Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently

by Berns, Gregory

  Copyright

  Copyright 2008 Harvard Business School Publishing Corporation

  All rights reserved

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior permission of the publisher. Requests for permission should be directed to permissions@hbsp.harvard.edu, or mailed to Permissions, Harvard Business School Publishing, 60 Harvard Way, Boston, Massachusetts 02163.

  First eBook Edition: October 2008

  ISBN: 978-1-4221-1501-5

  For Helen and Madeline.

  Nobody can tell you what can’t be done.

  Contents

  COPYRIGHT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  INTRODUCTION: Doing What Can’t Be Done

  Howard Armstrong

  ONE: Through the Eye of an Iconoclast

  Dale Chihuly, Paul Lauterbur, Nolan Bushnell

  TWO: From Perception to Imagination

  Walt Disney, Florence Nightingale,

  Branch Rickey, Kary Mullis

  THREE: Fear—The Inhibitor of Action

  Jackie Robinson, Dixie Chicks,

  Computer Associates, Rite-Solutions

  FOUR: How Fear Distorts Perception

  NASA, Richard Feynman,

  Solomon Asch, Martin Luther King Jr.

  FIVE: Why the Fear of Failure Makes People Risk Averse

  David Dreman, Bill Miller, Henry Ford

  SIX: Brain Circuits for Social Networking

  Pablo Picasso, Vincent van Gogh,

  Stanley Milgram, Ray Kroc,

  Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linus Torvalds,

  Warren Buffett

  SEVEN: Private Spaceflight—A Case Study of Iconoclasts Working Together

  Burt Rutan, Richard Branson,

  Peter Diamandis, Rick Homans

  EIGHT: When Iconoclast Becomes Icon

  Arthur Jones, Jonas Salk, Steve Jobs

  APPENDIX: The Iconoclast’s Pharmacopeia

  NOTES

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  INTRODUCTION

  Doing What Can’t Be Done

  JANUARY 31, 1954, WAS TO be a special day for Howard Armstrong. It marked the fortieth anniversary of sharing the results of his first great invention with his longtime friend, and president of RCA, David Sarnoff. More than any other person, Armstrong was responsible for the three basic technologies that make radio and television possible. In addition to his first discovery, called regeneration, which is the technique that allows radio signals to be amplified, Armstrong invented the superheterodyne receiver, which transforms high-frequency radio waves into audible sound waves. But his crowning achievement, and his ultimate undoing, was the creation of FM radio—a technology that the entire radio industry had dismissed as inferior.1

  Although Armstrong and Sarnoff had once been close friends, their relationship had turned acrimonious through years of fighting over patent rights. The legal battles took a steep emotional and financial toll on Armstrong. Since he was never one to accept the opinions of the majority, his colleagues were therefore puzzled when Armstrong removed the air conditioner from the window of his thirteenth-floor apartment overlooking the East River and stepped into the freezing wind of that bleak January night. Edwin Howard Armstrong, the most iconoclastic and influential engineer of radio technology, died as he had lived his life: iconoclastically and, ultimately, alone.

  Much of what Armstrong did ran counter to accepted wisdom. Armstrong thumbed his nose at authority, taking nothing for granted except what he could see with his own eyes. As he liked to say, “It’s the things people know, that ain’t so.”2 Ultimately, he was proved right. His invention of FM radio exemplified the benefits of the rugged individualist who shatters dogmatic thinking. And his suicide underscored the costs. But rather than deal with vague ideas of innovation or psychological constructs like nonconformity or personality traits, I will take an unorthodox view of iconoclasts like Armstrong. In this book, I will dig into the biological basis for iconoclastic thinking—the brain—and how this bit of biology sabotages creative thinking for most ordinary people.

  Ever since Guglielmo Marconi had unveiled his wireless telegraph in 1896, the basic technology of radio used amplitude modulation (AM). AM’s main advantage was simplicity. Take a radio wave oscillating at a high frequency and change—modulate—it by whatever signal you wish to transmit. AM works quite well as long as the modulating signal is much lower in frequency than the carrier wave. In fact, it worked so well that the radio industry mushroomed around the idea of bringing broadcasts into people’s homes. Having installed the first transmitter on the Empire State Building when it was completed in 1931, RCA was at the vanguard of this industry. But anyone who has listened to AM radio knows its limitations. It is noisy; stations interfere with each other; and it is low fidelity.

  All this was well known in the 1930s. Radio engineers had discussed the possibility of a different technology based on frequency modulation (FM), but a prominent mathematician who worked for AT&T published a mathematical proof of why FM would be no better than AM radio. The proof was accepted wholesale by virtually every radio engineer. Except Armstrong.

  Armstrong had a particular disdain for egghead types who made pronouncements by mathematical chicanery. Armstrong took these theoretical conclusions as a challenge to show not only that the legions of radio engineers were wrong but that he could create something superior. The technical challenges to create an FM receiver were formidable. It took Armstrong nearly eight years to solve the fundamental problem. But by 1934, when he demonstrated it to Sarnoff, the results were startling. For the first time ever, transmitting between RCA’s antenna on the Empire State Building and a receiver on Long Island, they could hear with clarity the sounds of someone pouring a glass of water or crumpling a piece of paper. Music was as clear as if you were sitting in a concert hall. Gone was the hiss of AM. In its place was high fidelity.

  Sarnoff, as president of RCA, was heavily invested in AM technology. He reacted as would anyone who had to protect the status quo. Perhaps out of fear, but certainly out of necessity, Sarnoff put his best engineers on the problem of discrediting the superiority of his friend’s discovery. The strategy worked for a while. He forced Armstrong to remove his transmitter from the Empire State Building. But Armstrong was tenacious. He countered by building his own transmitter across the Hudson River in New Jersey. Compared with RCA’s, Armstrong’s transmitter was tiny, but the fact that he could broadcast with such high fidelity with low power only made his case for FM stronger. Although Armstrong did eventually license FM technology to General Electric and AT&T, RCA held out, refusing to make deals on the same terms as the others. In the end, Armstrong’s widow settled with RCA for $1 million—the same amount RCA had offered Armstrong a year before his death.

  Armstrong’s story is a cautionary tale. He invented so many of the basic technologies that ushered in the age of communication that it is hard to imagine what the world would have looked like without them. Armstrong’s insights occurred at pivotal points in history. His invention of regeneration and the superheterodyne receiver played key roles in both World Wars. But what is most interesting about Armstrong is the extent of his iconoclasm. His extreme iconoclasm, which ultimately advanced radio technology but cost him his life, can be understood by differences in the way his brain functioned.

  The Brain, Neuroeconomics, and the Science of Iconoclasm

  You may wonder what the brain has to do with iconoclasts. Indeed, until a f
ew years ago, I really wouldn’t have given any thought to an iconoclastic brain either. As a neuroscientist, I had spent the last decade studying which parts of the human brain responded to reward and were responsible for motivation. During this period of time, a revolution had occurred in the way that scientists thought about the biological basis of reward and pleasure. This revolution swept away the idea that there was a pleasure center in the brain that somehow acted as an accelerator to the engine of human behavior. The picture of reward and motivation that emerged from this revolution was a sophisticated mix of computational algorithms and pharmacology. It was a picture in which chemicals like dopamine shuttled between neurons in ways that looked remarkably like the calculations that modern robots perform. And unlike in the antiquated, Freudian notion of the id driving human behavior, we now know that the decisions that humans make can be traced to the firing patterns of neurons in specific parts of the brain. These discoveries gave birth to the field known as neuroeconomics.

  Running a research laboratory to make these discoveries, however, is a job unto itself. Many labs, like mine, are housed within universities and academic medical centers, but they operate like a business. Funds go in, and knowledge and discovery come out. Since I am the director of such a laboratory, the things I do look very much like what a CEO of a small business does. On a day-to-day level, decisions must be made about how to direct resources and personnel within budgetary constraints. My lab, which is considered modest in size by academic standards, has an annual operating budget of about $1 million. As the head of this operation, I am responsible for growing the business by finding new sources of funding to remain productive.

  The laboratory’s primary function, of course, is research and development. We have tangible measures of success in the form of publications, and sometimes patents and licensing deals. In the biomedical field, the value of publications is easily gauged by the impact factor of the journal that they are published in. The impact factor measures how many times articles in a particular journal are cited by other people. It is extremely competitive to publish in high-impact journals, but the rewards for doing so are great: promotions, publicity, and more funding. It is a classic trade-off of risk and reward. Risky because so few papers get published in the best journals. Consequently, one of the critical decisions a laboratory head makes is how to allocate resources between high-risk, potentially high-impact projects, and low-risk, low-payoff ones.

  Unlike other types of business, however, the business of running a research laboratory is continually driven by the tenuous dance between advancing science within existing frameworks of thought and the headline-grabbing paradigm shifts that all scientists dream about. Every young PhD student fantasizes about winning the Nobel Prize someday—the crown jewel of paradigm-shifting, iconoclastic thinking. Science can be as competitive, and cutthroat, as any business endeavor. In addition to the constraint of resource allocation, the laboratory head must make strategic decisions about whom to collaborate with and when to bring products (discoveries) to market (i.e., publish them). And so, it was within this type of environment that I began to realize that the very thing I was studying, the human brain, also contained the secrets to success in an environment that demanded innovation and being able to do things differently than competitors.

  Different Brains, Different Ways of Thinking

  To be clear, I will operationalize the definition of an iconoclast as a person who does something that others say can’t be done. This definition implies that iconoclasts are different from other people. Indeed, this is true, but more precisely, the iconoclast’s brain is different, and it is different in three distinct ways. Each of these three functions maps onto a different circuit in the brain, which will be dissected in short order. For now, it suffices to know that the iconoclastic brain differs in these three functions and the circuits that implement them:

  • Perception

  • Fear response

  • Social intelligence

  Naysayers might suggest that the brain is irrelevant for iconoclasm. I have heard this argument many times. It is rooted in a sort of Cartesian mind-body dualism that separates human decision making from the messiness of the physical body, as if the mind somehow existed separately from our imperfect, and sometimes animalistic, bodies. But the fact that we have bodies, that we occupy defined physical spaces, that we need to fuel these bodies and, from time to time, reproduce them, leads to massive constraints on how our minds function. The field of neuroeconomics was born out of the realization that the physical workings of the brain place limitations on the way we make decisions. By understanding these constraints, we begin to understand human behavior and why some people seem to march to a different drumbeat.

  The first thing to realize is that the brain is mortal. It is a physical organ that consumes energy and performs feats of astounding complexity that we are just now beginning to understand. But the brain, like any machine, suffers the constraint of limited resources. The brain has a fixed energy budget. It can’t demand more power from the energy company when it needs to do something complicated. So it has evolved to do what it does as efficiently as possible. This is where the problem arises for most people and is the biggest impediment to being an iconoclast.

  For example, when confronted with information streaming from the eyes, the brain will interpret this information in the quickest and most efficient way possible. Time is energy. The longer the brain spends performing some calculation, the more energy it consumes. Considering that the brain runs on about 40 watts of power (a lightbulb!), it doesn’t have a lot of energy to spare. So it must be efficient. This means that it will draw on both past experience and any other source of information, such as what other people say, to make sense of what it is seeing. This happens all the time. The brain takes shortcuts in the interest of efficiency. It works so well that we are hardly ever aware of this process. What eventually bubbles to the surface of consciousness is an image in the “mind’s eye.” We take for granted that our perceptions of the world are real, but they are really specters of our imagination, nothing more than biological and electrical rumblings that we believe to be real.

  How you perceive something is not simply a product of what your eyes or ears transmit to your brain. More than the physical reality of photons or sound waves, perception is a product of the brain. Perception lies at the heart of iconoclasm. Iconoclasts see things differently than other people. Literally. They see things differently because their brains do not fall into efficiency traps as much as the average person’s brain. Iconoclasts, either because they were born that way or because they learned how to do it, have found ways to work around the perceptual shortcuts that plague most people. By looking at how the brain transforms perception into action, we can see exactly where these physical differences emerge, and where most people’s brains fall into the trap of unoriginal thinking, and how the iconoclast’s brain is different.

  Although the key process for iconoclasm is perception, this is only the beginning. As I shall explain, perception is not something that is immutably hardwired into the brain. It is a process that is learned through experience, which is both a curse and an opportunity for change. The brain faces the fundamental problem of interpreting physical stimuli that originate from the senses. Everything that the brain sees or hears or touches has multiple interpretations. The one that is ultimately chosen—the thing that is perceived—is simply the brain’s best guess at interpreting what flows into it. In technical terms, these guesses have their basis in the statistical likelihood of one interpretation over another. These guesses are heavily influenced by past experience and, importantly for potential iconoclasts, what other people say.

  Fortunately, there are ways to limit the effect on perception of past experience and other people’s opinions. To see things differently than other people, the most effective solution is to bombard the brain with things it has never encountered before. Novelty releases the perceptual process from the shackles of past experience
and forces the brain to make new judgments. As we shall see in the following chapters, there are many ways to accomplish this. Iconoclasts, at least successful ones, have a preternatural affinity for new experiences. Where most people shy away from things that are different, the iconoclast embraces novelty.

  The problem with novelty, however, is that, for most people, novelty triggers the fear system of the brain. Fear is the second major impediment to thinking like an iconoclast and stops the average person dead in his tracks. There are many types of fear, but the two that inhibit iconoclastic thinking are fear of uncertainty and fear of public ridicule. These may seem like trivial phobias, and some people might say, “Just deal with it.” Fear of public speaking, which everyone must do from time to time, afflicts one-third of the population. This is too common to be considered a disorder or mental illness. It is simply a common variant of human nature, but it is one that gets in the way of many potential iconoclasts. The true iconoclast, although he may still experience these fears, does not let them inhibit his actions.

  Finally (assuming one has conquered perception and fear), to make the transition to successful iconoclast, the individual must sell his ideas to other people. This is where social intelligence comes in, and it is where Howard Armstrong ultimately failed. His inability to sell RCA on the superiority of FM radio led to a spiral of depression and his demise. Although Armstrong was an iconoclast, he couldn’t persuade the masses to his point of view, and he died without the royalties that he ultimately deserved. But rather than simply dismissing Armstrong as an unfortunate casualty of business, we can learn from his mistakes by looking at social intelligence from a biological point of view.