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Creativity

“You’re asking the blood in your brain to flow in another direction.”

Bowie, Eno, and Darwin: How Frustration and Distraction Help Us Solve Problems in Art, Science, and Life

Keith Jarrett’s predicament was a happy accident. But there are those who take it for granted that such accidents can and should be planned; they feel that messy situations will tend to provide fertile creative soil.

In 1976, David Bowie fled to West Berlin. The unearthly, ambisexual rock star had repeatedly shredded the rule book for rock and roll, creating one persona after another—from Ziggy Stardust to the Thin White Duke—until he found himself stuck. He was beset by legal troubles, his marriage alternated between indifference and contempt, and he was taking too many drugs—which he planned to kick, in the words of his friend and housemate Iggy Pop, “in the heroin capital of the world.”

“It was a dangerous period for me,” Bowie reflected over twenty years later. “I was at the end of my tether physically and emotionally and had serious doubts about my sanity.”¹

Bowie put down roots near the Berlin Wall. Hansa Studios, where he and Iggy Pop recorded a series of groundbreaking albums, were overlooked by East German machine gun nests. Bowie’s producer, Tony Visconti, remarked that everything about the place screamed “you shouldn’t be making a record here.”² But amid Berlin’s great museums, legendary bondage clubs, and tormented geopolitics, Bowie found what he needed: new ideas, new constraints, and new challenges. And then, of course, there was Brian Eno.

Eno had already found fame as Roxy Music’s crazy keyboard player, and as the creator of a new sonic aesthetic called ambient music. Now Bowie had brought him in to play an undefined collaborative role alongside Tony Visconti. Visconti himself was recruited by Bowie with this sales pitch: “We don’t have any actual songs yet . . . this is strictly experimental and nothing might come of it in the end.”³

As Visconti and Bowie struggled to find a new direction—not so much composing songs as carving them out of blocks of sound—Eno took to showing up at the studio with a selection of cards he called Oblique Strategies. Each had a different instruction, often a gnomic one. Whenever the studio sessions were running aground, Eno would draw a card at random and relay its strange orders.

Be the first not to do what has never not been done before

Emphasize the flaws

Only a part, not the whole

Twist the spine

Look at the order in which you do things

Change instrument roles

For example, during the recording of the Lodger album, Carlos Alomar, one of the world’s greatest guitarists, was told to play the drums instead. This was just one of the challenges that Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards imposed, apparently unnecessarily. The cards drove the musicians crazy. (This annoyance cannot have come as a surprise to Eno. During work on an earlier Eno album, Another Green World, the cards reduced Phil Collins, the superstar drummer from Genesis, to hurling beer cans across the studio in frustration.⁴) Faced with one piece of card-inspired foolishness, Carlos Alomar told Eno that “this experiment is stupid”; the violinist Simon House commented that the sessions often “sounded terrible. Carlos did have a problem, simply because he’s very gifted and professional . . . he can’t bring himself to play stuff that sounds like crap.”⁵

Yet the strange chaotic working process produced two of the decade’s most critically acclaimed albums, Low and “Heroes,” along with Iggy Pop’s most respected work, The Idiot and Lust for Life. Low was arguably the bravest reinvention in pop history—imagine Taylor Swift releasing an album full of long, pensive instrumentals and you get a sense of the shock. It’s hard to argue with such results, and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies now have a cult following in creative circles.

The Berlin trilogy of albums ends with Bowie’s Lodger, a record with a revealing working title. It was originally called Planned Accidents.

•   •   •

Given both Jarrett’s and Bowie’s experiences, it seems that arbitrary shocks to a project can have a wonderful, almost magical effect. But why is that? One might expect that the answer lies in our psychological response to these curveballs, but that is only partly true. The advantage of random disturbances can also be seen in a far more technical realm—mathematics—full of practical applications.

Take the question of how to lay out a circuit on a silicon chip. Starting with a description of what the circuit should do tells us which parts of which components should be wired to other components, but there are trillions upon trillions of conceivable ways to lay out the wiring and the digital logic gates that make up the circuit—and some are much more efficient than others, making a big difference to the performance of the chip.⁶ This is an example of what mathematicians call an NP-hard problem. NP-hard problems are a bit like enormous combination locks: if you’re given a solution it is easy to check if it works, but it would take an impossibly long time to find the solution yourself by systematically trying every combination.

Fortunately, there is a sense in which the silicon chip problem differs from a combination lock. With a lock, only one solution will work. But with a chip, manufacturers don’t need to find the ultimate circuit layout; they just need to find one that’s good enough. To do that, they use an algorithm, which is a recipe for a computer to work through different possibilities. A good algorithm will get you a decent solution without taking forever.

But what makes for a good algorithm? One recipe that won’t get very far is a systematic check of every possible layout: that’s hopeless, because it might take a lifetime to stumble across a good answer. Another is to start with a random layout and look for incremental improvements: a small change that makes the layout work better, moving just a single component and redrawing the wiring to fit. Find another small improvement; then another; then another. Unfortunately, this method is likely to send you down a dead end. There’ll be a point where no single change can make the circuit more efficient, even though making several changes at once—perhaps moving several components together into a cluster—would produce a big improvement.

The better method is to emulate Brian Eno and introduce a judicious dose of randomness. For example, an algorithm called “simulated annealing” starts with an almost random search, willing to try any change, good or bad. Then it slowly becomes fussier and fussier about what changes it will accept, until eventually it has turned into a rigid search for small step-by-step improvements. There’s no guarantee of finding the very best circuit layout, but this kind of approach will usually find a good one. The combination of gradual improvements and random shocks turns out to be a very effective way to approach a host of difficult problems. One example: evaluate a complex new molecule for possible medical use by comparing its structure with that of many other complex molecules with known medical properties. Other examples involve scheduling (find a timetable for exams in which no student faces a clash between the subjects she is taking) or logistics (planning the optimal route for delivering packages).

Here’s an analogy: imagine participating in a strange competition to find the highest point on the planet, without being allowed to look at a map. You can name any set of coordinates you like, and you’ll be told its altitude: say, “50.945980, 6.973465,” and you’re told: “That’s 65 meters above sea level.” Then you can name another point, and another, as often as you like until you run out of time.

What strategy will you use? As with all the other problems, you could try a methodical search: start with “0.000001, 0.000001” and work your way up. You’re unlikely to have found a competition-winning high altitude by the time the clock runs out.

Or you could try a strategy of purely random leaps: pick one set of random coordinates after another, and when time runs out, look back through them and pick the highest point. You might get lucky and just happen to suggest some coordinates near the top of Everest, but pure randomness is probably not going to win you the contest.

An alternative extreme strategy is pure hill-climbing, analogous to the step-by-step search for improvements in the silicon chip design. Start at a random point and then look at all the nearby coordinates—say, a meter away in each direction. Pick the highest of those, and repeat the process over and over. The hill-climbing algorithm is guaranteed to bring you to a local summit—a point from which every direction is down. This strategy will serve you well if your first random guess was on the foothills of a cloud-capped pinnacle, but it may have been just a sand dune or a pitcher’s mound. Hill-climbing strategies get stuck if they meet small hills.

The most likely winning approaches will be a blend of randomness with hill-climbing. You might start by trying purely random coordinates for a while. Then, with time ticking on, you pick the highest you’ve hit so far and try some more random coordinates within a few kilometers of that point—hopefully, by now, you’re fishing in a mountain range. Finally, you pick the highest point so far and switch to a pure hill-climbing algorithm until time runs out.

Improvising at the piano seems a world away from laying out an efficient array of electronic components on a silicon wafer, but the analogy of random leaps and hill-climbing helps to make sense of what happened in Cologne. Keith Jarrett was already a highly accomplished pianist: we might imagine his performances as habitually scaling peaks in the Alps. When faced with the unplayable piano, with its harsh treble and anemic bass, it was as if a random disruption had plucked him from an Alpine peak and deposited him in an unfamiliar valley. No wonder he was annoyed. But when he started to climb, it turned out that valley was in the Himalayas, and his skill enabled him to ascend to a higher and more wonderful destination than he had ever reached before.

It’s human nature to want to improve, and this means that we tend to be instinctive hill-climbers. Whether we’re trying to master a hobby, learn a language, write an essay, or build a business, it’s natural to want every change to be a change for the better. But like the problem-solving algorithms, it’s easy to get stuck if we insist that we will never go downhill.

There are some situations in which a relentless hill-climbing search for marginal improvements seems to work well even without the occasional random leap. For example, the fortunes of British cycling were transformed by adopting a philosophy of “marginal gains.” Thanks to this approach, British cyclists won seven out of the ten gold medals available on the track at the 2012 Olympics—as well as winning the Tour de France in 2012, 2013, and 2015 after almost a century of failure. But this turns out to be an exception that proves the rule, because the cycling authorities had stacked the deck in favor of tidy step-by-step approaches. In the 1990s, Graeme Obree, a maverick cyclist nicknamed “The Flying Scotsman,” made some random leaps—he experimented with radical changes, building his own bike from odd components, including parts of a washing machine, and adopting unusual riding positions, one of which involved tucking his hands into his breastbone with no handlebars to speak of, and another with hands straight out like Superman.

Obree’s experimentations enabled him to break the world hour record twice, until the world cycling body, the Union Cycliste Internationale, simply banned his riding position. He switched to another unconventional position and won the world championship; the UCI banned that position, too. Given the UCI’s attitude, we should not be surprised that the best cyclists and cycling teams now focus largely on marginal gains. But in most endeavors, there is no UCI to artificially constrain our crazy ideas.

Most of us are not virtuoso jazz pianists, silicon chip designers, or elite cyclists. But many of us are commuters, and even the repetitiveness of the daily commute illustrates the power of randomness to unstick us when we don’t even know we’re stuck.

In 2014, some of the workers on London’s Underground system went on strike for two days. The strike closed 171 of the system’s 270 stations, leaving commuters scrambling to find alternative routes using buses, aboveground trains, or the stations that remained open. Many commuters in London use electronic fare cards that are valid on all forms of public transport, and after the strike, three economists examined data generated by those cards. The researchers were able to see that most people used a different route to get to work on the strike days, no doubt with some annoyance. But what was surprising is that when the strike was over, not everybody returned to their habitual commuting route. One in twenty of the commuters who had switched then stayed with the route that they had used during the strike; presumably, they had discovered that it was faster or cheaper or preferable in some other way to their old routine. We tend to think that commuters have their route to work honed to perfection; evidently not. A substantial minority promptly found an improvement to the journey they had been making for years. All they needed was an unexpected shock to force them to seek out something better.⁷

Messy disruptions will be most powerful when combined with creative skill. The disruption puts an artist, scientist, or engineer in unpromising territory—a deep valley rather than a familiar hilltop. But then expertise kicks in and finds ways to move upward again: the climb finishes at a new peak, perhaps lower than the old one, but perhaps unexpectedly higher.

As long as you’re exploring the same old approaches, Brian Eno explains, “you get more and more competent at dealing with that place, and your clichés become increasingly clichéd.”⁸

But when we are forced to start from somewhere new, the clichés can be replaced with moments of magic.

•   •   •

Brian Eno is annoyed. “I wish these people would go away.” He’s sitting in the sunshine in a mews in Notting Hill, West London, and a group of people have emerged from a nearby house. “I don’t know why they’ve chosen to have this fucking conversation outside right now.”⁹

Eno is being interviewed by my colleague, Ludovic Hunter-Tilney. The interview moves indoors, but even there things aren’t quiet enough. Eventually, he moves to the holy of holies—his recording studio. Only there, free from all auditory distractions, can Eno concentrate on talking about music.

Nothing gets past Brian Eno’s ears, it seems.

I meet Eno one February afternoon in the same Notting Hill studio. It’s a warehouse space with a wrought-iron spiral staircase in the center and a kitchenette in one nook. Architecturally the place is defined more by what it is not than what it is: it feels like someone put a flimsy roof over a space that was hemmed in on all sides by expensive town houses. The only daylight comes through the skylights.

While the spaciousness of the place stops it from feeling claustrophobic, it is engagingly messy. We are surrounded by a piano and some guitars, speakers and laptops, towering bookshelves packed with curiosities, bits and pieces of half-built instruments, plastic crates full of cables and wires and art supplies, and in a desk in a corner, a perfume collection.

Eno himself is a man who once dressed like a wizard, long locks dyed silver as he played the synthesizer with a giant plastic knife and fork. Now in his mid-sixties, the glam look is long gone. He is dressed expensively but casually. Where his head isn’t bald, it is shaved. He has the veteran cool of a star architect.

He hasn’t stopped making music. A new ambient work is being randomly generated by an Eno-tweaked algorithm even as we greet each other. As our interview begins he switches it off—otherwise we’d never be able to talk. “It’s a problem for me in social situations . . . I can’t be in a restaurant when there’s music playing,” he says. “I just can’t get my ears off it.”¹⁰

Brian Eno is easily distracted.

We’re often told that good work comes from the ability to focus, to shut out distractions. To choose from a plethora of self-help tips along these lines, a Mayo Clinic psychologist, Dr. Amit Sood, advises us to focus more effectively by turning off the TV, logging out of e-mail, and taking up “attention training” to “train your brain.” An article on the Psych Central website offers similar tips, counseling us to “limit distractions”—alas, on a webpage that is surrounded by sponsored links about wrinkle cream, sex addiction, and ways to save money on insurance. Some people turn to methylphenidate (better known as Ritalin) to help them concentrate. The science writer Caroline Williams even visited the Boston Attention and Learning Lab—an affiliate of Harvard and Boston Universities—to have her left prefrontal lobe zapped with magnetic pulses, all in an attempt to resolve what one of the lab’s neuroscientists called her “issues with attention and distractibility.”¹¹

Yet here is a creative icon, one of the most influential people in modern music, who seems unable to hold a conversation outside a soundproof box. Look around a record shop and Eno is everywhere: as a glam rocker with Roxy Music; composing ambient work such as Music for Airports; creating My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a collaboration with David Byrne in which two white geeks anticipated hip-hop; and making Another Green World, the record that Prince once named as his biggest inspiration. (It’s the one featuring Phil Collins and the beer cans.) But the albums with Eno’s name on the front are just the start. Look in the small print and he is everywhere, a zephyr of cerebral chaos blowing back and forth across the frontal lobes of pop. Famous for his contributions to David Bowie’s albums, Eno has also worked with Talking Heads, U2, Paul Simon, and Coldplay. Along the way he collaborated with punks, performance artists, experimental composers, and even the film director David Lynch.* When the music magazine Pitchfork listed its top 100 albums of the 1970s, Brian Eno had a hand in more than a quarter of them.

Distractibility can indeed seem like an “issue,” or even a curse. But that’s if we’re looking only at the hill-climbing part of the creative process. Distractible brains can also be seen as brains that have an innate tendency to make those useful random leaps. Perhaps, like Keith Jarrett’s unplayable piano, distractibility is a disadvantage that isn’t a disadvantage at all. Certainly to psychologists who study creativity, the fact that Brian Eno is easily distracted comes as little surprise.¹²

A few years ago a team of researchers including Shelley Carson of Harvard tested a group of Harvard students to measure the strength of their ability to filter out unwanted stimulus.¹³ (For example, if you’re having a conversation in a busy restaurant, and you can easily filter out the other conversations going on around you and focus only on the conversation at hand, you have strong attentional filters.) Some of the students they studied had very weak filters—their thoughts were constantly being interrupted by the sounds and sights of the world around them.

You might think that this was a disadvantage. Yet these students were actually more creative on all sorts of measures. The most striking result came when the researchers looked at precociously creative students—those who had already released their first album, published their first novel, produced a stage show of sufficient prominence to be reviewed by the national press, been awarded a patent, or some similar achievement. There were twenty-five of these super-creatives in the study; twenty-two of them had weak or porous attention filters. Like Brian Eno, they simply couldn’t filter out irrelevant details. But then, who is to say what is irrelevant?

Holly White of the University of Michigan and Priti Shah of the University of Memphis found something similar in a study of their own.¹⁴ They looked at adults with attention deficit/hyperactivity disorder at a severe enough level to have sought professional help. As with Shelley Carson’s research, the ADHD sufferers were more creative in the laboratory than non-sufferers, and were more likely to have major creative accomplishments outside the lab. The people who were most easily distracted were also the ones whose first album had been released, whose poetry had been published in The New Yorker, or whose play was showing off-Broadway.

Clearly, these people were not so completely incapable of focus that they couldn’t finish the album, the poem, or the script. There needs to be at least some hill-climbing between the random leaps. But looking at these achievements, the word “hyperactivity” takes on more positive connotations. One is reminded of the sardonic headline in The Onion: “RITALIN CURES NEXT PICASSO.”

•   •   •

Psychologists have conducted several laboratory studies of ordinary people struggling with messy disruptions, distractions, or constraints in situations that ask them to be creative.

In one, Charlan Nemeth and Julianne Kwan showed pairs of people bluish/greenish slides, asking them to shout out whether they were blue or green. The experimenters had a trick to play, however: one member of each pair was actually a confederate of the researchers, who would sometimes call out baffling responses—“green” when the slide was clearly blue. Having been thoroughly baffled, the experimental subjects were then asked to free-associate words connected with “green” and “blue”—sky, sea, eyes. Those who had been subjected to a confusing mess of signals produced more original word associations: jazz, flame, pornography, sad, Picasso. There was something about the sheer disruptiveness of the setup that unlocked creative responses.¹⁵

In another study, led by psychologist Ellen Langer, researchers assigned creative tasks to their subjects, then started messing with them. For example, as a subject was halfway through drawing a cat, the psychologists would say, “Oh, the animal has to be one that lives underwater.” Other people were given an exercise about breakfast, and then told, verbally, to write an essay about “morning.” Halfway through the exercise, they were asked to fill in a quick questionnaire asking how it felt to be writing an essay about “mourning.” As long as people had been appropriately briefed (“mistakes are human, try incorporating them into your work”) they did better work and reported that they had more fun.¹⁶

A third experiment was conducted by a team including Paul Howard-Jones, a neuroscientist at the University of Bristol. Researchers showed their experimental subjects a set of three words, and then asked them to tell a brief story involving the three words. Sometimes the words had obvious connections, such as “teeth, brush, dentist” or “car, driver, road.” Sometimes the words were unconnected, such as “cow, zip, star” or “melon, book, thunder.” The more random, obscure, challenging combinations spurred the subjects into spinning far more creative tales.¹⁷

These are, admittedly, artificial one-off situations with nothing at stake for the experimental subjects. When someone relies on creativity for a living, mucking them around becomes much more fraught: think of poor Carlos Alomar, too talented and too professional to be comfortable playing “crap”; or Phil Collins, so frustrated with Eno’s unpredictable requests that he started throwing beer cans around the studio. It’s one thing to throw random noise into a computer algorithm, mechanistically forcing it to seek fresh horizons in its search for the perfect circuit layout. But algorithms don’t have feelings. Is the mess of Oblique Strategies really a productive way to deal with human beings?

Brian Eno rubs his pate thoughtfully as we sit at a small circular table in the middle of his studio. The ambient music has been switched off, but he’s placed me so that over his shoulder I can view one of his ventures into ambient visual art. Mounted on the wall beside the piano is a brushed-aluminum diamond-shaped frame housing four exactingly fitted plasma screens on which an ever-shifting Eno artwork is displayed in fourfold symmetry. The change is slow, beautiful, and soothing—unlike the Oblique Strategies cards, which can wrench and jar.

I mention Adrian Belew, another fine guitarist, who was drafted into the David Bowie recording session where Carlos Alomar was ordered to play the drums. He didn’t really know what was happening, and had barely plugged in his Stratocaster when Eno, Visconti, and Bowie told him to start playing in response to a previously unheard track. Before he could ask why Carlos was on the drums, Belew was told that Alomar “would go one, two, three, then you come in.”

“What key is it?” asked Belew.

“Don’t worry about the key. Just play!”

“It was like a freight train coming through my mind,” said Belew later. “I just had to cling on.”¹⁸

“Poor Adrian,” muses Eno. “He’s such a great player that he can handle this kind of thing.”¹⁹ Still, he adds, “I think I would have a bit of difficulty doing that experiment now. I didn’t really know enough about being a playing musician at that time . . . I didn’t know how disruptive that was to players.” Eno admits that his experiments with Belew, Alomar, and the other musicians in Berlin weren’t much fun for them. Used to finding a comfortable groove, their routines were “entirely subverted” as Eno pushed them through arbitrarily chosen chord sequences by pointing at different notes on a blackboard in the studio.

The eventual result of the freight train coming through Belew’s mind, sliced and spliced by Eno and producer Visconti, became a guitar solo that is the spine of Bowie’s single “Boys Keep Swinging.” The solo is now regarded as a classic. And from a creative point of view, the end may justify the means: when we listen to a Bowie album, we don’t see the mess and frustration of the recording session; we can just enjoy the beauty that it produced.

On the table between me and Eno is a deck of the cards in a snug black box. Seeking an example, Eno jiggles the box open and pulls out a card. It says:

WATER

What impact might that card have on a group of musicians in a studio? Eno starts throwing out suggestions. Perhaps it would be a prompt to take a break and have a drink. One member of the band might argue that the music is too stiff and needs to be more fluid. Another might simply complain that the music already is soggy and wet. The point is that the card forces the group to take a new vantage point and to look carefully at what can be seen from that point.

What is more, he says, people respond to unexpected stimuli and constraints all the time. We just don’t call it randomness. A good conversation is a constant stream of unexpected responses. A new collaboration forces fresh perspectives and demands attention. “That’s why working with somebody new can be very exciting,” Eno says.

Or consider a rhyme in a poem or a song. “When you start out with a line . . . ‘Her hair was beautiful and red,’ then immediately your mind is saying ‘Dead . . . fled . . . instead . . . bled . . . lalala.’ Immediately you’ve pushed yourself into a place where you have to make a choice between a set of random possibilities, because there’s no connection between the word ‘red’ and the word ‘instead’ except they happen to sound the same. Suddenly you have a bunch of random possibilities thrown at you and of course as soon as you do that it pushes you into places that you really had not thought of going before.”

And then Eno says something that sheds a new light on the way I see the Oblique Strategies cards and the unplayable piano.

“The enemy of creative work is boredom, actually,” he says. “And the friend is alertness. Now I think what makes you alert is to be faced with a situation that is beyond your control so you have to be watching it very carefully to see how it unfolds, to be able to stay on top of it. That kind of alertness is exciting.”²⁰

That alertness is Keith Jarrett onstage in Cologne. It’s Adrian Belew desperately trying to make sense of “Boys Keep Swinging.” And it is the effect that the cards can have on a creative project. The cards force us into a random leap to an unfamiliar location, and we need to be alert to figure out where we are and where to go from here. Says Eno, “The thrill of them is that they put us in a messier situation.”

This sudden sharpening of our attention doesn’t just apply to pioneering artworks. It can be seen in an ordinary high school classroom. In a recent study, psychologists Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, and Erikka Vaughan teamed up with teachers, getting them to reformat the teaching handouts they used. Half their classes, chosen at random, got the original materials. The other half got the same documents, reformatted into one of three challenging fonts: the dense , the florid , or the zesty . These are, on the face of it, absurd and distracting fonts. But the fonts didn’t derail the students. They prompted them to pay attention, to slow down, and to think about what they were reading. Students who had been taught using the ugly fonts ended up scoring higher on their end-of-semester exams.²¹

Most of us don’t have an academic researcher or a Brian Eno in our lives, forcing us to seek out these attention-grabbing challenges. We don’t force ourselves to reformat our work into challenging fonts, perform on faulty instruments, or arbitrarily seek alternative commuting routes. However, there is another strategy for making random leaps which is altogether more achievable.

•   •   •

The journalist David Sheppard’s biography of Brian Eno noted that his “frenetic multi-episodic life can sometimes present a thick miasma of cross-pollinated activity.”²² Erez Lieberman Aiden seems much the same. Aiden is not a chart-topping musician, although his CV suggests that little is beyond his grasp. He has been a physicist, an engineer, a mathematician, a molecular biologist, a historian, and a linguist, and he’s won some big scientific prizes for his work.²³ All before he turned forty.

The science writer Ed Yong describes Aiden’s working method as “nomadic. He moves about, searching for ideas that will pique his curiosity, extend his horizons, and hopefully make a big impact. ‘I don’t view myself as a practitioner of a particular skill or method,’ he tells me. ‘I’m constantly looking at what’s the most interesting problem that I could possibly work on. I really try to figure out what sort of scientist I need to be in order to solve the problem I’m interested in solving.’”²⁴

The nomadic approach isn’t just about feeding Aiden’s natural curiosity, although he has plenty of that. It pays off whenever he hits a dead end. For example, in his mid-twenties, Aiden tried to sequence the human immune system. Human antibodies are built from a Lego kit of different genes, snapping together quickly to meet the challenges of constant invasions from viruses, bacteria, and other nasties. Aiden wanted to catalogue all the Lego bricks in the set—all the different genes that could be deployed to fight germs.

After months of hard work, the project crashed. The gene sequencing techniques just weren’t up to distinguishing among countless subtly different genes. But then Aiden went to an immunology conference, wandered into the wrong talk, and ended up solving a ferociously difficult problem—the three-dimensional structure of the human genome—by combining everything he had learned in failing to sequence antibodies with an obscure idea he’d stumbled upon from mathematical physics.

This wasn’t a fluke. It was a strategy. Aiden seeks the hardest, most interesting problems he can find, and bounces between them. A failure in one area gives fresh insights and new tools that may work elsewhere. For example, Aiden helped Google launch “n-grams,” graphs showing the popularity of words across history thanks to a quantitative analysis of five million digitized books. He’s now moving on to a similar analysis of music. This poses some formidable technical challenges, but fortunately Aiden already solved a key one while he was failing to sequence the human immune system.²⁵

Erez Aiden is clearly an unusual man. But how unusual?

In 1958, a young psychologist by the name of Bernice Eiduson began a long-term study of the working methods of forty mid-career scientists. For twenty years, Professor Eiduson periodically interviewed the scientists and gave them a variety of psychological tests, as well as gathering data on their publications. Some of the scientists went on to great success: there were four Nobel Prize winners in the group, and two others widely regarded as Nobel-worthy. Several other scientists joined the National Academy of Sciences. Others had disappointing careers.

In 1993, several years after Bernice Eiduson’s death, her colleagues published an analysis of this study, trying to spot patterns. A question of particular interest was: What determines whether a scientist keeps publishing important work throughout his or her life? A few highly productive scientists produced breakthrough paper after breakthrough paper. How?²⁶

A striking pattern emerged. The top scientists switched topics frequently. Over the course of their first hundred published papers, the long-lived high-impact researchers switched topics an average of forty-three times. The leaps were less dramatic than the ones Erez Aiden likes to take, but the pattern is the same; the top scientists keep changing the subject if they wish to stay productive. Erez Aiden is less of an outlier than one might think. As Brian Eno says, the friend of creative work is alertness, and nothing focuses your attention like stepping onto unfamiliar ground.

Eiduson’s research project isn’t the only one to reach this conclusion. Her colleagues looked at historical examples of long-term scientific achievers, such as Alexander Fleming and Louis Pasteur, and compared them to “one-hit wonders” such as James Watson, co-discoverer of DNA, and Jonas Salk, who developed the polio vaccine. They found the same pattern: Fleming and Pasteur switched research topics frequently; Watson and Salk did not.

This sort of project switching seems to work in the arts as well as the sciences. David Bowie himself is a great example. In the few years before he went to Berlin, Bowie had been collaborating with John Lennon, had lived in Geneva, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia, and had acted in a feature film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, as well as working abortively on its soundtrack. He had been drafting an autobiography. In Berlin, he produced and cowrote Iggy Pop’s albums in between working on his own.

Another example is Michael Crichton, who in the 1970s and 1980s had written several novels, directed the mid-budget sci-fi thriller Westworld, and written nonfiction books about art, medicine, and even computer programming. This remarkable range of interests served him well: by 1994 Crichton had the astonishing distinction of having created the world’s most commercially successful novel (Disclosure), TV show (ER), and film (Jurassic Park).²⁷

A study of this sort of project-juggling behavior has been conducted by a team including creativity researchers Keith Sawyer and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who popularized the idea of flow. The researchers investigated the creative habits of almost a hundred exceptionally creative people, including performers such as Ravi Shankar; Paul MacCready, who built the first human-powered airplane; Nobel laureates in literature such as Nadine Gordimer; twelve-time Emmy Award–winning TV producer Joan Konner; great nonfiction writers such as Stephen Jay Gould; and a pair of double Nobel laureates, Linus Pauling and John Bardeen. Every single one of this galaxy of creative stars had multiple projects on the go at the same time.²⁸

In the business world, too, different fields can cross-fertilize. Dick Drew was a sandpaper salesman at the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. In the 1920s he noticed the challenges of painting automobiles, and with a leap of intuition he realized that sandpaper could help. All he needed to do was produce a roll of sandpaper without the sand: the result was masking tape. Later, Drew saw DuPont’s new wrapping paper, “cellophane.” Again, he saw an opportunity. Cellophane didn’t have to be a wrapping paper at all: it could be one more product to be coated with glue and stored on a roll. Thus was Scotch tape invented.²⁹

These days Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing is called 3M, one of the most consistently innovative companies in the world. Given its origins, should we be surprised to discover that 3M has a “flexible attention” policy? In most companies, flexible attention means goofing off on the company dime. In 3M it means playing a game, taking a nap, or going for a walk across an extensive campus to admire the deer. 3M knows that creative ideas don’t always surrender to a frontal assault. Sometimes they sneak up on us while we are paying attention to something else.³⁰

3M also rotates its engineers from one department to another every few years. This policy is one that many companies—not to mention some employees—resist. Why make someone with years of expertise in soundproofing or flat-screen displays work on a vaccine or an air conditioner? For the company it seems wasteful and for the employee it can be stressful. But for a company that makes masking materials out of sandpaper and sticky tape out of wrapping paper, the real waste would be to let ideas sit in their tidy silos, never to be released.

•   •   •

Two leading creativity researchers, Howard Gruber and Sara Davis, have argued that the tendency to work on multiple projects is so common among the most creative people that it should be regarded as standard practice.³¹ Gruber had a particular interest in Charles Darwin, who throughout his life alternated between research in geology, zoology, psychology, and botany, always with some projects in the foreground and others in the background, competing for his attention. He undertook his celebrated voyage with the Beagle with “an ample and unprofessional vagueness in his goals.”

And then there are the earthworms. Darwin could not get enough of earthworms. This great scientist, who traveled the world, studied the finches of the Galápagos, developed a compelling account of the formation of coral reefs, and—of course—crafted the brilliant, controversial, meticulously argued theory of evolution, studied earthworms from every possible angle for more than forty years. The earthworms were a touchstone, a foundation, almost a security blanket. Whenever Darwin was anxious, puzzled, or at a loss, he could always turn to the study of the humble earthworm.³²

Gruber and Davis call this pattern of different projects at different stages of fruition a “network of enterprises.” Such a network of parallel projects has four clear benefits, one of them practical and the others more psychological.

The practical benefit is that the multiple projects cross-fertilize. The knowledge gained in one enterprise provides the key to unlock another. This is Erez Aiden’s advantage. He moves back and forth across his network of enterprises, solving an impasse on one project with ideas from another, or unexpectedly fusing two disparate lines of work. Dick Drew did much the same at 3M. Or as David Bowie once put it, “The idea of mixtures has always been something that I’ve found absolutely fascinating, using the wrong pieces of information and putting them together and finding a third piece of information.”³³

The psychological advantages may be just as important. First is the point emphasized by Brian Eno, that a fresh context is exciting; having several projects may seem distracting, but instead the variety grabs our attention—we’re like tourists gawping at details that a local would find mundane.

The second advantage is that while we’re paying close attention to one project, we may be unconsciously processing another—as with the cliché of inspiration striking in the shower. Some scientists believe that this unconscious processing is an important key to solving creative problems.³⁴ John Kounios, a psychologist at Drexel University, argues that daydreaming strips items of their context.³⁵ That’s a powerful way to unlock fresh thoughts. And there can be few better ways to let the unconscious mind chew over a problem than to turn to a totally different project in the network of enterprises.

A third psychological benefit is that each project in the network of enterprises provides an escape from the others. In truly original work, there will always be impasses and blind alleys. Having another project to turn to can prevent a setback from turning into a crushing experience. The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called this “crop rotation.” One cannot use the same field to grow the same crop indefinitely; eventually the soil must be refreshed, by planting something new, or simply taking a break.³⁶

Gruber and Davis observe that a dead end in one project can actually feel liberating. If one business model founders, an entrepreneur can pivot to something fresh. The writer can pull out some old jottings, the scientist can turn to an anomaly she had long wanted to investigate. What would have been a depressing waste of time for a single-minded person can become a creative lease of life for someone with several projects on the go.

That’s the theory, but in practice it can be a source of anxiety. Having many projects on the go is a stressful experience that can quickly degenerate into wheel-spinning. (Rather than turning to the study of earthworms for a break, we turn to Facebook instead.) How do we prevent it from becoming psychologically overwhelming?

Here’s one practical solution, from the great American choreographer Twyla Tharp. Over the past fifty years she has won countless awards while blurring genres and dancing to the music of everyone from Mozart to Billy Joel, and somehow has found the time to write three books. “You’ve got to be all things,” she says. “Why exclude? You have to be everything.”³⁷ Tharp uses the no-nonsense approach of assigning a box to every project. Into the box she tosses notes, videos, theater programs, books, magazine cuttings, physical objects, and anything else that has been a source of inspiration. If she runs out of space, she gets a second box. And if she gets stuck, the answer is simple: begin an archaeological dig into one of her boxes. She writes:

The box makes me feel connected to a project. It is my soil. I feel this even when I’ve back-burnered a project: I may have put the box away on a shelf, but I know it’s there. The project name on the box in bold black lettering is a constant reminder that I had an idea once and may come back to it very soon.

Most important, though, the box means I never have to worry about forgetting. One of the biggest fears for a creative person is that some brilliant idea will get lost because you didn’t write it down and put it in a safe place. I don’t worry about that because I know where to find it. It’s all in the box.³⁸

I have a related solution myself, a steel sheet on the wall of my office full of magnets and three-by-five-inch cards. Each card has a single project on it—something chunky that will take me at least a day to complete. As I write this, there are more than fifteen projects up there, including my next weekly column, an imminent house move, a standup comedy routine I’ve promised to try to write, two separate ideas for a series of podcasts, a television proposal, a long magazine article, and this chapter. That would potentially be overwhelming, but the solution is simple: I’ve chosen three projects and placed them at the top. They’re active projects and I allow myself to work on any of the three. All the others are on the back burner. I don’t fret that I will forget them, because they’re captured on the board. But neither do I feel compelled to start working on any of them. They won’t distract me, but if the right idea comes along they may well snag some creative thread in my subconscious.

Whether it’s a stack of boxes or a notice board full of cards, you can manage many projects like this. Rather than churning away at the front of your thoughts, ideas can be stored safely at the back of your mind, ready to pop up when unexpected inspiration strikes.

Eno’s Oblique Strategies began as a tidy prototype: a checklist. Working on the first Roxy Music album in 1972, Eno and the rest of the band found themselves in a proper recording studio for the first time. That was intimidating.

“It was a lot of money,” he says. “We were just working away and working away. And sometimes I would go home at night and remember, think back over the day’s work, and think, God, if we’d only remembered such-and-such a thing, some idea, that would have been better.”

Eno started making a list of ideas to remember in the high-pressure environment of the studio. The first was “Honor thy error as a hidden intention,” a reminder that sometimes what is achieved by accident may be much more worthy of attention than the original plan. The list of reminders grew, “sitting out on the control room desk.”

But Eno soon found that the list didn’t work. It was too orderly. It was too easy to ignore the disruptive instructions. Your eye would run down the list and settle on exactly the item that would cause the least stress, something that felt safe. And so the idea emerged of turning the checklist into a deck of cards that would be shuffled and dealt at random. Eno’s friend, the artist Peter Schmidt, had a flip-book filled with similar provocations. The two men teamed up to produce the Oblique Strategies deck—a guaranteed method of pushing artists out of their comfort zones.

The poet Simon Armitage, fascinated by the cards, says their effect is “as if you’re asking the blood in your brain to flow in another direction.”³⁹

That does not sound like a pleasant experience. Carlos Alomar, the guitar maestro who once told Eno his experiment was stupid, still remembers what it was like having to take orders from the cards.

“I picked the card and the card simply said, ‘Think like a gardener,’” he recalls. “The immediate impact of the thought of course throws you off. I think that’s the purpose. It’s like when you’re feeling a pain in your foot and someone slaps you in the face, you’re not feeling the pain in your foot anymore. I started thinking, how would I make things grow. So it allowed me to look at the sessions a little bit differently. I kind of let my guitar parts develop into being what they were. You know. Plant something, nurture it, water it, let it grow.”⁴⁰

Most of us don’t like being slapped in the face. But it’s possible to take that slap and turn it into something remarkable. Useful diversions can come from anywhere: an error from some piano movers and a guilt trip from a German teenager; the randomness of an algorithmic search; a strange order from a deck of mysterious cards; the background noise that you can’t quite shut out; the side project that suddenly suggests a new solution. Or the annoying need to collaborate with other people, which is the subject of the next chapter.

Over the years, Carlos Alomar came to realize that the cards he once dismissed as “stupid” have unexpected benefits. “I mean some of it worked, some of it didn’t,” he said a quarter of a century later. “But quite honestly it did take me out of my comfort zone and it did make me leave my frustration at what I was doing and totally look at it from another different point of view and although I didn’t like the point of view, when I came back, I was fresh.”⁴¹

Alomar now teaches music at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey, and he regularly resorts to the Oblique Strategies. His students will sometimes experience creative block, and “I need for them to see what I saw, and feel what I felt, and the dilemma that I had when I had to come up with something out of nothing.”⁴²

He adds, “They’re very curious cards.”

When I tell Brian Eno this, he laughs.