Elastic - Vignesh Prasad

## Highlights - Today we consume, on average, a staggering 100,000 words of new information each day from various media—the equivalent of a three-hundred-page book. That’s compared with about 28,000 a few decades ago. - Elastic thinking is what endows us with the ability to solve novel problems and to overcome the neural and psychological barriers that can impede us from looking beyond the existing order. - Scripted behavior is one of nature’s shortcuts, a reliable coping mechanism that leads to results that are usually successful. It can be either innate or the result of habit, and it is often related to mating, nesting, and killing prey. But—what is most important—while scripted behavior can be appropriate in routine situations, it produces a fixed response, and so it often fails in circumstances of novelty or change. - In the mid-twentieth century it took decades for people to change their simple habit of using a dial phone, while in the twenty-first century it took very little time for people to make the transition to carrying around with them what is essentially an entire computer system. - Because tedium used to be the norm, the concept of “boring”—or at least the English word for it—didn’t even appear until the industrial revolution, in the late eighteenth century. - the first step in nurturing either analytical or elastic thinking is to nurture thinking—to become more conscious of when you employ automated scripts, and to discard them when they don’t serve you well. For it is only when you are self-aware that you can interrupt an automatic script if it is not appropriate. - The difference is like that between answering the question “Where is Paris?” and the question “Where would you like to vacation?” To answer the latter requires you to formulate and invent the criteria that would determine your choice. That is elastic thinking. - The lesson of EVR is that emotions, especially pleasure, do not just make our lives rich—they are an integral ingredient in our ability to face the challenges of our environment. Perhaps the elusive key to success in artificial intelligence is to learn to build a computer that solves problems because it enjoys solving them. - We all want to make good choices, but research shows that making exhaustive analyses, paradoxically, doesn’t lead to more satisfaction. It tends to lead instead to regret and second-guessing. Letting go of the idea that a choice must be optimal, on the other hand, preserves mental energy and allows you to feel better if you later learn that a better choice existed. - Many recent studies in social psychology suggest that monetizing creative output can disrupt the processes that lead to innovation. That contradicts the ideas of traditional psychology, which is full of papers investigating the importance of reward in encouraging or even controlling a person’s behavior. But offering an extrinsic reward for an intrinsically enjoyable behavior can be counterproductive. - That a person who made a monumental and revolutionary contribution to his field could find equal pleasure in solving problems of far less significance is a testament to the fact that the exercise of elastic thinking is intrinsically rewarding. - Deep Blue was far faster at evaluating chess positions than was Kasparov—it could evaluate a billion in the time it took Kasparov to assess just one. That Kasparov gave Deep Blue a run for its money despite that speed disadvantage is a testament to the potency of the elastic thinking that a human brain can employ to set up and analyze problems. - I list some of my strongly held beliefs on slips of paper. I fold them, pick one, and imagine someone telling me that the belief written on it is false. - Almost hidden in all the noise was what I concluded to be their basic logic: We have laws about immigration. If we don’t like them we should change them, but as long as we have them, if they are ineffective, it makes sense to consider new means of enforcing them. - When we talk about triumphs of intellect, we tend to focus on brilliant analytical thinking, the kind of thought produced by powerful logic. But rarely do we recognize the contribution of being able to reimagine the framework in which our thinking occurs, the terms in which our mind defines the issue we are considering. That’s the product of elastic thinking, a task that requires that squishy ability called “judgment.” Creating new representations is difficult to automate, and most animals have trouble doing it, but it is often the key to successful problem-solving in the human world. - We understand that, magical as it may seem to be, thinking while we are not consciously focused is a fundamental feature of the mammalian brain, possessed even by lowly and primitive rodents. Known as the brain’s default mode of thought, it is a key mental process in elastic thinking. - As art historian Giorgio Vasari put it, “The prior of the church entreated Leonardo with tiresome persistence to complete the work, since it seemed strange to him to see how Leonardo sometimes passed half a day at a time lost in thought, and he would have preferred Leonardo, just like the laborers hoeing in the garden, never to have laid down his brush.” But Leonardo “talked to him extensively about art and persuaded him that the greatest geniuses sometimes accomplish more when they work less.” - That is why the quality of grit is important: When you reach an impasse, you may feel frustrated and be tempted to give up, but that is precisely the moment when, if you keep struggling, your ACC may kick into action and your most original ideas can begin to surface. - however, Franzen would have to overcome a phenomenon psychologists call “functional fixedness.” The term refers to the difficulty people have envisioning that a tool traditionally used for one purpose can be gainfully enlisted for another. - One can call that “the momentum of thought,” for, like a mass in Newton’s first law of motion, once our minds are set in a direction, they tend to continue in that direction unless acted upon by some outside force. It holds many of us back, keeps us from seeing the changes that would improve our level of satisfaction in life. - Just as an experienced golfer can have difficulty altering the much-rehearsed stroke that is encoded in his motor cortex, so too may a professional thinker have difficulty shedding the conventional ways of thinking lodged in her prefrontal cortex. - Zen Buddhism has a concept for a style of thought diametrically opposed to dogmatic cognition. It is called “beginner’s mind.” It refers to an approach in which you have a lack of preconceptions and perceive even routine situations as if you are encountering them for the first time, without automatically making assumptions based on your past experience. - Even if you’re not consciously open to considering opposing points of view, with a little exposure, they can affect your thinking. - just as we’d hesitate to add a contemporary wing to an old Victorian home, we resist making changes to the edifice of our worldview if those changes don’t seem in harmony with what is already there. And yet, in this rapidly evolving world, that is often what is called for. And so it is one of life’s ironic truths that, though we love to be right, we are better off if sometimes people tell us we are wrong. - Marijuana had enhanced his ability at elastic thinking, and through his cannabis experience, he wrote, he’d come to understand the minds of thinkers we call mad. - questionnaires to 153 potheads, or, as he called them, “experienced marijuana users.” The questionnaires asked them to describe the experience and then tabulated the most common responses. Reading them today, one notes, as did the scientist in his essay, a marked correspondence between the effects of marijuana and an enhanced ability at elastic thinking—at skills such as idea generation, divergent thinking, and integrative thinking, which are aided by the opening of our cognitive filters. - The problem with alcohol as a thinking aid is that while the defocusing it provides can loosen the thought processes, they can easily become so loose that they fall off their tracks. The same is true of marijuana. In both cases, the trade-off is much like that in schizotypy versus schizophrenia. Having a drink or two, or a hit of pot, while formulating your business strategy could increase the breadth of ideas that come to you—but if you are too far gone, those ideas might prove useless or incoherent. - Not everyone regularly feels their sharpest at a particular time of day, but for many, the labels “morning person” and “evening person” are well deserved—studies confirm that our bodily processes, like heart rate, temperature, alertness, and the executive functioning of our prefrontal cortex, indeed follow regular daily rhythms. These vary from person to person, governed by a cluster of about twenty thousand neurons in our hypothalamus, just above our brain stem. So if you find that you can sit down, focus, and grind through your spreadsheets, professional reading, and other analytical work with maximum efficiency in either the morning or the evening, there is a good physiological explanation. - The nuns who’d been the most positive lived about ten years longer than those who’d been the least. The nun study helped fuel a new field called “positive psychology.” Unlike much of psychology, which focuses on people’s problems and mental illness, positive psychology focuses on enhancing positive feelings. It is about how you play to the strengths that help you thrive. It’s an approach that has become popular with Fortune 500 companies, because research shows that a happy workforce is more productive and creative. That brings us to another way you can relax your cognitive filters without resorting to drugs or technology: by simply improving your mood. - Positive emotions, Fredrickson argued, prompt us to consider a wider range of thoughts and actions than are typical. They encourage us to create new relationships, expand our support network, explore our environment, and open ourselves to absorbing information. Those activities increase resilience and lower stress, which is why a happy disposition contributes to survival and longevity.