Deviate, page 19
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 stand-ins 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).
