene by altering your eye
movements. People in different states actually look at things differently. For
example, people with lower power look at background, whereas those with
higher power look at foreground. Since what we look at determines the statistics
of the images we sense, power alters the orientation of our windows, as well as
the way we move our mobile homes around the world. While it may seem
slightly frightening to realize how suggestible we are, and how the delusional
nature of perception can make us either “lucky” or “unlucky,” these behaviors
make sense. If one is in fact in a low state of power, then one’s behavior should
orient toward regaining control. Thus, research shows that even “background
mood states” strongly affect our decision making.49 The point is that our brain,
while amazing in so many ways, also makes us vulnerable, but that vulnerability
can itself have utility. The coming chapters are about how to actively use your
brain to help and not hamper you—to give you new ideas and unforeseen
creative insights. We are able to do this because we have consciousness—a brain
that modifies itself.
To break down your own personal Physics of NO that the meanings applied
to your past experiences have given you, you must embrace one fundamental
fact about yourself: You have assumptions! They are deep assumptions, so deep
that you can’t move without them—not even one step forward. You die without
them. These assumptions are a result of your empirical history of trial-and-error
experience, whether that experience be internal or external. They necessarily
limit what you think, do, and feel. But in doing so they can destroy relationships
and careers. Deviation from self-sabotaging or even just familiar behaviors
begins (but doesn’t end) with a disarmingly simple first step: awareness.
Awareness that you have assumptions, and that you are defined by them. And I
don’t mean, “Yeah, I know we all have assumptions… but…” I mean really
knowing this, which means actively living the knowing. Having this kind of
awareness, as we’ll see, is a revolutionary tool. It is where you start changing not
just your brain and your perceptions, but your whole way of being as a human.
CHAPTER 6

The Physiology of Assumptions

Can you think of a colorless apple?

Delusion is an important tool for creating new and powerful perceptions because
it allows us to change our brains—and thus future perceptions—from the inside.
But if the human brain is a physical representation of the history of trial and
error from evolution to learning and all perceptions are reflexive responses, then
how can anyone, even those of us with the most grandiose delusions, change our
perception? After all, the past, as we all very well know, is stubbornly
unchangeable. What happened, happened. Yet it is not that simple when it comes
to the workings of the mind, since, as we also know, we’re never recording
reality, much less the reality of time itself.
What our brains carry forward with us into the future isn’t the actual past…
definitely not an objective one. What your perceptual history of reality gives
your brain are reflexive assumptions manifest in the functional architecture of
the brain with which you perceive the here and now. These assumptions
determine what we think and do, and help us to predict what to do next. It is
important to note also the opposite: they also determine what we don’t think and
do. Independent of context, our assumptions are neither good nor bad. They are
simply us… collectively and individually.
We are very lucky that our brain evolved to have assumptions, yet many
often seem like the air we breathe: invisible. When you sit down, you assume the
chair—usually—won’t give way. Every time you take a step, you assume the
ground won’t give way, that your leg won’t give way, that your leg is far enough
in front of you, and that you’ve changed the distribution of your weight
sufficiently to propel yourself forward (since, after all, to walk is in fact a
continual process of falling). These are essential assumptions.
Imagine if you had to think about walking, or breathing, or all the other
eminently useful yet thoughtless behaviors your brain lets you effortlessly
perform. Likely you would never move. This is partly because attention can only
be directed at one task (what we call “local” information in perceptual
neuroscience), but also because of priorities: If you had to think about every
single operation underpinning your existence, you would probably want to spend
most of your time thinking about keeping your heart beating and your lungs
breathing, making sleep effectively impossible. The fact that you don’t have to
consciously keep your heart beating is thanks to your brain’s role as the
command center managing built-in physiological assumptions for your body.
Having to expend significant thinking energy on such a task wouldn’t have been
advantageous for survival in a shifting world. As such, we didn’t evolve to
perceive in this way.
So what actually guides our perceptions… what is it about the past that is
being extracted? An answer: A set of baseline mechanical assumptions that our
species developed over many, many millennia to right this very moment. This
goes not just for breathing, but for sight as well. We—like other animals—are
born with many assumptions (such as physical laws) already “bred” into us. This
is why our eyes can’t suddenly be reprogrammed to have the vision of a
stomatopod; we developed only to process light in the way that worked best for
our species. Yet not all of the preset assumptions in the brain are so basic (basic,
that is, in the sense of basic functions; they are obviously very complex). This is
because we are not only like frogs. We are also like turkeys.
Turkeys come into the world with an endogenous reflex to protect themselves
when their retinas receive a pattern that is consistent with birds of prey, even
without previous visual experience. In a curious experiment from the 1950s
measuring young turkeys’ fear responses, a silhouette of a bird of prey scared
them while one of a duck did not. They just knew.50 Likewise, recent research
suggests that humans are born with an innate fear of snakes, an adaptive
assumption from our past that helped us survive, and still does. We inherited this
from ancestors we’ll never meet. Likewise, in a study conducted at the
University of Virginia, researchers tested the speed with which preschool
children and adults reacted to different visual stimuli. Both the children and the
adults showed an “attentional bias” toward snakes, detecting them more quickly
than they did unthreatening stimuli such as frogs, flowers, and caterpillars.51 It is
clear, then, that human beings are not a blank slate.
The concept of the blank slate, or tabula rasa, forms part of an age-old
debate over how humans become who they are and end up with the lives they
lead. Everyone from philosophers to scientists to politicians has argued over the
topic, since it has implications about essential ethical questions that underpin
how best to create equality in a society. Are we products of nurture or nature?
Do we come into the world with our personalities and physical constitutions
already in place, or do our experiences and circumstances shape us? If we knew
the answer to this question, the thinking goes, we could better address the ills in
our societies. But it’s the wrong question, as the field of neural development has
shown, in particular the field of epigenetics: It’s not one or the other. Nor is it a
combination of both nurture and nature. Rather, it’s their constant interaction.
Genes don’t encode specific traits as such; rather, they encode mechanisms,
processes, and elements of interactions between cells and their cellular and non-
cellular environment. Genetics and development are inherently ecological
processes.
This insight, which has gained currency in neurogenetics, is apparent when
you study development inside the brain. What is inherent in the brain are ways
of growing and a rough blueprint of what is to be grown. But the exact type of
growth that occurs is surprisingly malleable. If you transplant a piece of visual
cortex into the auditory cortex, the transplanted cells will come to behave as if
they are auditory cortical cells, including establishing connections to other
auditory areas, and vice versa for the visual cortex. For instance, the transplanted
visual cortex will establish connections with a different nucleus within the
thalamus than it would have if it remained in the (primary) visual cortex. It will
also form connections with different cortical areas than it would have if left in
the visual cortex. Even its internal process structure changes. For instance,
whereas cells in the middle layer of the visual cortex will become dominated by
connections from either the right eye or the left eye (called ocular dominance
columns), this pattern of connectivity does not form if a region of naïve visual
cortex is transplanted into the auditory cortex. It is a combination of the
properties of the cells, the ensemble of cells, and their connections that
determines the function of that cell and its larger role in the “community” of
cells (which is much like a social network). This physiological reality is also a
biological principle: Systems are defined by the interaction between their
inherent properties and their external relationships in space and time… whether
cells in the cortex, or a person in a larger society or organization. This means
that the “meaning” of each of us is necessarily defined by our interactions
internally and externally. Thus, like us, a developing visual neuron is largely
pluripotent (i.e., capable of different potential uses) within the realm of a
particular cell time (much like personality traits). Like us, a neuron becomes
defined by its ecology. Yet this contextual elasticity doesn’t mean that our slate
is blank. On each one of our tabulae is written the same bedrock assumption that
to perceive and survive we must have assumptions.
What is more, also encoded is the assumption that we will look for more and
more assumptions.
Your brain uses experience to acquire as many of these assumptions as
possible in the hopes of finding principles that can be applied across contexts
(much like a theorem in physics). For example, heights: Oddly enough, it
appears that we are not born with a fear of heights and an awareness of the
dangers they hold. Recent research using “visual cliffs” like those used to test
the Kittens in a Basket has shown that while infants avoid heights, they don’t
exhibit an autonomic fear response.52 However, as we develop over time we
learn to respect heights, thanks to an added embedded hierarchy of assumptions
we gain from lived experiences, whether from the time our parents yelled at us
for going near a cliff or the time we fell off a top bunk and hurt ourselves.
Whatever the origin of our caution, henceforward we carry a very useful
assumption that keeps us safer. It feels like common sense, because it is, but it
wasn’t in our brain from the start. Other low-level assumptions—thousands of
them, actually—that influence our behaviors relate not to physical survival but to
social survival, yet they too are very physical.
The mechanics of your eye movements should be the same as those of every
other human on the planet, right? We each have the same visual processing
hardware in our brain, after all, so we should all use the same software. It’s an
intuitive conclusion, but it’s wrong. We use different “programs” to implement
our seeing, depending on where we’re from. In a delightfully revealing
experiment from 2010, David J. Kelly and Roberto Caldara discovered that
people from Western societies exhibit different eye movements than people from
Eastern societies. As they put it, “Culture affects the way people move their eyes
to extract information in their visual world.” Asians extracted visual information
more “holistically,” whereas westerners did so more “analytically” (there was no
difference in their ability to recognize faces). Western cultures focus on discrete
elements or “salient objects” with which they can confidently process
information, as befits a markedly individualistic culture. Eastern cultures, on the
other hand, put higher value on groups and collective goals, causing them to be
drawn to a “region” rather than one specific feature of a face. In practice, this
means that Asians focus more on the nose area on average, while westerners are
drawn to eyes and mouths. Different eye movements shape perception
dramatically, as what we “look at” constrains the nature of the information that
the brain then uses to make meaning. Changing the nature of the input
differentially constrains the potential meanings. Socially learned assumptions
and biases like these affect our gray matter, as well as subsequent perceptions
and behaviors, yet they are developed so unconsciously from larger cultural
assumptions that we don’t even know they are there, embodied in our brains.
Other very important assumptions that shape our perceptions, and even our
life trajectories, are also learned socially, but their effects are more easily
detectable in our behaviors than subtle eye movements. This is most powerfully
illustrated in that context from which every human originates, and which we all
share in some shape or form: family.
Meet Charles. He was the fifth child born into a family of six children in
Shropshire, England, in 1809. He was a cute British lad from a well-off home
and had rosy cheeks and straight brown hair. He liked being outside among trees
and nature. He collected beetles and had a precocious knack for natural history.
Unlike some of his older siblings, he was prone to questioning conventional
wisdom; for example, if it truly mattered that he do well in school, which irked
his father. Charles loved asking questions just for the sake of asking them, as
crazy as they might sound or in fact be. In 1831, landing on an unconventional
path that also bothered his father, he set off for South America on a ship called
the Beagle, in the hopes of making valuable observations about geology, insects,
marine life, and other animals. His observations, indeed, were valuable. Through
his study of twelve finches in the Galapagos Islands, and by questioning his own
beliefs about supposed divine design and the origin of our species, he changed
science forever. Charles, of course, was Charles Darwin, the man who gave us
the theory of evolution.
While Darwin was indisputably brilliant—not to mention fanatically curious
—he might not have uncovered the evolutionary process if it hadn’t been for the
assumptions that being one of the younger siblings in his family, or a
“laterborn,” gave him. This is one of the arguments of the evolutionary
psychologist and MacArthur “Genius” Frank Sulloway. In his research, on
which he continues to build with powerful new studies, Sulloway has shown that
where you fall in the birth order of your family strongly affects your personality
traits, behaviors, and perceptions. This is because we are all competing to win
the time and attention of our parents, and depending on where you fall in the
“sibship,” you develop different strategies and biases for succeeding at this. As
Sulloway memorably describes it, “The result has been an evolutionary arms
race played out within the family.”53 This doesn’t mean that siblings are
consciously fighting their older and younger siblings in a cutthroat Darwinian
battle for mommy and daddy’s love; rather that the structures of families
inevitably affect who we become, since we get better at different things as a
function of behaviors that more naturally fit our birth order. Firstborns, for
example, tend to win their parents’ favor by taking care of their younger siblings
to some degree, and thus generally develop a high degree of conscientiousness
and respect for authority figures. Laterborns, in contrast, strengthen “latent
talents” that will garner them parental attention. For this reason they’re more
open and adventurous, and less reverent of authority. How each sibling must act
in order to “succeed” inside the ecology of the family becomes a matter of
perceptual assumptions, recorded in the brain through a history of trial and error
that has its own kurtotic statistical weight.
So, is the point that Charles Darwin saw differently simply because he was
Darwin kid number 5? (Interestingly, Alfred Russel Wallace, a scientist who was
developing ideas about evolution similar to Darwin’s at around the same time
but who published less, was also a laterborn.) Or is it that if you’re a first-born or
only child, you should just call it a day and forget about being innovative? The
answer is no to both. The point is that the assumptions your brain has developed
from multiple sources of experience over different timelines don’t just shape
your perception… they are you. They are the layers of “empirical significance”
that you have attributed to stimuli, which define the reality you perceive… how
you perceive yourself and others, and thus how you lead your life. But what are
assumptions, physically speaking, in the brain?
We know now that all perception ultimately comes down to deciding whether
to go toward or away from something, and this even crosses species. This going-
toward-or-away is an essential part of why we perceive what we do, and
assumptions inescapably influence the direction we choose to go in. So how
does this process create our perception?
Assumptions are deeply physiological… electrical, in fact. They are not just
abstract ideas or concepts. They are physical things in your brain, with their own
sort of physical “laws.” This is what one could call the neuroscience of bias. The
reality we see projected on the “screen” of perception begins with the flow of
information our five senses take in. This stimulus (or stimuli if there are more
than one) creates a series of impulses at your receptors that move into your brain
(the input), becoming distributed across the different parts of your cortex and
other areas of your brain until they eventually settle on activating a response
(motor and/or perceptual… though the separation between motor and perceptual
isn’t as distinct as was once thought). That is basically the whole of neuroscience
in one sentence, with an emphasis on “basically.” Perception is nothing more
than a complex reflex arc, not unlike that which causes your leg to kick out
when the doctor hits your patellar tendon underneath your kneecap. At bottom,
our lives are in fact nothing more than millions and millions of sequential knee-
jerk reflexive responses.
What you experience at any moment is just a stable pattern of electrical
activity distributed throughout your brain—an unromantic view of perception,
but it is nevertheless roughly accurate. Over the course of your life, the electrical
patterns generated in your brain in response to stimuli become ever more
“stable,” which is called an attractor state in physics.54 Dunes in the desert are
an example of an attractor state, as are whirlpools in a river. Even our galaxy is
an attractor state. They all represent emergent, stable patterns that arise from the
interactions of many individual elements over time. In this sense, they have their
own stable energy state, or momentum (in that they can be difficult to shift), that
is most natural to continue in (though the brain states of children are not as
stable as those of adults). What evolution does is to select some attractor states
or, more accurately, a sequence of attractor states—as more useful than others.
The electrical patterns are created by the neural pathways that link the
different parts of the brain… a staggeringly complex, sprawling superhighway of
connectivity that is your brain’s infrastructure. These patterns make some
behaviors and thoughts very probable, and others not. Studies have shown that
the more connectivity you have in this superhighway, the more likely you are to
have more diverse and complex assumptions (e.g., stronger vocabulary and
memory skills).55 Yet in spite of the brain’s prolific interconnections and the
importance of these interconnections in your perceptions, the number of
neuroelectrical pulses that your perception actually entertains and uses
throughout its life is very small. That is, relatively speaking, because their
potential is nearly infinite.
The cells in your brain constitute the Cartesian You. By “Cartesian,” I’m
referring to the French philosopher René Descartes, who espoused a mechanistic
view of human consciousness, out of which came his famous phrase cogito, ergo
sum: “I think, therefore I am.” Your thinking, and therefore your being, depends
on the cells that constitute your brain’s railroad system, allowing the electrical
patterns—like trains—to follow their reflex arcs. Counting the number of these
cells is itself an interesting story. For years, neuroscientists have cited and re-
cited that there are 100 billion neurons in the brain. (Neurons are nerve cells that
receive and send signals through synapses in the nervous system.) It’s a nice,
round, weighty number. It also happens to be wrong.
No one appears to know where the figure of 100 billion first emerged, and
each scientist who cited it seems to have assumed it to be correct for a terrible if
fairly understandable reason: because they’d heard it from someone else. With
wonderful irony, it more likely reflects an inherent bias we have to wholeness,
and so in this case the round number of 100. This changed in 2009 when the
Brazilian researcher Dr. Suzana Herculano-Houzel implemented a remarkably
clever innovation and proved that the figure was an erroneous assumption… a
received idea that had inadvertently disguised itself as a fact, a scientific
meme.56 (More on memes shortly.) Through a brilliant research method that
involved liquefying four brains donated to science, Herculano-Houzel
discovered that on average we have 14 billion fewer cells than we thought,
which is itself the number of cells in a baboon’s brain. Though not an
insignificant reduction, the 86 billion we do have is still a lot of neurons. So the
thinking-therefore-being you is all these neurons and how they talk to each other
(and of course with the rest of your body and environment, lest you think that
you are only your brain).
Now let’s return to the relatively tiny number of electrochemical patterns
your brain engages when you perceive. The cells that make up your brain form
100 trillion connections. That is a massive number, but what does it really mean?
Since the potential connections form the possible reflex arcs that shape behavior,
what’s really at stake is how you will respond… what you perceive and whether
the perception you produce will be good or bad, innovative or complacent, risk-
taking or conservative. So what we’re talking about is possible responses versus
actual ones, and the possible ones are almost inconceivably numerous. For
instance, imagine humans had only 50 brain cells instead of 86 billion. (Ants
have approximately 250,000 brain cells, so having 50 would make you an
exceedingly elementary organism.) Yet if you took those 50 brain cells, each
with 50 connections, and came up with all the possible ways that they could
connect to each other, the number of different possible connectomes (as a set of
connections is called) would be greater than the number of atoms in the known
universe. Just 50 neurons! Now consider all the potential patterns that 86 billion
cells forming 100 trillion different connections could make. The number is pretty
much infinite. Yet our perceptions in practice aren’t infinite—far from it, in fact.
They are a mere minuscule subset of what is objectively possible. Why? Because
of our assumptions, which come from experience.
These experience-driven biases define and limit the synaptic pathways
through which our thoughts and behaviors come into being. Hence, the
relationship between a stimulus (input) and its resulting neural pattern (output)
that is a perception is constrained by the network architecture of your brain. This
electrochemical structure is a direct representation of the empirical process of
shaping the brain by trial and error. It is a grid of possible responses shaped by
experience, from seconds to millennia ago, from enriched environments to
impoverished ones. Our reflex arcs, then, are contained not just in our bodies as
such, but in our ecology. Layers upon layers of history passed down into you,
which means that most of the experiences that shaped your “frog” (and turkey)
brain happened without you even being there. Yet this evolutionary history is
what determines the “reality” of so much of what you perceive and how you
behave. Combine this species-level experience with your own lived empirical
history, and you have your own unique tapestry (or more accurately, embedded
hierarchy) of assumptions that allow you to survive at the same time that they
threaten to limit the electrical currents—that is, the ideas—that produce your
responses.
In short, your assumptions make you you. This means pretty much
everything you perceive about your own conscious identity would be on the line
if they were ever to be doubted. Yet the process of creating these brain-based
biases that give you your “you-ness” also endows us with the unique people the
world so badly needs (whom I’ll refer to as “deviators”).
Near the end of 2013, an infant boy in Guinea became infected with the
Ebola virus, an extremely painful and contagious hemorrhagic fever with a
fatality rate of approximately 50 percent. After this “index case”—the first
person infected—Ebola spread throughout West Africa with alarming speed and
by early 2014 hit epidemic proportions, the first time this had happened since the
virus’s discovery in the 1970s. It spread to a total of nine countries, the worst hit
of all being Liberia, where nearly five thousand people died. It was also in
Liberia, in the summer of 2014, that a 40-year-old Liberian-American citizen
named Patrick Sawyer visited his sister, who had contracted Ebola and died
while he was there caring for her. After his sister’s funeral, on July 20, Sawyer
flew to Nigeria, where Ebola had yet to spread from its neighboring countries.
When he arrived in Lagos, Nigeria’s most crowded city, Sawyer collapsed at the
airport, racked by vomiting and diarrhea. Doctors of the public health system
happened to be on strike at the time, causing him to end up at the private hospital
where the Nigerian doctor Ameyo Adadevoh worked.
Dr. Adadevoh was a woman who seemed to have medicine “in her blood.”
Her father was a highly respected pathologist and university official, and she had
inherited his same rigor when it came to her profession. She had wavy black hair
and large dark eyes that projected a serious gaze in the halls of First Consultant
Hospital in Lagos, where Dr. Adadevoh was a senior endocrinologist. When
Sawyer arrived in her hospital, she was the attending physician. He claimed that
he only had a case of malaria, but Adadevoh wasn’t convinced. He tried to leave
the hospital, but she refused his request, convinced that he should be tested for
Ebola, even though she’d never treated anyone infected with the disease before.
Sawyer became very upset, and she and her colleagues ended up having to
physically restrain him. During the ensuing chaos of this altercation, his IV
popped out of his arm, spraying blood on Adadevoh. They were finally able to
subdue him, but the struggle didn’t end there.
While Adadevoh and her fellow doctors were waiting for the results of
Sawyer’s test, the Liberian government put diplomatic pressure on Nigeria to
release him to them. Again, Dr. Adadevoh refused. With no secure
transportation method available in the country to guarantee that he wouldn’t risk
infecting anyone else, she and her colleagues fought to maintain his quarantine
—and won. By neutralizing their “patient zero,” they could now focus their
energies on mobilizing Nigeria’s response to contain the impact of Sawyer, who
had passed his virus on to twenty people.
 On October 20, 2014, three months after Sawyer arrived in Nigeria and
Adadevoh became his doctor, the World Heath Organization officially
announced that Nigeria was Ebola-free, a spectacular and heartening feat amid
so much suffering in the region. As the Telegraph’s chief foreign correspondent
wrote at the time, “It may not sound like tremendous news, given that the death
toll is still rocketing elsewhere in West Africa. But given how bad it could have
been, it’s something to be extremely thankful for. I could just as easily be
writing now that Ebola had claimed its 10,000[th] victim in Nigeria, and was on
its way to kill hundreds of thousands more.”57 As global media soon broadcast,
this victory was largely thanks to Dr. Adadevoh, who tragically wasn’t able to
see the impact of her work. Sawyer died of Ebola, along with seven people who
caught the virus from him—one of the victims being Adadevoh herself, who
died on August 19, 2014. Since her death, Adadevoh has been lionized as the
hero that she was—the person who, along with her colleagues, protected Nigeria
from what would have surely been an extremely fatal outbreak if Sawyer hadn’t
been kept in quarantine. Their brave response—in the face of the assumptions of
others—has become a model for other countries around the world, and an
example of the right assumptions working. Adadevoh’s story offers a vivid
illustration of how assumptions produce useful thoughts and behaviors, and also
of how these assumptions can be specific to a person creating ideas that others
are unable to see.
Let’s take a look at how Dr. Adadevoh’s assumptions shaped her thoughts
and perceptions (leaving mostly aside the process by which her assumptions
came into being), to better understand how your neural patterns shape yours. To
do so, it’s time to introduce an important new concept central to getting more
and better ideas from those 86 billion electrically charged cells in your head.
Your Space of Possibility

The space of possibility is the patterns of neural activity that are possible given
the structure of your network (or connectomes). Collectively, your neural
network determines all the different possible patterns inside your head. In other
words, it contains the matrix of perceptions/ideas/behaviors that you are capable
of having, which means it contains a lot (but again, its potential is far from
infinite). These perceptions/ideas/behaviors run the gamut from the most
luminous, earth-shaking ones, to the most banal, humdrum ones… most of
which you’ll never actually experience, but are theoretically possible given a
certain concatenation (network linking) of stimuli. Moreover, outside this space
are those perceptions and ideas that don’t, indeed can’t, arise in your brain and
can’t occur to you, at least at that moment—which arguably are much more
numerous than the ones that are possible. Your assumptions (i.e., the
connectivity between brain cells that is your history) determine the boundaries
and everything that falls within—and hence the structure and dimensionality of
your space of possibility. Note also that each of these patterns is related to
others, some being more similar to each other and others less so.
 Now, while an infinite number of neural patterns are theoretically possible,
not all of them are useful. Let’s consider Adadevoh’s actions inside the schema
of the space of possibility. She had an assumption that she shared with Nigerian
government officials: that the spread of Ebola needed to be contained as quickly
and completely as possible. Where she differed from others was in how to effect
this, which led to her second assumption: that Sawyer needed to be kept in
quarantine in the Lagos hospital, as opposed to the officials who assumed that
the best response was to get Sawyer out of the country and back to Liberia as
fast as possible. Because Adadevoh had different assumptions, she had a
different space of possibility, which meant she had different potential states of
brain activations… manifested as ideas, thoughts, beliefs, actions, and so on.
These different assumptions encoded in the physiology of her brain represented
her own unique history, which allowed her neurons to generate a ‘next possible’
perception (an attractor state) that people without the same wiring (assumptions)
couldn’t generate. Again, we are focusing here not on what that history was as
such, but simply on the fact that because of it, what was possible for her to
perceive was not possible for others to perceive. She was not making a “big
jump”… for her. The “big jump” she was making was from their perspective
since they were blind to what she could see, simply because they had different
spaces of possibility. To begin with, Adadevoh was a seasoned professional who
not only knew but followed medical best practices, even in a moment of conflict
and danger. So she had sound convictions, but even more important, she had the
courage to pursue them. In spite of pressure from the government, she put the
collective well-being of her countrymen ahead of possible damage to her career.
As such, the value of sacrifice for the good of people beyond herself was an
essential assumption that guided her perception and her actions. It shaped her
space of possibility as much as her technical medical training did. In other
words, she had hard-won knowledge plus courageous intention.
For the purposes of this chapter, the main point isn’t why Adadevoh had the
assumptions that allowed her to lead Nigeria out of the Ebola crisis, but simply
that she had assumptions that differed from those of others. So do you, and so do
I, and both our most mundane and heroic actions result from them; they are
equally contained within our own neurological space of possibility. Adadevoh’s
story illustrates how behaviors emerge out of synaptic pathways to which past
experiences have rigged green and red streetlights, so to speak. But what in
retrospect was a brilliant response on her part didn’t feel “brilliant” or “creative”
to her. This is an essential point: it was simply the most natural (indeed,
possibly the most personally rational) idea inside the landscape of possibilities
her assumptions had created for her. The space of possibility of Person X
(Adadevoh—the person on the left in the figure) contains the solution, whereas
the space of possibility of Person Y (the Nigerian government—the person on
the right in the figure) could not. As such, Person Y is quite literally blind to the
solution. This explains a great deal of conflict wherein one person, company,
organization, or country simply cannot “perceive” (either literally and/or
metaphorically) the action of the other person, company, organization, or
country. The issue at play isn’t a disagreement as such, but a much more
pervasive kind of pathological blindness that affects many more than those
suffering from eye-related pathologies.
 Taking the example of the blindness to Ebola’s risk of spreading in Nigeria, it
is clear, then, that assumptions also have their “other side,” or negative
possibilities. While they are essential for the brain’s functioning, they are not all
good (at least in general since everything is necessarily contextual)… just like
the ideas they produce. They make us vulnerable to useless or even destructive
actions, like the officials who nearly let the highly contagious Sawyer out of
quarantine… or to generalizations across contexts that are not useful. So at the
same time that assumptions enable useful perceptions, they also inherently limit
them… sometimes for good (in that you often don’t have bad ideas), and
sometimes for bad (in that you often don’t have good ideas). Hence, we are
blessed with the fact that inherent in the neural structure of the brain are the
processes by which these structures are created. Development never truly ends,
as our brains evolved to evolve… we are adapted to adapt, to continually “re-
define normality,” transforming one’s space of possibility with new assumptions
according to the continual process of trial and error.
 For now, to better understand how assumptions limit perception, let’s take
our theoretical map of potential thoughts for the brain (illustration here) and
create a mathematical “God model” of behavior, as it assumes the role of
omniscience. We can see everything, not just what happened and happens but
everything that could happen or could have happened. This allows us to
represent the behavioral/survival value of every possible perception, and we can
transform the space of possibility into a “landscape” of mountains and valleys.
The mountains represent the “best” perceptions and the valleys represent the
worst. We’ve converted our neutral space of emergent attractor states, which
arise from the interactions of what we in science descriptively call a complex
system, into a fitness landscape. This idea comes from the study of mathematics,
evolution and other fields, including physics, which charts how “fit” a trait (or a
“solution” more generally) is, whether in a valley, on a false peak, or on a true
peak. When in the valley, the trait reduced survival and the animal/species died.
When on a true peak, the animal/species survived better than those on a lower
“peak” of the same conceptual landscape. Our thoughts and behaviors have a
similar “fitness” in their degree of usefulness to us. In the figure below, valleys
are the smallest dots, false peaks are the medium-sized ones, and true peaks are
the large ones. Note that they are all generated by the same assumptions.
To know the uber-fitness landscape of life is to know how this landscape
changes with time and context… and is therefore to know the mind of God. That
is the point of any religious text—or indeed any text—that professes to know the
truth. The text of science has an attempted rigor to it (say, for instance, Darwin’s
Origin of the Species or Stephen Hawking’s A Brief History of Time), whereas
others do not (e.g., the Bible, the Koran, science fiction). Of course, none of us
are God… thank God!… though some often profess to be, or even worse,
profess to know what he/she/ it “thinks”… in short, to effectively “channel”
God. The problem is that in the non-omniscient world of real life, we don’t know
beforehand which perception is better than another a priori. It’s the a priori of
the previous sentence that’s especially significant! Since that, of course, is the
whole point of trial and error, or empiricism, which is nothing other than a
“search strategy” for exploring the landscape of possibility. Like Dr. Adadevoh,
we only know what our assumptions make us think, and while we often have
confidence about the results we will produce (such as saving lives, in her case),
we don’t know beforehand what will happen in the future as a consequence…
despite the irony that the current assumptions are predicted on the success and
failure of what did happen in the past. To search your space of possibility and
find those superior perceptions, like she did, you must draw on the perceptual
record of experience that has given you your assumptions. The process of trial
and error, whether lived or imagined, is nothing more than exploring this
landscape in an attempt to discover the highest mountains while avoiding the
valleys. But if there are both good ideas and bad ideas in your space of
possibility, what does it look like to land on a good idea?

To answer this, you are represented by the figure in the middle of the space
of possibility. This is your current perceptual state. The question is, where are
you likely to go to next in thought or behavior? In the case of the development of
a flower, Elena Alvarez-Buylla (in collaboration with my lab) showed that the
different developmental stages of the flower—carpals to sepals to petals—follow
a specific sequence. This suggests that not only were the states themselves
selected during evolution, but so was their actual sequence. The brain is no
different. It too settles into continually changing attractor states of neural
patterns, each reflexive response following from another, depending on the
nature of the stimulus input given a certain spatial and temporal ecological
context.
NOT
BRAIN
YOUR
DOES
BIG
MAKE
 You have already accomplished the first step in deviating thoughtfully. You
are aware that you are usually unaware.
Which means… a bit confrontationally, though I mean it more
challengingly… now that you know this, each of us no longer has the excuse of
ignorance, which is too often the initial barrier to change. If I’ve replaced your
brain’s default assumption of “knowing reality,” then my aim so far has been
achieved: you now know less than you did before. And in knowing less, you
(and we) now have the opportunity to understand more. Without this step of
understanding, every decision you make in the future will remain a response
grounded in history… for better or worse. There will not be any choice in the
matter, despite the narrative your brain tells itself. Choices exist where there is
an option. Understanding why you see what you do provides that option. It gives
you the potential of choice, and therein the potential for intention.
Seeing differently—to deviate—begins with awareness… with seeing
yourself see (but by no means ends there). It begins with knowing that some of
those often invisible assumptions that maintained your survival in the past may
no longer be useful. It begins with understanding that they may in fact be (or
become) bad for you (and others), and if not changed would curtail living. To
truly embody this is to empathize with what it is to be human… indeed, with
what it is to be any living, perceptual system.
 So how do we see differently?
We change our future by changing our past.
As strange as it may sound, this is entirely possible. As a matter of fact, it’s
what we do all the time. Every story, every book, all narratives spoken, read, or
enacted are about changing the past, about “re-meaning” past experiences, or
more specifically, about changing the future past.
CHAPTER 7

Changing the Future Past

One of the most famous and controversial experiments in the history of

neuroscience, done by a man named Benjamin Libet in the early 1980s, had a
very simple premise: participants had to move their left wrist or their right wrist.
A researcher in the Department of Physiology at the University of California,
San Francisco, Libet died in 2007 at the age of 91, but his 1983 paper that came
out of the experiment is still legendary. He discovered that there is a time lapse
between the behavioral decisions our neural circuitry makes for us and our
awareness of these decisions. His results set off a debate about the brain, human
consciousness, and free will that is still raging today. Why? Because his findings
challenge the very idea that we have agency in engendering new and creative
thoughts. In other words, his experiments suggested that we aren’t the conscious
owners of our destinies… we just watch them happen, falsely thinking we’re in
control. But we do have agency. However, in order to know how to exercise it,
we must first understand why it is possible.
Libet’s experiment went like this: He and his team began by fixing electrodes
to the scalps of participants to measure the electrical activity in their brains.
Then the participants were asked to move either their right or left wrist, but
before doing so they indicated the exact instant in which they made their
decision about which to move. This was made possible by an ingenious
stopwatch-like device, which measured three different things down to the
millisecond: the instant the participants’ neuroelectric signals indicated that their
decision was made inside the brain (the Bereitschaftspotential in German, or
“readiness potential”), the instant they consciously made the decision, and the
instant of the actual movement of the participants’ wrists. The results? On
average, the Bereitschaftspotential in the participants’ cortexes came 400
milliseconds before their self-aware decision to move, which in turn came 200
milliseconds before the actual movement. While this finding may seem
straightforward enough, suggesting a natural “sequence,” the philosophical
implications of the experiment were—and are—profound.60
In Libet’s (and many others’) interpretation, his discovery revealed that the
participants’ conscious decisions were a fiction. They weren’t decisions at all…
at least not as we commonly think of them, since they happened in the brain
before the participants were conscious of them. The relevant attractor state of
activity within their specific brain networks was present before their conscious,
nominally decision-making minds. Only after the fact did the decision appear in
their consciousness, masquerading as the cause of the movement. By
implication, this means that decisions in the present don’t necessarily belong to
conscious proactive intentions as such, but to the neural mechanics that
determine automatic perceptual behavior. By extension, it suggests that free will
doesn’t exist. If correct, Libet’s experiment would mean that humans are passive
spectators to the ultimate virtual reality experience: their own lives.
Over the years, Libet’s findings proved to be so provocative that they
spawned a whole new discipline of research… the neuroscience of free will. His
experiment also upset and pleased philosophers in equal measure, depending on
where they fell in the ancient argument of determinism versus free will, since his
experiment confirms that we do not have control over what we do now since
everything we do in the moment is a reflexive response, even though it doesn’t
feel that way. We only ever react in the here and now… at least when we are
unaware.
But a lack of proaction does not mean we can’t act with intention. The key to
unlocking this process of acting with intention is awareness. Once we are aware
of the fundamental principles of perception, we can use the fact that we don’t see
reality to our advantage. To do so, we must remember that all of our perceptions
represent nothing other than our and our society’s past perceptions about what
was useful (or not). So while we’re not able to consciously control the “present
now,” we can influence our “future now.” How? By changing our future past,
which raises a deep question about where free will—if we have it—might
actually live.
What do I mean?
Libet’s experiments demonstrate that we have little… if any… free will over
our responses to events in the present. But through the process of imagination
(delusion), we do have the ability to change the meanings of past events,
whether they occurred a second ago or, as in the case of some cultural memes,
centuries ago. “Re-meaning,” or changing the meaning of past events,
necessarily changes our “past” history of our experience of the world—not of
course the events themselves, nor the sensory data arising from those events, but
the statistical history upon which perception is predicated. From the perspective
of perception, exercising the free will to re-mean the past history of meanings
(i.e., our narrative) changes our future history from that moment on… hence, our
“future past.” And because future perceptions—just like the ones you’re
experiencing now—will also be reflexive responses to their empirical history,
changing our “future past” has the potential to change future perceptions (each,
ironically, is generated without free will). Hence, almost every story we
construct about ourselves in relation to the world, whether they are born out of
consultation with a psychotherapist or from behavioral cognitive therapy or from
reading a “pop-sci” book like this one, is an attempt to re-mean past experiences
in order to change future reflexive behaviors individually and/or collectively.
But HOW do we begin to change our future past in practice?
Answer: By starting with a question… or with a joke.
The great Czech writer Milan Kundera’s first novel, The Joke, is a perfect—
and perfectly layered—example of just this. The central character is a young
man named Ludvik who makes a joke that turns out to be the wrong one for
communist Czechoslovakia in the 1950s, a time in which “fun went over
badly.”61 He writes a postcard to a girl he has a crush on, who he doesn’t feel
appreciates him. It reads: “Optimism is the opium of the people! A healthy
atmosphere stinks of stupidity! Long live Trotsky!” She shares his subversive
missive with the authorities and this horribly recasts his future, causing him to
commit a cruel deed many years later. But at the book’s end, a matured Ludvik
reflects on his past, arriving at a deterministic—and perhaps convenient—
conclusion. He decides that the effect of the joke he made, as well as other
seemingly harmless acts, are the result of historical forces beyond human control
(a clear argument against free will): “I suddenly had the feeling that one’s
destiny is often complete long before death.”
The irony is that not only does The Joke tell the story of upheaval in Ludvik’s
life, but the real-life story of the book’s publication led to upheaval in Kundera’s
own life and in the life of his country. Soon after The Joke was published, the
radical social uprising of the Prague Spring of 1968 embraced it, absorbing its
irreverent attitude into a heady rebellion against the repressive government,
which promptly banned the novel. Kundera’s book, like Ludvik’s joke, went on
“monstrously multiplying itself into more and more silly jokes.” Soon after,
Kundera lost his teaching job and entered exile in France, changing the course of
his life. The authoritarian regime saw the novel and its titular joke as a threat,
and its author as a threatening deviant. This is because governments—especially
totalitarian ones—and their spin doctors understand the power of re-meaning
history. Those who influence the meaning of the past will shape the foundations
by which those who identify with that past behave in the future. Hence asking
Why? about the past on something as objectively harmless as ink and paper, as
did Kundera’s novel and like the work of so many before and after him, became
an act of rebellion that rippled in significance… which ultimately shaped his
own future. Years later, Kundera quipped in an interview that every one of his
novels could be titled The Joke.62
All of this happened because Kundera didn’t simply publish a work of fiction
but also engaged in the most dangerous thing a person can do and has done
throughout history. He asked a question: why?
To ask why is evidence of awareness… of proactive doubt. And The Joke is
evidence of the power of why. In particular, the subversive quality of Why? is to
be found in the change that it has created throughout history, and in its active
suppression by governments and institutions, religions, and—most ironically of
all—educational systems. Hence, innovators begin the process of creating new
perceptions—of changing their future past—by asking why not just of anything,
but of what we assume to be true already… our assumptions. Arguably, to
question your deep assumptions, especially those that define you (or your
relationships or society), is the most “dangerous” thing you can do, as it has the
greatest potential to lead to transformation and destruction in “equal” measure. It
can have such a seismic impact precisely because it recasts the past, giving you
new ways of thinking about concepts and circumstances that had previously
appeared to be simply a set reality. If you don’t ask why you have one response,
there’s no chance of creating a different one. Yet learning to constantly ask why
is not easy, especially in a time when information is seen to be so essential.
“Big Data” is the buzzword phrase of the early twenty-first century that is as
powerful as currency. An obsession with it has taken root in many areas of our
societies, from medicine to commerce, all the way to individuals in the
measuring of their “steps” throughout the day. There is even a popular band
called Big Data. The term simply refers to sets of data so immense that they
require new methods of mathematical analysis, and numerous servers. Big Data
—and, more accurately, the capacity to collect it—has changed the way
companies conduct business and governments look at problems, since the belief
wildly trumpeted in the media is that this vast repository of information will
yield deep insights that were previously out of reach. By gathering metadata on
our behavior… which presently is largely restricted to our Internet-based habits
of viewing/buying/traveling… companies will be able to market to me directly:
to my “preferences” (read: assumptions). Netflix might be better at
recommending movies and shows that are specific to what I like; Amazon might
better market to me according to what I like to buy in spring, and thus be more
likely to make a sale; traffic apps might better route me through traffic according
to my preferred trade-off between time and aesthetic; and health researchers
might better locate dangers in my body.
The irony is that Big Data by itself doesn’t yield insights, since what is being
collected is information on who/what/where/ when: on how many people clicked
or searched something, and when and from where they did so, as well as sundry
other quantifiable particulars. All that this bank of who-what-where-when gives
you is precisely what the term “Big Data” so nakedly admits: Lots of fucking
data…
Without the brain (and in the future, brains augmented with AI) to generalize
usefulness across contexts—to effectively find wise metaphors that transcend a
situation—information doesn’t serve us. Without knowing why, we can’t find
laws (basic principles) that can be generalized… like the law of gravity, which
applies not to any particular object but to all objects that have mass. Effects
without an understanding of the causes behind them, on the other hand, are just
bunches of data points floating in the ether, offering nothing useful by
themselves. Big Data is information, equivalent to the patterns of light that fall
onto the eye. Big Data is like the history of stimuli that our eyes have responded
to. And as we discussed earlier, stimuli are themselves meaningless because they
could mean anything. The same is true for Big Data, unless something
transformative is brought to all those data sets… understanding.
Understanding reduces the complexity of data by collapsing the
dimensionality of information to a lower set of known variables. Imagine you’re
part of a startup that has developed a new heating device of some sort, which
you want to market in a targeted manner. For your research, you take a series of
measurements of the body temperature of living animals, and in particular the
rate at which they lose heat. You find that they all lose heat at different rates.
The more animals you measure—including humans—the more data you have.
Given your dedication and diligence in measuring, you have accrued a huge
dataset, one that is of an increasing number of high dimensions, in which each
animal is its own dimension, despite the seeming straightforwardness of the
simple measurement. But the measurements themselves don’t tell you anything
about how or why there is variability in heat loss among different animals.
What you want is to organize the data set. But in principle there are a huge
number of ways to do so. Should you organize it by type, color, surface quality,
or a combination of one, two, or n variables? Which is the best (or “right”) way
to organize it? The “right” answer is the one that offers the deepest
understanding, and it turns out that in this example the answer is by size. We
know—because someone did exactly this experiment—that there is an inverse
relationship between size and surface area: the smaller the critter, the more
surface area they have proportionally, and the more heat they lose and the more
they need to compensate for that heat loss in other ways, thus creating the
conditions for the trial-and-error process of evolution to find the solution.
There you have it: a generalizable principle. What was once a massive, high-
dimensional dataset has now collapsed to a single dimension, a simple principle
that comes from using the data but is not the data itself. Understanding
transcends context, since the different contexts collapse according to their
previously unknown similarity, which the principle contains. That is what
understanding does. And you actually feel it in your brain when it happens. Your
“cognitive load” decreases, your level of stress and anxiety decrease, and your
emotional state improves.
To return to dour, put-upon Ludvik, does his philosophy on life apply to
human perception? Is your perceptual “destiny” already “complete,” out of your
control because it was shaped by historical, evolutionary forces that preclude
free will? Absolutely not. “Why?” provoked not only the Prague Spring but also
the French Revolution, the American Revolution, and the fall of the Berlin Wall.
The revolutionaries and everyday citizens who brought on these societal waves
of change all shared the same question: Why are things this way and not another
way? If you get enough people to ask themselves this, tremendous—and
tremendously unpredictable—things suddenly become possible (without being
able to define what those things may be a priori). And the reason is simple: who,
what, where, and when lead to answers that are lit by the metaphorical
streetlamp illuminating the space that we can see (i.e., measure). Of course,
measurement is essential, as are descriptions more generally. But data is not
understanding. For instance, while traditional schools continue to teach what is
measurable (e.g., the kinds of answers that come through rote learning), such
methods do not teach understanding in the children being measured. It’s teaching
under the streetlamp, when we know that we dropped our keys somewhere else,
in a place of darkness. Rather than search in the dark, we stay in the light and
harvest more and more measurable data. Notwithstanding incredible feats of
engineering technology required for some kinds of measurement, gathering data
is easy. Understanding why is hard. And, to reemphasize the point… the cash
isn’t in knowing, it’s in understanding. Thus, when thinking of the rise of TED
Talks (the popular online videos of interesting thinkers explaining their ideas
onstage to an audience), rather than “ideas worth spreading” we need to consider
“questions worth asking.” Good questions (most aren’t) reveal and build links
in the same way the brain does in order to construct a reality… a past we use to
perceive in the future… out of the objective one that we don’t have access to.
This is why George Orwell was so wise when he wrote, “Every joke is a tiny
revolution.”63 It’s worth noting that asking why follows a long tradition… the
tradition of philosophical thinkers since time immemorial, from Socrates to
Wittgenstein. What philosophers do is take previous assumptions (or biases or
frames of reference) and question them. This leads them to elaborate on them or
tweak them or try to destroy them, to then replace them with a new set of
assumptions that another philosopher will engage with in the same way. This
seemingly esoteric methodology of questioning is anything but esoteric. It is not
only a learnable skill, it is of incredible practical importance in a world obsessed
with finding definitive, cure-all answers. This is why we must bring back the
craft and way of being of philosophy in our everyday lives. Anything creative is
initiated by this kind of philosophical questioning, which is why it might be one
of the most practical of our dying intellectual disciplines. Schools rarely even
teach children how to ask questions, much less what a good question is, or the
craft of finding it. As a result, we’re—metaphorically and in a way quite literally
—“great engineers but crap philosophers.”
Questioning our assumptions is what provokes revolutions, be they tiny or
vast, technological or social. Studying the brain has shown me that creativity is
in fact not “creative” at all, and that, at heart, “genius” emerges from simply
questioning the right assumption in a powerful, novel way. The story of the
Rosetta Stone demonstrates this.
Discovered by a French soldier in 1799 near the small port city of Rashid on
the Nile, the Rosetta Stone was a charcoal-dark slab of granite measuring nearly
four feet high and more than two feet across. Repurposed from a disappeared
building (possibly a temple) to form part of a fort, it was etched from top to
bottom with intricate inscriptions in three different “scripts”: ancient Greek,
hieroglyphs (a type of “high” formal writing used by priests) and demotic (a
“low” common writing). Hieroglyphics and demotic were two different ways to
represent the ancient Egyptian language, though no one knew this yet; languages
and orthographies had mixed and mutated across centuries and empires, leaving
a confused and confusing trail of clues about their evolutions. The potentially
revolutionary importance of the stone was immediately apparent to scholars,
who knew relatively little about the pharaonic civilization that had left behind
the pyramids at Giza with their tombs, mummies, and other enigmatic artifacts…
and knew nothing of their language. As a result, the stone seemed a godsend,
offering the most direct access to these writing systems and thus to their long-
gone underlying civilization. To use a cool, geeky term of today, the Rosetta
Stone might be a “cryptanalytic crib.”
The discovery of the stone took place at a time of international military
intrigue. Napoleon had invaded Egypt in 1798 with the intention of attacking
British hegemony by taking control of this far corner of their empire. He failed,
but this incursion prefigured and even determined what was to come for the
Rosetta. It caused the British and French to both be present at the discovery of
the stone—it might not have ever been discovered if not for the French, but the
victorious Brits took it home. This set the stage for a battle of scholarship
between the two countries, like a mirror of their warring imperial ambitions.
Since the scholars at the time knew Greek, they thought it would simply be a
matter of translating the stone into the other two “languages,” thus deciphering
the code and subsequently all other writings left behind by ancient Egypt. The
only problem was that no one could figure out how to use the Greek to decode
the hieroglyphics and demotic—at least initially, until Jean-François
Champollion.
 Born in 1790, the French Champollion was still a boy when the Rosetta Stone
was found, though he would eventually come to be revered as the father of
Egyptology. The son of a bookseller father and an illiterate mother, by the age of
sixteen he had learned over a dozen languages. He was gifted, but impatient with
the banal drudgery of school. The one thing that excited him over everything
else, however, was ancient Egypt. In his book Cracking the Egyptian Code,
British writer Andrew Robinson included a 1808 letter from Champollion to his
parents that says it all: “I wish to make of this ancient nation a thorough and
continual study. The enthusiasm with which the description of its vast
monuments transports me, the admiration with which its power and its
knowledge fill me, are sure to increase with the new ideas that I shall acquire. Of
all the peoples whom I admire the most, I shall confess to you that not one of
them outweighs the Egyptians in my heart!”64
By his early twenties Champollion had established himself as a respected
philologist and scholar (by age nineteen he was a professor). He pushed himself
incredibly hard, driven by a feverish desire to learn every language that he could
and study every artifact the conquests of Napoleon had appropriated and brought
back to Paris. By then small “dents” had been made in the tantalizing hunk of
rock found in Egypt, and foremost among the people who had worked on
decoding it was Thomas Young, a brilliant British doctor and physicist.
Although Young has largely been overshadowed in history by Champollion,
he had a polymathic, Goethe-like wingspan of interests of his own, but unlike
Goethe, he was a truly formidable man of science. He too studied the perception
of color and in fact made one of its most fundamental predictions—that the
human eye uses three types of receptors in daylight (called trichromacy), despite
himself being “color blind.” Young had expended immense time and effort in
studying the Stone’s puzzling inscriptions but hadn’t landed on an insight that
would unlock them. When Champollion returned to his attempt at translating the
Rosetta in earnest in 1815, an arms race of scholarship began.
Young and others had been working from the assumption that the Egyptian
hieroglyphics were only symbolic—characters that represented concepts, with
no correspondence to a spoken language. But in January 1822, Champollion
obtained a copy of a newly discovered inscription from an obelisk related to
Cleopatra, which allowed him to better understand the complexities of
hieroglyphics. One of these complexities was that phonetic signs were used in
ancient Egypt.
From this, for Champollion to unlock the Rosetta Stone he needed to
question Young’s baseline assumption in order to institute a new, correct one:
that the hieroglyphs did represent phonetic sounds… words from the Coptic
language, an outgrowth of ancient Egyptian, which Champollion just so
happened to speak from all his tireless work slurping up languages. He was so
overwhelmed when he had this breakthrough that he supposedly passed out after
shouting, “I’ve got it!”
We typically consider creativity the “Aha!” moment of bringing two things
together that were once far apart. We think, “Wow! How did you bring those
two things together like that? I never would have thought of it!” The seemingly
further apart the ideas, the greater is the genius. We assume big causes lead to
big effects. As the Rosetta Stone shows us, to understand what is really going on
we must sweep away the myths to examine the perceptual mechanics.
Let’s experience firsthand the power of changing assumptions—through
questioning them—by returning to the diamond whose directionality we changed
in Chapter 5. Before you flip the book and “make” the diamond spin, your brain
is in a particular physiological (and thus perceptual) state… namely, of seeing a
set of stationary lines. We can represent that “state” by referring back to our
egocentric circle diagram in Chapter 6. You are represented as the “person” in
the middle of the diagram.
Now… start flipping the book.*
Because your brain has an inherited bias (assumption) that we typically look
down onto planes, the most likely direction of rotation, given your history of
experience, is to the right. So when you flip the book, even though the lines are
not actually moving, your brain takes the small physical differences between
each image and perceives the probable meaning of the information—not the
information itself—and sees the object to be in motion, specifically spinning to
the right; it depends only on your brain’s subjective interpretation, which draws
on your past history of usefulness. This reminds us that not all perceptions are
equally possible at a given moment. Some are always more likely than others.
I’ve represented the most likely steps of what you perceive according to
distance to your current “location,” and rightward rotation is close to the center.
Your brain made a small step based on its history of interaction with the world.

So, while there might be other perceptions that are theoretically possible (the
diamond spinning from right to left), it’s in the “dark zone” of what is possible.
But change your assumptions (that you’re looking up—not down—on the
surface of the diamond), and your space of possibility changes too, enabling
previously impossible perceptions to become possible (and vice versa).
 Remember, perception doesn’t exist in the Star Trek universe: behaviors
don’t teleport. Your heart rate will increase gradually, not jump suddenly from
50 bpm to 150 bpm without passing a rate in between. Your muscles can’t cause
you to be sitting one instant, then standing the next. Champollion didn’t happen
upon the beginning of Egyptology. A host of tiny linear movements occur. As
with the body, so with the mind: you don’t get beamed to big ideas. The process
of “coming up with ideas” may feel like leaps, but thousands of minute,
sequential processes actually take place. Just as the development of a flower
goes from carpals to sepals to petals, you don’t just suddenly soar across your
space of possibility; you are constrained by your circuitry that represents what
was “best” in the past. Let’s look at a very contemporary example.
 In March 2008, Apple released the iPhone. Across the world people waited
for hours and hours in long lines to buy the new device. It is reportedly the best-
selling product in the history of humanity (rivaling the Bible). But a tally of units
sold and money made isn’t interesting or illuminating; this is information that
describes who, what, when, where, or how (or how much). What is important is
to look at how the iPhone and subsequent smartphones changed us, and why
they did so.
Smartphones gave us a new way to interact with the world and with each
other (though one must not simply glorify them for the sake of it, acknowledging
that this “new” way of interacting is in some instances a worse way). They
closed the gap between our longstanding physical lives and our now-parallel
digital lives, giving us the best bridge yet for bringing these two realities into
harmony to make them just one life, which for better or worse is the future. This
is why smartphones have changed the way we live, and why Steve Jobs and Jony
Ive, Apple’s chief designer (as well as many others at Apple), have affected so
many lives, including yours, whether or not you own one of their products. They
offered an answer to a question that transcended geography, culture, language,
and individual personalities. That is a truly stunning achievement, to tap so
deeply into universal human experience… an experience that is above all else
defined by the brain and the perceptions it creates.
But what is critical to understand is that the steps taken to create such a
massive shift were small, each initiated by a question… in particular the
question why. Apple didn’t magically teleport to the iPhone. Jobs, Ive, and the
whole company had “why-asking” past patterns of perception, which made ideas
that would seem out-of-the-box or literally unthinkable to another person feel
intuitively logical to them. They were naturally occurring thoughts inside the
Apple-specific box, though this doesn’t mean they didn’t put intense effort and
work into finding them. To bring back our neuro-attractor model for perception,
the assumptions the Apple team had acquired let their collective brain-train
make stops at ideas others didn’t even know could be stops. Each question
changed the structure of the space of possibility, sometimes massively so, and
not only for one person but for many, many people. Because of it, the space of
possibility for others is now forever changed.
A very tricky nuance when it comes to the concept of genius and revolution
is that once we share our ideas with the world at large it’s impossible to know
what will happen. Some insights, like hieroglyphs, represent spoken language; or
concepts such as Kepler’s discovery that we aren’t in fact the center; or even
products like the triangular sail that enabled sailors to move upwind for the first
time, or Steve Jobs’s vision and Jony Ive’s design philosophy at Apple, have a
meteoric impact on lives and people. Others, like the 1980s LaserDisc
“innovation” in home cinema, go plop and disappear. So why is it that some
ideas or questions lead to big changes, while others do not? Why did Milan
Kundera have to go into exile after the Prague Spring instead of some other
Czechoslovakian novelist who also published a novel at the same time? Why did
Steve Jobs change modern life forever and I didn’t, or you didn’t? Is there a way
to explain this? Yes, there is.
A large person jumping into a pool makes a large splash. A small person
doing the same cannonball makes a smaller splash. This is obvious. Ideas,
however, don’t obey the same rules, which is why innovative perception is so
powerful… and so desired.
To understand “genius,” we must challenge the assumption that big effects
must have arisen from big causes. They don’t have to, and arguably the best ones
don’t. Everyone seeks the small investment that leads to “unicorns.” The answer
is a question, which while seemingly “small” has massive effects; this, I’m
suggesting, is what defines a “good” question. Whereas big-seeming questions
(ideas) can have little or no effect, mathematics has been studying this
observable truth, and the explanation takes us into one of the most ground-
moving realms of science of recent years… complexity theory. By
understanding why some ideas cause massive change, while others don’t, we can
learn to more effectively construct and target questions that produce so-called
genius breakthroughs. Why questions are those that will lead to breakthroughs,
especially when why is challenging a known truth. But because we are so
entrained in assuming linear causality, and thus assume that creativity arises
from linking disparate elements through spontaneous insight, it is essential to
understand why this is the case. And in doing so, this awareness can lead to new
ways of seeing, experimenting, and collaborating.
Complexity theory is a general area of scientific research that has emerged in
the last thirty years, and an area of research that my lab has been actively
engaged in… in the context of adaptive networks… for fifteen years. It helps us
to study phenomena both natural and man-made, from earthquakes and
avalanches to economic crises and revolutions. Complexity theory has helped
scientists prove that such influential events are actually systems of interacting
parts that follow mathematical patterns and principles. Upheavals are impossible
to foresee, but after the fact, their “upheavability” falls into a neat breakdown, or
“power law.” This is because complex systems can eventually progress to a
“self-criticality” where they occupy a fantastically thin threshold between
stability and convulsion in which the falling of a grain of sand (or the publication
of a novel in Czechoslovakia in 1967) may cause absolutely nothing, or unleash
a landslide. And the brain is the most complex living system… if not the most
complex system altogether… in the known universe.
 The basis of complex systems is actually quite simple (and this is not an
attempt to be paradoxical, like an art critic who describes a sculpture as “big yet
small”). What makes a system unpredictable and thus nonlinear (which includes
you and your perceptual process, or the process of making collective decisions)
is that the components making up the system are interconnected. Because the
components interact, the behavior of any one of the system’s elements is
affected by the behaviors of all the others to which it is connected. We all
embody complex systems because we as humans are one, as is the society and
larger environment in which we live, including its history of evolution. Yet for
centuries, science has pursued a different kind of assumption, of a world that
doesn’t actually exist… a world of “linear causality,” largely because it seems
the brain evolved with this assumption as a useful approximation. It is a place
where A causes B causes C, epitomized in the formulas of Newtonian physics
where all the world is not a stage but a billiard table. The Newtonian view works
approximately. The energy from this causes the movement of that; happy cause
results in happy effect. This model is useful, but not accurate. The problem is
that breaking a system down into its component elements strips the world of
what makes it not only natural, but beautiful… and fun—the interaction between
the stuff! Life and the perception of life. Live… in the space… between.
(This suggests the biologically inspired mantra “Be in between.”)
We can think of these interconnected things, whatever they happen to be, as
nodes (the elements) in a network that usually have non-uniform connections
(called edges). In any network, some nodes have more edges (connections) than
other nodes. This takes us back to questions, but in particular good questions…
questions targeting assumptions.
Our assumptions are unquestionably interconnected. They are nodes with
connections (edges) to other nodes. The more foundational the assumption, the
more strongly connected it is. What I’m suggesting is that our assumptions and
the highly sensitive network of responses, perceptions, behaviors, thoughts, and
ideas they create and interact with are a complex system. One of the most basic
features of such a network is that when you move or disrupt one thing that is
strongly connected, you don’t just affect that one thing, you affect all the other
things that are connected to it. Hence small causes can have massive effects (but
they don’t have to, and usually don’t actually). In a system of high tension,
simple questions targeting basic assumptions have the potential to transform
perception in radical and unpredictable ways.
Take, for instance, the three simple dot diagrams shown over-leaf. They all
have 16 assumptions (nodes). In the first diagram, none of the assumptions are
connected (there are no edges). In the second diagram, there are some edges; and
in the third diagram they are all connected. Now imagine “moving” a single
node in the upper right corner by questioning it. Only it moves. Now imagine
doing the same thing to the same node in the second image: three nodes move.
Finally, imagine doing the same thing to the same node in the third image: they
all move. You could think of this as the visual story of a “genius idea.” One key
insight or realization sets off a chain reaction of other insights and realizations,
creating a “house of cards” effect of no-longer-useful assumptions collapsing.
 The interplay of assumptions in your brain and in your creative process is
what we call an embedded hierarchy. They are like your body. Your body is
made up of organs, your organs are made of cells, your cells are made up of
organelles (the organs of your cells), your organelles are made up of molecules,
and so on. In essence, a society is nothing other than the changing density of the
molecular elements that make us all up. Each is just an attractor state within a
larger system, like waves rising on the sea before crashing on the shore, or
transient whirlpools on a fast-flowing river. The lower and more foundational
the assumption, the more its change can affect the rest of the system, since the
hierarchy builds off of it. So, the right question—though small—can cause a
person, an invention, an idea, an institution, or even a whole culture to change
(hopefully for the better, but not always).
The principle for deviation here is this: To question begins a “quest,” and a
journey into the unknown. The most insightful quest begins with “Why?”…
especially when targeted at what you assume to be true already. Because your
truths are highly connected assumptions, change them and you may change the
whole system. This will mean that the next step you take into that new space of
possibility will be “creative.” Here choice begins, and in making this choice, you
begin the process of changing your future.
The importance of interconnectedness is reflected in the brain itself. In a
creatively engaged mind there are higher levels of cortical activity… that is,
more ideas generating heat both during moments of “inspiration” and in general.
This is because the patterns become more widely distributed and thus more
connected and interactive. Inhibition also goes down, which means the voice in
your mind that loves to shout the Physics of No speaks less often and less loudly.
In case you were wondering, some psychedelic drugs like those found in “magic
mushrooms” have a similar effect on the brain. Recent functional imaging
research by Enzo Tagliazucchi, Leor Roseman, and their colleagues at Imperial
College in London has confirmed this to be true. Normally, when we look at a
scene, most of the neural activity is restricted to the primary visual cortex at the
back of your head. When, however, subjects looked at the same visual scene
after taking LSD, not only was the visual cortex more active, but many more
areas also became active. In other words, LSD enabled activity to pass between
more areas of the neural network, thereby linking more diverse parts of the
brain. In line with this physiological change, many people also reported a sense
of “ego dissolution” and “oneness.” Maybe not surprisingly, then, given this
more “open” perspective, low doses of psychedelics (such as psilocybin in
“magic” mushrooms and LSD) have been shown to facilitate human
relationships, support couples therapy, and lower levels of depression for an
enduring amount of time. By connecting more diverse areas of the brain, it’s as
if these chemicals enable people to see beyond their current entrenched
assumptions and create new assumptions… expanding their space of possibility,
and in doing so altering their future past, and thus their future perceptions
(frequently for the good; the response varies depending on the dose taken).
While this might sound like an endorsement of drug use, it’s just
“information.” And if you find it emotionally challenging—as people often do—
it’s not that the information is itself challenging, since it is meaningless in and of
itself. If you find this happening to you, then it’s likely because the information
is inconsistent with your own set of assumptions, against your meaning of the
information. But information is agnostic. Meaning isn’t. The meaning you make
with this knowledge is up to you.
All this is to say that creativity is in fact a very basic, accessible process. It’s
all about changing your space of possibility by questioning the assumptions that
delineate its dimensions. It is, therefore, misleading to divide (or self-identify)
the world into “creative” and “non-creative” people. In a dynamic world, we’re
all hungry fish needing to thrive… which means we all need to deviate and
therefore start with questions rather than answers, in particular the question why.
And this process of questioning assumptions is entirely within reach. We all
have spaces of possibility, and live in a dynamic, contextual world, so we can—
and indeed must—all change those spaces. In our contemporary society we say
that a creative person is creative because they are able to see a connection
between disparate things that we were not able to see. But for that “creative”
person, the two ideas/perceptions were not a big step belonging to a perceptual
process that we physiologically just don’t have. Instead, the step was a small one
that resulted in a massive change. Considering this, suddenly creativity as we
traditionally think of it is not creative at all. Creativity is only creative from the
outside.
In other words, if we just learn how to use the tools we already have inside
our brains, to change our future past with our own well-aimed whys, this is how
we change the “destiny” that Kundera’s Ludvik couldn’t alter. But if there’s
nothing creative about creativity (as typically defined), what makes creativity so
difficult?
CHAPTER 8

Making the Invisible Visible

Revolutionary questions and the revolutions they start come from demolishing
old assumptions to institute new, wiser ones. The problem is we are often blind
to why we do what we do. As we have seen, the assumptions that shape our
perceptions are often like the air that sustains us… invisible, which makes it hard
to know where to ask and target our why questions. In this chapter we will learn
to see what is unseen.
Have a look at the objects in the image on the previous page: a candle, a
matchbook, and a box of thumbtacks. Your task is simple: place the candle on
the wall and light it using the items in the image, which is called “Dunker’s
candle problem” after its creator Karl Dunker (please don’t look ahead to find
the answer). Note that the thumbtacks in the box are not long enough to
penetrate through the candle itself.
Are you struggling? Most people do, as did I when I first saw this. Despite
the “right” answer (the X in the space of possibility) being objectively easy,
most people take a long time to find the solution, if they find it at all. Does this
mean we’re simply uncreative individuals who are unable to bring two disparate
ideas together, unable to fully engage in the “mysterious, serendipitous process
of creativity”? Is it an indication that we lack the genes that only very few have
who can make large jumps?
Remember that the landscape of your space of possibility is determined by
your assumptions. The diagram is constructed so as to make certain assumptions,
and thus patterns of activity in your brain (attractor states), more likely than
others. In a similar way, look at the image of the cube below (we’ll come back to
the matches and the candle in a bit). You’ll see a dark surface on the top of the
cube-like structure, with a light surface below and a gradient between them.
Notice that—without you necessarily being consciously aware of it—the
arrangement of the surfaces and gradient are consistent with illumination coming
from above. Interestingly, because we evolved on an earth where light comes
from above, this aspect of nature has been incorporated into assumptions wired
into our brain. Consequently, I’ve created this image (in a study on the
Cornsweet Illusion with Dale Purves), and in particular the gradient between the
surfaces, in such a way that it confirms this assumption in your brain and
activates the particular rail tracks that result in you seeing the two surfaces as
being differently lit.

Yet, the two surfaces are physically identical. They’re the same color.
If you don’t believe me, look at the image below, where two central areas of
the surfaces have been printed in isolation. You can also turn the book upside
down, which makes the stimulus inconsistent with light from above. When this
happens, the strength of the illusion reduces because the stimulus is now made
less consistent with your assumption of light from above.
What is true for the cube is also true for the candle and matchbox creativity
challenge. In the same way that you can’t see the surfaces in the cube for their
underlying physical reality, neither can you see the actual solution to the candle
challenge… because you’re seeing the most likely perception given the space of
possibility of your assumptions. But, as you did with the spinning diamond,
changing your assumptions can change the next possible perception. This puzzle
is difficult not because the solution is itself difficult. Rather, it’s difficult because
you are blind to the assumptions that the stimulus was designed to activate. If
you knew what those assumptions were, the solution would come immediately,
since the solution would be the most obvious answer given the new set of
assumptions required to solve the puzzle.

So let’s reconsider whether we are uncreative individuals, or instead actually

just people who are only naïve to our assumptions… assumptions that are
constraining what is possible for us to see and think and imagine. In exploring
the latter possibility, take a moment and try to reveal your assumptions about
each element of the picture to yourself.
What are your assumptions about the thumbtacks? What are your
assumptions about the matchbox? What are your assumptions about the candle
itself ? Articulate these assumptions clearly; even write them down if you like.
Why do you think the thumbtacks serve one purpose and not another? As an
extension of this question, ask another… and another… and in doing so, you are
beginning to see yourself see in real time. Asking why in this manner is useful
not only for challenging assumptions but for finding them as well. This approach
allows you to hold multiple, even contradictory realities in your mind at the
same time, and evaluate them. Are the possibilities different now?
In the first image the thumbtacks are inside the box. As such, your brain
makes a perception of least resistance and assumes that the box is a container,
and that containers contain things. It couldn’t be anything else, until you
consider the possibility that it in fact could be something else. Thus, when you
view the second image where the tacks are placed outside the box, this stimulus
frees your brain from the first assumption (“container”), and the idea of a “shelf
” becomes possible. Of course, you could have taken the tacks out of the box
yourself in your mind. But it didn’t even occur to you to do so, since even the
question itself was constrained by your assumptions. But for those who did
change their assumption about the box (consciously or—more likely—
unconsciously), the answer would have come in an “aha” moment. But is this
really an aha moment?
 It wasn’t! There was nothing particularly miraculously inspirational about it.
Rather, like all things creative for the person being creative, it was a small,
logical progression to the next possible perception, given good questions that led
to new assumptions that rearranged the space of possibility, which happened to
have a big effect. What was blocking our creativity with the candle was not a
genetic predisposition to linking disparate ideas, but rather our species’ genetic
predisposition to be blind to the causes of our own perceptual behaviors. This is
one of the most important obstacles to seeing differently and deviating from
uninspired, conventional perceptions: our assumptions are as blind to us as we
are to them. This bias-blindness is the foundation of what I referred to earlier as
the Physics of No. The person saying no doesn’t necessarily know why, but only
that they always have done so in that circumstance previously and so behave as
if their perception is an immutable law of nature. This in turn makes it
impossible to question, until we gain sight (awareness of our assumptions). But
why do we continue to be blind to so many crucial assumptions even after
learning that we ARE our assumptions? And how do we develop a method for
constantly uncovering them, and thus enable our dormant creativity? How do we
cure this kind of conceptual blindness that has led to so much destruction, from
religious zealotry to everyday bigotry?
One of the main reasons we are so often blind to our assumptions is that the
brain tends to perceive itself as stable and unchanging. Yet, to quote my partner
quoting one of our favorite poets, Walt Whitman: “I contain multitudes.” For
poetry, this is a lovely metaphor that captures a nuance of the human spirit. For
neuroscience, it’s a proven fact that captures the truth of perception. As the
cognitive scientist Bruce Hood wrote, “Who we are is a story of our self—a
constructed narrative that our brain creates.”65 In this sense, we are like one of
my earlier lightness illusions ourselves, a color that changes shade depending on
what is around it. Our assumptions—and thus our personalities—differ
depending on the day, the place, and the company we keep. Yet we rarely
approach life with this in mind. It makes us nervous.
Evidence of this is that companies are spending millions if not billions of
dollars on the pretext that people are stable and unchanging. There is a huge
push in twenty-first-century business to define who someone is. What companies
are really asking is, “What are their assumptions?” This started in a big way with
Google and Facebook, as they figured out the “value” of information. But
Google and Facebook don’t want information per se, since, as we know, raw
data is as meaningless as stimuli falling on the retina. What they want to know is
why you search for what you search for. The semantics of keywords are a proxy
for this. Much of Silicon Valley is now centered on funding enterprises that are
able to bring in unique data about human assumptions. But this trend started
decades ago with so-called targeted marketing. In the end, it all comes down to
selling to someone’s biases. But you can’t do this well unless you know what
those biases are… to know another person’s why. So what many do instead,
quite naturally, is approach consumers as if we were non-contextual, unchanging
personalities… that is, as if we formed a composite average. It’s the part of the
road that is illuminated and thus measurable. But so-called measurability is
inherently limiting; moreover, it is fundamentally out of synch with the realities
of life lived with others.
What would you do, for instance, if you were in a romantic relationship with
someone who treated you as if you had the average assumptions of humankind?
What’s more, imagine that this partner gave you the average amount of
affection, spent the average amount of time with you, had average sex with you
the average number of times per week in the average kind of way, shared the
average amount of feelings, and hit the milestones of getting married and having
kids at the average age (but hopefully not the average number of children, lest
you be left with a fraction). Surprisingly, because humans are all variations on a
theme, it’s not a bad strategy. Without bruising our egos too much, it’s likely
that they’d do OK with this strategy… initially, that is, since as humans we all
exhibit basic shared assumptions. Most relationships start this way… indeed
most engagements with the unknown do, quite practically, since this is all one
has to go on in the beginning.
However, is it a good strategy longer term? Definitely not. Engaging with
people in the world as if they were an unchanging, measurable “average” can
have disastrous effects.
In 2014, Victoria’s Secret launched “The Perfect Body Campaign” in the
UK. As usual, the advertisement photos for the new line of undergarments
featured curvy, paper-thin super-models that made most potential customers feel
inferior, even as it was trying to motivate them to buy. Instead of responding to
the campaign with frenzied, “aspirational” buying, as Victoria’s Secret had
hoped, indignant women launched an outraged counter-campaign. A Change.org
petition gained viral momentum online with this clear request: “We would like
Victoria’s Secret to apologise and take responsibility for the unhealthy and
damaging message that their ‘Perfect Body’ campaign sends out about women’s
bodies and how they should be judged. We would like Victoria’s Secret to
change the wording on their advertisements for their bra range Body, to
something that does not promote unhealthy and unrealistic standards of beauty,
as well as pledge to not use such harmful marketing in the future.”
Victoria’s Secret had failed to market to its potential customers’ real
identities, but even more important, the company hadn’t marketed to their
potential customers’ ideas of beauty, which in reality encompassed many
different shapes and idiosyncrasies. Instead, the company had spoken to a single
idea of beauty (which often gears toward an idealized “average” of beauty) that
had nothing to do with the diversity of people’s personal lives and the diversity
of how we collectively conceive of beauty. Their mistake was less in presenting
the so-called unattainable than in thinking they knew the assumptions that
created the spaces of possibilities of their customers… namely, that women all
aspire to one “perfect body,” which they don’t. It’s simply not possible, so
people want to feel reflected in their own uniqueness by a brand, not excluded
by it. In the end, Victoria’s Secret discarded past assumptions about what would
be useful in a campaign for driving sales… or at least sort of. They kept the
same photo for the ad campaign, but gave it a new tag: “A Body For Every
Body.”
Victoria’s Secret behaved as if they didn’t know why they did what they did;
and alienated the very people they wanted to connect with, which is quite simply
bad business. Nor—it seems—did the company understand their consumers’
spaces of possibility, or that those spaces are contextual for each of us, though
they quite likely did focus groups and other types of research to pretest their
campaign, which clearly failed. If businesses want to understand their customers
better, they should focus less on common market research techniques like focus
groups and questionnaires. These are only reliable in stable environments with
consumers that, well, aren’t human. As noted above, humans are not only
unstable but also naïve to themselves. Hence, research by social psychologists
has shown that the answers people give tend to not be true to a surprising degree.
The evidence suggests that what respondents are doing is answering in a way
that reflects who they would like to be, not who they actually are. Also,
sometimes they’re not paying attention, or even take glee in responding
untruthfully. This is why we must conduct research “in our natural habitat,”
where real decisions are made for reasons of consequences with feedback that
can be either trivial or fundamentally salient. As such, it’s much more reliable to
study people’s behavior than their introspective interpretation of it. A useful
perceptual principle: If you want to understand humans or a situation generated
by humans, you need to know their assumptions. But don’t ask them! And if you
want to understand yourself, sometimes the best answer exists in another person.
Studies have shown that other people can be better at predicting our behavior—
at usefully predicting us—than we ourselves are. That said, we do have an
important built-in method for seeing ourselves more clearly… for not treating
ourselves like “an average” and for empowering ourselves with our deviance and
questioning.
What is this method? Emotions. The physiology of feelings often tells us
everything we need to know. This is important, since–among other things–our
emotions are indicators, or proxies, that reveal one’s assumptions to oneself (as
might have happened to some when learning about the positive data of
psychedelics on the lives of individuals). When we go into any given situation,
we have expectations. Your brain rewards your ability to predict the future,
including the behaviors of others, by releasing good-feeling chemicals in
different regions of your cortex. When you fail to predict correctly, however, the
opposite of tranquility occurs: You feel negative emotions, and your perception
is flooded with all the accompanying sensations. Your assumptions failed you,
meaning that a useful predictive perception wasn’t within your space of
possibility. Thus, the negativity that you feel upon entering a conflict (with
yourself, with another, or with the world) is simply a reflection of the fact that
what is happening now is not consistent with what you think “should” be
happening; that is, the meanings from the present don’t match past meanings.
The interesting thing is that when you are consciously aware of your
assumptions going into a situation, even if your assumptions aren’t met, your
emotional reaction will be less severe because you weren’t blind to the forces
that were shaping your perception in the first place. My past colleagues at
University College London have discovered an equation that roughly predicts
whether someone will feel happy or not in a given situation.66 The basic key to
their finding is whether the event matches expectation. What is more, the
expectation of an event matching your expectation alters your level of happiness
in anticipation of the event itself… that is, until you actually experience it. It’s in
the anticipation of an event that happiness itself often lives. This is because
dopamine—a neurotransmitter in the brain correlated with positive feelings,
among many other things—spikes in anticipation of a positive event, and then
decreases during the event itself.
 To make the point… to put the challenge of creativity into a more immediate
biological context… consider seasickness. We sometimes get nauseous on boats,
especially when we’re below deck. One reason is because there is a conflict
between two of our senses. As our eyes move in register with the boat around us,
they effectively tell our brain: “We are standing still.” However, because our
inner ears are receiving signals that indicate movement, they tell our brain:
“Nope, we’re definitely moving.” So there is a conflict between the vestibular
and ocular systems in your brain. Your brain has entered uncertainty. A key
response to internal biological conflict is nausea, which is the brain’s way of
telling the body, “Get out of here!” To remove the conflicting uncertainty, you
can either lie down and close your eyes (thus removing the battle of
contradictory information), or you can go above deck and watch the horizon, so
that the sensory input from your eyes and inner ears falls back into a
complementary certainty. Now the world makes perceptual “sense” again, and
your body calms. When your body isn’t calm, however, the stress induced by
uncertainty drastically narrows one’s space of possibility in the pursuit of
maximizing efficiency and sharpening physical responses.
While sea sickness isn’t strictly an emotion, knowing that this is how
emotions work in general is extremely useful. First, it gives you a practical task
when something upsets you, big or small… to ask yourself what was the
assumption that wasn’t fulfilled. This postmortem of a situation, be it
professional or personal, is so valuable because it forces you to look for the
unseen assumption that guided your behavior. Once you see that assumption,
you have the potential for choice.
This means that to truly uncover your assumptions and replace if not expand
them with new ones, you must constantly step into an emotionally challenging
place and experience difference… actively! By challenge, what we really mean
when we say this is that an experience or environment doesn’t match our
assumptions (expectations). But here this emotional challenge is in fact a good
thing, since actively seeking contrast is the engine that drives change (and the
brain). Thus, diversity of experience is a transformative force for the brain
because new people and environments not only reveal our assumptions to
ourselves, they also expand our space of possibility with new assumptions. A
particularly useful way to experience difference of contrast is to travel.
In recent years, there has emerged a growing body of research about the
effects of openness in travel on creativity and the brain. In collaboration with
several colleagues, Adam Galinsky, the researcher whose work with enclothed
cognition we looked at in Chapter 5, is pioneering studies in this new area. In a
study published in 2010, Galinsky, William Maddux, and Hajo Adam found that
having lived abroad was strongly linked to heightened creative intelligence. For
the experiment, which was conducted in France with French college students,
they primed the participants, who had all previously lived in other countries—
that is, had them do an activity that triggered a certain state of mind—in two
different ways and on two different occasions, then asked them to carry out the
same task. In the first prime, participants had to write about an experience in
which they “learned something new from a different culture.” In the second they
had to write about a time they “learned something new about their own culture.”
In both instances, after the priming task participants had to do a word-
completion test similar to the letter-string exercise you did earlier. What was the
result? The participants were significantly more creative when primed with their
multicultural experiences abroad. In other words, their space of possibility took
on a higher dimension (effectively becoming more complex; more on this later
in the book) when drawing on the perceptual history they had gained in another
country. Living abroad had already uncovered many assumptions that structured
their past perception, so they were less tied to their previous biases. In addition,
they were more capable of seeing calcified assumptions as such. How we act
once we unblind ourselves from our biases, however, depends on each
individual’s willingness to deviate and—of fundamental importance—the
ecology that they find themselves in and/ or create.
I find there are often two general responses to living overseas. One response
is to become a more extreme version of oneself (becoming the prototypical
“expat,” who resists the “deviations” of a foreign culture), where one’s original
assumptions become more stable because they are in contrast to differing
assumptions of another culture. There is considerable psychological evidence
that shows when people are placed in a new, uncertain environment they can
often become more extreme versions of themselves.67 A true irony (which, of
course, the brain is full of) is that when presenting people with more and more
rational reasons that their assumptions are wrong, they will hold increasingly fast
to their argument, which quickly becomes more faith than knowledge. We
witness this in the current experience of the climate change “debate.” Note that
while the BBC and other reputable news agencies must offer equal time to any
two sides of the argument, this doesn’t mean that both sides have equal support
for their view.
The other, more enlightened common response to life abroad is to embrace
the (thoughtfully positive, constructive) assumptions of another culture. The
consequence is a space of possibility of higher dimensionality, and thus by
definition one of a greater degree of freedom (i.e., diverse in both the
mathematical and metaphorical senses). I’ve had the immense pleasure of
experiencing difference in others with tremendous positive effect. One of my
graduate students when I was at University College London was from Israel,
where a number of people I’ve had the honor of being friends with hailed from
(along with Scotland, England, Chile, the United States, and others). Despite
spending her whole life up to the age of 22 in Israel, she had never actually met a
Palestinian in any deep way. This was hard to believe for someone like me, an
outsider whose only sources of information about another location are
superficial, but there you go. When she moved to London she—of course—
needed accommodation. It just so happened that the flat in which she found a
room was located in an area of London with a particularly high density of
Palestinians. By coming to London, she was able to experience the assumptions
of the Palestinian community that had been in fact omnipresent in Israel. In
doing so, she redefined what “home” was when she returned, seeing Israel and
its people differently, and maybe even more important, seeing herself
differently. Thus, multiculturalism is a positive attribute, and indeed a necessary
one for any metropolis that wants to encourage innovation, given a certain way
of being (as it isn’t just diversity that matters, but also the ecology of innovation
that diversity inhabits… more on this later). Exposure to a diversity of ways of
being has been shown to increase not only empathy, but creativity itself.68
In another study that Adam Galinsky and his colleagues conducted, titled
“Fashion with a Foreign Flair,” they came away with even more resounding
findings, as they left the lab to examine creativity as it is linked to success in the
professional world of fashion. They studied 21 seasons (11 years) of collections
of world-renowned clothing design houses and concluded that “the foreign
professional experiences of creative directors predicted the creativity ratings of
their collections.”69 That’s right: if the leaders of the company had not just lived
but also worked abroad, they were more creative, and this trickled down to the
culture of the entire company in the same way that a host determines the
demeanor of a party, as does the leader of a company who takes on the
assumptions of leadership. It could be argued that stocking the workplace with at
least some people who have lived abroad makes it in principle stronger as a
whole. The foreign experiences of leaders inside the company will have the most
influence, but at any level, the more elastic the assumptions, the better… and not
only for cerebral tasks but for interpersonal ones, too. A 2013 longitudinal study
published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology showed that when
we “hit the road,” people tend to become more agreeable and open, and less
neurotic. Naturally, being more open increases our chances of espying the
assumptions shaping our perceptions. So…
Be an alien. Strangers in strange lands bring home new brains. This makes it
easier to see assumptions that need questioning, and then actively question them.
Yet there are limitations to the benefits of such globetrotting lifestyles; or
rather, there is a sweet spot professionals residing abroad should strive toward.
Galinsky’s fashion study found that too much international movement, or
immersion in cultural environments too drastically dissimilar from one’s own,
could actually inhibit creativity. This very likely has to do with challenging
situations unloosing stress hormones in the brain, which overrides the free-
flowing electrical patterns of perception associated with creativity in favor of
more urgent, fight-or-flight-style responses. Recall Marian Diamond’s work with
rats raised in differently enriched environments, where the more enriched the
environment the more connected the brains of the rats became. But when the
environment became over-enriched, the brains of the rats actually decreased in
complexity. Deciding on what is “too much” is of course personal. The lesson is
that living and working abroad can be very good, but it’s advantageous to do so
in places where you’re not completely starting from scratch culturally,
linguistically, and economically.
 Not all of us, however, have the opportunity to travel abroad for the pleasure
of revealing assumptions (among others), much less to live and work abroad.
Does this mean that we’ll be outwitted by our competitors who have? No. To
reveal assumptions that will in turn open up the possibility of a new future past,
our travel doesn’t have to be to the other side of the world. If you are willing to
ask why, it can be just as generative for your brain and perception when it is
within your own country, whether in a neighboring state, neighboring city, or
even a neighboring neighborhood. What is crucial is that you are challenged
with contrasting situations and ecologies—and that emotions are provoked—
since these will push you into unfamiliar contexts of trial and error that will then
become recorded in your neural history of responses. You can also travel in your
mind.
As we already know, imagined experiences encode themselves in our brains
in nearly the same way as lived ones, so engaged delusion can offer a substitute
for travel, which might explain the popular genre of travel writing (and indeed
reading in general, since books take us into unfamiliar worlds). As surrogates or
standins for us, the travel writer’s process of revealing his or her own
assumptions becomes our own, and perhaps there is no one better at describing
the often chaotic and difficult, yet often life-affirming experience of travel than
the American-born writer Paul Theroux.
An inveterate adventurer who has ridden the Trans-Siberian Railway, trekked
through Afghanistan, and visited Albania during its civil strife, the entertainingly
grouchy Theroux also writes movingly about not just travel but why we travel:
“The wish to travel seems to me characteristically human: the desire to move, to
satisfy your curiosity or ease your fears, to change the circumstances of your
life, to be a stranger, to make a friend, to experience an exotic landscape, to risk
the unknown.”70 Also he writes, “Delay and dirt are the realities of the most
rewarding travel.”71
So get dirty.
While reading is powerful, we do reveal our assumptions and make new ones
most starkly, and by extension benefit most perceptually, by physically engaging
with the world… by reaching out! This is how the brain most effectively and
lastingly makes meaning and also re-means past meanings. It’s real-life trial and
error, and it’s not only how we uncover our biases. It’s how we actually make
new ones.
Meet Destin Sandlin. He is a missile engineer from Alabama who is married
with two kids. He has infectious energy, a charismatic southern accent, and a
round-cheeked smile he seems rarely capable of turning off. He is also a person
who has done the following things: shot an AK-47 underwater, studied the
physics of a “slow-motion flipping cat,” had a hummingbird eat from a feeder in
his mouth, milked the most venomous fish in the world, analyzed the lip
movements of people beatboxing, eaten goat brain, and recorded the work of
tattoo artists at 32,000 frames per second. Come to think of it, pretty much all of
these things he filmed at an extremely high number of frames per second, and
they are quite astonishing to see. Why has Sandlin done all of this?
The superficial reason is that he has a very popular YouTube science show
called Smarter Every Day, with well over 100 episodes to its name. The real,
deeper reason is that he is a person who by nature and by choice seeks out wildly
diverse life experiences that embody questions, even if surely he’s too self-
effacing to put it this way. He frames it as curiosity about how things work, why
things happen the way they do, and how science can explain the most enigmatic-
seeming things, like why the legendarily steel-stomached Houdini died from a
punch to the stomach, and whether toilets flush in different directions in the
northern and southern hemispheres (they do). All of this is just an elaborate
package for what Sandlin is really doing: adding new experiences to his
perceptual past that constantly reveal his assumptions about the world around
him. He is seeing a version of life that is oriented not toward average
experiences, but toward his personal (thoughtful and thought-provoking)
deviance. In so doing, he changes what is possible in his brain in the future.
In one episode, titled “The Backwards Brain Cycle,” a welder at the company
where Sandlin works specially designed a bike so that when he turned the
handlebars left the bike turned right, and vice versa. Sandlin’s first assumption
was immediately revealed: He thought he wouldn’t have any trouble riding it.
He would intellectually incorporate the reversal into his motor-processing neural
circuitry lickety-split and pedal off. Sorry, not quite. He challenged this
assumption, embodying his questioning as a lived experience in the world,
something that physically happened to him… and it took him eight months to
learn to steer the bike, riding it every day for five minutes. (It took his young son
only two weeks, thanks to his young brain’s neural plasticity, which results in an
ability to incorporate feedback (read: experience; trial and error) faster than
adults.) What I particularly like about Sandlin’s work is that he too believes in
living (and thus becoming) the thing you’re talking about. Thus Sandlin has
taken the bike with him for talks in places as far-flung as Australia, and nearly
every time someone cockily volunteers to ride the bike onstage… then falls. In
this way, Sandlin’s way of being and space of possibility shifts that of others. By
sharing his lived questions that uncover assumptions, and making people
physically participate, he changes their brains and perception. He gives them
potentially new reflex responses.
Sandlin’s experiment with the Backwards Brain Bicycle challenged a bias he
had trained into the “physics” of his neuro-muscular cells to the point of
invisibility: steering left directs me left, while steering right directs me right.
This was such a deeply entrenched assumption—an attractor state if there ever
was one, a rolling wave whose momentum seemed impossible to stop—that his
conscious awareness could only unseat it after considerable and time-consuming
effort. It was a “body assumption,” but it all came from his neuroelectrical
network, since there is no universal law that says how bikes must steer (no
matter how intuitive). He uncovered the reflex arc that past experiences had
given him, and the behavioral limitations this imposed on him. More than this,
he was also able to embody new assumptions: In a strangely exciting moment at
the end of the “Brain Bicycle” episode, Sandlin goes back to riding a “normal”
bike for the first time in eight months. Or rather, he tries to go back.
Sandlin carried out this stunt in Amsterdam, one of the most bicycle-friendly
cities in the world, and bystanders were clearly puzzled by this adult who
appeared to be riding a bike for the first time. What was really happening, of
course, was that his brain was struggling to reroute its currents from the newly
attained neuroelectric attractor state for how to ride a bike back into its old more
conventional reflex arcs. But then he did it. “It clicked!” Sandlin said, suddenly
able to ride again, though still with quite a bit of wobble. “It clicked!”… a
physical manifestation of a behavioral self-criticality when one small movement
seemingly led to a big effect in the moment. He was suddenly able to institute
useful new assumptions in his brain only because he had rediscovered the old
one and its meaning. I wonder whether with more time and work the new
assumption could coexist with what at first seemed a set of contradictory
assumptions, and he could become “ambidextrous” at riding the two types of
bikes. Most likely he could, instituting more dimensions (and coexisting,
contradictory-seeming assumptions) in his perceptual network.
Sandlin never could have trained his brain to go from A to B… namely, to be
fluent in these “dual” perceptions… if he hadn’t forced himself to physically
engage with the world, which allowed him to see the unseen forces shaping his
perceptions. From this he was able to challenge the assumptions… as we learned
to do in the previous chapter by examining how great ideas are “made”… and
then embody the new assumptions through the feedback inherent in empiricism
and trial and error. In doing so, the novel experience he created for himself
opened up invigorating new possibilities (and the requisite connections) for him
and his brain, as well as for anyone else willing to risk taking a tumble.
Key to Sandlin’s discovery of assumptions and both the creation of new ones
and thus the expansion of his space of possibility was his bike. A novel
technology is often key to the process of deviation. By “technology,” I don’t
mean the latest app or device (though I’m not necessarily excluding them either).
Most technologies make what we can already do easier, faster, or more efficient,
which of course is useful. However, the best technologies—I argue—are those
that impact our awareness of previously unseen assumptions, as well as change
and expand them, with a resulting change in our individual and collective spaces
of possibility. Hence, the greatest innovations tend to be those that show us new
realities, like the microscope, the telescope, the MRI, the sail, theorems, ideas,
and questions. The best technologies make the invisible visible.
Such technologies open up new understanding, transforming the ideas that
we have about our world and ourselves. They not only challenge what we
assume to be true already, they also offer the opportunity for a new, larger, more
complex set of assumptions. They push us further from being the center of the
universe toward the more interesting and interested perspective of an outsider.
The point about perception here is that if you want to get from A to B in your
life, whether you’re transitioning personally or professionally, the first challenge
is to accept that everything you do is a reflex grounded in your assumptions. So
we need humility. Though change never happens without it, by itself that is
never enough. Once we come to accept that all we see and do is grounded in our
assumptions, we are nonetheless usually blind to the reasons why we do what we
do. The next challenge to deviation, then, is to discover what your assumptions
are. This usually involves other people who are foreign to you, hence the power
of the diversity of groups. The next step is to complexify your assumptions—and
thus redefine normality—by actively engaging in the contrasting nature of the
world. That’s what Destin did, as did the people who wore the feelSpace
magnetic belt and acquired heightened powers of navigation.
Another key for seeing differently is not to move through the world
comfortably. Whether literally or metaphorically, in one’s body or in one’s
mind, we need to get dirty, to get lost, to get swallowed by the experience. This
could sound clichéd, but it’s nonetheless true… and necessary to reiterate loudly,
given the speed of the sprint in which much of the Western world is running
toward health and safety. (We’re rushing so fast toward mitigating against short-
term risk that to stand still in our society is to become relatively risky!) Don’t be
a tourist of your own life, taking your assumptions with you wherever you go.
Leave them in the lift at JFK or at Terminal 5 at Heathrow. And when you get to
wherever you’re going, buy groceries, ask for directions in the local language,
navigate an unknown transit system, try to remember how to get back to your
hotel rather than referring constantly to your Google map. And through it all,
listen to your emotions so you know whether you’ve traveled far enough. Only
in this way will you be able to discover the mishaps and misfits that all-inclusive
luxury vacations rob you of. Only then will you discover the invisible in yourself
by assuming you might be wrong about your “knowledge” of things. Seek new,
more generalizable assumptions through real-world engagement in concert with
your delusional powers, and in doing so, you will alter the probabilities of your
future reflexive responses by increasing the chances of beating the kurtotic
biases that past experiences have given you. This is how you institute new and
better assumptions and “travel” to new perceptions. In short, don’t shift…
expand!
But once you have unblinded your assumptions, experimenting with new
ones is not an easy process, and our very own evolution often steers us away
from it. Our brains want to avoid it, even if the results will be generative for us.
This brings us to the second biggest challenge to creativity: we are afraid of
the dark.
CHAPTER 9

Celebrate Doubt

Darkness. Few things frighten us more. The fear it creates is a constant in our
existence: The living darkness of our bedrooms after our parents turn out the
lights. The pregnant darkness beyond the glow of the bonfire as we listen to
“spooky” stories. The ancient darkness of the forest as we walk past deep
shadows between trees. The shivering darkness of our own home when we step
inside wondering if we’re alone.
Darkness is a fundamental, existential fear because it contains all the fears
that we carry with us in our brains—fears both real and imagined, engendered
from living life and from the life lived in stories, from culture, from fairytales.
The more we are in the dark, the more there is to fear in the dark: hostile
animals, bone-crunching falls, and sharp objects that will draw blood; muggers,
rapists, and murderers; and the imagined creations that aren’t even real but
frighten us just as much: evil spirits, mythical beasts, and the flesh-eating
undead. Darkness is the embodiment of the unknown, and this is what scares us
more than anything else: knowing that we don’t know what dwells in the space
just beyond. Not knowing if we are safe or unsafe, if we will feel pain or
pleasure, if we will live or die. Our heart thuds. Our eyes dart. Our adrenaline
courses. The unknown “haunts” humans. To understand why this is, we must go
back in time and look at how this fear made us who we are, and how it helped us
survive. This is our evolutionary past, and it explains why creativity often eludes
us even when we know how simple the process is. It also explains why asking
why and unseating bad assumptions can be so difficult.
Imagine our planet as it was nearly two million years ago, in particular the
deadly, unpredictable expanse of East Africa, from where we all originate. Great
tectonic shifts have caused the landscape of a once flat, forested region to
radically transform into a dry, mountainous topography of peaks and valleys,
lake basins and plateaus. It is a rugged world of scarce and scattered resources
(food, water, tool-making materials) that made our genetic forebears come out of
the trees, and in doing so become bipedal—and thus they have not disappeared,
as other related species have before them. There were still various types of
hominids competing and evolving on this harsh landscape, braving a changeful
climate full of other dangerous animals, among them hippopotami bigger than
our modern-day ones, wild pigs nearly as large, and vice-jawed hyenas. But only
one species of the hominids would survive: humans.
This was the environment we evolved in—that our brain and our perception
evolved in. It was Earth long, long before law and order. It was a highly unstable
place in which we had very limited knowledge of sheltering, feeding, and
healing ourselves. Humans weren’t yet the “masters of the planet” we are today
(though true “master” living systems like bacteria and cockroaches will be here
long after we are gone). Simple illness killed, as there were no medicines or even
the imaginable possibility of them. The world was a hostile and erratic place—
the epitome of uncertainty, with the future cloaked in “darkness.” In such a
context, not being able to predict was a very bad idea, and predicting was a very
good idea. If you failed to predict where a close water source might be, if you
couldn’t predict which plants to eat and which not to, if you couldn’t predict that
the shadow “over there” was something that could actually eat you in time… it
was too late. Certainty meant life. Uncertainty meant death. To not “know” was
to die.
Throughout evolution, it has been harder to stay alive than to die. As a matter
of fact, there are simply more ways to die than to not die. When you are sitting
in your community, sheltered and protected, where everything is momentarily
predictable, the last thing you want to do is say, “Hmmmm, I wonder what is on
the other side of that hill?” Bad idea! It seems obvious that the probability of
dying just suddenly increased considerably. Yet what might be true for the
individual is not necessarily true for the group or species. It is because of that
“mad” individual that the group has a better chance to survive in an environment
that is dynamic—by learning what dangers or benefits are on the other side of
that hill, and perhaps discovering new spaces of possibility that the group hadn’t
known existed. Thank God we have such seemingly pathological people out
there… the deviators (i.e., “seemingly” to the normal… who are the average,
and, by definition, non-deviating).
For fish it’s the same. In schools of fish, the ones that stray away and find
food are usually the same ones that are first to get eaten. In the end they benefit
the whole school, even if they are sacrificed in the process. A diverse ensemble
—the full orchestra—is essential in a world like ours that is always changing!
Indeed, it is common knowledge that diversity is essential for systems to evolve.
Our research on evolving artificial life systems has shown that diverse
populations are more likely to find the optimal solution than a less diverse
population. What is more, they were more likely to exhibit more “contextual”
behavior (i.e., conditional behavior) when they evolved in uncertain
environments (where there was a one-to-many relationship between stimulus
and reward) relative to unambiguous environments (where there was a one-to-
one relationship between a stimulus and reward). Their neural processes were
also more complex. For instance, they evolved multiple receptor types in their
artificial “retinae,” which is a prerequisite for color vision, when the light stimuli
were ambiguous. These findings are consistent with the view that contextual
behavior and processing are born from uncertainty.
Overcoming uncertainty and predicting usefully from seemingly useless data
is arguably the fundamental task that the human brain, as well as all other brains,
evolved to solve… hence why existing in uncertainty is exactly what our brains
evolved to avoid. Living systems in general hate uncertainty. This is why a fear
of the dark appears not just in humans but across all simian species, as it makes
us tremendously vulnerable.72 It’s not simply the literal darkness that we try to
avoid, but also the fear we feel when stepping into the uncertainty of both literal
and metaphorical darkness. In contrast (yet deriving from the same perceptual
principle), rats fear not the dark, but the light. As nocturnal animals, they feel
more certain and less threatened amid darkness, since in darkness they have
shelter from being seen.73 For them it is the light, and not the dark, that is
uncertain. How amazing! So all living systems (individually and collectively)
evolve and learn their own particular “darkness,” as well as a deep, active
resistance to that particular uncertainty, just as each living system evolves
physiological responses for dealing with unavoidable uncertainty. These
responses are visceral and physical, and point up the way brain and body are
very much one when it comes to our perceptions and their ability to limit
otherwise natural creativity.
 Our brain has evolved two general strategies when presented with the fear of
uncertainty. One of them is anger. Have you ever seen a furious traveler yelling
at a hapless gate agent in an airport? They are often doing so because they’re
dealing with the inherent uncertainty of travel; they don’t exhibit much
innovative thinking or compassion in dealing with the situation, because their
brains have entered a state that prevents them from doing so. Anger’s effects on
our perception are in a sense a cure for fear arising from uncertainty.74 Anger
tends to make us feel wholly justified in our perception of what is true, which is
a very powerful perceptual delusion of certainty. This process is supported by
the drastic physiological changes in your body that accompany anger. Your
muscles tense, and neurotransmitter chemicals known as catecholamines are
released inside your brain and increase the perception of energy, which provokes
the common anger-fueled desire to take immediate protective action. Your heart
rate accelerates, your blood pressure rises, and your respiratory rate also
increases. Your attention locks onto the target of your anger and you can pay
attention to little else. A person who has been angered will often continue to
ruminate long after the stimulus has passed, re-creating the stimulus-response
sequence in their imagination and further reinforcing the causal neural
connections (remember back to the power of imagery on activity in the brain).
Then additional brain neurotransmitters and hormones (among them adrenaline
and noradrenaline) are released that trigger a lasting warlike state of arousal.
And what is interesting and ironic is that the more creative and intelligent the
individual, the more difficult it can be to dissuade them from their anger
response, since they are better at finding seemingly meaningful connections in
what are in fact non-causal relationships, as well as creating internally consistent
arguments that support their erroneous position, thus protecting them from the
uncertainty of ignorance. But although this “natural” response can have
tremendous advantages in certain life-and-death contexts, is it really the best
response in all contexts?
The brain’s evolutionarily foundational drive to increase certainty gives us a
new framework through which to view the Lab of Misfits study on power that
we discussed earlier. In that experiment, we primed the subjects into states of
lower and higher power (and also a control neutral state), which affected their
perception. For example, the group in the lower state saw my color illusions
more strongly than the group in a higher state of power; they were being more
“promiscuous” with contextual influences, in a sense more gullible. But this
gullibility in perception was actually an attempt to increase certainty and power.
The low-power subjects’ sharpened vigilance in perceiving the illusions was a
mediator for the aversive physiological state of uncertainty. Younger people also
perceived the illusions more strongly because children and the young are in a
kind of perpetual low-power state and are very aware of this lack of certainty in
the outcomes they effect (though parents who have had a kid melt down
uncontrollably in a public place would probably aver their own powerlessness;
tantrums are a form of control). Outside the “lab,” not understanding how the
search for certainty drives us—and constricts our space of possibility—can be
tragic, though it also explains self-destructive behaviors, even though they may
feel “logical.” Just ask Donna Ferrato.
Ferrato is a woman with the penetrating gaze of someone who has seen a
lot… because she has. As the fearless photographer whose photos of domestic
violence forced the issue into the public spotlight in the 1980s, she has seen—
and captured—the dark side of human nature up close. Her seminal book, Living
with the Enemy, is a devastating portrait of women under siege in their most
intimate relationships. Her online multimedia project, I AM Unbeatable,
explores the journey toward a new life, observing women who escape their
abusive environments. This process, however, is not simple, and Ferrato has
watched women take years before they finally chose the uncertainty of leaving
over the certainty of continued violence. This tendency tells us about the strange
extremes toward which not understanding our own perception can blindly push
us. It also explains the famous proverb, Better the devil you know than the devil
you don’t.
The drive to mitigate uncertainty underpins much of what we do, feel, see,
experience, choose, and love. This is true to the extent that we even prefer to
experience pain over uncertainty. A recent study by scientists at UCL shows that
the greater the level of uncertainty, the more stress participants experienced.
According to the lead author of the study, Archy de Berker, “It turns out that it’s
much worse not knowing you are going to get a shock than knowing you
definitely will or won’t.” In short, not knowing is more stressing to the system
than having certain knowledge of something bad. Hence, controlling the level of
another person’s sense of uncertainty can be used as a means of control, whether
by governments or even within interpersonal relationships.
This is perhaps why sexual “dis-disclosure” (which is only one form of
transparency) can enhance a sense of closeness in a relationship (and perceived
relationship-satisfaction more generally). And why companies that are in the
business of reducing uncertainty can be incredibly profitable. As the insightful
marketing guru Rory Sutherland pointed out to me, the success of Uber is less
about disrupting the taxi industry (which most ascribe it to be) and more in line
with our own research on uncertainty, in this case our need for certainty about
where the taxi is and when it will arrive. With this perspective in mind, look
around you and you’ll find yourself noticing similar examples. As Rory pointed
out, stress in bus shelters in London was dramatically reduced when Transport
for London installed LED displays telling people when the next bus would be
arriving. Even if the wait was considerable, knowing that it was considerable
made the experience more emotionally tolerable. Similarly, the designers of
Terminal 5 at Heathrow retrofitted an “UP” button in the elevator from the
Heathrow Express platform, even though there is only one direction and only
one floor to which the lift could go! Without it, people would enter the lift and
find no button to push, and then panic. What’s beautiful about this design is that
the plastic button is not actually connected to anything but a light. So, when the
future travelers touch it, all that happens is that the button lights up (and then the
lift does what it would have done anyway). This example also demonstrates the
deep inverse relationship between our fear of uncertainty and agency. When you
feel you have agency (a sense of control—delusional or otherwise), your sense
of uncertainty is also decreased. Designing according to this deep
neurobiological need has tremendous effects not only on well-being but on the
success of the companies that engage in this practice, and thus provides a
fundamental design principle that guides our design thinking when creating
experiences for others (within the context of the Lab of Misfits).
It is clear, then, that the desire for certainty shapes our spaces of possibility,
our perceptions, and our lives both personally and professionally. Usually, this
need saves us. But it also sabotages us. This produces an ongoing tension
between what we might think of as our conscious selves and our automatic
selves. To overcome our inborn reflex that pushes us to seek certainty
(sometimes at any cost), we must lead with our conscious selves and tell
ourselves a new story, one that with insistent practice will change our future past
and even our physiological responses. We must create internal and external
ecologies that… celebrate doubt!
This means the biggest obstacle to deviation and seeing differently isn’t
actually our environment as such, or our” intelligence, or even—ironically—the
challenge of reaching the mythical “aha” moment. Rather, it is the nature of
human perception itself, and in particular the perceived need for knowing. Yet
the deep paradox is that the mechanisms of perception are also the process by
which we can unlock powerful new perceptions and ways to deviate. Which
means that mechanism of generating a perception is the blocker… and the
process of creating perception is the enabler of creativity. Through a
neuroscience-based, intentional engagement with your perception, you give
yourself the opportunity to unveil possibilities in your thoughts and behavior that
might otherwise be unavailable. Yes, our number-one aim is to stay alive. But to
stay alive for extended periods of time requires more than responding in the
moment. It requires adaptation, since the most successful systems in nature are
also the most adaptable. What is more, we want to thrive in every sense. To
achieve this requires taking risks in perceptions, which requires us to be
deviant. To deviate well is hard. It takes commitment, since we’re not just up
against ourselves.
Humans have come to structure their societies around institutions that
provide certainty: courts, governments, police, and, most sadly, our educational
systems (even at the university level), and the processes therein. In politics, the
notion of a “U-turn” or “flip-flopping” is always portrayed negatively. Just think
for a moment how silly this is. Do we really want our politicians—indeed,
anyone—to hold on to what they “assume to be true” in the face of evidence
(and sometimes overwhelming evidence) to the contrary, especially knowing
that what was “true” yesterday isn’t necessarily true today? Or do we want
politicians (and leaders more generally) who embody flexible thinking, people
who are as pragmatically plastic as the brain that produces their thoughts?
Religion also reduces uncertainty for us, which is a principal reason (among
other reasons) why so many billions of brains value so passionately the
assumptions that their unquestioning faiths espouse. A 2014 BBC article
reported that high rates of atheism appear in countries with marked stability,
while places besieged with more disaster-prone natural living conditions usually
have “moralising gods.”75 But the flip side of this security is that religions
replace your own assumptions with theirs, and take it as an article of literal faith
that you will not question them. And, of course, there is that momentum of our
attractor states of neural activity inside our brains (just like our cultural
homeomemes), the inertial force of past meanings that push us toward reflexive
perceptions that are hard to resist.
But embracing uncertainty in order to innovate within it is possible… in fact,
it is essential. Feeling uncomfortable and other sensations of discomfort are in
fact welcome states. They are places to dwell and let perception explore, like a
crowded foreign market with vendors yelling things at you in an unintelligible
language. If you can muster the courage to celebrate doubt enough to say, “Fine,
I don’t know,” suddenly the constricting axes of your space of possibility fall
away, freeing you to construct an entirely rebooted space full of new ideas.
Approaching conflict with doubt is not just possible but ideal. Now that you
know how your perception works, you’re able to understand that you might be
behaving and thinking in a certain way not because it is an expression of your
most creative, intelligent self, but rather out of your physical need for certainty.
So how do we ensure that we engage in creative conflict in practice? Most
essential, we must listen differently… that is, actively observe. Instead of
listening only to help us better defend ourselves, we must listen with the thought
that conflict is a genuine opportunity. And by conflict, I mean this generally,
namely a situation that doesn’t match one’s expectation, hope, or desire, such as
when facing the conflict of gravity for the first time as children, or a view that
differed from our own later in life. The most essential space for learning is in
conflict when in the right ecology. Within interpersonal relationships, that
ecology requires both sides letting go of the idea of a confrontational
conversation… “I’m right and here’s why” (though there are times when this is
an essential position to take, just not nearly as many as we seem to think).
 Imagine what governments would look like using this model… or
interpersonal relationships more generally. Imagine what would be constructed
creatively if one engaged with difference with not-knowing rather than
knowing… entered conflict with questions, and not answers… with the intention
of understanding how this difference might reshape my perception and my future
past. Not only can this approach be an essential way to uncover your own
assumptions… as well as the assumptions of the other, embodying this approach
will change your future past, and thus alter your approach to future conflict.
While this is a radically open and pacific attitude toward fighting, it’s not
saintly. You are being productively selfish, since you are looking for the best
ideas to create more understanding in your life and relationships from inevitable
conflicts that arise.
This is why conflict is in fact as much a part of love as physical affection,
though for most people it’s not nearly as enjoyable. Unlike hugs, kissing, sex,
and other kinds of touch (which also require active listening to be felt
meaningfully), the emotional touch of conflict is often what divides instead of
unites a couple, since it so often leads to the anger axis described above:
bickering arguments and worse. It is an outlet for tensions that arise out of
everything from banal matters like daily logistics and housework, to attitudes
toward weightier matters like ways of being, fidelity, and fundamental world-
views. Yet as most of us know, all matters can become weighty during conflict if
we don’t stay aware of how perception works in oneself, NOT just in the other
person; the pettiest gripes are capable of unleashing the worst arguments, and
the messy axis from fear to anger starts guiding our perception of self and—in
particular—of others. This is because conflict often comes down to your own
assumptions not being fulfilled, which produces emotions that in turn may not
meet the expectations of your partner, producing still more emotions, and so on.
In other words, two people in a relationship never have the same past, never
have the same brain, and thus never have the same space of possibility filled
with the same ideas in the same positions of availability. While too many rarely
question the validity of their own expectations or what they reveal about
themselves (ideally to themselves), conflicts can find resolution when couples
find a (literally) “higher” state of being, loving, and understanding that when
they expand the dimensions of their space of possibility to include the
assumptions of their partners, they co-create a larger, more complex space
wherein both responses can not only coexist, but are no longer in opposition. But
this process of learning through conflict requires patience and care and—of
course—new assumptions about conflict itself.
John Gottman is a psychologist and professor emeritus at the University of
Washington who, along with his wife, Julie Schwartz Gottman (also a
psychologist), has revolutionized the study of relationships. By bringing a
scientific and not just clinical approach to their work with couples, they have
pioneered the gathering of data, as well as a method of meaning making for
identifying universal patterns of behavior that produce either happiness or
unhappiness in relationships. Much of this work they carried out at their “Love
Lab” in Seattle, a studio apartment rigged with state-of-the-art equipment that
tracks the physiological responses of couples that volunteer to spend time there.
The participants are tasked with simply being themselves as scientists observe
and record them, while also taking measures of physical indicators such as heart
rate. Over the years, John Gottman has marshaled the data gathered from
studying couples interacting to design a model that makes him 91 percent
accurate in predicting whether they will divorce or not. Now, that’s an unsettling
amount of certainty.
The Gottmans have identified what they call “The Four Horsemen,” a quartet
of behaviors that almost invariably lead to the downfall of a couple: criticism (as
opposed to simply voicing a complaint), contempt, defensiveness, and
stonewalling.76 The Gottmans have also discovered that creating and sustaining
a happy relationship is much more complex than that, and I would like to argue
that this is because most people… not just those in romantic relationships, but in
any relationship… approach conflict as an essentially unconstructive activity.
We tend to see it as an adversarial showdown in which our only goal is to smash
the other person’s point of view to preserve our own. Nothing constructive at
all… no sense of exploration or entertaining new notions, no openness to
“travel” or new experiences, no eagerness to discover if there are perhaps
implicit and harmful assumptions that need to be made explicit. No questions,
just “answers” that lead to an uncreative, uncaring, unintentional kind of
deconstruction. But what if, instead, we went into every conflict with a
completely different mindset… perceived conflict with very different
assumptions… namely as a chance to discover another’s deviance? Since to
understand another—even oneself—is not to know how one is similar to others.
To love is to love another’s deviance. What makes you you and them them is
how one deviates from the norm. As my partner, Isabel, and I like to say, it’s
about whether two people’s madnesses are compatible. To enter conflict
consciously with doubt as a part of your ever-evolving history of perception is
difficult, risky even, especially if the other person is not entering the conflict
with an understanding of the principles of perception. Thus, in addition to
humility, creativity requires courage because you are stepping into a space that
your brain evolved to avoid.
How do I step into a place that evolution told me is a pretty bad place to go—
the dark of uncertainty—by celebrating doubt? How do I turn all this new
understanding into a way not just of seeing but of being? What is the first active
step to deviation, to questioning my assumptions in order to go from A to B? To
borrow a phrase from an old Bob Newhart sketch that I love…
 I mean this literally. Not slow down, but stop.
As noted in Chapter 8, if you want to go from A to B, then you must actively
engage with the world. But the first step to get to B is to go from A to not-A. To
be in not-A is to be in uncertainty, to experience the stimulus without the
requisite meaning of the past. The key is to choose to look away from the
meanings we have been layering onto stimuli. Stop your reflexive response with
awareness… as one can do when one is able to see the cause of a reflex.
Someone bumps into you on the street. Your first automatic response could be:
What an asshole! That is “A.” But just stop. Don’t go to A. Go to not-A.
Perhaps the person who bumped into me is ill; that’s why they stumbled, and
they may need help. Or they may indeed be an asshole. Don’t know more.
Stopping gives you the chance of knowing less, of halting the perception-
narrowing force of the cognitive biases that we are always trying to confirm, of
taking the jerk out of the knee-jerk and sitting with the meaninglessness of the
stimuli, even if it doesn’t feel meaningless.
When all is “happy,” there is really only one choice: stay with meaning A.
That’s obvious. There really is no choice at all… unless one actually finds
reward in destruction for the sake of it, which, sadly, some do. But for most of us
it’s only when the situation is in conflict that we truly have the chance to exhibit
choice. One might even argue that it’s in conflict that our character is revealed
and created. One option when in conflict is to jerk the leg out, as one always has
in the past. That is a normal (i.e., average) response. But now that you’ve
awareness of why you see what you do, you have another option: to deviate… to
choose not-A… to enter uncertainty. That is where control lives, not in what
comes after not-A, whether it be B, C, or Z. But to look away from the obvious,
from the well-entrenched attractor state is hard. First, you must stop your first
response.
As you begin to do this, you dim the intensity of the influence your current
assumptions have on your perceptions. This is essentially what meditation is… a
mechanism for going to not-A, the goal of which is for you to “empty your
mind” and stem the ceaseless (and often fruitless) flow of meanings. Apart from
helping with amygdala fight-or-flight responses to stress, meditation has been
shown to help people develop more empathic thinking (empathy is nothing if not
a creative process of imagining yourself as another person) and thought patterns
that involve “mind wandering.” A 2014 study at Harvard even showed that an
eight-week mindfulness course increased the gray matter in the participants’
brains, proving that meditation itself is an inner enriched environment that
fosters neural growth.77 In stressful situations in which creativity often loses out
to your fight-or-flight response drives, just stopping actually engages a
different chemical in your brain than the distress-induced cortisol. It releases
oxytocin, which is quantifiably associated with more empathic and generous
behavior (as well as other behaviors). Through generosity and empathy we listen
much more creatively. So, you can actually create better living through your own
chemistry.
Stopping our reflexive meanings is so important because it is the first step
into uncertainty from which we can create new, unforeseen meanings, and in
doing so re-create the meaning of past experiences through the tool of delusion,
which alters your future past, thus in turn altering your future perceptions. Free
will lives, not in going to A, but in choosing to go to not-A. Free will lives in
changing the past meanings of information in order to change future responses.
Free will requires awareness, humility, and courage within the context of
uncertainty.
Several years ago there was a period in my life that was particularly and
continually stressful. The result was a moment in my life when I “crashed”
emotionally and physically. My body entered a state of fairly constant illness:
Headaches, spontaneous numbness, a large number of neurological symptoms.
This is a dangerous thing to experience as a neuroscientist, both fascinating and
fear-inducing at the same time, as you know too much and nothing at all. Each
symptom (stimulus) triggered a series of assumptions and consequent
perceptions, from brain tumors to MS. I went through the lot for weeks, if not
months. Eventually, as there was no clear diagnosis despite the symptoms being
not only psychological but also physiologically measurable, panic attacks
ensued. The associated perceptions were as real as with any other perception.
The sense that I was dying—immediately—was profound. It was so profound
that ambulances would be called, which upon their arrival became a necessary
step from the unknown to the known, and thus the sense of impending death
would pass. So how did I recover and get from A (feeling awful, with phasic
panic attacks) to B (feeling a new “normal,” whatever that is)? Like many, many
before me: by embodying the process of perception and applying the essential
first step to moving in a new direction, becoming aware of my biases… and with
that understanding, stopping the movement in the current direction. I just
stopped my speculative worries. I actively ignored them. And in that suspension
of thinking, new and much better thoughts began to appear. This ignited a new
history for my perception.
When it comes to anxiety attacks in particular, one of the routes… if not the
best route… to shifting away from them is to ignore them. And I mean to truly
ignore them. As the famous psychotherapist Carl Jung said, problems are never
fixed; we only change our perspective on them. In this instance, the change in
perspective was to not pay them any attention at all. Not to try and figure out
their cause, as doing so actually reinforces the meaning, making subsequent
attacks stronger. It was easier to be in A (“knowing” that something was wrong)
than in not-A (I was experiencing a useless delusion). It was difficult to look
away, and as studying attention demonstrates, it is a challenge all humans
experience from a very young age.
When my second son, Theo, was a baby, one day he was sitting in a bouncy
chair on the kitchen table in our Stoke Newington house in London. He was
perfectly happy because suspended in front of him were four highly contrasting
soft toys that were just out of reach. Every time he would bounce in his seat, the
toys would bounce in response, resulting in what initially seemed like endless
enjoyment. There were only smiles and even laughter while I cooked nearby.
But then something changed. He started to cry (not that surprising, as that’s what
babies do a great deal of the time). So I did the obvious thing and made the toys
move again. It drew his attention immediately, and yet he continued crying.
It was sad, but, well… it was also fascinating. I observed rather quickly (yes,
I watched him as he was crying, but his cry wasn’t desperate yet!… one of the
various costs of having a perceptual neuroscientist as a father) that his crying
would slow or stop as his eyes moved away from the toys. But then, as if drawn
like a magnet, his eyes would pop right back to attending to the central toy, at
which point he would begin crying again. He would then try to move his
attention away again, ceasing his cry in the process, only to have his eyes bounce
back again to the central toy, and he’d cry yet again. It was as if his crying was
out of frustration, I thought, taking all of this in. But frustration about what?
That the toy had more power over him than he had over himself.
I realized that Theo no longer wanted to look at the toy, but he couldn’t help
but do so. It was remarkable. He couldn’t stop responding. He couldn’t move
from position A. He wanted to move to a position of not-A, but was frustrated
with his own inability to divert his attention. So after three hours of watching
this behavior, I finally removed the toy and all was well—todo bueno! (Just
kidding: I removed the toys very quickly.)
What does this little personal experimentation on my own child tell us?
While we still know very little about attention (which can be a convenient
catchall for neuroscientists), it seems that the power of attention is not in doing
the looking, but in the ability to stop looking… to look away, to move your eyes
toward the less obvious, to stop a cycle of thoughts and perceptions. This is
because our attention is naturally drawn to things that historically mattered to us,
whether they be as basic as high-contrast objects in the case of young,
developing visual systems (which is like an insect’s visual brain), or stimuli that
were associated with pain or pleasure.
Clap your hands near an unsuspecting person, and they will immediately
divert their attention toward your eyes. At a party, stand next to your friend who
is talking to someone else, and purposefully start telling the person you’re
talking to about your friend, saying their name audibly. Notice how quickly your
friend will either join your conversation, even if you stop talking about them, or
move away, simply because they find it nearly impossible to continue their
current conversation. Or consider the thousands of hours we spend in traffic on
motorways that are not actually blocked by any accident in our lane, but because
the accident in the opposite direction draws the (morbid) attention of the drivers
in the opposing lane. This power to stop is the power of the frontal cortex of
your brain. The point of attention is not in looking toward, or in directing your
gaze to the rational… the things that make most sense statistically and
historically, as in the case of Theo. Rather, the power of attention is in looking
away from the “obvious,” toward the less obvious. The power of attention is in
beginning deviation, and steadfastly challenging your brain to engage the
frontal-cortex-driven inhibition of stopping when needed.
In this and pretty much every other regard, we’re very similar to other
animals, perhaps more than many want to believe. Not only do bees with their
mere one million brain cells see many of the same illusions we see (and see in
ways that our most sophisticated computers are unable to), but birds can think in
abstract ideas, and certain primates get upset if situations aren’t fair. So, too,
with the directionality of attention: Much like other animals that are drawn to
shiny objects, we too attend instinctively to what is shiny (i.e., high contrast both
physically and conceptually). Our eyes move systematically, rarely randomly.
We look at borders between surfaces. We change our eye movements according
to our emotional state, looking more at the foreground when we are in a state of
higher power, more at the background when we are in a state of lower power. If
you’re a woman, you’re more likely to look at another woman’s face differently
than if you’re looking at a man’s (at the mouth instead of the eyes, for instance).
Our eye movements, which are our windows into the world, belie our
assumptions. Thus, to look at the obvious is an obvious thing to do, though each
of us has a different “obvious.” And the narrow focus of what you look at can
determine the meaning of the rest of the information.
 You’ll have by now noticed that in addition to the diamond at the bottom-
right corner of the book, there is another pattern of lines in the bottom-left
corner. Here, I want you to flip the pages. Like the diamond, the bars can appear
to move in two different ways. You can either see the two bars moving left to
right and back again in the form of an X (which is called pattern motion), or you
can see them as two independent bars moving up and down separately from each
other (which is called component motion). It might seem that they flip from one
direction of motion to the other randomly. But they don’t. It has everything to do
with where your eyes are looking. To illustrate this, I want to focus your gaze on
the center of the X, where the two bars meet. When you do this, you will see an
X moving left to right. When, however, you fix your gaze on the end of one bar,
and follow its motion up and down, you will see the two bars moving
independently up and down against each other. What you see is determined by
where you look. This is because, while the entire image might have two equally
likely possibilities, different elements of the same overall stimulus do not. The
space of possibility is determined by where you look, not by the abstract
possibility of the image itself. So what does this reveal?
Fundamental to defining a person or collection of people is not only what
they do (i.e., what they look at), but also what they don’t do (what they don’t
look at). In the brain, for instance, it’s not only the active cells that determine the
nature of what we do, but also the inactive cells, since it’s the overall pattern of
activity that matters. Thus, unlike most animals, we can change our future past
by looking away from the obvious… by going from A to not-A. What we look at
reveals us, but what we choose to not look at creates us.
It’s in looking away that you begin the process of deviating, because not
looking at one thing means your eyes must now settle on something else. It’s
that “something else” that you’ve much less control over, as your brain will now
settle into a new attractor state given the new stimulus combined with your past
history. But at least it won’t be A. Do this enough, and in the future you’re less
likely to reflexively see A, and more likely to see B (or C, or Z). We can
generalize this process: What is true for how we direct our eyes is also true for
how we direct our thoughts. It just takes practice to guide them.
Let’s go back to the flipbook of moving bars now, and do it again. But this
time, you’ll have noticed that there is a dot just above the intersection of the two
bars on each page. I want to you keep your gaze fixed on that dot as you flip the
pages. While you do so, I want to you focus the direction of your attention on
either the junction between the bars or where one of the bars meets the
boundary, just as you did previously with the movement of your eyes. This time,
instead of moving your eyes, move your attention only. Notice how again the
bars will change their direction of motion depending on the direction of what
you attend to—and don’t attend to. What we look away from (and toward)
changes the nature of the information we encode in our brains and the meanings
that we see. Thus, we can shift from A to not-A by “looking away” both
externally with our eyes and internally with our “minds.” We can rewrite our
perceptions through stopping, then beginning anew. Being in not-A… and all
that is required to get there is what I call “ecovi.” But this requires going to a
place that our brain evolved to avoid… namely, uncertainty.
CHAPTER 10

The Ecology of Innovation

We have seen that understanding how perception actually works opens up a

whole new frame for looking at creativity and creation more generally. By
learning why our brain evolved to perceive the way it does, we are able to
engage ourselves with steps that can change the way we see. This approach
illustrates the role of the individual, since we are each responsible for actively
questioning (and the consequences of doing so). But, as I have emphasized
throughout this book, none of us exist in a vacuum. We not only create our
ecology… the environment we inhabit that is constituted not just by the things in
it but also by the interactions between them… we are created by it as well. Thus,
to truly learn how to deviate, we must learn how to innovate our perception
within the world with which we interact. It is here that we can discover a new
way of being for ourselves and others, and construct a place that ties together all
of the perceptual principles we have examined.
At the end of a dimly lit hallway on the fifth floor of the Valley Life Sciences
building at the University of California, Berkeley, stands a nondescript door. It
promises very little intrigue or surprises as to what’s on the other side: a
janitorial closet, perhaps, or a storage room full of office supplies. In reality,
behind the door is a both strange and revolutionary space within four large
adjoining rooms. A latticework of struts and supports hangs from the ceiling,
connected to electric cords, wiring, and flood lamps. Computers and video
cameras abound, along with engineering tools and circuit boards. Most striking
of all, on nearly every surface sprawl small robots that look like insects or
reptiles… not just a bit like them, but remarkably so, down to the joints of the
limbs and the sinews of the bodies. When I step inside a narrow room and ask a
Ph.D. student what brought her here, she answers simply, “Cockroaches.”
This is the Poly-PEDAL Lab of the biologist Robert Full. PEDAL stands for
Performance, Energetics, Dynamics, Animals, and Locomotion, yet even these
five words strung together in such a geeky-cool way don’t tell the “full” story of
Full’s lab or its wonderfully eccentric and stunning achievements. Full and his
sundry collaborators, from undergrad college students to renowned experts in
wildly diverse fields, have excited scientists and nonscientists alike with their
discoveries. The Poly-PEDAL Lab has solved the millennia-old mystery of why
geckos are able to stick to walls: by using van der Waals forces, an incredibly
complex rule of intermolecular attraction and repulsion. They have answered the
question of why cockroaches can flip around at top speed and keep moving
upside down: hind legs with adhesive hairs that hook onto a surface and let them
swing into a “rapid inversion.” And they have uncovered how weaver spiders
move efficiently across mesh surfaces that have only 90 percent of the surface
area as compared with solid surfaces: through a foldable spine that allows them
to spread contact onto different parts of their legs. The Lab has asked some of
the greatest and (in hindsight) most insightful questions about the most
inexplicable phenomena of natural biomechanics… and answered them, too.
Their answers aren’t just interesting in and of themselves; they also reveal a
powerful principle at work.
Full’s goal isn’t just to unlock these mysteries. As the Lab’s credo states
about the critters whose bodies they model, “We do not study them because we
like them. Many of them are actually disgusting, but they tell us secrets of nature
that we cannot find out from studying one species, like humans.” Full’s goal is to
apply these “architectural secrets” to human endeavors through advances in
robotics, thus reverse-engineering (up to a point) facets of the creatures whose
movements he and his labmates study. He has had nearly unprecedented success
doing this, essentially creating the new field and design philosophy of biological
inspiration, as well as other subfields such as terradynamics (how things move
on surfaces, as opposed to aerodynamics) and robustness (how structures
achieve their most robust form). One innovation that came out of his lab is
RHex, a cockroach-inspired robot that can maneuver terrain better than any
previous experiment in bionics. While all its applications are still being
explored, it is already beginning to change the literal frontlines of conflict zones.
The American military has deployed it in Afghanistan, reducing violent
encounters by sending in RHex as the robotic vanguard to clear areas before
soldiers go in themselves.
In spite of the parade of breakthroughs his Poly-PEDAL Lab has produced,
Full himself is a humble, unprepossessing man who values collaboration over
ego, and exploration over prestige. With a full head of silky white hair and a
charismatic walrus-esque mustache, he isn’t driven by usual ambitions. He is
like a brilliant, caring uncle, as gentle as he is wise and experienced. As he was
one of my supervisors when I was an undergraduate at Berkeley many years ago,
I know this firsthand. “It’s in the curiosity,” says Full.
As the head of the lab, I suggest Full’s job is not… as was once the case for
leadership… to have all the answers. Rather it’s to have the good questions.
Thus, Full’s first job as a leader is to create a sense of caring (often through
inspiring wonder—though there are other routes), since if you don’t care, you’ll
not have the necessary drive to face uncertainty and the momentum of
neurological and cultural attractor states discussed previously. Second, is to ask
Why? of just the right assumptions (which are often hidden from sight)… and
then How? or What if ?… and then to observe… and finally to share… and
then to repeat this process again and again. He’s clearly extremely good at this.
Asking great questions that disrupt is not enough, however. A great leader must
also create a space for others to step into uncertainty and to flourish, since he
understands that the success of the system is determined by those he leads and
how he leads them into uncertainty. This is why he chooses to work with people
who will welcome the ways he disrupts conventional thinking in order to create
new opportunities. (And he doesn’t get defensive when faced with people who
disrupt his own thinking… on the contrary.) Periodically, he enables the
collective to just stop. As such, he has created a lab based on the solution
evolution itself has given us to uncertainty.
What is this solution?
Answer: It is a way of being that can profoundly change how we live… a
way of being that applies to most things innovative and pathbreaking, a way of
being that is defined by five principles that form the backbone of this whole
book:

I. Celebrating uncertainty: to approach “stopping” and all the questions this

stopping spawns from the perspective of gain, not loss.
II. Openness to possibility: to encourage the diversity of experience that is
the engine of change, from social changes to evolution itself.
III. Cooperation: to find value and compassion in the diversity of a group or
system, which expands its space of possibility—ideally, combining
naïveté with expertise.
IV. Intrinsic motivation: to let the process of creativity be its own reward,
which will enable persistence in the face of tremendous adversity. and
 which will enable persistence in the face of tremendous adversity. and
V. Intentional action: ultimately, to act with awareness… to engage
consciously, from the perspective of why.

Remarkably, principles I through IV are defined by one word: PLAY. By

“play,” I don’t mean so much a literal activity as an attitude. It’s about
embodying playful qualities in how one approaches a problem or situation or
conflict.
The Oxford natural philosopher and primatologist Isabel Behncke is a
specialist in the science of play, with an emphasis on adult play, specifically
among bonobo apes. She has lived with bonobos in the Congolese jungle for
extended periods, closely observing their habits and behaviors. Bonobos, along
with chimpanzees, are our closest living relatives. But unlike chimps, they are
unique in that they are highly sexually promiscuous (including male–male,
female–female, adult–infant, etc.). These adapted traits are useful; sex is used as
a language to regulate conflict. But while bonobos are well known for their
sexual promiscuousness, Behncke discovered that play is in fact more frequent
in their primate society.
Humans are very much like bonobos. It has allowed us to engage with the
world and learn because in play uncertainty is celebrated. If you take away
uncertainty, the game ceases to be “fun.” But fun does not imply “easy.” To play
well is hard (as any Olympian can attest).
What is more, unlike most activities to which we humans and other species
such as bonobos devote our energies and hard-earned calories, Behncke and
others have shown that play does not have a post hoc nature (post hoc means that
what matters is the results the activity produces, not the process itself). Post hoc
activities include hunting (result: food), working (result: ability to pay for food
and shelter), and dating (result: sex and/or romance). But play stands out as a
unique pursuit in that it is intrinsically motivated. We play in order to play, just
as we do science to do science. It’s that beautifully simple. The process is its
own reward.
A further, crucial aspect of play is that we often do it with others, not just by
ourselves. When you play with someone, it has a lot to do with who you are and
who I am, be it playing racquetball, poker, or sex. But I might play differently
with someone else than I do with you. If, however, I played with you as if you
were someone else, or with just a generalized idea of what play is, this would
distort and limit the things we could authentically do together. Yet many
misguided brands speak to all customers as if they were one average customer,
so that in the end they basically speak to no one. Treating people like the average
playmate, then, ignores deviance. Research on play has shown that it is a way of
safely learning other people’s deviance. Play is a way of engineering experiences
that reveal assumptions that we then question, unleashing unpredictable results.
The underlying premise of Behncke’s work is that play makes your system more
complex, increasing the likelihood of inspiration.
While play enables one to step into uncertainty and thrive, play alone isn’t a
complete tool, as much as a childlike approach to life can be generative for the
brain. To survive during evolution, innovation needs more than creation. We
also need principle V: Deviate with intention—not just for the sake of deviance
(though there can be value in that, too, in terms of a random search strategy).
This is essential, and we have a clear example of its significance. What do you
get if you add intention to play?
SCIENCE.
This word will evoke in you a series of assumptions… most of which, I fear,
won’t be terribly positive. You’re likely to be thinking that science is about the
sterility of lab coats and unimaginative facts. You might be thinking that science
is a methodology defined by and through measurement, and is thus the ultimate
in information harvesting. This is not what defines science. Nor is science
defined by its “scientific method,” which is only one expression of a way of
perceiving and acting that is in fact much deeper. To be sure, the skills needed to
design and run a good experiment are essential and can be very difficult indeed
to learn and hard to run well: There are few things in my view as elegant or
beautiful as a well-designed experiment, in the same way that there are few
things as compelling as a beautifully executed painting, song, or dance. But just
as with art, so too with the craft of science. The craft of the medium doesn’t
necessarily define it.
Evidence that this way of being has practical application is found in a class of
ten-year-old children (including my son Misha) who in 2011 became the
youngest published scientists in history after conducting a study of the
perception of bees. By applying these principles of science (“play-with-
intention”), the Blackawton Project, as it was called, challenged the world of
science as the editors of many, many journals rejected the children’s work (even
the largest funding institution for public engagement in the UK… the Wellcome
Trust… declined to fund the project, arguing that it wasn’t likely to have a large
enough impact). Yet the program (we call the iScientist programme, which was
devised with the brilliant British educationalist David Strudwick), created a
wholly new space of possibility that had not been explored before… the process
of innovation that unites creativity and efficiency rather than pursues them
independently.
Together, creativity and efficiency define innovation. Innovation is this
dialectic that is present throughout nature and is echoed in a number of other
dualistic tensions that run through this book: reality versus perception, past
usefulness versus future usefulness, certainty versus uncertainty, free will versus
determinism, and seeing one thing but knowing another is actually the physical
truth. This elemental dialogue between creativity and efficiency is embodied in
the brain itself, which is perhaps the most innovative structure in existence.
The human brain is balanced between excitation and inhibition. This is
essential, since it keeps your brain at the point of maximizing its ability to
respond: too much inhibition, and stimuli will not propagate properly, yet with
too little inhibition a stimulus can create an excessive closed feedback loop that
results in an epileptic fit.78 Increased use changes the balance of excitation, and
as a result the inhibitory connections must grow in order to maintain the balance
(and vice versa). This enables the brain to maintain a state of readiness in any
environment… to be able to respond to change in uncertain contexts… and this
is why the brain is effectively matching its complexity to its context. The brain is
adapted to continually redefine normality… to constantly look for a dynamic
equilibrium. It creates a discursive, ongoing process of growing and pruning,
growing and pruning. This is simply the brain moving back and forth between
creativity and efficiency, and between the increasing and decreasing of the
dimensions of its search space. Recently, neuroscience has discovered two larger
cellular networks. One is the “default network” that is more active when the
other is resting and “free-thinking.” The connectivity of the default network is
more vast and inclusive. The other is more directed and efficient, and tends to be
activated during focused behaviors.
To simplify things into a straightforward rule of thumb, think of it this way:
In an ecology of innovation you can frame creativity as saying yes to more new
ideas. Recall Chevreul and how he solved the mystery of the Gobelins fabrics. If
the king had given him just one month, or even one year, to figure out the
problem, he would have failed. The imposition of efficiency would have
curtailed his lengthier yet necessary investigations. But since Chevreul had a
timeline that allowed him to eliminate erroneous explanations (for example,
regarding the quality of the tapestries) and explore more counterintuitive
explanations, this eventually produced a tremendous and historically important
jump forward in our understanding of human perception.
While we love to worship “geniuses” like Chevreul, Steve Jobs, and their ilk,
sometimes the efficiency of saying no is also essential. Thus, efficiency in and
of itself is not a bad thing. Saying no, yet not establishing a Physics of No, is its
own creative art. The people who know how to properly implement and work
with exploratory creative minds are essential, like editors who set deadlines for
writers and help them tell their stories in the most compelling fashion possible
(as Arron Shulman has done for me in this book). After all, sometimes efficiency
will save you more than creativity. Think of the bus coming at you and how
useful your fight-or-flight response is at that moment. You don’t want to ask
yourself, “Hmmm, is there a way I could see this differently?” Because the
answer is, yes, there is. But you probably shouldn’t try. The wise decision is to
get out of the way as efficiently as possible. This gives you a better chance of
surviving—which is always the point.
All things being equal, then, a system that consumes less energy (literal or
financial) in completing a task will outcompete another system that consumes
more, whether in the context of biological evolution, business, or personal
development. As such, a focus on efficiency has been the approach of most
industries.
Even schools and universities… the very places that are meant to be there to
inspire different ways of seeing at the individual, cultural, and social levels…
have come to be incubators of efficiency. This is, of course, deeply ironic:
“Businesses” are there explicitly (even legally) for themselves, not for the people
who are their human manifestation, and the companies are (mostly)
straightforward about this. So we—to a certain extent—accept it (except in
situations where we experience hypocrisy; the brain is very sensitive to
authenticity). But surely the point of schools and universities is to be hothouses
of great questions. Great questions can’t be “produced” on an assembly line. I
can’t say to my Ph.D. student or postdoctoral fellow, “I’d like that discovery by
Tuesday, please!” Nor can the value of a discovery be quantified in terms of
dollars (at least not in the immediate future), making it wholly wrongheaded to
attempt to maximize creativity by ratcheting up efficiency. Yet this is precisely
what happens with creativity in education: it gets crunched into a competitive
economic model. This is like seasickness: a contradiction of the senses, resulting
in not just intellectual but also human costs. Incredibly sadly, in 2014 a professor
at Imperial College London committed suicide. His university was threatening to
remove him if he didn’t bring in large sums of grant money.79 While we can’t
speculate about what other struggles he may have privately faced, universities
are increasingly pressuring faculty to achieve goals that have little to do with the
true aims of education: teaching and expanding our intellectual and scientific
universe. Surely there needs be one place in the world where one purposefully
runs a deficit, simply because creativity is inefficient in the short term (but not in
the long). But instead that kind of deficit spending seems to be reserved for the
least creative of our institutions (governments). And yet, running on the
efficiency model of businesses (even without the financial infrastructure of a
top-flight business) will reduce the creativity arising from universities. As a
result, the work will shift toward translational research, with ever fewer
foundational discoveries that will reap rewards in the long term being made. It’s
interesting, then, that consistent with this perspective, a paradigm shift is
occurring between universities and businesses, wherein more creative work is
starting to come from the latter, in the names of Google, Facebook, Apple, and
the like.
(end of rant)
Given such a ubiquitous focus on maximizing efficiency, it is worth asking
whether there is a best environment for this practice outside of life-or-death
scenarios. Biology—including neurobiology—gives us an answer: a competitive
environment. Competition is a great motivator and process for eliminating “the
fat”… the superfluous, the redundant, the outdated. But evolutionarily speaking,
there is a lot of death in competition. As a business model, competition means
that a company will have a culture of termination, in which people are fired for
not producing certain results according to a given timeline. While such an
approach can spur extreme effort under pressure, it is exactly the wrong way to
promote creativity… not just because exploration is not prioritized, but also
because employees’ stress levels will narrow their spaces of possibility.
Even at the level of the brain we see evidence of maximizing efficiency
through competition. As you may recall, 20 percent of the energy that your body
consumes is spent (or should be spent) on this 2 percent of your body mass. So,
brain cells cost a lot in terms of the biological material required to make the
trillions of connections, as well as generating electrical activity along those
connections, hence the energetics of simply thinking (which doesn’t necessarily
mean creative thinking). This is why your brain tries to minimize its number of
brain cells and reduce the number of times each fires. The process plays out like
this: Either you have lots of brain cells and each one fires only once in your
lifetime, or you have only one brain cell that fires continuously throughout life.
It turns out that the brain employs both strategies. It balances the number of cells
with requisite activity by producing growth factors that compete for limited
resources of energy. Those that are the most active… or, more accurately, are the
most active concurrently with the cells that they connect to… are more likely to
survive. However, the amount of available resources isn’t so limited as to
eliminate redundancy in our neural circuitry, which is essential for creativity and
resilience.
Think of the cerebellum of a bird as compared to the wiring of an airplane.
The bird’s cerebellum controls its motor behavior, as does the cerebellum in
mammalian brains. In the case of the bird, it enables coordinated wing
movements that are essential for fighting the laws of gravity. In contrast to
ground-dwelling creatures like ourselves… who, if their motor coordination
fails, might fall a few feet at most, with the requisite cuts and bruises… a failure
of the bird’s cerebellum would be catastrophic. As such, you might imagine it
was very efficient indeed. This is true. But it’s also true that a bird’s cerebellum
has a tremendous level of redundancy of connections: it is theoretically possible
to remove over half of it without causing the bird to tumble to earth!80 Compare
this to the most sophisticated war-plane, which is possibly one of our most
efficient creations. Cut just a few wires in its control system, or damage one of
its wings just a small amount, or even have a bird fly into one of its jet engines,
and hundreds of millions of dollars will crash to earth. The system, like most
businesses (and indeed much of modern-day life, from sports and athletes to
education), is highly efficient but not at all creative, and as such is not adaptable
—i.e., innovative!
To create a successful ecology of innovation we must look to our own
biology and tap into our very own neural nature that balances efficiency and
creativity. This is why neither always being creative nor always being efficient
is the end-all route to success. The two qualities must exist in dynamic
equilibrium. What is more, the system must develop.
The process of development is the process of adding dimensionality, called
complexification, which my lab and others have studied for many years. It’s very
intuitive: start simple (few dimensions), add complexity (more dimensions), and
then refine (lose dimensions) through trial and error… and repeat. Development
is the process of innovation incarnate.
In 2003, when Apple began work on its revolutionary smart-phone, they were
sure that they wanted to use new “multi-touch” technology for the screen, which
would radically change the user interface experience. But design of the phone
itself was still unclear. One approach was called “Extrudo.” The case was made
out of extruded aluminum, with a fatter middle and tapered sides. Not totally
satisfied with the Extrudo, however, Jony Ive also spearheaded another
approach, the “Sandwich,” which combined two halves of specially designed
glass. Ive and his team were complexifying, simultaneously entertaining the
possibility that both of these assumptions were good to help them more
creatively discover which, in fact, wasn’t. In the end, neither turned out to be the
chosen solution. Instead, Ive decided on a previous prototype that they’d had all
along… a third assumption that his team wouldn’t have chosen if they hadn’t
first complexified by designing the other two.81

This complexification model is effectively the Silicon Valley model, though

it has its roots in biology, since development, learning, and evolution are the
iterative processes. So, “innovative” Silicon Valley are companies doing nothing
new. They are basically doing what slime molds and brains do all the time.
There are a few important tricks and strategies to ensure that complexification
succeeds, though, which David Malkin and Udi Schlessinger’s inspired Ph.D.
work in my lab revealed.
Thinking back to modeling assumptions as a network, we have shown that
the more complex the network, the more likely the “best” solution will exist in
your search space of possibility, simply because the large number of
interconnections increases the number of potential solutions (as shown in the
bottom image here). This is in contrast to very simple systems that have only a
few possible solutions (as shown in the top image). The problem is that complex
networks don’t adapt well (this is what we call low evolvability). So while the
highest peak is more likely to exist in your space of possibility if you’re a
complex system, an evolutionary process is unlikely to find it, which creates
quite a conundrum: complex systems can help us adapt, but aren’t very
adaptable themselves.

So how do you find the best solution?

You develop.
Start with one or a few dimensions, then add more. The image here shows the
progressions of the same system as it develops. David Malkin and I call it an
“uber-landscape,” which is a unique idea that adds the element of time to a
search space (which are usually modeled as static). Notice how the system starts
off very simply… with a single peak. But as time progresses along the z axis, the
number of peaks steadily increases as more elements are added to the system,
until it reaches its most complex state at the other end of the plot of the graph,
where there are roughly five peaks. What we found surprising is that when one
grew the network in this way, the best solution in its most complex state was
also the solution that had the highest probability of being discovered… when at
each step the complexifying system tried to minimize its “energy state.” This is
in contrast to our search for the same solution when the system started in its
complex state in the first instance. It’s as if, when starting from the simple state,
we were able to walk along a ridge from lower to higher dimensional space. In
doing so, we were able to walk past the troughs of a lower-dimension system by
adding a higher dimension, which is called extra-dimensional bypass. The
findings suggest a counterintuitive, but essential, and admittedly speculative
principle: Adding what we call “noise” (i.e., a random element) to a system can
increase the adaptability of that system. If true, then—though highly speculative
—there could be genes that are there not because they encode any particular
phenotype, but because they increase the dimensionality of the search space full
stop… and are then lost (or silenced) once the system settles on a new peak.
Imagine what this would mean in an organization where the only function of a
particular person is to increase the dimensionality of the space, thereby bridging
the poorer solutions… suggesting that sometimes…

Noise in a system is good!

Having said that, it is very important when adding new dimensions that you
balance the rate of periodic success with the rate of complexification… while
minimizing the energy state of the system at each level of complexity. In other
words, you wouldn’t want to add updates and upgrades to a fundamentally
crappy cell phone; you should only do this for one that is already strong at its
core. This mirrors how the brain develops. When it grows, it is adding
connections, and therefore complexifying itself: adding dimensions to the space
of possibility, and forging new pathways of neuroelectric connectivity. But it’s
doing so according to feedback on what worked and didn’t work in the past. The
internal patterns of activity that worked (the useful assumptions) are reinforced,
and those that didn’t work (the no-longer-useful assumptions) are lost. As you
may recall from Chapter 3, this is what your cells do in the neuromuscular
junction, creating redundancies that the system then prunes away, only to then
complexify again, with the result that the number of connections is actually
greater overall, but organized usefully. What is more, Udi Schlessinger also
demonstrated in the lab that the process of useful complexification has its own
useful progression. Rather than just add a random connection, it was more useful
to duplicate the system (add redundancy) with an additional small step. This
process is something that deviators embody not just in their cells but in how they
live their lives… complexifying their existence with new experiences that
complexify their assumptions, one small step at a time… and in turn alter
perceptions, not just in their minds but also in the physical world, only to then
follow this process of complexification with a process of consolidation. Each
update, then, is a “riff ” on the last version, not a rethinking of the whole thing.
This cycle of increasing and decreasing complexity IS the innovation process
that is endemic to life itself, and the underlying route to resolving its inherent
conflicts.
So, if you own an iPhone or any other Apple product, there are always new
modifications, new updates, and new models. This is not just about marketing as
such, but a result of the questioning process that Ives pioneered through the
design group at Apple—the governing idea that, even though the company has
an unequivocally great and successful product, they must keep asking
themselves, Why can’t we make this better? They can and do, continuing to
unloose new little “jokes,” as embodied by each new iteration of the iPhone that
improves on the last.
In addition to brain development, evolution is also a great example of the
successful tension between these two poles. All species go through exploration
(creative) periods, in which different traits appear, like feet in the first organisms
that left water billions of years ago, or like the opposable thumbs that developed
in some primates, including humans. There have been periods of massive
expansion of the diversity of species (increasing dimensionality), followed by
the exploitation (efficiency) period in which those with useful new traits survive
(decreasing dimensionality) while others are selected out, leaving only the most
robust organisms.
We can also see this cycle reflected in the movement of Earth in relation to
the Sun, and how humans evolved to be in synch with their environment. If our
species’ existence is itself an ecology of innovation, then the balance between
wakefulness and sleep is at the heart of the process, where wakefulness creates
connections and sleep consolidates them. The same goes for our development,
first as babies and then as children. When we are young, this critical period for
our brain is plastic… as it’s establishing many of its future assumptions and
attractor states. This is the tremendous advantage of our species being born “too
early,” as small beings that can’t survive on our own for many years, with brains
that are underdeveloped. Because of this, the human brain adapts itself to the
environment in which it happens to find itself. It is for this reason that
humankind, more than any other species, has been able to occupy such a
diversity of niches in nature. Then, as we age, this formative period slows and
change becomes more difficult, as our repeated experience forms deeper
attractor-like states (though of course we can still creatively change… that’s why
you’re reading this book!). Yet in allowing you to be creative, these “detours”
enable you walk along ridges around the valleys between different peaks in a
fitness landscape. Once you end up on the higher peak, you can discard that
extra dimension and swing back toward the efficiency side of the paradigm.
Innovation (adaptation), then, is like a spiral: when you’re in the cycle usefully,
you never return to where you were. Instead, you return to a similar but higher
place.
A useful metaphor is the tonic scale in music. When you’re at middle C, as
you move up through notes D, E, and F, you are moving further “away” from C
in that the signal is shifted to higher frequencies. This is akin to the creative
phase. But as you continue still further up the tonic scale, through G, A, and B,
you start moving perceptually “back toward” C, but one octave higher. This
spiral nature of innovation illustrates that creativity—ironically—is a key route
to efficiency, and efficiency can lead to creativity. Like all things in nature, it’s
the movement between them that matters in order to create an ongoing process
adaptable to a changing world.

This is why in business and other cultures that attempt to foster adaptation
(which should include universities), the key is to never be “phase-locked,”
wherein one pursues a single idea with maximum efficiency without movement.
In nature, as in business, such systems are quickly selected out of the population.
The app called Yo was a single, highly specialized and very efficient messaging
system that reduced communication to a single word: “YO!” The significance of
the message varied with context. It took the founder only eight hours to code, yet
it quickly won over hundreds of thousands of users. Nothing could compete with
it. It was Malevich’s White on White of messaging platforms, taking the genre to
its ultimate conclusion. But had it not complexified, it is likely to have quickly
died, or even more likely to have been subsumed by another, more general
platform. Indeed, the most successful companies follow what I call wedge
innovation. They start off “sharp,” with a highly focused product that enables
them to outcompete others in their space (by being efficient with an original,
creative idea with which they started). But then they widen their use-case and
thus the company’s contextuality, increasing what they do and why they do it.
Kodak is the classic example of a company that did not do this and died because
they didn’t expand their wedge (the pioneering of print photography for
everyday people) to start a further twist to its spiral by expanding into digital
photography before their competitors, although they had the opportunity to do
so. Apple is an example of the opposite… a spiraling, forward-thinking
company.
As a company grows (and indeed as life grows), it needs to have different
spirals simultaneously underway with a variety of products at a variety of time-
scales (frequencies). For example, when Google reaches the efficiency phase of
one of their products… that is, it works well, like the Google search engine or
the Chromebook laptop… the company is already in the beginning phases of
other innovations, like self-driving cars. This could be considered the point of
GoogleX, Googe’s moonshot research and development initiative, which is to
create the creative ideas that others then make efficient (which I’d suggest is the
same process that a lab follows… as exemplified by Bob Full above). The result
is that some ideas will become innovative and others will die, like Google Glass
.. not because of the technology, but because Google didn’t seem to consider one
fundamental attribute in the design: human perception/nature. Google doesn’t
appear to have taken into account the importance of eye-gaze in communication.
We move our eyes not only to obtain information but also to signal our state of
mood and the nature of the relationship in which we are engaged. For instance, if
I’m looking at you and you look down, you may be signaling a sense of
subservience or insecurity. If you look up, you can be signaling just the opposite.
 The fundamental, biologically inspired point is this: adapt or die.
In business and in life we must always be in a cycle, while constantly being
aware of an equation Bob Full uses to evaluate the interplay of efficiency and
creativity in his lab. “The probability of success of the project,” he says, “is the
value of the project divided by how long it takes. You’ve got to balance those
things.” To ensure that a high probability comes out of that equation, a simple
model emerges: One must lead with creativity and follow with efficiency… and
repeat, not the other way around and not in tandem (unless via different groups).
“Blue-sky thinking” is important at the beginning of a project, long before
the deadline looms, just as gene mutations are important for a species before a
life-or-death scramble for resources occurs, and just as Picasso did hundreds of
studies for his masterpiece Guernica before ultimately painting the final canvas.
If you start with efficiency, however, you confine your space of possibility
before you have had the optimal amount of time to rearrange it repeatedly to
reveal the best available ideas. This is why editors don’t edit every sentence as a
writer works, but read chapters or the whole book after the writer has had his or
her exploratory period. (The best editors help writers find a balance between
creativity and efficiency.) This is why Goethe wouldn’t have burned a whole
twenty years on his obsession with color if he had given himself a limit of, say,
ten years to organize his thoughts on the subject, instead of the open-ended
timeframe he had for his overly exploratory book.
Alternating cycles of creativity and efficiency are what the most successful
living systems did (and still do), and this is the process that Silicon Valley/tech
culture has effectively rebranded as their own. The key for making this work is
figuring out when to analyze feedback from the ecology. Companies with quick
feedback iterations for apps that have potential but are far from perfect… like
the first versions of the dating app Tinder, the traffic app Waze, or the real estate
app Red Fin… have an advantage in being able to “code-switch” rapidly from
efficiency to creativity and back again, and thus best serve their product and
what their consumers are telling them. They are empirically seeking the best
solutions and exploring the peaks and valleys of their fitness landscape of ideas.
As such, a collateral necessity of this process, according to this way of framing
things, is “failure.” The success of certain startups that have embraced this
approach has led to all the recent hype around catchphrases like fail forward and
fail better. These make for good mottos, yet their essence has been around since
long before the tech community. They’ve discovered science.82
But no failure is actually taking place in such a model if done well. In science
as in business—or as it should be in business, though the issue of revenue is
always present—failure is when you don’t learn anything, not when you
disprove a hypothesis (which means you learned). So, for instance, the Silicon
Valley mottos—Fail Forward is either wrong or, well, wrong: Either it’s wrong
because there is no failure in a properly designed experiment, and thus the very
idea of failing is the wrong approach to the craft of science; or, Silicon Valley is
wrong in its concept of failure, since to move forward in science is to learn and
therefore isn’t a failure at all. This view is at the heart of any and all ecologies of
innovation. So maybe Silicon Valley needs some new mottos: Learn… Move
Forward… Experiment Well… (not nearly as catchy).
What modern tech culture does understand very well is that the process that
produces true innovation, success, and emotional fulfillment is not seamless.
There are conflicts. There are delays. There are errors that have consequences,
like the painful falls Ben Underwood took while he was learning how to “see”
again. These disheartening bumps feel awful (and this should be acknowledged
as such). But conflict can lead to positive change (if in the right ecology), since a
true ecology of innovation shouldn’t produce seamless results, and the brain
itself again tells us why this is.
The human brain doesn’t strive for perfection. We are wired to find beauty in
the imperfect. Our brain is not only drawn to certainty, it is also drawn to the
“noise”—the imperfections that create difference—and of course you’ll
remember that our five senses need contrast in order to make sense of
meaningless information; otherwise it stays meaningless, and as you experienced
yourself with the microsaccades self-experiment, we go blind! Take, for
instance, the playing of a piano. What is the principal difference between a
machine playing the piano and an expert human playing it? Why is it that the
machine-based piece is aesthetically unpleasing? It sounds cold and “soulless”
because—ironically—it is perfect. There are no mistakes, no hesitations, nothing
that gives a sense of spontaneity and the universal human need and desire to be
constantly adapting. In short, your brain evolved to find what is naturally
beautiful, and what is natural is imperfect. This is why the process to innovate
does not need to be perfect, and neither does the result.
It’s how you are imperfect… how you are DEVIANT… that matters.
This spiral process of moving between creativity and efficiency is inherently
imperfect because the “spaces between” are by definition zones of transition,
which in biology go by the term ecotome—areas of transition from one kind of
space to another, whether between a forest and neighboring meadow, the sea and
the beach, or Neanderthals and humans. Ecotomes produce most biological
innovation, but they are also where the most risk is involved, since as we all
know, transitions bring uncertainty: the transition from youth to adulthood, from
a familiar home to a new home, single life to married life (and often back again),
childless life to parent life, working life to retired life. The key nuance is that
innovation moves within the “space between.” It is movement between that is
innovation: to be innovative is not to live at the edge of chaos, but to be at the
edge of chaos on “average.” What this means in practice is that you must know
which phase you’re in at any given moment. This awareness should also extend
to making sure that efficient people have been placed in an efficiency role and
creative people in a creative role. If you get this wrong, you’re likely to get
everything else wrong in the innovation process. You have CEOs to guide the
vision of a company, not COOs, whose job it is to make sure that vision gets
implemented. The greatest innovators are rarely individuals, but rather groups
that embody this tension between creativity and efficiency. In particular, one
potentially powerful pairing inside an ecology of innovation is the novice and
the expert.
“Undergraduates are kind of our secret weapon… because they don’t know
what can’t be done,” says Robert Full, referring to the “naïve” college students,
sometimes young men and women not even twenty years old, who don’t know
what they’re not supposed to believe is possible. “I would say really our major
breakthroughs have been done by undergraduates. It was a sophomore to whom I
said, ‘We have to measure the force of an individual hair of a gecko that you
can’t see or hold. If we did that, we could test how it might stick.’ And she took
that literally!” The undergraduate found an ingenious way to actually measure
the gecko hair, which Full hadn’t thought could be done. “She discovered that as
a sophomore. I couldn’t in good conscience put a graduate student on that. She
just came in and said, ‘Oh! I measured it.’ I said, ‘What?!’” Ignorance is more
than bliss—it can be achievement.
In my own lab, I tell students not to initially read in their discipline. I much
prefer they just do stuff naïvely, to begin their own search process, which will
inevitably spin out later on and require them to hunker down into a specialized
efficiency mode, which their Ph.D. work will eventually require of them anyway
in the end. So it’s that pristinely unspecialized quality that I hope they’ll
preserve as long as possible, because it means they have a totally different set of
assumptions than their “expert” professors (such as myself), who actually end up
learning from them, as I so often do. In fact, while diversity of groups is
essential for creativity within an ecology of innovation, not all diversities are the
same: some kinds of diversity are better than others. In the Lab of Misfits, we
typically explore a diversity of experts and naïfs (who are not ignorant, only
inexperienced). This is because experts are often poor at asking good questions,
because they know the questions they’re not supposed to ask. Yet almost any
interesting discovery comes from not asking the “right” question… from asking
a question that seems “foolish.” This is why experts can be relatively uncreative,
but are instead efficient. The right kind of expert, however… one who embraces
a way of being that is defined by play with intention (i.e., science)… can
nonetheless recognize a good question when asked. And yet they themselves just
can’t ask it, which is really quite remarkable. Naïve people, in contrast, can toss
out disarmingly good questions because they don’t know what they’re not
supposed to ask. The flip side is they also don’t know what constitutes a good
question.
The point is that we need experts and novices together because they form an
essential dyad. Creator types don’t always know where they are going to go or
what it will mean (if they are truly creators, that is, which means they are
deviant). They often need a “doer” to help them, and recognize which idea is the
best idea. Experts, on the other hand, are more prone to “tunnel vision,” until a
novice comes along and asks a question that suddenly turns the tunnel into a
wide-open field. Perhaps the most celebrated example of such a novice is
Einstein, who was, relatively speaking, an outsider to academia. Not
professionally taught, he was naïve to the questions he wasn’t supposed to ask.
Of course he became the expert in physics, but without ever losing his naïveté.
Herein lies an essential point.
It’s possible to—like Einstein—maintain both expertise and naïveté inside
oneself. In the Poly-PEDAL Lab, for example, where biologists work with
physicists, and often neither understands the other’s work very well. Full says
that the people coming from different fields “are naïve to the other’s field.”
Roles constantly shift, since Full is the expert to his undergrad and grad students,
but a naïf when working with, for instance, mathematicians. Recognizing
people’s plurality, and which role they play in any given situation, is key.
“Somebody can be brilliant,” Full says, “but that doesn’t mean they know
anything about biology.” This is simply to say that for innovation we need
diversity of group, which includes the “group” inside each of us. We must
each foster our own internal collective. This creates an ecology of innovation
with built-in contrasts. And groups bring us to leadership, which is
fundamental to any ecology of innovation.
What defines a good leader? Enabling other people to step into the unseen.
Our own fears about what can happen in the uncertainty of that unseen place,
however, often lead us—and therefore others—astray. Our protective nature can
cause us to constantly plug in metaphorical nightlights for our children, because
we think we should illuminate the space for them. We need to lead kids into the
darkness so that they learn to navigate it themselves.
When each of my three kids was two years old and doing what two-year-old
children do, I gradually came to understand that when they were in the dark they
wanted to find where the walls were—often by running full speed into them.
When they went to school at Blackawton in Devon, England, Dave Strudwick,
the wonderful head teacher at the time (who was also instrumental in the
Blackawton Bee Project described earlier) would say to the parents, “Here, the
children are allowed to climb trees” (amazing, really, that he needed to say this,
since saying it explicitly implies that some parents would rather send their
children to a different school than let them climb trees). Like Dave as the leader
of a school, as a parent my role is not so much about turning on the lights for my
children, but about letting them run in the dark (to explore), while providing
walls that keep them from running too far, and letting them know with certainty
that when they hit a wall and fall down they will be picked back up, since what a
two-year-old wants is to both explore and be held at the same time (as does a
teenager, and as does an adult… all of us). In this way, they came to define the
architecture of their space of possibility (and how that space necessarily
overlapped with the space of others around them… in this case me, their father).
This requires giving children the freedom to go, and the discipline and wisdom
to know when to say stop, not because their transgression triggers one of your
own fears, but because they are doing something that would actually harm them.
Much like the movement between creativity and efficiency, parenting is about
letting children learn how to move between go and stop by building their own
history of trial and error, not by adopting yours.
This means, as the world becomes increasingly connected and thus
unpredictable, the concept of leadership too must change. Rather than lead from
the front toward efficiency, offering the answers, a good leader is defined by
how he or she leads others into darkness—into uncertainty. This change in
leadership style is manifest in the most successful companies, the best labs, and
even the best medicine.
Nick Evans is one of the United Kingdom’s leading eye surgeons. Every day
he works with people who are at risk of stepping into a perpetual darkness. As
with any person who is suffering from an early illness, a tremendous stress arises
from the uncertainty of the condition. To lead these individuals well is not to
provide them with more data about their condition and symptoms—an approach
called the information deficit model, in which the aim is to convince by
providing more measured data. (This is the approach rationally used by most
climate scientists—but to their detriment—when engaging in the public domain.)
Rather than provide information, Nick deals directly with his patients’ fear and
stress arising from the uncertainty of their situation through the process of
compassion—by treating them as individuals who need to understand the why, as
well as the how.
A primary component of good leadership is the willingness to give…
unreservedly. In the case of Bob Full, his giving drives the success of the “lab”
as a whole, as well as the individuals therein, which naturally is the goal of its
leader. “Almost every day I give up my best idea,” says Full, meaning he
regularly passes his insights about biomechanics on to his students and
collaborators instead of hoarding them. “This is fine because then I select people
who can take it further. When I look out I still see my curiosity finding out the
answers.” Sometimes these answers appear while students are still in his lab, and
other times many years later. Full sees it as all the same cross-pollinating
ecology, just spread out over time and space. Passions and the discoveries
transcend the individuals involved.
A lab should be like family. A lab, as in any caring relationship, works well
when people feel taken care of and safe to experiment. Trust is fundamental to
leading others into the dark, since trust enables fear to be “actionable” as
courage rather than actionable as anger. Since the bedrock of trust is faith that
all will be OK within uncertainty, leaders’ fundamental role is to ultimately
lead themselves. Research has found that successful leaders share three
behavioral traits: they lead by example, admit their mistakes, and see positive
qualities in others. All three are linked to spaces of play. Leading by example
creates a space that is trusted—and without trust, there is no play. Admitting
mistakes is to celebrate uncertainty. Seeing qualities in others is to encourage
diversity.
I would take this even further and say that the greatest leaders, whether
knowingly or just intuitively, lead from an understanding of perception—
knowing how to work with the human brain and its evolutionary origins, rather
than against it. And of course, leaders know how to communicate this to the
people they are leading. A good leader thinks in shades of gray… but speaks in
black and white.
The greatest leaders possess a combination of divergent traits: they are both
experts and naïve, creative and efficient, serious and playful, social and reclusive
—or at the very least, they surround themselves with this dynamic. In the realm
of parenting, a good parent sees the naughtiness of the behavior but the quality
of the person. A good teacher creates the freedom for the student to see (as
opposed to constraining them in what to see), but also sets conditions for the
process of success. The greatest leaders are compassionate, are courageous,
make choices, are creative, are communal—and we add the sixth fundamental
quality, which is that they care about their mission; that is, they have a strong
intention. Whether in a parent/child relationship, romantic relationship, or
corporate relationship, creating an ecology of innovation requires knowing the
why of a relationship, and even knowing the why of an individual (how they
define themselves). In the case of a father and daughter or a romantic couple,
that why is love (a love that they define for themselves). For a company, the
why might be defined by the company’s “branding DNA.” This is the element
that isn’t questioned, while other things are. This isn’t to say that it can’t be
questioned, only that to go from A to not-A, you need a purchase, a base, in
addition to the ability to forgive, and thus the knowledge that things will still be
OK even when you step into darkness and your brain inadvertently produces a
less-than-useful response, something that inevitably happens in life. New
research on the science of forgiveness has shown that it is not only good for the
brain in enhancing cell growth and connectivity, but for the body as a whole.83 A
key component of practicing forgiveness is, of course, forgiving yourself when
you need to. From a practical standpoint, forgiveness is forgetting an old
meaning. It’s the act of just stopping, of going from A to not-A… of “ecovi.”
It’s why “failures” can lead to successes.
Every person embodies the dialectics/movements/tensions of perception that
we have explored in this chapter. You are an expert and a novice, you are
creative and efficient, you are a leader and you are led, and so contain a
community within. The imperfections such a complex process creates are
inevitable, along with flat-out screwups. But the deeper mistake is not trusting
that your brain will reward you for stepping into the dark of uncertainty,
especially when we do it alongside others… within the ecology of innovation. It
is here and here only that we see differently and deviate, both as individuals and
together. Leaders too must create physical spaces of deviation, since place and
space are essential to human well-being. In this technical age, we seem to forget
that the brain evolved in a body and the body in the world. We will never escape
that essential fact, and thank God this is so!
I wrote much of this book in my home: a narrow, 200-year-old, four-story
brick English townhouse in Oxford, England, that Isabel and I call The Cove.
We conceive of it as a sheltered space for pirates (and non-pirates) to be
different versions of themselves in all their plurality, even if our certainty-driven
perception tries to convince us we’re each a unitary whole. We have arranged
and furnished the different spaces in our Cove to reflect the brain’s movement
between the two poles of creativity and efficiency, as well as the fact that spaces
strongly affect our perceptions while we are occupying them. For instance,
dimmer light increases creativity, whereas brighter light improves analytical
thinking.84 Ceiling height improves abstract and relational thinking, and lower
ceilings do the opposite.85 A view of generative landscapes improves
generativity, whereas mild exertion temporarily improves memory and
attention.86 The Cove embodies these ideas by having each room have a
different “why,” which is essential for interior design and architecture. What is
more, in any space it is also essential to have noise—spaces that are not
predefined… ambiguous spaces that enable the brain to adapt. More than this,
The Cove embodies an attempt to care—the desire to take active agency in
creating a way of being that enables us and others to thrive within our misfit
brains. We all must engineer our own ecology of innovation, at home and at
work, both in the spaces we create and through the people with whom we
populate them. Because your brain is defined by your ecology, the “personality”
of the space you inhabit will necessarily shape itself accordingly.
Now that we know what constitutes an ecology of innovation, it is up to us to
create one (or more than one) ourselves, wherever we see fit. Our jobs can be a
lab. Our families can be a lab. Love can be a lab. Our hobbies can be a lab. Even
our most banal daily routines can become a lab. These are all simply ecologies,
in that what defines them is the interaction between the different parts, one of
which is ourselves. Yet none of these spaces are by nature necessarily
innovative, especially if they are prone to obeying the Physics of No. It is up to
us to make them innovative, and by now I hope you understand why this is so
essential for a fulfilled life: Doing so will enrich your brain, and new
possibilities will open up for your perceptions, and this enhances your life itself.
A BEGINNING

Why Deviate?
With Deviate, my goal was for you to know less at the end than you thought you
knew at the beginning. I wanted to foster courageous doubt at the deepest
level… the level of your perceived reality. By communally joining reader and
author in the same process of creating a new perceptual past, I aimed to create
new perceptions in the future. My brain now has different reflex arcs than it did
when I began writing this book, and yours should too, now that you’ve finished
reading it (although it’s questionable whether those new arcs are the ones I
intended to create). What we both share from here forward is only the beginning
of a brain-based understanding of why we do what we do, and why we are who
we are. This shouldn’t lead to a new fixed way of being. The world is in flux,
and what was once useful is likely to change, maybe even tomorrow. What I
hope it does lead to, then, is a new plastic way of being (like the brain) in which
you are now always able to see yourself see.
 Through your own brain’s seemingly miraculous ability to let you hold multiple
realities in your mind, you can reshape your perception with perception itself. By
bringing informed intention to this process, you can see yourself see yourself see
differently.

Because we now know that our perception enables us to experience life out there
usefully. This is a tremendous gift earned over the cost of eons of evolution, years of
development, and moments of learning through trial and—in particular—error (since
form follows failure, not success). The embodiment of perception inside our brains in
the experience of objects out there is the reason we feel we are seeing reality, although
our perceptions themselves, as we know now, aren’t reality. Everything you see
—everything—exists in only one place: in here. Inside your head. Everything you
experience is only taking place inside your brain and body, constructed in “the space
between,” arising from the ecology of interaction between you and your world of
others, and in the space between you and the world of yourself.

It doesn’t feel this way because we project perceptions that were created in the space
between (i.e., arising from interactions between things) onto stuff out there. Thus, a
red surface may appear one meter in front of you, but in fact it couldn’t be closer…
the red of that surface is inside you. It’s as if our eyes and all our other senses
 combine with the rest of our brain to create a video projector. The world out there is
really just our three-dimensional screen. Our receptors take the meaningless
information they receive; then our brain, through interacting with the world, encodes
the historical meaning of that information, and projects our subjective versions of
color, shape, and distance onto things. In this sense, the ancient Greeks were close to
the metaphysical truth with the emission theory of vision propounded by Plato and
others, which claimed that we saw by way of streams of light that flowed out of our
eyes.

Our perceptions are the feedback onto our perceptions, creating a self-reinforcing
narrative, albeit an effective one for survival, and one that makes life livable. What
you perceive right now is a consequence of the history of your perceptions that led to
this point. And as soon as you perceive it, that perception too becomes part of your
future past, thereby contributing to what you will see in the future. This is why free
will lives less in the present and more in the re-meaning of past perceptions in order to
change your reflexive perceptions in the future. All these meanings, including the
meaning of ourselves and other people, are projected out there, just as we project
attributes onto water, surfaces, and other objects, which we see as having different
meanings in different contexts. Of course, when the other object is another human
being, this process is much more complex, if not the most complex in nature. Your
brain can only sense their stimuli (their sounds, their reflected light, their movement),
not their meaning of self or their perceived meanings of you, since you can never be
inside their head.
 Instead, we project everything we perceive onto the world, including the
world of others: their beauty, their emotions, their personalities, their hopes, and
their fears. This isn’t a philosophical position; this is a scientific explanation that
I hope fundamentally changes the way you look at your thoughts and behaviors,
and the thoughts and behaviors of others. While what you perceive about another
person is indeed in reference to your interactions with them, your perceptions
still take place internally to you, though they arise from the dialectic space
between you and them. This means that their personality is in a very literal sense
your personality transposed. Their fears are your fears transposed. Yes, people
do exist objectively… just not for us, ever. Likewise, other people’s perceptions
of you are exactly the same. You too are created as a function of them. You
contain all the personalities, fears, and colors of others you perceive.
We feel so deeply connected to other human beings—and we are deeply
connected to other human beings—that it can feel frightening, perhaps even
somehow cheapening, to know that they are just figments of our brain and body.
So when I fall in love or have a profound or meaningful experience with others,
is it really a Matrix-like dream inside my brain? In a sense, yes, but just like with
a surface, with people there is an objective constancy that transcends their
ambiguities that the brain must interpret.
This is their why.
In our search for certainty in an inherently uncertain life, we’re often trying
to find the constant in other people, and also in ourselves. In much the same
way, we look for the invariant aspects of an object, such as its reflectance
properties, which in color vision is called color constancy. We’re effectively
looking for character constancy in people, so that we can predict their behavior.
Through prediction we feel familiarity, and in familiarity we feel secure, since to
predict in evolution was to survive. In security, we are able to engage in the
active vulnerability that creates trust and lets us feel love and be loved. It is
possible that it is this consistency, this elusive constant that deviates from an
average, that we are trying to touch in others… what we might call their soul.
But this constant that others possess isn’t a normative thing… it’s their personal
deviation.
The connections we feel with other people are the way our projections
interact. So what we need to teach our children and each other is the ability to
“just stop” when listening, not only while in conflict but always—in order to
listen differently. Listening is the diminishment of the answers we project
onto the world. It lets in the possibility of the question, the possibility that
through questions my assumptions might come to map onto your
assumptions, which is when we feel “connected.” Or, alternatively, it reveals
where our assumptions conflict, giving us the opportunity to be affected and
enriched by spaces of possibility divergent from our own. The barrier to
accepting the full humanity of others is often a lack of awareness of our own
humanity, since our overriding impression is that what we see, hear, and know is
the world as it really is. But we don’t, which I hope inspires compassion. Indeed,
this has been my primary motivation in writing Deviate… to inspire compassion
through scientific understanding, and in doing so create the possibility of the
great things that compassion (and humility), when combined with courage,
creates.
By understanding how thoughts, feelings, and beliefs are intrinsically relative
to one’s physical, social, and cultural ecology, one can better understand the
source of coherence and conflict within and between individuals. By re-seeing
the process through which we are shaped by our communities, and remeaning
our historical experiences, we feel a stronger sense of skepticism and, through
this, also a sense of belonging and connectedness… and thus courage and
respect for ourselves and all things and people around us. This conception of
communities encourages us to be still more humble, as it illustrates that all of us
are defined by a collective ecology. So choose that ecology well, because your
brain will adapt to it.
In fact, now that you know why we see what we do, to not enter conflict with
doubt is to enter with ignorance, since intelligence is to not keep repeating the
same behavior in the hope of a different outcome. At the heart of “seeing
yourself see differently” is a rational reason for courage… the courage to occupy
spaces of uncertainty. When my daughter Zanna was a child and would come to
me and say she was scared to go on stage and dance, or my sons Misha and Theo
go and play on a new team, or when Isabel followed bonobos in the jungles of
the Congo, or my mum went to nursing school with five kids at home, or my
father started his own business with little support, or my deaf great-grandmother
crossed the sea to an unknown world on her own… my goodness, what a
collection of “bad” ideas. So I completely agree with them. It is scary, and
rightly so. Writing this book was scary, too. Doing anything that might result in
utter failure is scary, and the more public that failure, the worse the fear, since
we evolved a “social brain” that gives us the need to belong. Thus, to embark on
what might result in failure is objectively a bad idea. When all is good around
you, why on earth would you want to see what is on the other side of the hill?
What an utterly bad idea, since—remember—there are more ways to die in the
world than there are to survive. Yet remember those pathologically courageous
fish who leave the safety of the school, risking everything but finding food?
Each of us has each kind of fish inside us. So hearing the stories of Isabel in
the jungle or seeing my kids embarking on new experiences in spite of the
tremendous possibility of failure… that is inspiring. We can also find
tremendous inspiration in elderly people who have remained open. For a young
person to do something that might fail, for a twenty-something to “fail forward”
in Silicon Valley, is one thing. Relatively speaking, there’s not as much to lose
(though it may feel otherwise). However, when you’ve had the experience of
life, of actual failure, of responsibility for many others, and you know the real,
tangible cost of failure, but step into uncertainty anyway, that is truly amazing.
That is inspiration incarnate. We all know these older people. For me, a clear
personal example is a man named Yossi Vardi, who is one of the leading
technology investors in Israel… but who is also so much more than this. He
brings together the interested and interesting from around the world in his
incredibly playful Kinnernet meetings, which embody the ecology of innovation
that challenges assumptions, or in the school he supports for underprivileged
children, which challenges the status quo of governments, and even the
assumptions of age. Evidence is the fact that in his mid-seventies he is one of our
favorite guests at Burning Man. And yet too often we distance ourselves from
people of his age, sometimes because they reveal to us our own assumptions and
biases, and even our humanity. Yet they are so often the ones who enable us to
powerfully deviate, if we were to just give in to listening.
Research has shown that when it comes to a sense of well-being, it’s difficult
to beat the neurological effects of giving. This isn’t to say that all behaviors
aren’t selfish. They are, in that they are directly (for the most part) aimed at
increasing our own sense of value, which is a deep neurological need. I’ve
argued in this book that nearly all of our perceptions, conceptions, and behaviors
are in one way or another linked to uncertainty… either a move toward it or,
more often than not, a move away from it. The deeper question, then, is how
much value one adds to others in the genesis of one’s own value. Might this be
where we have choice? If we don’t have free will in the moment… as what we
do now is a reflex grounded in a history of meanings, this means that free will
isn’t about the present at all. It is about making a new future past. By choosing to
re-mean the meanings of a past experience, you alter the statistics of your past
meanings, which then alters future reflexive responses. You change what you’re
capable of.
The science of perception gives you the permission to become an observer of
your own perceptions, and in doing so also gives you the need to thoughtfully
deviate again and again, in order to discover the questions worth asking that
might change our world… or might not.
Welcome to the Lab of Misfits.
To be is to be perceived.
—George Berkeley
NOTES

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PRAISE FOR DEVIATE

“Combining evolutionary imperatives with modern imaging of the brain, Deviate

helps us understand perception as the key to an individual’s survival. It is written
with humor, clarity, and delight. I highly recommend it.”
—Jerry Harrison, lead guitarist of the Talking Heads

“It’s time to deviate! Citizens of the world seem stuck in their paths, and are
losing perception of what’s there to enjoy as the mundane traps us in our tracks
and routines. Beau Lotto teases our sense of adventure by suggesting we romp
through our perceptions and break out of the framework. Deviate will give you a
sense of yourself, whether you’re a misfit or wish you were one!”
—Marian Goodell, co-founder and CEO of Burning Man

“What if we all tried harder to be misunderstood? And what if we could embrace

and channel our own misunderstanding of the world around us? Beau Lotto’s
Deviate honors the messy, imperfect genius of human perception as the most
valuable resource for creative progress. Lotto is teaching us something so loudly
fundamental to our existence, it seems almost impossible that we’ve missed it.”
—Ross Martin, executive vice president of Marketing Strategy and Engagement
at Viacom

“In Deviate, Beau Lotto’s remarkable research into human perception is

crystallized into a series of astute explanations of how we experience reality. By
bringing together an ‘ecology of the senses’ that goes beyond the mechanisms of
the eye, Lotto’s ingenious account of the brain’s perceptive evolution arrives at
an extraordinary proposition of how we can go beyond our current ways of
seeing.… It is a brilliant book!”
 —Hans-Ulrich Obrist, director of the Serpentine Galleries and author of The
Interview Project

“Beau Lotto has delivered a fresh, provocative, stimulating, revealing, neuro-

inspired, entertaining text on that most fugitive of subjects—reality.… The
world of theoretical and experimental neuroscience has much to offer us as we
search to produce better environments for all.”
—Ian Ritchie, director of Ian Ritchie Architects and architect of the largest free-
standing glass building in the world

“Beau Lotto shows better than anyone else how dependent we are upon our own
limited sensory perceptions of the world. The radical thesis that he presents in
Deviate reveals to us that reality is relative, and that we, ultimately, are capable
of changing our world through changing our perception of it.”
—Oafur Eliasson, sculpture artist and spatial researcher, founder of Studio
Olafur Eliasson

“In a brilliant and skillful way, Beau Lotto pulls the rug from under our naive
view of reality—bit by bit. In reading this book, we discover how our
conventional way of seeing, of perceiving reality, is incomplete and illusory. He
begins to dismantle this illusion by showing us why we see the world the way
we do and, in doing so, he opens the curtain to a new beginning—a new
beginning of seeing past our individual interpretation of reality, to recognize that
others may surely have a different interpretation. In daring us to deviate, Lotto
encourages us to discover that compassion has a root that can be revealed
through scientific insights.”
—Peter Baumann, founder of Tangerine Dream

“Beau Lotto is one of the most creative scientists I know, and his passion for
introducing neuroscience to the public ranks him among those rare
communicators like Carl Sagan whose ideas can change people’s thinking. At a
time when many neuroscientists are pursuing the mindless goal of mapping all
the connections in the human brain, Beau is right on target in his conviction that
science advances by doubting the conventional wisdom and asking simple
questions in a novel way.”
—Dale Purves, professor emeritus at the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences and
member of the National Academy of Sciences
 member of the National Academy of Sciences

“As a neuroscientist and a specialist in vision, Beau Lotto opens up the subject
of just how it is possible to actually see and understand anything in the world
when it seems that meanings are always constructed somehow separately from
the reality of what we see. This is done with immense clarity and ease… directly
relevant to anyone involved in shaping our world—designers, engineers, and
architects.”
—Alan Penn, professor of architectural and urban computing at University
College London

“If someone else told me that reality is something we create in our heads—I’d up
my medication. This brilliantly written book shows us that this is actually the
road to liberation. We have the ability to change our internal landscapes, making
our lives a masterpiece rather than a ‘been there done that’ cliché.”
—Ruby Wax, OBE, comedian, actress, mental health campaigner, and
bestselling author of How Do You Want Me?
 Copyright

A W&N ebook

First published in Great Britain in 2017 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

This ebook published in 2017 by Weidenfeld & Nicolson © Beau Lotto 2017
Design © Luna Margherita Cardilli and Ljudmilla Socci, Black Fish Tank Ltd
2017

The right of Beau Lotto to be identified as the author of this work has been
asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior
permission in writing of the publisher, nor to be otherwise circulated in any form
of binding or cover other than that in which it is published without a similar
condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

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is available from the British Library.

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