A Few More Apples

[Editorial note by George Turin: I got two responses to my recent comparison of Silicon Valley to other historical sites of great creativity such as Elizabethan London, in which I pointed out that creativity depended heavily in all those sites on a free interchange of ideas—'open sourcing' in modern lingo [1].  A writer friend was shocked that I would make the comparison at all, and I responded to him in [2].  My son David had a totally different complaint: I hadn't recognized that Silicon Valley's creativity was just one facet of the wider-spread creativity of the San Francisco Bay Area, exhibited not only by the digirati but by the literati and 'musicati' too.  I was interested in his take, and asked him to write a guest posting, which follows.]

  Recently there was a squawk about Steve Jobs' claim, in his posthumously released autobiography, that he conceived of his Apple empire while on LSD.  Tales of acid inspiration are not uncommon—it's routine to associate the drug with the Beatles' groundbreaking later recordings and, maybe not so coincidentally, with their own Apple trademark.  But Jobs' claim rattled a nerve in the straights.  That LSD could inspire a computer organization was too cute to leave untouched, so his comment ricocheted around the newswires.  More than a few times, it ran up against the press that a book called Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead was getting at around the time of Jobs' death.  I think that's not coincidental: both the Grateful Dead and Jobs were nurtured in the ethos of Northern California in the 1950s and 1960s.

  I bring this up in The Berkeley Write because, although I like its earlier assertion that Silicon Valley is the Mecca of our times in part because of the open sourcing of technology there, I feel that it short-changed the overarching role that the Bay Area played as a hub for many creative communities, not just technical ones.  It also didn't take into account a common thread that ran through all of these communities: LSD.

  In a 1985 Playboy interview, Jobs said something about the Silicon Valley area that I think is important:

"Woz and I very much liked Bob Dylan's poetry, and we spent a lot of time thinking about a lot of that stuff. This was California. You could get LSD fresh made from Stanford.  You could sleep on the beach at night with your girlfriend.  California has a sense of experimentation and a sense of openness—openness to new possibilities."  (Emphasis is mine.)

(It's ironic that, while Stanford inspired Silicon Valley through supporting student enterprises, it apparently also did so by making acid.  Both activities found fertile ground in the Bay Area of the day.)

  

  The California that Woz and Jobs were experiencing was also home for a young Jerry Garcia.   Garcia and the Grateful Dead were originally from Menlo Park, only a few miles away from where Woz and Jobs grew up.  They started as the house band that Ken Kesey employed to play at his experimental acid parties.  Kesey had participated in early psychedelic experiments while a student at Stanford.

  

  If acid was inspiring the creative community of Silicon Valley, then openness to taking the drug has to be attributed to San Francisco.  The Beat Generation (including such creative literary lights as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti) had taken firm root there, giving the city yet another burgeoning creative community and a growing reputation for open-mindedness.

  While surely not everyone participating in the percolating open-source mentality of the Bay Area was dosing, one could say metaphorically that those who did were affecting the water supply.  Inspired by new visions of how the world works and at least temporarily disabused by the acid muse of the concept of ownership, many techies began freely sharing technology and the Grateful Dead began freely sharing tapes and encouraging audiences to record their shows.  In these cases the Beatnik/hippie dream did not die—it became big business.  And more.

  I'm now an expat from the Bay Area—I live and learn in London.  The interest in the UK in Jobs' life when he died caused a surge of pride in me about my roots.  As you may know, Californians aren't always favorably viewed abroad.  Yet stories about Jobs, the Grateful Dead and the California that nurtured them ran through the UK papers for a few months, along with widespread speculation that the Bay Area had given the world its new brain.  The world in turn was learning where to send a thank-you letter.  I didn't rush to re-introduce 'cute' and 'yummy' to my lexicon, but I did put my San Francisco-ness up front again in casual conversation. 

  Still, in discussions about San Francisco with Londoners who'd picked up on the spate of recent headlines and chosen to commend me for my great choice of birthplace, I noticed that the common thread of LSD was missing.  I was disappointed to see it missing from this blog too.  Perhaps that is understandable—it is very hard to publicly commend a drug like LSD for advancing our evolution.  No matter how hard that is, it is harder still to deny that taboo substances are often the common experience of a generation, intimately linked with its ideals, creations and in some cases with its centers of creativity.  If wine gave us poetry, what then LSD?

  I've not really tried LSD—the 'really' is a long story—but I have my eye on the new 'standardized' approach to taking it in legal, sympathetic 'retreat' environments guided by Shamanic coaches. I'm thinking that these organized psychoactive rituals might bear some fruit for us humans—maybe even a few more Apples.

  

David Turin

Creativity à la Silicon Valley

  A writer friend of mine, whom I'll call X, choked on a comparison I made in an earlier posting.  It took a Heimlich maneuver to resuscitate the poor fellow.

  I had written about communal creativity, the kind that arises when creative people frequently and randomly interact, stimulating each others' individual creativity.  In a book I referred to, Jonah Lehrer says that communal creativity reaches a peak when an assortment of supportive social, civic, economic and demographic conditions align.  What he calls "clots of excess genius" then form.  (Better to call them "clots of excess creativity," since true genius is too rare to come in clots.)  He gives as examples fifth century BCE Athens, fifteenth-century Florence, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London and today's Silicon Valley, and I used the same examples.

  After recovering sufficiently, X emailed me to ask how Silicon Valley's "techies" and their creations could possibly be compared with the cultural illuminati and creations of Athens, Florence or London.  To put words into his mouth, it was as if he were asking: Can one even begin to compare Steve Jobs with Sophocles or Leonardo or Shakespeare?  Can one even begin to compare the iPad with Oedipus Rex, Mona Lisa, or Hamlet?  Put this way, the juxtaposition is staggering.

  It isn't that Silicon Valley doesn't have a clot of excess creativity. Annalee Saxenian, in her now classic book Regional Advantage, showed how the alignment of  the very same social, civic, economic and demographic conditions cited by Lehrer led to an explosion of communal and individual creativity there.  That alone at least invites comparison of Silicon Valley with earlier eras, if not necessarily leading to its inclusion in the pantheon. 

  X might accede thus far.  He admits that creators of technology have at least mental originality, but objects on another ground, asserting that their work doesn't emotionally engage the whole being of the creator or the beholder of the creation.  This, he seems to say, excludes Silicon Valley from any grouping with the other eras.  I wish I could imbue him with the sense of beauty and wonder that creators and beholders of engineering masterworks can feel.  It's sad that, more than a half century after C. P. Snow wrote about the disjunction between the two cultures of science/engineering and the humanities, mutual comprehension is still largely lacking.

  Yet X has correctly identified a difference in kind.  Many of the earlier eras' major creations were artistic or literary masterpieces by single creators. Silicon Valley's major creations are technological masterworks, usually agglomerations of efforts by many individuals.  Since responses to these different species of creations are so subjective, side-by-side comparisons of creators and creations from Silicon Valley with those from the earlier eras might shed more light on the comparer than the compared.  I think the four eras should therefore be compared by using a more objective yardstick: their overall impacts on civilization, which is probably what Lehrer had in mind in the first place.

  The golden age of Athens set the course for western civilization for millennia.  Fifteenth-century Florence set the tone for the rest of the Renaissance and still enthralls us with the beauty it created.  Writers in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London set a standard for English literature for centuries.  Yet even as measured against these colossal accomplishments, X isn't justified in being so dismissive of Silicon Valley.  It almost alone created the Information Age, enormously changing the very structure of society in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries and likely for centuries to come.  In terms of the magnitude of the consequences each creative era has had for the world, Silicon Valley clearly belongs to the quartet. 

  I will concede one point to X, though.  It is a big one, concerning the relative merits of the contributions of the four eras, not just their magnitude.  The creative heritages we have received from Athens, Florence and London, seen through the lens of time, are unalloyed boons. We are not yet sufficiently distant from the heritage of Silicon Valley to comprehensively and dispassionately evaluate its ultimate contribution to civilization.  On the plus side, the Information Age has made the cultural heritage of the world easily and freely available to all of its population, not just its elite.  It has begun to redress the imbalance between the powerful and the powerless by giving a stentorian voice to those who had been ignored.  It illuminates the dark recesses of society that would never have been discovered otherwise.  On the negative side of the ledger—as I have argued in the past two weeks—the Information Age has greatly distorted the way we interrelate personally, the "alone together" effect.  And there might be perils of the Information Age (sentient robots?) that are as yet unknown—after all, it took almost two centuries for the global warming arising from the still-ongoing activities of the Industrial Revolution to become evident.

  The jury remains out on the net legacy of Silicon Valley, its balance of good and bad.  The verdict might not be rendered for a century or two.  I wish I could be there to hear it.

Neurons and Creativity

  I've been puzzled ever since I posted "Intuition and Expertise" about a month ago. If you read it, you may remember a central postulate of Daniel Kahneman's book Thinking, Fast and Slow: people use two distinct mechanisms in thinking.  These are a fast and intuitive "System 1" and a slow and analytical "System 2."  It's a model that left me with nagging questions, unaddressed by Kahneman.  Are the two systems merely metaphors that don't have discrete neurological counterparts?  Or is each system instantiated at a specific neurological site?

  I was therefore excited to hear an interview on NPR in which Jonah Lehrer discussed his new book Imagine: How Creativity Works.  He talked not only about intuitive and analytical thinking in creativity, but also about particular neural circuits that are their loci.

  Thankfully, Lehrer is a journalist, not a scientist like Kahneman, so his book is short and relatively crisp.  (Good! I thought. I didn't want to plunge into another tome like Kahneman's.)  The book has two parts, "Alone" and "Together," which respectively address individual and communal creativity.  Just the first part is concerned with the details of neural activity, so I will confine myself mostly to it.  But the other part is of sufficient interest to warrant a brief outline.

  Together.  Lehrer asks why such places as fifth century BCE Athens, fifteenth-century Florence, late sixteenth-century London and today's Silicon Valley came to have "clots of excess genius"—rare agglomerations of creative people.  He maintains that they have in common a vital combination of ingredients: a dense population, relative affluence, and civic and social institutions that encourage creativity. Together, these ingredients foster frequent interactions among imaginative individuals, resulting in their interchanging ideas.  Each individual's creativity, the "alone" kind, is stoked by bumping into other creative individuals at random.  The environment in turn attracts still more of the brightest and most original, driving a positive feedback loop.

  For example, late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century London had one of the densest populations on earth; a relative lack of censorship; an amazing near-50% literacy rate nurtured by the English Reformation's rendering of the Bible into the vernacular; ardent and supportive theater-goers; and a plethora of coffee houses, which acted as milieux for chance meetings.  The result was a "clot of excess genius" containing the likes of Jonson, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Milton, Kyd, Spenser and Donne.  English literature has never again seen an efflorescence like that in such a short time period.

  Many modern companies try to mimic this clotting phenomenon.  At the insistence of Steve Jobs, for instance, all of the most-frequented spaces at Pixar and Apple—cafes and cafeterias, mailboxes, meeting rooms, even bathrooms—were clumped together centrally, so that people would be forced by happenstance to bump into each other, chatter and exchange ideas.  It seems to work, for Pixar and Apple are among the most creative companies ever established.

  Alone.  Still, while people can be prodded into creative acts by their surroundings, the act itself is usually individual.  That's where System 1 and System 2 thinking come into play.  Lehrer provides a fine insight into how these two forms of thinking occur in the brain.  Here are some of the facts he presents, with a few of my own comments interpolated.

  As I argued in my posting on intuition and expertise, System 1 leads to the Aha! moments that we all experience.  Finding the part of the brain where those epiphanies are generated has recently been made possible by using functional MRI (fMRI) measurements, which perceive increases in neural activity as surges in blood flow to those neurons.  Such measurements show that the anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG), a small fold of brain tissue above the right ear, becomes especially active a few seconds before an insight.  The aSTG functions subconsciously, apparently by obsessively searching for relationships among the myriad pieces of data that are stored in the brain.   When it finds a significant relationship, it "lights up" in the fMRI scan, like the light bulb above a cartoon character's head indicating an intuitive flash.  We may trigger an aSTG search because we are stumped in the analysis of a particular problem, probably because we are looking at the wrong data, or it may happen autonomously.  Interestingly, the aSTG seems to be most active when we are relaxed, possibly daydreaming.  That may be why Archimedes got his Eureka! moment while in a bath.

  On the other hand, System 2 thinking, the analytical kind, is in our conscious mind all along; we know that it is happening because it is effortful, concentrated work.  That work takes place in the prefrontal cortex (PFC), located behind the forehead.  The PFC has associated with it a short-term working memory that allows it  to focus on the very pieces of data it presumably needs to solve a problem—akin, I think, to a computer's RAM.  By not paying much attention to the vast amounts of other data in the brain (data "on disk" so to speak), the PFC emphasizes the fine-tuning of an emerging solution, but doesn't provoke epiphanies.  We gain incremental understanding from its activities, piece by piece.

  Part of the PFC may actually inhibit our full creativity: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which is most closely associated with impulse control.  It constrains our thoughts and actions so that we don't make fools of ourselves or violate social norms—a sort of straitjacket that the mind places on itself.  It can therefore prevent us from thinking "out of the box."  Tellingly, it is one of the last areas of the brain developed by children, which may explain both their relative lack of social inhibitions and their as-yet unbridled creativity.  fMRI studies of jazz musicians while they are improvising show their DLPFC activity to be suppressed, as if they are purposely inhibiting their inhibitions so as to be able to jam; this suppression doesn't occur when they are merely playing a set piece.

  Another connection, or actually lack of one, between creativity and the PFC is quite amazing.  When we are asleep, the PFC shuts down!  Our analytical abilities and our inhibitions—our sanity checkers—are gone.  The brain is then free to run amok, dreaming uninhibited thoughts and making "insane" connections among its memories.  Occasionally connections that do make sense occur in this maelstrom.  Perhaps that is why we sometimes decide to "sleep on it" when we are trying to solve a particularly vexing problem.

  These few facts about the neurology of thinking are of course not the whole story.  No matter. They are the beginning of an answer to the "nagging questions" Kahneman left me with.  My inner scientist is very pleased.  I love it when observational data can be understood in terms of underlying physical phenomena!