Deviate, page 22
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
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.
