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JUST DO IT

Tim Berners-Lee built his first computer while he was a student in physics at Oxford. The son of two mathematicians who had worked during the 1950s on the first commercial stored-program computer, he became a software engineer. In 1980, he landed a temporary consulting contract at CERN, the renowned particle physics laboratory in Geneva, Switzerland, that is dedicated to nuclear research. The company had a central control room for its computers, so most employees did not have access to individual terminals. In addition, many of the scientists came there from, or worked in, other countries. Berners-Lee had to work with slow and complicated access to projects and people. Frustrated, he found this to be an unnecessary waste of time, not to mention a hindrance to focused production. So, he flashed on an idea.

He wrote a program, Enquire, to help him remember the connections among all the people, projects, and systems at CERN and its international associates. The name was a brief version of the title of a British book of common sense that Berners-Lee had enjoyed as a boy: Enquire within upon Everything.1 It nicely captured his personal philosophy about information access, and it worked with a simple structure. The program had an internal link among its pages and an external link that allowed him to move between organized files.

Berners-Lee left CERN, giving away his program on an old floppy disc, but in 1984 he returned for a fellowship. He remembered Enquire and sort of wished he had kept it, but now he thought he could devise something better. He started to write a program that he called Tangle. It worked via pattern recognition, but it failed to operate as he'd hoped. Still, he could imagine creating space on his personal computer to digitally connect all CERN computers and allow everyone access to information that others had. He then envisioned making it even bigger than just the CERN environment: he wanted to connect everything to everything else. For him, this was the key to growth and freedom, a way to make society itself mirror the human mind. “There would be a single, global information space.”2 He started re-creating Enquire.

Berners-Lee was aware of ideas from four decades earlier that had described information storage based on associations, and by now other computer programmers had created and used hypertext, which allowed documents to be published in a nonlinear way; users could delve deeper into various areas in an electronic document without having to leave it altogether. For example, “CERN,” hyper-texted, could open into a full report of its history. In fact, hypertext had allowed Berners-Lee to create Enquire. In addition to this cyber-function, the Internet linked computers via standard protocols for communication and the transmission of documents, even if people were using different software.

Berners-Lee considered all this. He wanted to bypass the necessity to format documents for compatibility with CERN's main system—especially since so many CERN employees in and from other countries worked on incompatible systems. The challenge for him was not to make everyone correspond to a single system but to create a program that would be flexible enough to work with whatever system other users already had. Berners-Lee wanted to make his own database freely available, as well as gain faster access to the work of other employees. Hypertext seemed the right display medium.

His parents had modeled and nurtured this desire for greater connectivity, especially of making computers work like the mind, and he'd never forgotten this notion. As early as high school, Berners-Lee had been pondering how it could be done. “I wanted the act of adding a new link to be trivial; if it was, then a web of links could spread evenly across the globe.”3 Through addresses that could be easily referenced, documents would all be equivalent.

In 1989, he submitted a proposal to CERN to develop a way to create this information web. No one in authority responded. Undeterred, Berners-Lee went to work. He wrote the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) and designed a way to give documents Internet addresses. He called this a Universal Resource Identifier (URI), which would evolve into the Universal Resource Locator (URL) in use today. He added a way for anyone to view and retrieve documents, labeling this interconnectedness the WorldWideWeb. He then formatted pages with his own invention, Hypertext Markup Language (HTML) and created software to store web-based pages (a web server), for access. He was excited. He believed he was on the right track. He presented his idea once more to CERN officials, this time more fully formed and with support from others, but they were slow to recognize its value.

Berners-Lee knew its value. Thus, he went elsewhere. He posted his server and browser on the Internet and let several newsgroups know about it. Computer enthusiasts responded in force, setting up sites to link to his—and some even tried to compete with Berners-Lee by inserting their own products. Soon a global information network began to form. Scientists recognized its usefulness for posting their data, as did university and government groups. Through these highlighted addresses, users were able to jump easily to a new page of information, on their site or on other sites that were connected—even with different operating systems. They could pull together a lot of information in a small space, and do it quickly. It was an idea that opened doors everywhere.

Berners-Lee realized that he had to move this all off his specialized personal computer to something with broader applications. Other people, including CERN colleagues, created new browsers. More information was added to the digital arena, which helped to attract more users. Because Berners-Lee saw the right way to bring two tools together, the World Wide Web was established.4

Thousands of people in this same field had been working with the same tools, but only he had snapped on the connection. He had a vision and the impetus to create something that would be practical for computer users. He also had the right personality: he shared rather than hoarded it. He wanted to see global connections, not exploit a marketable idea for private gain.

Although Berners-Lee denies in his memoir that he had a eureka experience, everything he describes is in fact consistent with one. He prepared for just such an event. He persisted over several years. He worked at it, mulled over it, played with programs, and then recognized what could be done in a way that had not been done before: “The Web resulted from many influences on my mind, half-formed thoughts, disparate conversations, and seemingly disconnected experiments. I pieced it together as I pursued my regular work and personal life.”5

As we have seen thus far, this is the foundational formula for snaps. Berners-Lee recognized the power of a weblike organization of information. He even describes the revelation as a breakthrough: “The Web arose as an answer to an open challenge, through the swirling together of influences, ideas, realizations from many sides, until, by the wondrous offices of the human mind, a new concept jelled.”6 With a bit of synchronicity, the right person was in the right place at the right time with the right idea: “I happened to come along with time, and the right interest and inclination, after hypertext and the Internet had come of age. The task left to me was to marry them together.”7

THE WONDROUS OFFICES OF THE HUMAN MIND

Berners-Lee's story is not just an example of a snap. One of his tools—hypertext—is also a metaphor about what happens when people specialize, focus, and develop expertise. We can build hyperlinks into our memory system by crunching or chunking data into smaller units, as we saw in chapter 3, and the quicker we can access a lot of information in an organized and contained manner, the more prepared we are to evoke epiphanies. “There are billions of neurons in our brains,” Berners-Lee wrote, “but what are neurons? Just cells. The brain has no knowledge until connections are made between neurons. All that we know, all that we are, comes from the way our neurons are connected.”8 He made this statement around the time that a team of researchers from Princeton University and MIT were creating “Doogie,” the smart mouse, and learning about the cluster-cell structure of human memory. This gives us our next link—hyperlink—in the process of understanding snaps, which bridges the aforementioned chess players with other experts.

First, some basics. Memory involves three recognized processes: encoding, storage, and retrieval. Our brains convert information that comes through our senses via encoding to transform it for storage. We described in chapter 3 how some data get stored for brief periods and some indefinitely. When we want to remember or recall an idea or event, we retrieve the stored information. The quality of a memory depends on the quality of the encoding, as well as on whether there were any interfering factors during either encoding or recall. It also depends on how our senses actually work. What we receive is not an exact replica.

Take the visual system. The eye takes parts of images of what we see that will help the brain make sense of them and ignores whatever seems incidental. It can then make the limited information it has extracted into a seemingly complete picture. When you look at the following message, for example, you can make sense of it:

Aoccdmig to rscheearch, it deosn't mttaer waht oredr the ltteers in a wrod are, the olny iprmoetnt tihng is taht the frist and lsat ltteres are at the rghit pclae. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can sitll raed it wouthit a porbelm. Tihs is bcuseae we do not raed ervey lteter by itslef but the wrod as a wlohe.

You can also read messages like this when some letters are missing. The brain makes sense of patterns, helped along by what we know.

OK, back to Doogie. Let's get elemental. Neurologist Joe Tsien and his colleagues discovered that to form a memory the brain relies on a population of neurons in the hippocampus that act in concert.9 The same is true of mice. In 1999, scientists had designed a way to create a strain of “smart mice” that would be engineered for superior memory. To accomplish this, the researchers manipulated a gene that encoded a specific receptor, NDMA, that assists us to make associations between signals from two independent sources. First, they removed the gene and found that the mutant mice failed to learn. Then they gave other mice extra copies of the gene and found that they learned faster. The latter became the “Doogie mice,” named after the TV character Doogie Howser, a brainy kid who became a doctor.

When compared with their counterparts in the wild and to the mutants, these genetically engineered Doogie mice seemed able to remember things for longer periods. For example, the mice were allowed to cozy up to two unfamiliar objects for five minutes. Then, after a few trials, one of the objects was switched out and a novel one introduced. Doogies devoted effort to exploring the new object but not to the one they already knew, whereas ordinary and mutant mice devoted equal time to both. Seemingly, unaltered mice had not noticed the switch or remembered the original item.

The mice were then put into a chamber and given mild electrical shocks. They were placed back into this chamber one hour later, one day later, and ten days later. The Doogies showed more fear to the chamber across the board, which suggested that they had formed emotional memories and did not want to go back in.

In a third step, the research team similarly conditioned the mice to be frightened of a chamber and then left them inside without any jolts. When time passed and nothing happened to them, the Doogies calmed down more quickly. They seemed to get it.

But they still had a spatial test to pass. The mice were all dunked into a tank of water with a hidden ramp. After just three dips, the Doogies learned where the ramp was and remembered it. The other mice took twice as long to find it and did not remember its location as well. Even better, in experiments designed to test them as they aged, the Doogies showed greater plasticity. Their brain patterns seemed to remain fairly youthful.

In this early experiment, the scientists deduced that memories arise as the result of two neurons forming a lasting connection.10 However, they believed that this was not the whole story. They sought the organizing principles, the fundamental neural network dynamic.

A few years later, they designed better equipment to simultaneously monitor the activity of large groups of neurons—well over two hundred at once. They then devised experiments that would cause “flashbulb” memories of dramatic events, the type of memory that seems to remain robust and vivid for a long time. Typically these occur for humans after a dramatic, even traumatic, event. The experiments had to replicate such conditions as closely as possible. There were three conditions.

The mice were placed in a container and shaken to simulate an earthquake experience. Then they had to endure a sudden blast of air on their backs, such as it might feel when an owl attacks. Finally, they had a fun ride into a vertical free fall, to feel like the sudden drop of an elevator. Each mouse, Doogie or otherwise, had to go through seven repetitions of each event, with only a few hours of rest between.

The research team analyzed the resulting data with a mathematical 3-D pattern-recognition program and found “bubbles” of activity associated with four states: the resting brain, the earthquake experience, the air puff, and the elevator drop. They realized that sets of “neural cliques” encoded different aspects of each event. In other words, the brain contained functional coding units, each designed to represent a specific type of information. “The brain relies on memory-coding cliques to record and extract different features of the same event, and it essentially arranges the information relating to a given event into a pyramid whose levels are arranged hierarchically, from the most general, abstract features to the most specific.”11 The brain records key features for here-and-now coping, while also extracting information to apply to a similar future event. Each neural clique coordinates with all the others to form and store a whole memory.

Although this may seem perhaps more fundamental to the aha! experience than we need, it will be useful to understand how the brain's memory system is organized as we get into the neurological research that focuses specifically on the way snaps occur. A robust memory system is an essential part of an equally robust ability to snap.

In addition to the quality of our cellular activity, recall is influenced by what makes sense to us. In an experiment on jury perception in 1992, run by researchers Victoria Holst and Kathy Pezdek, subjects answered questions regarding their beliefs about common scenarios, such as what occurs during a convenience store robbery. Common beliefs proved to be widely shared about how a criminal cases a store, acts inside the store, uses a gun to demand money, and drives away in a getaway vehicle. The second stage of the research was to expose the same subjects to a mock trial of such a robbery. Most of the aspects of a typical script were played out, but some key elements were missing: The robber did not case the store, use a gun, or take money. Nevertheless, when asked after the mock trial to describe what they remembered, the subjects included these very elements. The implication is that prior ideas and beliefs get mixed into actual events when a person is making sense of familiar situations for recall.12

Although many people believe that memory is like a video recorder, it is actually constructed from a diverse set of items. One is, obviously, the original experience. However, exposure to new information between storage and retrieval can also affect what is recalled, even if that information contains errors about the original experience.

Consider this experiment for eyewitness research. Subjects were exposed to a film. They then received written information about it, but in the narrative, half were misled about certain details: a critical blue car was described as white, for example, or an intact window was described as broken. Those subjects who were exposed to the errors directly after the screening tended to report the incorrect information rather than what they had actually seen. In fact, error rates for some subjects were as high as 40 percent. Some remembered seeing things they had not seen at all, merely because the written narrative included them.13

This is called the misinformation effect. When we're exposed to erroneous information after an event, we can make erroneous reports. Worse, this information can become part of our memory for that event. In other words, misleading or new information can supplant our original memory. This effect strengthens with time because the original memory has often eroded.

In one set of studies, subjects shown advertising about Disneyland® that included the image of Bugs Bunny® (who is not a Disney® character) resulted in 25-35 percent of people reporting that on their trip to Disneyland they had met Bugs Bunny. After the following was suggested to them during questioning, two-thirds of these subjects recalled shaking his hand and nearly half remembered hugging him. In another experiment, the photographs of subjects, in the company of a relative, were pasted into a prototype photograph of a hot-air balloon. Subjects were shown the faked photo and asked to describe everything they could remember about that “experience.” Fifty percent supplied some details, and some embellished it quite a bit.14

One might object that such “memories” would feel different than actual memories, but evidence from research fails to support this. Subjects who reported erroneous information from the misinformation effect retrieved the “memory” as quickly as they did an actual memory and felt confident that they had had the experience that they “remembered.” Clearly, memory is malleable. We cannot rely on our memories to be accurate, no matter how confident we may be, as research has shown that even confident people have been mistaken.

Human memory can be contaminated, distorted, and re-formed with added details. The more plausible or anticipated those details are, especially if they fill in gaps in a narrative, the more likely it is that they will be integrated into the actual memory. However, it's this very quality of flexibility that assists with the aha! moment.

TAKE CHARGE OF MEMORY

A team of scientists at NASA was working on the Hubble telescope, trying to fix a distortion in the lenses. An optics expert offered a suggestion, but they couldn't figure out how to accomplish it: tiny mirrors would have to be placed in areas that were difficult to reach. They were at an impasse. None of their tools worked. But then one of the engineers, Jim Crocker, was in the shower in a hotel in Germany. Something about the showerhead caught his attention. He paused and looked more closely. The showerhead was mounted on adjustable rods. He knew at once what he'd need to do to solve the problem with the telescope. He could mount the mirrors on adjustable folding arms, just like this showerhead. Taking this back to NASA, he applied his solution.15

The leap to sudden insight means a shift in our typical framework. This takes us back to neural networks. Scientists at Heidelberg University in Germany and the Brain Research Centre at the University of British Columbia in Canada were interested in discovering how neural networks function as new strategies replace old ones.16 Did it occur gradually in the brain, they wondered, or was the transition abrupt?

Computational neuroscientists Daniel Durstewitz and Jeremy Seamans studied the encoding of clusters of neurons (neural cliques) in the medial frontal cortex in rats (no Doogie mice here) as they forced the animals during trial-and-error tasks to deduce novel rules. Within the medial frontal cortex, the visual field and motor area have been implicated in the control of voluntary action during tasks that involve rapid choices between competing demands. In rats, this area appears to be involved in decision making and adjusting to new situations.

Thirteen rats were trained on a simple visual task. They saw two levers, each of which had a light above it. When the light came on, the rat learned that it could now hit the bar below the light to get food. Once the rats could perform this task without error, the researchers introduced a new element. Only one level delivered food, even though both lights continued to come on. To most effectively get the food, the rats had to forget or suppress what they had just learned in order to grasp the new system. “Ah! It's just the one lever.”

When each rat figured out the new system, the brain changed, which registered on the computers. The scientists found that unique networks formed in the same neuron population that had activated while performing the familiar task. Cells that had fired weakly before now fired with strength, whereas the strong firings weakened. Even though it took some rats more trials than others to “get” the new rule, the neurons always showed the abrupt transition that corresponded with the new behavior. It appeared that the new information built up and then switched on certain neurons. The researchers thought what they saw resembled a revelation. “In the present problem-solving context where the animal had to infer a new rule by accumulating evidence through trial and error,” Durstewitz commented, “such sudden neural and behavioral transitions may correspond to moments of sudden insight.”17

In other words, as the rats realized what they needed to do to perform this task, they had the rat equivalent of an aha! moment. This means that learning can occur in some cases faster than traditional notions attest. The standard model holds that as we learn, neural pathways are created to support learned items with repeated use while others wither away. But this takes time. Sudden insight is instantaneous. Switching neural tracks might help solve a telescope problem, yield a world-changing invention, or even save lives.

When Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger faced a midair crisis while flying US Airways Flight 1549 in 2009, he had just seconds to act.18 He had 154 people in his care. He knew he had to save them if he could, but nothing was certain. He was pilot in command of the Airbus A320, which had just left New York's bustling LaGuardia Airport. They were heading to Charlotte, North Carolina. Although it was a clear morning, just two minutes into its flight, at around three thousand feet altitude, the plane encountered a flock of geese. They slapped into the craft, pelting it with so much force it reminded Sullenberger of a Texas hailstorm. He felt the engines vibrate in an alarming way and heard disturbing noises, like a tennis shoe being thrown into a dryer—“only louder.” The engines sputtered. Suddenly, both lost thrust, and the plane stopped climbing and went eerily silent. The engines had died. An odor filled the cockpit of burnt birds. Sullenberger had trained for this moment—had even trained other flight crews for such in-air emergencies—and here it was. He could hardly believe it.

He grabbed the stick and said, “My aircraft,” meaning he was taking control.

First Officer Jeff Skiles affirmed, as per protocol, “Your aircraft.”

Sullenberger knew this situation was his responsibility now, and his father had always taught him to take his duty seriously. Everyone onboard was depending on him. He tried to start the engines, and when this failed, he tried an auxiliary engine. He felt the shift as the plane lost altitude over one of the most densely populated areas in the world.

As Skiles worked on emergency procedures, Sullenberger called in to air traffic control, “Mayday! Mayday! Mayday! Cactus 1549.”

He didn't know that the left engine had caught fire, but some of the passengers had noticed. In fact, he had less than three minutes to make the right move. He was already in emergency mode, letting his experience and training dictate his actions. He knew this was a bad situation, but he also believed there was hope. He just needed to keep the plane gliding in a way that allowed the airflow over the wings to provide lift.

In a calm voice, he reported the bird strike and requested an emergency return. The plane continued to glide. Sullenberger and Skiles worked hard to keep it level. Balancing airspeed with gravity was their best strategy against the inevitable descent.

The controller reported that runway 4, the one they'd just used to take off, was open and instructed Sullenberger to turn left. He barely avoided a collision with another plane. Sullenberger wasn't sure he'd make it, so he asked about Teterboro, a small airport in New Jersey. Even as he asked, he knew he'd need more altitude to safely land, so he stated, “We can't do it.”

He'd suddenly realized, about one minute after the bird strike, the very real possibility that they might not have enough thrust to make it to any airport. Sullenberger felt as if he were in a box that he must escape. His mind blocked out everything except the need to focus on landing the plane. Fortunately, they were over water. He knew it was possible to bring the plane down there, if necessary. In fact, it was their only hope. “We may end up in the Hudson.”

The ATC cleared the situation with Teterboro and added that a runway at Newark was available.

“Unable,” said Sullenberger. He and Skiles worked to keep control as they barely cleared the George Washington Bridge.

The ATC seemed not to hear. He repeated that runway 1 at Teterboro was ready.

“We can't do it,” said Sullenberger. “We're going to be in the Hudson.”

He saw below that there was enough room among the boats and barges to take the plane down, as long as they could keep it level and glide over the water. From everything he knew about flying, he realized that he would have to simultaneously perform a number of tricky moves, any of which depended on things going exactly right: he had to touch down with the wings precisely level, the nose up, at a survivable descent, at just the right speed—barely above the minimum needed to fly.

He picked up the intercom and in a restrained tone alerted the passengers, who already knew they were going down, to brace themselves for impact. He heard the flight attendants giving orders to passengers to stay in their seats and keep their heads down. His stomach churned as he felt the plane angle downward, but he suppressed the adrenaline rush. He knew the water would be frigid at this time of year.

He and his copilot focused on the controls as they drew near the water. Aware of planes breaking apart while trying to land in water, they looked for a place to avoid hitting boats but to also be near an area where someone could rescue them. As seconds ticked by, Sullenberger felt confident he could make this work. The plane skimmed the surface, and he felt the impact. It was hard. Water sprayed up on both sides, blinding his view. The plane skidded across the surface for several seconds—as astonished onlookers watched from seacraft and the shore—before it slowed and finally came to a stop. The nose went down, and the plane shifted to the left.

Both pilots breathed out and looked at each other. “That wasn't as bad as I thought,” Sullenberger said. They had safely landed in the Hudson River without incident. However, they knew that the plane could fill with water and sink. They still had a job to do.

Everyone went into motion. Sullenberger opened the cockpit door and ordered, “Evacuate!” Skiles and the three female flight attendants assisted the passengers to disembark in an orderly manner. Each person was helped to step out onto the wings of the plane, already under water. They stood there until first responders arrived in boats to assist. The crew was the last to board the boats.

His heart still pounding, Sullenberger walked the aisles of the passenger cabin twice to ensure that everyone was off. He waited until the last crew member was safe before he grabbed the logbook and disembarked. The passengers later lauded him for his poise and sense of control during the crisis. As the news spread, airline pilots around the world marveled at this near-miraculous feat and hailed the crew as heroes.

In numerous interviews, Sullenberger praised his crew and attributed his fast but controlled response to years of training and experience. “We train all the time for emergencies,” he said. He viewed the experiences he'd had and the skills he'd honed as a lifelong preparation for this very moment. “One way of looking at this might be that for 42 years I've been making small, regular deposits in this bank of experience: education and training. And on January 15, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal.”19

He was right. Because his brain had developed strong neural pathways via discipline and constant exposure, Sullenberger's working memory was sufficiently agile and connected to what he knew to grab the stored information in a split second. This same combination operates in the incubation of a creative snap.

So, let's pull together the different elements of a snap that we can see in this incident. As a boy, Sullenberger had been keenly fascinated with planes. He'd seen military jets take off at Perrin Air Force Base near his home in Texas, which had inspired him to build model airplanes.20 He certainly had the intelligence to pursue a career that required a good memory and a sense of detail. By the age of twelve, Sullenberger was a member of the renowned genius organization Mensa International. When he was sixteen, he learned to fly. Sullen-berger had realized his “bliss” early and had eagerly pursued it. After high school, he enrolled in the United States Air Force Academy and was selected for a cadet glider program. Within a year, he was an instructor pilot and on graduation received an award as an outstanding cadet. He was also the top flier of his class. As an officer, he attended Purdue University, achieving a master's degree in industrial psychology. For five years he was a fighter pilot before becoming a training officer and accident investigator. After leaving the air force, Sullenberger became a commercial airline pilot. By the time of the incident over the Hudson, he had some forty years and 27,000 hours of flying experience. He had also run a consulting business in airline safety. As he put it, he had placed deposits into his memory bank (template) throughout his entire life. This had developed and strengthened the neural cliques and specifically prepared him for emergencies. When he faced one, he was ready, and because the necessary acts were now second nature, his mental template took over to guide him.

KEY POINTS