Elastic

215 Pages·2018·6.04 MB·English

by  Leonard Mlodinow

ALSO BY LEONARD MLODINOW
The Upright Thinkers: The Human Journey from Living in Trees to
Understanding the Cosmos Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules
Your Behavior War of the Worldviews (with Deepak Chopra) The Grand
Design (with Stephen Hawking)
The Drunkard’s Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives A Briefer History
of Time (with Stephen Hawking) Feynman’s Rainbow: A Search for Beauty
in Physics and in Life Euclid’s Window: The Story of Geometry from Parallel
Lines to Hyperspace FOR CHILDREN (with Matt Costello) The Last Dinosaur
Titanic Cat

For Donna Scott
Contents
Cover
Also by Leonard Mlodinow
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Introduction
The Demands of Change…Rising Above the Nematode…Onward
Part I CONFRONTING CHANGE
1 The Joy of Change
The Peril and the Promise…The Myth of Change Aversion…Our
Exploratory Drive…Personal R&D and the Neophilia Scale
Part II HOW WE THINK
2 What Is Thought?
Peeking Inside the Skull…What Qualifies as Thought…Becoming
Mindful…The Laws of Thought…The Non-Algorithmic Elastic Brain
3 Why We Think
Desire and Obsession…When Thought Goes Unrewarded…Choice
Overload…How Good Feelings Happen…The Rewards of Art…Attention
Deficit, Elasticity Surplus…The Pleasure of Finding Things Out
4 The World Inside Your Brain
How Brains Represent the World…How Brains Create Meaning…The
Bottom-up Brilliance of Ants…Your Brain’s Hierarchy…An Intellectual
Adventure
Part III WHERE NEW IDEAS COME FROM
5 The Power of Your Point of View
A Paradigm Shift in Popcorn…The Structure of Personal
Revolutions…Reimagining Our Frames of Thought…The Dog-and-Bone
Problem…How Mathematicians Think…The Influence of Culture
6 Thinking When You’re Not Thinking
Nature’s Plan B…The Dark Energy of the Brain…The Symphonies in Idle
Minds…Smarts by Association…The Importance of Being Aimless
7 The Origin of Insight
When the Unimaginable Becomes the Self-Evident…Splitting the
Brain…The Connection Between Language and Problem-Solving…The
Trial of the Hemispheres…The Lessons of CRAP…Deconstructing the
Insight Process…Zen and the Art of Ideas
Part IV LIBERATING YOUR BRAIN
8 How Thought Freezes Over
Building Lives and Candleholders…The Momentum of Thought…When
Thought Freezes Over…Destructive Doctrine…Handicapping the Expert
Brain…The Benefits of Discord
9 Mental Blocks and Idea Filters
When Believing Means Not Seeing…Thinking Outside the Box…Our
Idea-Filtering System…Long Live the Sophomoric
10 The Good, the Mad, and the Odd
It’s a Mad, Mad World…Measuring Doses of Madness…Elastic
Personalities, from the Arts to Science…The Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Inside
11 Liberation
Let’s Go Get Stoned…In Wine There Is Truth; Also in Vodka…The Silver
Lining of Fatigue…Don’t Worry, Be Happy…Where There’s a
Will…Survival of the Elastic
Acknowledgments
Notes
About the Author
Introduction
The Demands of Change
On July 6, 2016, Niantic, a forty-person startup company founded by ex-
employees of Google’s “Geo” division, launched Pokémon Go, an “augmented
reality” game that employs a phone’s camera to let people capture virtual
creatures that appear on their screens as if they exist in the real world. Within
two days the app had been installed on more than 10 percent of all Android
phones in the United States, and within two weeks it had thirty million users.
Soon iPhone owners were spending more time each day on Pokémon Go than
on Facebook, Snapchat, Instagram, or Twitter. Even more impressive, within
days of the game’s release, the words Pokémon Go drew more searches on
Google than the word porn.
If you’re not a gamer, you might roll your eyes or shrug at all that, but in
the business world, the events were hard to ignore: The game generated an
astonishing $1.6 million in revenue each day from domestic Apple users
alone. Just as important, it added $7.5 billion to Niantic’s market value
virtually overnight, and within a month it had doubled the stock price of
Nintendo, the company that owns the Pokémon trademark.
In its first six months of existence, more than six hundred million people
downloaded the Pokémon Go app. Contrast that with some of the greatest
successes of the early 2000s. Facebook launched in 2004, but it didn’t hit the
thirty-million-user mark until 2007. The hugely popular World of Warcraft
game, also released in 2004, took six years to climb to its peak of twelve
million subscribers. What seemed like pedal-to-the-metal growth back then
became, ten years later, life in the slow lane. And though no one can predict
what the next big new thing will be, most economists and sociologists expect
that society will only continue to morph faster in the foreseeable future.
But to focus only on the speed of Pokémon Go’s ascent is to miss much of
the point. The game’s massive success might not have been predictable, but
neither was it accidental. In creating the app, Niantic made a series of
innovative and forward-thinking decisions concerning the use of technology,
such as piggybacking on the GPS and camera capabilities of a cell phone and
leveraging cloud computing to power the app, which provided a built-in
infrastructure and a capacity to scale. The game also took advantage, like
nothing before it, of app-store economics, a business model that hadn’t even
been invented when World of Warcraft launched. In that now familiar
approach, a game is given away free of charge and makes its money by selling
add-ons and upgrades. Maintaining that revenue stream was another
challenge. In the interactive entertainment industry, a game can start out
popular and still have the shelf life of raw oysters. To avoid that fate, Niantic
surprised many with a long campaign to aggressively update the app with
meaningful features and content. As a result, a year after its launch, 65
million people were still playing the game each month, and revenues had
reached $1.2 billion.
Before Pokémon Go, the conventional wisdom was that people didn’t want
a game that required physical activity and real-world interaction. And so,
despite all the innovation in Silicon Valley, the Pokémon Go developers were
often admonished that gamers just “want to sit and play.” But the developers
ignored that widely held assumption, and by leveraging existing technologies
in a novel way, they changed the way game developers think. The flip side of
the Pokémon Go story is that if your thinking is not deft, your company can
quickly sink. Just look at BlackBerry, Blockbuster, Borders, Dell, Eastman
Kodak, Encyclopaedia Britannica, Sun Microsystems, Sears, and Yahoo. And
they are just the tip of the iceberg—in 1958, the average life span of
companies in the S&P 500 was sixty-one years. Today it is about twenty.
We have to face analogous intellectual challenges in our daily lives. 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. Due to innovative new
products and technologies, and to that proliferation of information,
accomplishing what was once a relatively straightforward task can now be a
bewilderingly complex journey through a jungle of possibilities.
Not long ago, if we wanted to take a trip, we’d check out a guidebook or
two, get AAA maps, and call the airline and hotels, or we’d talk to one of this
country’s eighteen thousand travel agents. Today, people use, on average,
twenty-six websites when planning a vacation, and must weigh an avalanche
of offers and alternatives, with prices that not only change as a function of
when in the day you wish to travel but also as a function of when you are
looking. Simply finalizing the purchase once you’ve decided has become a
kind of duel between business and customer, with each vying for the best deal,
from his or her vantage point. If you didn’t need a vacation when you started
planning one, you might by the time you are done.
Today, as individuals, we have great power at our fingertips, but we must
also routinely solve problems that we didn’t have to face ten or twenty years
ago. For instance, once, while my wife and I were out of the country, my
daughter Olivia, then fifteen, gave the house sitter the night off. Olivia then
texted us asking if she could invite “a few” friends over. “A few” turned out
to be 363—thanks to the instant invitations that can be communicated over
cell phones on Instagram. As it turned out, she wasn’t entirely to blame—it
was an overzealous friend who posted it—but it’s a calamity that wouldn’t
have been possible when her brothers were that age, just a handful of years
earlier.
In a society in which even basic functions are being transformed, the
challenges can be daunting. Today many of us must invent new structures for
our personal lives that account for the fact that digital technology makes us
constantly available to our employers. We must discover ways to dodge
increasingly sophisticated attempts at cybercrime or identity theft. We have to
manage ever-dwindling “free” time so that we can interact with friends and
family, read, exercise, or just relax. We must learn to troubleshoot problems
with home software, phones, and computers. Everywhere we turn, and every
day, we are faced with circumstances and issues that would not have
confronted us just a decade or two ago.
Much has been written about that accelerating pace of change and the
globalization and rapid technological innovation that have fueled it. This book
is about what is not so often discussed: the new demands on how we must
think in order to thrive in this whirlwind era—for as rapid change transforms
our business, professional, political, and personal environments, our success
and happiness depend on our coming to terms with it.
There are certain talents that can help us, qualities of thought that have
always been useful but are now becoming essential. For example: the capacity
to let go of comfortable ideas and become accustomed to ambiguity and
contradiction; the capability to rise above conventional mind-sets and to
reframe the questions we ask; the ability to abandon our ingrained