How to be visionary
Transformative discoveries require imagining the far-reaching implications of your anomalous observations. There are methods that can facilitate creating visionary ideas.
“In choosing a hypothesis, there is no virtue in being timid.”
– Thomas Gold
In the episode “Cause and Effect” of the TV series Star Trek: The Next Generation, the starship Enterprise gets stuck in a time loop. The senior crew members start their day at the beginning of the episode playing a friendly game of poker together. Suddenly, their game is interrupted when the ship encounters a “spatial anomaly”. While studying this anomaly, the Enterprise collides with another spaceship that emerges from the anomaly, resulting in the destruction of the Enterprise. At this moment, the time loop is restarted. The crew members of the Enterprise once again find themselves playing poker, starting their day, but with no memory of their previous experience and catastrophic collision.
This plot is intriguing from the perspective of making unexpected discoveries. There is a monumental discovery waiting to be made — that the Enterprise is in an endless time loop in which it gets destroyed at the end of each cycle. However, there are few clues available to alert the crew as to what is happening.
Dr. Beverly Crusher, chief medical officer on the Enterprise, played by Gates McFadden, hears unusual noises when she goes to bed after the poker game, and she has a sense that she can predict which cards will be dealt in the poker game. On the basis of these keen observations, she decided to collect more data — she uses a tricorder to record the noises and analyze them in more detail. In so doing, she finds that the noises are the panicked yelling of the crew — an echo of the previous time loop. Her attention to detail provides her with some crucially important information. However, the key to solving the mystery in this episode was the ability of the crew members to imagine the most far-reaching possible implications of their scant data: they generate the hypothesis that they are caught in a time loop. This allows them to take action to avoid the crash with the other spaceship, which turns out to be Enterprise itself emerging from the time loop. Their leap of imagination illustrates the value of being able to imagine far-reaching implications of a meager set of observations.
Visionary ideas may be unpopular, even if they are correct. In 1965, a young man named Albert took a course with a Professor Roger Revelle, in which he learned about rising carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, and the dangers of climate change and global warming. Albert began holding hearings on climate change in 1976, while he was a member of the U.S. House of Representatives. He became convinced that climate change was occurring as a result of human activity and developed a vision that humans must act to stop climate change before it is too late for the species, publishing books about this problem in 1992 and 2006, and starring in the popular documentary, An Inconvenient Truth. His visionary 1965 hypothesis looks particularly prescient from the perspective of 2022. It took many years and over a thousand Powerpoint presentations by Albert Gore to shift the tide of public opinion on this issue. His visionary work was recognized with the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, providing a measure of vindication for his perseverance.
One reason that creating visionary ideas is so difficult is that we have implicit mindsets that force us to think within an existing framework. As the psychologist Allan Snyder wrote: “Our brains see the world through mindsets — mental templates, if you like, of the world derived from past experiences. While templates [provide] very good expertise, they blind us to novelty.”
Visionary ideas have been the foundation of other important discoveries, such as Tom Cech’s hypothesis that proteins are not the only class of enzymes, but that ribonucleic acids represent a new class of enzymes, catalyzing chemical reactions. Tom Cech’s lab was studying how genes are expressed in the single-celled pond animal Tetrahymena. They had developed a method of observing in a test tube how the DNA of Tetrahymena is converted into RNA, which acts as the messenger to create the proteins that carry out the instructions encoded in the DNA. They observed unexpectedly that the RNA molecule in their test tube was getting cut into several pieces when they added a set of proteins, so they set about purifying the protein enzyme responsible for this effect, since it was known that all enzymes, which help to facilitate chemical reactions in biology, are proteins.
The Cech labmembers did an important control experiment — they incubated the RNA in a test tube without any proteins, but they observed the RNA-cutting reaction still proceeded very efficiently without any of the supposedly necessary proteins. They assumed there must be a small contaminant of protein in the test tube, so they tried boiling it, adding detergents and other methods known to destroy most proteins, but the RNA-cutting reaction was unaffected by any of these treatments, suggesting it was a very stable protein. Finally, they developed a different method of making the RNA and eliminating any sources of contaminating protein, and found that the RNA still underwent the cutting reaction, as though the RNA itself was causing this reaction to happen.
Cech’s discovery started with an unexpected observation, but a key step in the discovery process was imagining a high impact hypotheses — that the RNA itself was the catalyst, a radical idea that had never been observed before and which would overturn a well cemented dogma in biology at that time. It would have been simple to drop the project, and assume there was a technical problem, but Cech was able to imagine and then pursue a visionary hypothesis — that a new class of molecules, RNA, could act as enzymes. Indeed, Cech commented that several years prior to his discovery, other labs were in a position to make the same discovery, but they did not. In particular, one Danish lab had the same results, but didn’t believe their own data, so far-fetched was the conclusion. The Danish lab dropped the project, much to their later regret. Imagine the frustration at having obtained literally Nobel-prize-worthy data, but having lacked the ability to see what the implication was. Indeed, in reflecting on his discovery, Cech noted, “It is still true that two exceedingly competent scientists who are investigating the same phenomenon will often come up with two related but distinct interpretations. Maybe that is not so different from art after all.”
There are some practical tools we can use to enhance our ability to imagine the impact of our observations and ideas, and develop visionary insights. First, it is important to take time to think about your goals for a project before you begin. Don’t rush in and start doing an experiment, project or work of art without thinking about how it fits into the bigger picture. As the saying goes, “a week in the lab can save you an hour in the library”.
The creativity researcher Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi performed a test of this idea in 1972 at the School of Art Institute in Chicago. He presented student artists with one empty table and one table containing 27 objects that would be suitable for a still-life painting, such as fruit, books, prisms, instruments and clothing accessories, and instructed them to choose whichever objects they liked, arrange them however they wanted on the empty table, and draw a picture of them.
There were two kinds of responses to these instructions among the students: some quickly selected objects, arranged them, and sketched out an initial drawing, all within a few minutes, and then spent most of their time embellishing their drawing. Other artists spent most of their time examining the 27 objects, touching them, thinking about composition, and trying out different compositions before swapping out some objects for others, and just contemplating the overall idea of what they wanted to accomplish. In the last few minutes of the project, these students settled on a composition and quickly sketched the drawing. The second group of students who had spent most of their time thinking about the bigger picture of what they wanted to accomplish was judged to have produced substantially more creative art by a panel of judges. Five years later, the artists who had succeeded in the art world were by and large this second group, who had used the approach of thinking about their vision before they began work on a project.
These findings were replicated with other groups, including middle school student writers, expert teachers, and high school math students. In science, the objects “on the table” are the full landscape of scientific literature, and the empty table is your choice of research lab, research mentor, and research project. A similar dynamic takes place, in which problem selection and visionary thinking play a key role in the discovery process. Consider the discovery of Aaron Ciechanover, winner of the 2004 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, along with Avram Hershko and Irwin Rose, of the process by which proteins are destroyed within cells. As Ciechanover commented: “I was lucky to have an excellent mentor. I don’t know if the word luck is proper here because I picked him [on] purpose, not because I knew that one day both of us were going to share the Nobel Prize, but I really searched around.”
Ciechanover was very deliberate in choice of problem and mentor, thinking about the big picture of his possible postdoctoral research projects. What attracted him to Avram Hershko’s lab was not a detailed and thorough research plan — just the opposite. He recalled that Avram Hershko recruited him by saying, “I don’t know what I am going to do. All I know that I want to identify the system that degrades into solo proteins. I don’t know how to do it, I don’t know where it is, I don’t know [what] it’s going to look like.” It was the beauty of the vision, not the detailed methods, that attracted them both to the problem.
Kenneth Heilman, a neurology professor at the University of Florida, has studied how the brain is able to generate visionary ideas that diverge from the conventional wisdom. One important neurological ability is disengagement, meaning the ability to disengage from a stimulus. In a typical experiment to test disengagement, a researcher tells a patient to place their hands in their lap and close their eyes, and the researcher touches the patient’s left hand, while instructing the patient to raise his or her right hand. Most people can disengage from the stimulus on their left hand and successfully raise their right hand. However, patients with damage to certain parts of their brain cannot stop themselves from raising the hand that was touched.
Another test of disengagement, at the cognitive level, is the Stroop test, in which a subject views a word such as “red”, that is written in a green font, and is asked to name the color of the font, not the text of the written word.
I’ve tried this particular test; you can try it yourself on various websites online. It is hard to disengage from the written word and call out the color that the word is written in when you are tested on this repeatedly; certainly, your speed doing this is much slower than when the word is colored in a way to coincide with its meaning. With effort, however, most people can successfully disengage. Some subjects with damage to their frontal lobes, however, are unable to disengage in this test.
Heilman argues that the ability to disengage intellectually from commonly accepted wisdom is a key feature in generating creative “out-of-the-box” hypotheses. The drive to accept and adhere to the conventional viewpoint is strong, and must be overcome. Presumably, people differ in the strength of their frontal lobe’s “divergence” capacity, and this may impact on their ability to recognize and develop hypotheses that are at odds with the prevailing paradigms.
There is some experimental support for this hypothesis. For example, when subjects were given a test of creativity in which they had to describe potential uses of a brick as they could think of within three minutes, subjects who had more creative responses (i.e., those who could think of more unusual and a larger number of uses of a brick), had greater activity in their frontal lobes. One idea to explain this role of the frontal lobe is that networks of neurons that encode unusual ways to use a brick are wired together weakly compared to the networks of neurons that encode common ways to use a brick, and that the frontal lobe plays a role in suppressing strongly connected networks to explore weaker and more remotely connected networks, possibly through modulating production of specific neurotransmitters that control access to local versus remote networks.
Heilman suggests also that stress suppresses creative thinking through such a mechanism, and that relaxation favors creative thinking. He notes that some of the most important discoveries in the history of science occurred while the researchers were in a relaxed state: Darwin was cruising on the HMS Beagle, Einstein was relaxing after working all day in the patent office, Isaac Newton was relaxing on a farm, on leave from the University due to an outbreak of plague, and Gregor Mendel was gardening. Heilman suggests that stress hormones bring about an aroused state, which depresses access to remotely connected, weaker networks in the brain. Numerous studies show that subjects placed under stress perform worse on a variety of tests of creativity.
To improve divergent thinking, and our ability to imagine how a particular observation might overturn some piece of conventional wisdom, creating a contemplative state of mind free of stress is helpful. In other words, it is probably going to be difficult to come up with a visionary hypothesis the night before your project is due, when you are stressed about finishing it. John Reed, former CEO of Citigroup, was a financial innovator and hard worker, as you might imagine for the chief officer of a major financial institution. But he found time to be relaxed and creative. As his co-worker Michael Callen said about him, ‘’John’s a free thinker.” But his most innovative ideas did not come in high stakes, adrenaline-filled brainstorming meetings. On the contrary. Of his most creative thoughts, Reed says: ‘’I travel a lot alone and often do my best work and best thinking then.’’ It is the quiet, contemplative, relaxed time that yields the bold hypothesis.
Many studies also show a spacing effect, in which learning in general, and creativity in particular, are enhanced when the work is broken up into chunks, instead of happening all in one sitting. I experienced a striking example of this while reading Keith Sawyer’s excellent book on creativity, Explaining Creativity, The Science of Human Innovation. I came across this puzzle about someone named Ana while reading his book late one evening:
BAN ANA
I stared at it for about half an hour, unable to make sense of it. Why should we want to ban poor Ana? And from what? I finally gave up and went to sleep. I doubt if I had spent another hour on it that I would have made sense of it. I just couldn’t see it.
The next morning, after having a hot cup of Sencha tea, I opened up his book again, curious to take another look. By taking a break, I gave myself a chance to take a fresh look at the problem. This time, the answer was immediately obvious to me.
Another strategy for being able to think divergently and generate visionary hypotheses is to remove the mental mindset that forces you to think within a prevailing framework. Artists know a trick for doing this: try looking at a picture or painting upside down — this often obscures the identity of the objects in the picture, allowing you to see details that your brain otherwise glosses over in identifying what the objects are. If you are trying to copy a picture, for example, it is often easier to copy the upside-down picture than the right way up picture, because it is easier to see the shading and structure of the image itself when you are not automatically identifying the objects using your implicit mental framework. In the same way, some discovery efforts require that we focus not on the identities of the elements in the problem, but that we examine the intellectual analog of colors, shading and spaces. In this approach, we look for the solution that seems to fit, rather than the logical answer to a linear problem.
Psychologist Allan Snyder has shown that 10 minutes of transcranial magnetic stimulation can reduce activity in the left temporal lobe, resulting in much more realistic drawings by otherwise typical 20-year old subjects, as their mental frameworks become impaired. Forty-five minutes later, the magnetic stimulation effect wears off and the subjects returned to their prior low-quality drawing methods, with the mental frameworks now intact. This suggests that forcing yourself to be more literal in your analysis of data may be helpful. For example, try deciphering this code:
9S2A4F6E8T1Y0
If you think in your usual framework, you may not be able to see the meaning. However, if you can force yourself to be extremely literal, you may see it. Getting out of our usual frameworks and imagining the visionary implications of our observations is a key to making impactful discoveries.
