Imagine: How Creativity Works

by Jonah Lehrer

  Or consider a recent paper published by Sara Mednick, a neuroscientist at the University of California, San Diego. She gave subjects a variety of remote-association puzzles. Then she instructed them to take a nap. Interestingly, subjects who started to dream during their nap solved 40 percent more puzzles than they had in the morning, before their brief sleep. (Subjects who quietly rested without sleeping showed a slight decrease in performance.) According to Mednick, the reason dreams are such an important source of creativity is that, once the uptight prefrontal cortex turns itself off, we are exposed to a surfeit of surprising connections and strange ideas. Most of these new ideas will be useless, of course, just the surreal babble of the dreaming brain. But sometimes, if we’re lucky, we’ll find our answers in the middle of the night.

  This is what happened to Keith Richards, the lead guitarist of the Rolling Stones. One night in May of 1965, Richards fell asleep early, passing out with a guitar and a tape recorder in his hotel bed. “When I wake up the next morning, I see that the tape [in the recorder] is run to the very end,” Richards told Terry Gross in a 2010 interview. “And I thought: Well, I didn’t do anything. You know, maybe I hit a button when I was asleep. So I put it back to the beginning and pushed play and there, in some sort of ghostly version, is the opening of a song. The whole verse is on the tape, followed by forty minutes of me snoring.” The song that Richards imagined that night was “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction,” one of the most influential rock songs of all time.

  The neuroscience of sleep reminds us that, every night, we temporarily turn into improv artists. Once we start to dream, we stop worrying about truth or logic or common sense. Instead of deleting our errant thoughts, we embrace the sheer freedom of our associations. And so we amuse ourselves with a set list of made-up stories and melodies, finding new connections amid the confusion.

  The tragedy of frontotemporal-dementia patients is that their illness has no cure. Before long, their higher cognitive functions will start to flicker and fade. Nevertheless, this awful affliction comes with an uplifting moral, which is that all of us contain a vast reservoir of untapped creativity. The desire to make something beautiful, to express our luminous sensations, is not a rare drive confined to those with artistic training. That same desire is present in cellular biologists and stockbrokers, janitors and housewives. We don’t notice this need because we constantly suppress it, because the timid circuits of the prefrontal cortex keep us from risking self-expression.

  Allan Snyder, a neuroscientist at the University of Sydney, has spent the last few years documenting all this untapped creativity. He relies on a tool called transcranial magnetic stimulation, or TMS, which can temporarily silence a specific circuit of the brain with a blast of magnetic energy. Snyder is most interested in the possibility of enhancing creativity by shutting off certain brain areas, just like a jazz pianist inhibiting their DLPFC. (He refers to TMS as a “creativity-amplifying machine.”) In recent years, Snyder has used the tool to selectively switch off the left frontal and temporal lobes for minutes at a time. He then asks the subject to perform a variety of activities, such as drawing an animal or solving creative puzzles. When people are hooked up to the machine, nearly 40 percent of subjects exhibit strange new talents. For instance, in the induced-drawing experiment, Snyder gives people one minute to draw an animal or face from memory. Before subjects are treated with TMS, most of their drawings are crude stick figures that don’t look very much like anything. However, after people receive their “creativity treatment,” their drawings are often transformed; the figures are suddenly filled with artistic flourishes. (One subject confessed that he “could hardly recognize the drawings as his own even though he had watched himself render each image.”) According to Snyder, the explanation for this remarkable effect returns us to the inhibitory mechanisms of the mind, which constantly hold back our latent talents.

  Picasso once summarized the paradox this way: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.” From the perspective of the brain, Picasso is exactly right, as the DLPFC is the last brain area to fully develop. This helps explain why young children are so effortlessly creative: their censors don’t yet exist. But then the brain matures and we become too self-conscious to improvise, too worried about saying the wrong thing, or playing the wrong note, or falling off the surfboard. It’s at this point that the infamous “fourth-grade slump” in creativity sets in, as students suddenly stop wanting to make art in the classroom.

  Of course, this doesn’t mean that we’d be better off without our frontal lobes — we need these neural circuits to function. Nevertheless, every mental talent comes with a tradeoff. Once we learn to inhibit our impulses, we also inhibit our ability to improvise. And this is why it’s so important to practice letting ourselves go.

  Take this clever experiment, led by the psychologist Michael Robinson. He randomly assigned a few hundred undergraduates to two different groups. The first group was given the following instructions: “You are seven years old, and school is canceled. You have the entire day to yourself. What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you see?” The second group was given the exact same instructions, except the first sentence was deleted. As a result, these students didn’t imagine themselves as seven-year-olds. After writing for ten minutes, the subjects in both groups were then given various tests of creativity, such as trying to invent alternative uses for an old car tire, or listing all the things one could do with a brick. Interestingly, the students who imagined themselves as young kids scored far higher on the creative tasks, coming up with twice as many ideas as the other group. It turns out that that we can recover the creativity we’ve lost with time. We just have to pretend we’re little kids.

  Yo-Yo Ma echoes this idea. “When people ask me how they should approach performance, I always tell them that the professional musician should aspire to the state of the beginner,” Ma says. “In order to become a professional, you need to go through years of training. You get criticized by all your teachers, and you worry about all the critics. You are constantly being judged. But if you get onstage and all you think about is what the critics are going to say, if all you are doing is worrying, then you will play terribly. You will be tight and it will be a bad concert. Instead, one needs to constantly remind oneself to play with the abandon of the child who is just learning the cello. Because why is that kid playing? He is playing for pleasure. He is playing because making this sound, expressing this melody, makes him happy. That is still the only good reason to play.”

  Ch. 5 THE OUTSIDER

  Despite a lack of natural ability, I did have the one element necessary to all early creativity: naïveté, that fabulous quality that keeps you from knowing just how unsuited you are for what you are about to do.

  — Steve Martin, Born Standing Up

  Don lee’s creative journey began with a broken heart. In the winter of 2005, Don was a computer programmer for a large insurance firm. He spent nine hours a day in a Manhattan skyscraper staring at a flickering computer screen and writing code. “It was a pretty nice life,” he says. “After work, I’d hang out with the cat, sit on the couch with my girlfriend, watch some television.”

  But then the girlfriend left — “She even took the cat,” Don says — and he found himself with lonesome evenings and too much free time. His empty apartment made him sad. And so Don turned to a substance that’s long been a Band-Aid for the broken-hearted: alcohol. He started frequenting a local bar after work, sitting at the counter and ordering a few stiff drinks. “I never went to get drunk,” Don says. “I would sip very slowly. I guess I just wanted to be around other people.”

  At first, Don didn’t know what to order, so he watched the bartenders work. He quickly grew enchanted with their cocktail rituals and the exacting way they crushed the ice cubes and squeezed the lemons and measured the shots. And then Don started paying attention to the taste of the drinks as he tried to memorize the subtle flavors of all the expens
ive liquors. He began to appreciate the smoky haze of rye, and the peaty tang of good Scotch, and the medicinal taste of gin. And then he watched as the drinks came together, as the alcohols were shaken and stirred and strained and poured. “I had nothing else to do but observe,” Don says. “And I had no one else to talk to, so I talked to the bartenders.”

  Don was lucky: his local bar was the Pegu Club, a swank New York lounge widely celebrated for the quality of its (fifteen-dollar) cocktails. Audrey Sanders, the club’s chief mixologist, was intent on bringing back classic drinks, finding inspiration in the recipes of vintage cocktail guides. Instead of listing neon green appletinis and margaritas from a mix, Sanders’s menu featured obsolete libations like the gin-gin mule and the burra-peg and the Tom and Jerry. “It was only later that I realized how lucky I’d been to learn at the Pegu Club,” Don says. “I learned about the importance of perfect technique and perfect ingredients. I learned about the importance of tasting and then tasting again. Those first drinks [at the Pegu Club] taught me what drinks are supposed to be.”

  After six months of educational imbibing, Don decided that he was ready to start making his own cocktails. Although he had virtually no bartending experience, he was asked to cover a few shifts at Death and Company, a new speakeasy in the East Village.

  (Brian Miller, the head bartender, had been charmed by Don’s enthusiasm.) After a few months, the bartending shifts multiplied, so Don was working five nights a week while still holding down his job at the insurance firm. His routine was exhausting: he’d put in a full day of programming and then take the subway downtown and pour drinks until two in the morning. Then he’d break the bar down and catch a cab home, slinking into bed around four in the morning. After a few months at Death and Company, Don was asked to help run PDT (aka Please Don’t Tell), a hip basement bar that could be entered only via a phone booth in the back of a hot-dog joint. “At first, the bar was just famous for the weird entrance and all the secrecy,” Don says. “But then we started getting serious about the drinks. I wanted to develop a bar that was all about technique, so that we’d serve classic cocktails better than anyone else.” (The work paid off: in July of 2009, at the Cocktail Spirit Awards, PDT was voted the best cocktail bar in the world.) Although Don was still working at the insurance firm, his bartending renown was spreading. Cocktail snobs started waiting in line outside the phone booth.

  Don, however, was getting restless: there was something tedious about his pursuit of alcoholic perfection. “I guess I realized that I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life making the same drinks over and over,” he says. “I could make an excellent martini, but it was still just a martini, you know? At a certain point, it didn’t matter if I was using the best gin, the best vermouth, and the best olives. I was still just following someone else’s recipe. There was nothing new. It was kinda boring.”

  But Don wasn’t bored for long. His frustration with the strict traditions of bartending — there was only one way to make everything — soon gave way to a creative epiphany. He remembers the moment clearly: “I was prepping the bar before we opened. Cutting limes, making syrup, that sort of stuff. And I was looking up at all our bottles, all these beautiful bottles behind the bar, and I suddenly realized that I could invent a new drink. I could come up with my own cocktail. It sounds so obvious now, but for me it was a pretty big idea.”

  Don immediately went to work on his new cocktail project. He turned Monday and Tuesday at PDT into experimental nights during which he tested his strange new concoctions on customers. Most of the experiments were utter failures, like his attempt to carbonate a cherry. “Wouldn’t it be cool if you got a Manhattan but the maraschino cherry was fizzy inside?” Don asks. “The only problem was that the fruit kept on exploding.” Another experiment involved a gel cap that propelled itself around the drink — “Like a little submarine,” Don says — and kept the cocktail properly mixed. Unfortunately, the propulsion system altered the flavor of the drink; the martinis tasted like baking soda.

  But Don refused to get discouraged. “I was having so much fun,” he says. “I was like a little kid in a candy store, except my candy was ninety proof.” And so he continued to experiment, searching for new techniques and ingredients to work into his avant-garde cocktails. For Don, the research was a chance to combine his long-standing interest in chemistry — he had been an engineering major at Columbia University — with his new bartending obsession. “I was really a novice behind the bar,” Don says.

  “Unlike the bartenders, I didn’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of vodkas or single-malt whiskeys. I knew much less about liquor per se. But I knew a fair amount of chemistry, and that let me think about bartending in a slightly different way.”

  Look, for instance, at one of Don’s first successful inventions: the bacon-infused old-fashioned. The drink relies on a process called fat-washing, in which a fatty food (like cooked bacon) is combined with an alcohol. The mixture is then chilled — the greasy globules solidify on the surface — and strained, so that no lard remains in the liquid. While fat-washing might seem like a weird concept, Don saw the experiment in terms of its elementary chemistry. “I was pretty confident it would work,” he says.

  “Alcohol and fat have very particular atomic properties.” Don then launches into a lecture on chemical polarity, a phenomenon that’s caused by the separation of electrical charges within a molecule. “Polarity is why oil and water don’t mix,” Don says. “The fat is nonpolar and the water is polar, and so the molecules stay far apart from each other. I knew that the same principle applies to alcohol, which is also polar.” However, the flavorful compounds embedded in the fat — those stray molecules that give the bacon its savory taste — are polar too, which is why they easily dissolve in the bourbon.

  It took Don a few weeks of careful tinkering — he had to adjust the ratio of lard to alcohol, and then figure out how long to refrigerate the mixture — but he eventually developed a booze that made him drool. “It was a delicious drink, a perfect combination of those oaky bourbon flavors with the saltiness of breakfast meat,” he says. “Unfortunately, it was a little much straight, even with ice.” And so Don began testing out cocktail recipes, whisking his flavored bourbon with a variety of mixers. After adding a dash of bitters for balance, he started searching for a sweetener, as the standard squirt of simple syrup just seemed too, well, simple. His breakthrough arrived at breakfast: “I was eating pancakes and I thought about how when you pour the syrup on the pancakes and you get some maple syrup on your bacon by accident . . . That’s pretty fucking tasty. So I decided to try maple syrup with the bacon-bourbon instead of straight sugar. And it worked. It worked really, really well.”

  Don added the bacon-infused old-fashioned to the PDT cocktail menu, serving it to his bravest customers on the experimental nights. It was an instant hit. The fat-washed bourbon soon became the bar’s signature drink, garnering praise in Gourmet, Saveur, and New York. Don is now the chief mixologist at the Momofuku restaurants in New York, run by the chef David Chang. His latest cocktails make the bacon-infused old-fashioned seem conventional. There is the celery nori, in which Don steeps dried seaweed in apple brandy and then removes the seaweed and adds a dash of celery-flavored simple syrup. “I don’t know how this drink works, but it does,” he says. “Sometimes, you have to suspend your better judgment and just taste it.” Or consider his sesame-candy cocktail, which involves mixing cognac with toasted sesame seeds and a burnt-caramel syrup. Or his pickled-ramp martini, in which tangy onion juice takes the place of olive brine. And then there is Don’s clever riff on rum and Coke, which begins by fat-washing white rum with melted butter and then steeping freshly popped popcorn in it. The drink is finished with a dash of Coke. “I call it the ‘movie theater,’ ” he says. “On the one hand, it’s composed of really familiar flavors. On the other hand, it’s bizarre to taste them all together in a liquid. I like inventing stuff that’s just weird enough to make you think.”

  The succ
ess of Don Lee is a story of creativity coming from an outsider, a person on the fringes of a field. It’s a parable about the benefits of knowing less — Don was a passionate amateur — and the virtues of injecting new ideas into an old field. After all, when Don invented the bacon-infused old-fashioned, he wasn’t a cocktail expert. He hadn’t taken any fancy bartending classes or mastered the subtleties of Kentucky whiskey or studied the history of the old-fashioned. (In fact, he was still working as a computer programmer.) “Basically, I experimented with fat-washing because I was bored and nobody told me not to,” Don says. “I’m sure most bartenders would have told me it was a terrible idea, that it would never sell, that I was wasting perfectly good bourbon. But the laws of chemistry told me it should work, so why not try? I guess my only secret is that I didn't know any better."

  1.

  In the late 1990s, Alpheus Bingham was a vice president at Eli Lilly, one of the largest drug companies in the world. He was in charge of research strategy, helping to manage thousands of scientists working on hundreds of different technical problems. At the time, Eli Lilly’s business was booming — the company was flush with “Prozac profit” — but Bingham was starting to worry about the future. The company was throwing vast sums of money at its scientific problems, desperately trying to develop the next blockbuster drug. Unfortunately, this expensive investment was producing tepid results; Bingham was beginning to wonder if there wasn’t a more efficient approach to drug research. “After spending years on a problem, we’d often end up with a solution that was so imperfect it was virtually useless,” he says. “And those failures weren’t cheap.”