Under the Hood of Creativity
How the brain bends, breaks and blends existing concepts and objects to invent bold new forms
Apollo 13’s mission control engineers and artist Pablo Picasso both broke the mold, reconfiguring traditional forms in new ways.
Several hundred people scramble in a control room in Houston, trying to save three humans ensnared in outer space. It’s 1970, and Apollo 13 is two days into its moonshot when its oxygen tank explodes, spewing debris into space and crippling the craft. Fuel, water, electricity and air are running out. The only working part of the craft is the lunar module. NASA has simulated many possible breakdowns, but not this one.
A day and a half into the crisis, carbon dioxide reaches dangerous levels in the astronauts’ tight quarters. The lunar module has a filtration system, but all of its cylindrical air scrubbers have been exhausted. The only remaining option is to salvage unused canisters from the abandoned command module—but those are square. How to fit a square scrubber into a round hole?
Working from an inventory of what’s on board, engineers at Mission Control devise an adaptor cobbled together from a plastic bag, a sock, pieces of cardboard and a hose from a pressure suit, all held together by duct tape. They tell the crew to tear off the plastic cover from the flight plan folder, and to use it as a funnel to guide air into the scrubber. They have the astronauts pull out the plastic-wrapped thermal undergarments that were originally meant to be worn under spacesuits while bouncing on the moon. Piece by piece, the astronauts assemble the makeshift filter and install it.
To everyone’s relief, carbon dioxide levels return to normal. But other problems quickly follow. As Apollo 13 draws closer to re-entry, power is growing short in the command module. When the spacecraft was designed, it had never crossed anyone’s mind that the command module batteries might have to be charged from the lunar module—it was supposed to be the other way around. Faced with a problem they hadn’t foreseen, the engineers improvise an entirely new protocol.
In the pre-dawn hours of April 17, 1970—80 hours into the crisis—the astronauts prepare for their final descent. A minute and a half later, word reaches the control room: Apollo 13 is safe.
Now travel back 63 years earlier, to 1907. In a small studio in Paris, a young painter named Pablo Picasso sets up his easel. He sets to work on a provocative project: a portrait of prostitutes in a brothel. An unvarnished look at sexual vice.
Picasso begins with charcoal sketches of heads, bodies, fruit. In his first versions, a sailor and male medical student are part of the scene. He decides to remove the men, settling on the five women as his subjects. After hundreds of sketches, he sets to work on the full canvas. At one point, he invites his mistress and several friends to see the work in progress; their reaction so disappoints him that he sets aside the painting. But months later he returns to it, working in secret. Picasso views the portrait of the prostitutes as an “exorcism” from his previous way of painting: the more time he spends on it, the further he moves from his earlier work. When he invites people back to see it again, their reaction is even more hostile. Dismayed, Picasso rolls up the canvas and puts it in his closet. He waits nine years to show it in public. Critic John Richardson would later call that painting—Les Demoiselles d’Avignon—the most original painting in 700 years.
What made Picasso’s painting so original? He changed the goal that European painters had subscribed to for centuries: the pretense of being true to life. In Picasso’s hands, limbs appear twisted, two of the women have mask-like faces, and the five figures seem to have been painted in five different styles. Here, ordinary people no longer look entirely human. Picasso’s painting undercut Western notions of beauty, decorum and verisimilitude all at once. Les Demoiselles came to represent one of the fiercest blows ever delivered to artistic tradition.
And what does this have in common with the story of Apollo 13? At first glance, not much. Saving the Apollo 13 was collaborative. Picasso worked alone. The NASA engineers raced against the clock. Picasso took months to commit his ideas to canvas, and nearly a decade to show his art. The engineers weren’t seeking points for originality: their goal was a functional solution. “Functional” was the last thing on Picasso’s mind—his goal was to produce something unprecedented.
Yet the cognitive routines underlying NASA’s and Picasso’s creative acts are the same. And this is not just true of engineers and artists—it’s true of hair stylists, accountants, architects, farmers, lepidopterists or any other human who creates something previously unseen. When they break the mold of the standard to generate novelty, it is the result of basic software running in the brain. The human brain doesn’t passively take in experience like a recorder; instead, it constantly works over the sensory data it receives—and the fruit of that mental labor is new versions of the world. The basic cognitive software of brains—which drinks in the milieu and procreates new versions – gives rise to everything that surrounds us.
We propose a framework that divides the cognitive landscape into three basic strategies: bending, breaking and blending. These, we suggest, are the primary means by which all ideas evolve.
BENDING
In bending, an original is modified or twisted out of shape. For instance, size can bend. French artist Anastassia Elias creates miniature art that fits inside toilet-paper rolls.
What might this art piece have to do with, say, making nighttime driving safer? At first glance, not much. But the same cognitive processes were at work when a baffling problem about windshields was solved. Early in the automobile age, riding around after dark was dangerous because of the blinding glare caused by approaching headlights. American inventor Edwin Land was determined to create windshields that were glare-resistant. To increase visibility, he turned to the idea of polarization. It wasn’t a new concept: during the reign of Napoleon, a French engineer had noticed that the sunny reflections of palace windows were less brilliant if he looked at them through a calcite crystal. Several generations of inventors, however, had struggled to put large crystals to practical use. Imagine a windshield made up of six-inch-thick crystals: you wouldn’t be able to see through it. Like everyone before him, Land tried working with large crystals but got nowhere. Then one day he had his “aha” moment: shrink the crystals. What Land later described as his “orthogonal thinking” involved the same mental process as Elias’ diminutive artwork. Turning the crystals from something you held in your hand to something you couldn’t see, he soon succeeded in making sheets of glass with thousands of tiny crystals embedded inside them. Because the crystals were so microscopically small, the glass was both transparent and able to cut down on the glare. The driver got a better view of the road, even while the creativity that produced it remained invisible.
Like size, shape can bend. In classical Western ballet, dancers’ postures create straight lines as much as possible. Starting in the 1920s, dancer and choreographer Martha Graham used innovative poses, movements and fabric to bend the human form. As dancers can change shape, so can structures. Using computer modeling and new building materials, architect Frank Gehry warps the normally flat planes of building exteriors into rippling and twisting facades.
How might bending allow the cars of the future to hold more fuel? One of the impediments to converting engines from gasoline to hydrogen is the bulkiness of the tank: standard hydrogen tanks are barrel-shaped and take up too much cargo space. A company called Volute has developed a conforming tank that folds upon itself in layers and can snake into unused space in the car body, finding ways to make the volume work by bending and twisting it.
By reworking something that already exists, bending opens up a wellspring of possibilities through alterations in size, shape, material, and more. As a result of our perpetual neural manipulations, human culture incorporates an ever-expanding series of variations on themes passed down from generation to generation.
BREAKING
In breaking, something whole is taken apart, and something new assembled out of the fragments.
Artists Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso broke apart the visual plane into a jigsaw puzzle of angles and perspectives in Cubism. In his massive painting Guernica, Picasso used breaking to illustrate the horrors of war. Bits and pieces of civilians, animals and soldiers—a torso, a leg, a head, all disjointed with no figure complete—create a stark representation of brutality and suffering.
Similarly, breaking up a continuous area revolutionized mobile communication. The first mobile phone systems worked just like television and radio broadcasting: in a given area, there was a single tower transmitting widely in all directions. Reception was great. But while it didn’t matter how many people were watching TV at the same time, it did matter how many people were making calls: only a few dozen could do so simultaneously. Any more than that and the system was overloaded. Dialing at a busy time of day, you were apt to get a busy signal. Engineers at Bell Labs recognized that treating mobile calls like TV wasn’t working. They took an innovative tack: they divided a single coverage area into small “cells,” each of which had its own tower. The modern cellphone was born.
The great advantage of this system was that it enabled the same broadcast frequency to be reused in different neighborhoods, so more people could be on their phones at the same time. In a Cubist painting, the partitioning of a continuous area is on view. With cellphones, the idea runs in the background. All we know is that the call didn’t drop.
Breaking also gives the option of leaving pieces out. Bruno Catalano leaves out whole chunks of the human body in his sculpture The Travelers.
This technique of breaking down and discarding parts has created new ways to study the brain. Neuroscientists looking at brain tissue have long been stymied by the fact that the brain contains detailed circuits—but those are buried deep within the brain and are impossible to see. Scientists typically solve that problem by cutting the brain into very thin slices—a form of breaking—and creating an image of each slice before painstakingly reassembling the entire brain in a digital simulation. However, because so many neural connections are damaged in the slicing process, the computer model is at best an approximation.
Neuroscientists Karl Deisseroth and Kwanghun Chung and their team found an alternate solution. Fatty molecules called lipids help hold the brain together, but they also diffuse light. The researchers devised a way to flush the lipids out of a dead mouse’s brain while keeping the brain’s structure intact. With the lipids gone, the mouse’s gray matter becomes transparent. Dubbed the CLARITY method, it removes part of the original but does not fill in the gaps—in this case, gaps that enable neuroscientists to study large populations of neurons in a way never before possible.
Breaking enables us to take something solid or continuous and fracture it into manageable pieces. Our brains parse the world into units that can then be rebuilt and reshaped.
BLENDING
In blending, the brain combines two or more sources in novel ways. All over the world, representations of humans and animals have blended to create mythical creatures. In ancient Greece, a man and a bull were combined to create a Minotaur. For the Egyptians, human plus lion equaled the Sphinx. In Africa, merging a woman and a fish produced a mami wata—a mermaid. What magic happened under the hood to generate these chimeras? A new merger of familiar concepts.
As in myth, so in science. Genetics professor Randy Lewis knew that spider silk had great commercial potential: it is many times stronger than steel. If only the silk could be produced in bulk, one could weave apparel such as ultra-light bulletproof vests. But it is difficult to farm spiders—when confined in large numbers, they turn into cannibals and eat one another. On top of that, harvesting silk from spiders is arduous: it took 82 people working with 1 million spiders several years to extract enough silk to weave 44 square feet of cloth. So Lewis came up with an innovative idea: splice the DNA responsible for silk manufacturing into a goat. The result: Freckles the spider-goat. Freckles looks like a goat but she secretes spider silk in her milk. Lewis and his team milk her and then extract the strands of spider silk in the lab.
Genetic engineering has opened up the frontier of real-life chimeras, producing not only spider-goats but also bacteria that make human insulin, fish and pigs that glow with the genes of jellyfish, and Ruppy the Puppy, the world’s first transgenic dog, who turns a fluorescent red under ultraviolet light thanks to a gene from a sea anemone.
By enabling different lines of thought to breed in novel ways, blending is a powerful engine of innovation. The human mind represents an enormous jungle of memories and sensations in which the mating of ideas is unconstrained.
When NASA engineers reversed the electric current aboard Apollo 13 to recharge the command module batteries, they were bending; so too was Picasso when he warped human bodies in Les Demoiselles d’Avignon. When the engineers tore apart equipment, they were breaking; so too was Picasso when he fractured the visual plane. When the engineers taped together cardboard, plastic, a sock and a hose to build an air filter, they were blending; so too was Picasso when he incorporated Iberian and African masks into his portrait. The engineers’ and artist’s materials were different, but they innovated by the same means: bending, breaking and blending what they knew. As a result they each made history, one with a daring rescue, the other with groundbreaking art.
Bending, breaking and blending are tools our brains use to turn experience into novel output; they are the basic routines in the software of invention. The raw materials are provided from every aspect of our involvement in the world: turns of phrase, musical riffs, toys, photos, eye-opening concepts and every memory we’ve ever accumulated. By intertwining these cognitive tools, human minds ply, split and merge their experiences into new forms. Our civilization blossoms from these zigzagging branches of derivations, reassemblies and recombinations.
Picasso’s revolutionary Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907) reshaped the female body—and so did modern dancer Martha Graham (shown in 1940).
“People ask me if I’m an artist or an architect,” Frank Gehry said. “But I think they’re the same.” A few of his dynamically contorted creations, the Dancing House in Prague (collaboration with Vlado Milunic)
The Cleveland Clinic’s Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas
The Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain
Picasso’s Guernica (1937) and Bruno Catalano’s sculpture The Travelers (2013) break up the body into fragments
The Sphinx at Giza in Cairo (c. 2500 B.C.) blends human and lion traits.
Adapted with permission from The Runaway Species by Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman, Catapult (2017).