chap5

THE KIRK EFFECT

Martin Cooper sat outside on his patio, enjoying a nice day, when the phone rang inside. Annoyed, he got up to answer it. Typical of the late 1960s, the phone was attached to a wall, with the listening and speaking mechanism corded to the phone's body. As a chief engineer at Motorola and general manager of its Communication Systems Division, Cooper believed that phones should be as mobile as people were. Thus, there should be a way to carry a phone from place to place without all the cords. In other words, he shouldn't have to interrupt a pleasant time outside to get up and answer a phone. Get rid of the wires! He'd been working on it, but he just wasn't there yet.

The concept of wireless transmission got its foot through the door in the 1930s from the crude mobile radio phones used in police cars. The first public mobile phone call made from a car occurred in Saint Louis, Missouri, in 1946. However, the primitive wireless networks of that era—basically, one central tower (antenna) per city—handled only a limited volume of calls. Each mobile phone had to stay within the cell area serviced by its base station, so there was no range or continuity. In addition, the phones required powerful, clunky transmitters.

In an effort to refine the technology, AT&T Bell Labs employee D. H. Ring (yes, really) conceived of sending phone calls through a series of grids rather than a single tower. Each would use low-power transmitters that would hand off calls from one cell to another. Thus, many calls could use the same frequency simultaneously, and each call could travel much farther. It was a great idea, but the technology for it did not yet exist. AT&T executives asked the Federal Communications Commission to allocate more radio-spectrum frequencies so they could expand their customer base and get funds for research and development. But the FCC gave little ground, so the status of mobile communication remained as it was until 1968. That year, the agency finally increased the frequency allocation.

In keeping with Ring's idea, AT&T began building cell towers with radio transceivers and base station controllers for handling a larger volume of calls. This would allow mobile phone transmissions to move through several cell areas during a single conversation. The competition heated up to invent a truly mobile phone that could exploit the technology.

At Bell Labs, Richard Frenkiel and Joel Engel ran this project, but at Motorola, Cooper was also at work. He thought that AT&T had it wrong. Those scientists and engineers were hoping to design better car phones, while he wanted a phone so portable that people could carry it on their person. He knew how it should work, but the necessary parts would require a suitcase.

There was no sense of quitting in this Chicago-born executive. Computers had gotten smaller over the past decade, and he knew that phones could as well. They could also be easier to use.

Even as a child, Cooper had been an inventor. When he was only eight, he'd envisioned “magnetic propulsion,” so that trains could levitate over roadways. However, he soon realized that it's one thing to envision a neat idea; it's quite another to make it happen. Thanks to teachers who encouraged him, he read voraciously and went to college for an engineering degree. After a four-year stint during the Korean conflict as a submarine officer, Cooper went to work for Motorola. It was not long before he was directing others to help transform ideas into products. A well-designed mobile phone was among them.

One day during this period, Cooper was watching television. He enjoyed the popular science fiction series Star Trek, which gave its characters all manner of “impossible” items, from teleportation systems to spacecraft that zipped through the universe with ease. Cooper watched “Captain Kirk” flip open his handheld communicator and give an order to one of his crew. Suddenly, Cooper sat up. He'd seen it many times, and yet now he really noticed. That's what he wanted! A portable device you could carry around in a pocket or purse, flip open, and talk to whomever you wanted, no matter where they were. In particular, he wanted a voice-controlled device. Cooper knew what he needed: an antenna and a series of integrated circuits that could transform voices into readable data, all inside a very portable package.1

In order to work, cell phones have codes that identify the phone, the service provider, and the phone's owner. The phone makes or receives calls through a special frequency via its home system. As the caller moves toward the edge of a cell, two base stations coordinate to hand off the call to the next cell. Motorola ran a contest among five different industrial designers, and Cooper picked the simplest design from among them. It was christened the DynaTAC. However, with hundreds of parts, this device was far from Captain Kirk's handheld flip-phone. It was more like a brick with an antenna sticking out, and the caller still needed to program it by hand. But it was a good start on the world's first portable cordless cellular phone. Motorola employees tested it in-house, using the cell towers that AT&T had already prepared. Finally, it was time to go public.

On April 3, 1973, Cooper walked down the street in New York City with the DynaTAC pressed to his ear. He enjoyed how people gaped at him, and he thought he probably looked like something out of Star Trek. All the better. He punched in a number and made the first public cellular call, bouncing off the city's transmission towers until it rang…in the office of Joel Engel at Bell Labs. Cooper just had to gloat.

Then, as he crossed a busy street, he placed a call to a radio reporter to make public the fact that he and his cronies had been the first to shift the communications market: “The most important thing we did back in 1973,” Cooper says, “was to prove that a telephone number should not be a location like a house or a business but rather that a telephone number should represent a person.”2 The cell phone's inventors had relied on inspiration, immersion, genius, and the persistence to achieve a vision. “It's great to let your mind run free,” Cooper advises, “to think of new ideas, new ways of doing things, to daydream. But an inventor needs a foundation of science or engineering, of education to make these dreams come true. An inventor needs imagination and practical knowledge.”³

It took another ten years and a considerable drop in price before cell phones became more consumer-friendly. By the late 1980s, there were more than a million US subscribers. By this time, the cell phone had lost weight, going from forty ounces to less than one-tenth of that. Today, there are over a billion in use around the world—many of which respond to a voice command, just as Cooper had envisioned—and they contain cameras, MP3 players, and tiny computers with multiple applications. Captain Kirk would have been jealous.

SWITCHING ON

The flash that explodes as a snap originates in the brain's right hemisphere, the area of the brain that picks out metaphors, nuances, and emotions. The left hemisphere gets to analyze facts and abstract language. It's not quite equipped for the excitement of a snap. That's good news for neuroscientists; because the electrical activity involved in an insight feels distinctly different from analytical A-to-Z reasoning, researchers can—and have—set up conditions to measure and compare them.

Jerome Swartz and his colleagues at New York's Swartz Foundation and California's Swartz Center for Computational Neuro-science say that relevant information might come from either the external world or from the brain.4 What brings the snap insight from the tip of the tongue to the top of the mind is the selective triggering of well-formed stimuli. For example, you might come to an impasse while at work on a crossword puzzle. At some point prior to this, you had walked through a market that contained the correct answer. At another point, what you had observed will converge with your impasse and bang! You have the answer. It seems to have arrived from out of the blue, but it didn't. You've been primed, and once the brain has had time to associate the stimuli from your mental accumulation, it delivers.

Also testing this notion, Bhavin Sheth at the University of Houston, Simone Sandkuhler at the Austrian Academy of Sciences, and Joydeep Bhattacharya of London's Goldsmiths College devised a set of problems that they believed would provoke insight.⁵ Such problems had to be simple but not widely known, such as one might find on a brain-teaser website. They could not lend themselves to a methodical solution. One was the following:

You enter a two-story house. On the ground floor is a set of three light switches. Two do not work, but one illuminates an old-fashioned lightbulb on the second floor that is invisible to you from downstairs. When you enter, this light is off. Your task is to figure out which light switch turns it on. You may flip the switches as much as you want, but you may only go up to the second floor once. Under these conditions, how might you determine which switch controls the second-floor light?

Eighteen participants, connected to an electroencephalograph (EEG), had ninety seconds to solve this puzzle (after thirty seconds to read it). If they gave up, they received a hint: turn one switch on and leave it for a while. (The solution is to turn on switch A for several minutes. Then switch it off and turn on B. Then immediately go upstairs. If the light is on, switch B turned it on. If the light is not on, feel the bulb. If it is hot, then switch A turned it on. If it is cold, switch C will turn it on.)

Because the problem required both speed and concentration, the scientists reasoned that the solution for those who solved it would likely pop as a sudden insight. The EEG readings confirmed this. They showed different results between those who solved the problem and those who could not. And better yet, just a second or two before the reported insight occurred, there appeared to be consistently identifiable brainwave activity. More interesting, the EEG readings allowed researchers to predict an aha! moment up to eight seconds in advance, because increased activity in the right frontal cortex—associated with shifting mental states—announced it. These researchers also found that a positive mood assists insight.

In an experiment that also relied on verbal associations, researchers Mark Jung-Beeman (Northwestern University) and John Kounios (Drexel University) monitored the brains of participants solving insight-inspiring problems. They had already learned that the brain functions differently during a flash of insight than during ordinary methodical processing. This time they were to bring together a number of different angles to try to spot just when the brain begins to generate the aha! moment.

First, prior to starting the experiment, they examined each participant's baseline neural activity. To monitor activity-related neural events, they had subjects press buttons to indicate their thought processes: one for when they started solving a problem, and the second for arriving at a solution. If they did get there, they chose from two more options: (1) normal reasoning or (2) a sudden insight. Nineteen subjects were hooked up to an EEG while working on 186 timed problems. Twenty-five received 135 timed problems while functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) measured blood flow in their brains. So, two buttons were designated for the processing, two for the solution type, and two methods were applied for measuring physiological responses.

The research relied on a process called comparative remote association. A problem consisted of three words, and subjects had to come up with a single word that would form a common compound with all three. For example, they were shown tank, hill, and secret, and the answer was top. The EEG participants solved about 46 percent of the problems, labeling 56 percent of their solutions as sudden insight. The fMRI participants solved 47 percent of the problems correctly, with an insight 56 percent of the time.

The physiological measures revealed that about one-third of a second before an insight occurred, some left-brain areas showed decreased activity while high-frequency brainwaves increased in parts of the right temporal lobe: the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), posterior cingulate cortex (PCC), and the anterior superior temporal gyri (STG). In these areas, new associations form or attention is reoriented. The fMRI results confirmed the EEG results, and the EEG added one more thing: about 1.5 seconds before insight, there was an increase in lower-frequency brainwaves. This disappeared just as the high-frequency waves spiked. In contrast, little activity was found in these areas during non-insight solutions.7

Something was definitely happening in the right temporal lobe, just before and during the experience of insight. It's possible, the scientists surmised, that the right hemisphere has access to more brain resources for insight because its dendrites are longer, denser, and more broadly connected around the brain than those in the left. Perhaps it took some time to reach the more remote areas. They thought that the lower frequency activity that showed up 1.5 seconds prior to insight acted as a “gating effect,” packing energy for a spurt of momentum at the threshold of insight. “This is like closing your eyes so you can concentrate when you are trying to solve a difficult problem,” said Kounios.8

An intriguing development was that a subject's preparatory brain state prior to tackling a problem appeared to influence whether it would be solved with insight or with analytical processing. Although no personality tests were administered to these participants, this finding might be related to the difference between a mindfully engaged person, ready for action, and one who's just following directions. It appeared that the brain controlled whether a solution would derive from methodical thinking or from sudden insight. This suggested that people who are at work on something can prepare for an insight by focusing attention inward to reduce visual input and silence irrelevant thoughts. This approach may set up conditions for the brain to do its best work. “At a certain point,” Jung-Beeman remarked, “you just have to admit that your brain knows more than you do.”⁹

Researchers suspect that problem solving by insight demands a great deal of cognitive energy. In that case, it might be restricted to special needs rather than those used for daily calculations. We might think of the left brain as the plodder and the right as the sprinter. When left-brain cognition reaches an intense impasse, neural mechanisms in the right hemisphere can take over. The need arises, the energy gathers, the brain redistributes its resources, and if the person is receptive, the insight flashes.

In short: for the aha! moment, the relaxed (unclenched) mind can wander into uncharted territory to spark remote associations in the creative parts. It searches beyond known databases into hidden resources. Since you're not actively calculating, it might feel as if you're no longer working on the problem. You might think you've reached the end of your rope and simply cannot come up with the solution. You might even doubt your abilities. But on its own, the brain is still working for you. People who learn to work with this neurological quirk can make amazing discoveries.

LIGHTNING STRIKES

When James Watson and Francis Crick outlined the double-helix structure of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) in 1953, Kary Mullis was just getting curious about science. Like other eight-year-old boys of this era, he'd received chemistry sets for Christmas and liked to make things explode. By his teenage years, he was trying to launch mini rockets with his own concoction of potassium nitrate and sugar. “We could buy dynamite fuses from the hardware store,” he said, “with no questions asked.”10 Most of these rockets sputtered out, but “after many experiments and much thought, I came upon a nice little engine that built up enough thrust to move itself.”¹¹ Mullis also blew a frog high into the air and got it back alive. And yet, despite his scientific bent, he said in an autobiography—penned for an esteemed committee—that he'd once seen the ghost of his deceased grandfather. By this time, the consummate surfer had won fame far beyond what might be expected of the son of a general store manager from the Blue Ridge Mountains. He'd also won a Nobel Prize, the result of blending the right ingredients for another explosion—this one in his head.

When Mullis was a precocious grad student in biochemistry at the University of California at Berkeley, he possessed a “creative nonconformity that verges on the lunatic.”¹² To his mind, a science lab “is just another place to play,” and an intellectual frolic is the secret source of genius. Despite his apparent penchant for chaos, he appreciated elegance. Thus, he was initially disinclined to focus on DNA. While at work on his PhD, Mullis found the structure of DNA disturbingly clumsy in the way it “spirals off without limits and only ends because it gets broken or because it spontaneously terminates out of a morbid fear of being endless.”13

Nevertheless, after a stint with pharmaceutical chemistry in which he found DNA's cloning potential to be wondrous, Mullis sought closer encounters with the molecule when he went to work in 1979 for Cetus, a biotechnology corporation. Scientists around the world at this time were struggling to get past the molecular “junk” attached to DNA so they could analyze pure segments. To that point, no one had succeeded.

Decades earlier, Phoebus Levene had discovered that the nucleus of individual cells contains two types of acid: ribonucleic (RNA) and deoxyribonucleic (DNA). Within each cell are twenty-three pairs of chromosomes made of DNA, which transfers the unique “instructions” from our parents for how each of us will look, among other things. Each DNA molecule contains four chemicals units: adenine (A), guanine (G), cytosine (C), and thymine (T). When strung together in paired chromosomal strands (the double helix), A always aligns with T, G with C, and so on. This has the appearance of a twisted ladder, with the strands as the sides and the alternating pairs as rungs. Inside the cell, DNA coils tightly, but when unrolled a DNA molecule is approximately six feet long. Although some parts of our DNA are universally human (species-specific), certain sections contain the codes that correspond to our unique assets, and every cell of our bodies mirrors this alignment. The base pairs in these polymorphic regions are called Variable Number of Tandem Repeats, and they provide the possibility for genetic identification. To an astronomical degree of probability, experts can determine whether a particular strand of DNA from a biological sample matches the DNA of a particular person.

A polymerase is a naturally occurring enzyme that ensures the formation and repair of DNA, which in turn ensures the accurate replication of all living matter. Scientists had worked hard over past decades to understand this process and control it. “Like a FIND sequence in a computer search,” Mullis explains, “a short string of nucleotides in a synthetic molecule might be able to define a position.”14 They just had to find a place to start in the midst of the tangled DNA tape.

Mullis began to experiment with oligonucleotides and DNA polymerase, but he kept bumping his head against the wall of DNA's complexity. “What I needed to make this work,” he said in his Nobel speech, “was some method of raising the relative concentration of the specific site of interest.”¹⁵ In other words, he needed a way to enlarge his biological workspace. “I kept thinking about my experiment without realizing that it would never work.”¹⁶ Thus, he was at an impasse.

He pondered this problem as he drove along a highway in Mendocino County one Friday evening in the spring of 1984. Mullis and his girlfriend were heading to a cabin he was building in Northern California. She was asleep in the passenger seat, leaving him alone with his thoughts. “My hand felt the road and the turns, my mind drifted back to the lab. DNA chains coiled and floated. I see the lights on the trees, but most of me is watching something else unfolding.”¹⁷ He casually glanced at the blossoming buckeye stalks along the road, breathing in their oily aroma. Then: aha! In that instant, he knew what he had to do. Mullis stopped the car right there in the middle of the road, at marker 46,7 on Highway 128. His girlfriend awoke, confused, but he couldn't talk. “I was just driving and thinking about ideas and suddenly I saw it,” he recalls. “I saw the polymerase chain reaction as clear as if it were up on a blackboard in my head, so I pulled over and started scribbling.”¹⁸ He broke the pencil lead, so he scrambled for a pen. He knew he was on the verge of something big. His snap offered an efficient method of getting at a pure DNA fragment.

He could still smell the buckeyes, but just barely, as sensory input receded in favor of his fervent mental activity. He started driving again, and again pulled over as his head exploded with the realization that he had solved the “most annoying” problem in DNA chemistry. In a series of flashes in just moments, Mullis envisioned polymerizing the junk parts of DNA and stringing them all together so they could be swept aside. He could then apply the same process to the denatured DNA. In short, he'd conceived of a way to start and stop a polymerase's action at specific points along a single strand of DNA. He could also initiate the creation of complementary new strands. By harnessing molecular-reproduction technology, the target DNA could be amplified—and many, many more copies could be made.

But he wasn't sure. He thought getting the answer had been too easy. He kept pestering his girlfriend throughout the weekend as he drew diagrams all over the cabin and kept coming back to the same thing: his vision while driving. But he wanted someone else to affirm it, or else to tell him he was crazy. He couldn't sleep. He was in the grip of the flow of his inspiration. Even when some mundane task pulled him away, he was able to pick right up with his mental process where he'd left off. He was in a state of total absorption, which felt to him like semiconsciousness. Uncharacteristically, he could hardly wait to get back to work in the lab.

But no one at Cetus was quite as excited. Disappointed, Mullis shrugged off the lack of support and examined the research. He found no evidence that someone else had tried this idea and failed. None of his colleagues could recall someone who might have done it, although every isolated step in the process had been performed in other contexts. “It was not easy in the post-cloning, pre-PCR year to accept the fact that you could have all the DNA you wanted,” Mullis stated, “and that it would be easy.”19

He continued talking to other molecular biologists, and in September, several months post-snap, he tried his first actual experiment. One evening, he put human DNA and the nerve growth factor primers into a tube. He boiled this concoction for several minutes, cooled it, and added ten units of DNA polymerase. Then he sealed the tube and left it at 37 degrees. He recalls that it was exactly midnight. He was heating the extracted DNA in a thermocycler to make it split, and each time the temperature decreased and increased, it produced a copy. The process repeated multiple times, with chemicals added to locate specific regions of the DNA.

The next day, an impatient Mullis checked his results and was gratified to see partial success. He was on the right track. Over the next three months, he refined his methods, and on December 16, he finally produced a successful batch. With this, he knew he had changed the rules in molecular biology.

Mullis showed his colleagues his results and convinced Cetus to get this technology into gear. Once the scientists had succeeded in making the polymerase chain reaction reliable, they realized they had an immensely powerful technique for providing unlimited quantities of the genetic material that molecular biologists required for their work. In a matter of hours, the target sequence could be amplified a billion-fold. It was a discovery that would reverberate in so many important ways.

Cetus eventually sold the patent for PCR to Hoffman-LaRoche for a staggering $300 million—the most money ever paid for a patent. In 1993, Mullis won the Nobel Prize in chemistry and the prestigious Japan Prize. (The next year, he waited in the wings to provide expert testimony for the defense in the O. J. Simpson double homicide trial.)

In less than a decade, PCR became simultaneously a routine component of practically every molecular biology laboratory and a versatile tool with as-yet-unknown potential. The process expanded to more than 130 US patents. PCR can sequence a disease, help identify the perpetrator of a crime, or trace a lineage. It has also become the basis of paleobiology, due to its ability to amplify DNA from fossils, and in the future it will solve other biological mysteries. On Nightline, Ted Koppel announced, “Take all the MVPs from professional baseball, basketball and football. Throw in your dozen favorite movie stars and a half dozen rock stars for good measure. Add all the television anchor people now on the air, and collectively they have not affected the current good or the future welfare of mankind as much as Kary Mullis.”20

Mullis's immersion in DNA research had paid off, but it was the soothing drive on that California highway on which he pondered his work in a relaxed mental state that had let it gel. On that evening, Mullis had been in “flow.”

FULLY ABSORBED

Imagine being occupied in an activity that you fully enjoy: drumming, sailing, rock climbing, writing a song, or building a shed. You have the right equipment, and you can devote at least an hour or so to the activity. Your full attention is on the project, and you know the rules. You're there, doing it, because you enjoy it. As time passes, you become more fully engaged, concentrating deeply. You feel terrific.

A positive mood makes an insight more likely to occur, and the experience of flow is among our most vital mood-heightening experiences. Sports figures call it “the groove” or “being in the zone,” while psychologists identify it as the central component of peak performance. This is better known as “flow,” the experience of complete absorption in a given activity that produces a sense of effortless concentration. It could happen during a game of tennis, while performing neurosurgery, or in the midst of preparing a gourmet meal. It could arise from an intense business negotiation or from making a dress. Whatever it is, the moment is exciting and alive. Time stands still, and we're less aware of our external environment. Music might be playing, people talking, machines clicking, or motors running, but we remain attuned to the activity at hand.

The concept of flow has been closely linked to a deep state of Zen-like meditation. A central tenet is the idea of “oneness,” which means being inseparable from the essence of what you are doing. Thus, you work or play without hindrance. Flow is about our best functioning as individuals—we find our niche and do it so well that we feel fully satisfied and successful. The work we do during flow feels like quality work, and we believe that our time is well spent. Thus, it complements discovering our bliss, Aristotle's entelechy.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi is commonly called the architect of the experience of flow, because he articulated its dimensions. He initially studied flow with surgeons, artists, and mountain climbers who had reported great joy from complete immersion in what they were doing. He then expanded his work to other areas. Arriving in the United States from Fiume, Italy, at the age of twenty-two, Csikszentmihalyi attended the University of Chicago, where he acquired his undergraduate and graduate degrees. He remained there to teach and eventually became chair of the Psychology Department. Now considered one of the foremost spokespeople for Positive Psychology, his primary areas of interest center on creativity, happiness, and flow.

Csikszentmihalyi discovered that flow arises from within a single-minded purpose or motivation, which produces a joyful alignment between ourselves and our achievements. It's an organic process in which personal desire and behavior come together in a feeling of achievement. In an interview with Wired magazine, Csikszentmihalyi described flow as “being completely involved in an activity for its own sake. The ego falls away. Time flies. Every action, movement, and thought follows inevitably from the previous one, like playing jazz. Your whole being is involved, and you're using your skills to the utmost.”21

People have described the experience as being in a current that carries them along—flow! They report feeling “most alive” or “at full throttle”—a sense of having been transported into a new and sharper reality. As flow sets in, the pace increases as the rhythm picks up. There's greater fluidity as perception, imagination, and manual operations function at a higher than normal level. Thought and motion seem perfectly integrated as focus narrows.

Flow may be experienced in a single time frame, or may arch over a period of time that is also punctuated by non-flow events. A machinist described how he was able to come back to work each day and pick up with a project where he'd left off, getting back into this heightened performance almost immediately. “The experience is like day-dreaming,” he said, “only my body had stopped working.”22 Kary Mullis described the same thing: it was as if the flow of his idea was still there, even if he interrupted it to drive or work on his cabin.

Flow arises as mental energy before it deepens into heightened performance and a trancelike state. Best-selling writer Dean Koontz has experienced it. He had spent the early part of his career writing just about anything to keep ahead of the bills. As he became more established and successful, he could spend more time developing plots and characters and deepening his structure. The more he wrote, the more he knew he was born to write, and the better at it he got. For him, finding his bliss paid off, and finally he was able to relax. As he did so, he developed a rhythm that offered him an unexpected bonus.

One day he was writing his novel Watchers, which features a dog with artificially developed human intelligence. Initially, Koontz had found this tale to be difficult to write, and he took eight months to complete the first two-thirds to his satisfaction. As he took up the last third, however, he had gained a clear sense of direction coupled with a feeling of control and spontaneity. It was then that he had an incredible experience, as the pages seemed to write themselves. “It just flew,” he said. He began to write fast and did not stop, save for one break, for two days. “I got up one morning and went to work. I ate a sandwich at my desk, kept going, worked around the clock, and finally fell into bed the next evening, totally exhausted. I slept that night, and the next morning got up and worked twenty-four hours straight. In the first session, which was about thirty-six hours, I wrote something like forty pages. In the second session, I wrote around forty pages in even less time. That's about thirty thousand words in two sessions, and it needed almost no revision.”²³

When the state of flow recedes, reorientation brings an awareness of being hungry or cold or stiff. You're surprised at how much time has passed. It's almost as if you've been channeling some highly creative spirit. You may be delighted by all that you've accomplished—and possibly you won't even remember much of what you did during the time of flow. You have worked with a sense of purpose, as well as an instinct for how to achieve that purpose. It's an organic process, beginning inside, in which personal desire and behavior come together to flow into a sense of achievement; it produces a sort of pride in ownership. It's about craftsmanship—caring about what you're doing—as opposed to just working at something. Csikszentmihalyi went on to study this phenomenon with specific groups of people who had reported feelings of great joy from complete immersion in what they were doing. He then expanded his work to other areas, including creativity.

“Action follows upon action,” he stated, “according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the actor. He experiences it as a unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which he is in control of his actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present, and future.”24

To study people in flow, Csikszentmihalyi gave his assessment device, the Experience Sampling Method, to several thousand participants. All received a pager that went off at random times within a two-hour segment of their day, and all were shown how to rate their experience on a scale. Whenever the pager buzzed, they were to write down in a journal what they were doing and thinking, where they were, who they were with, and what rating they would give their present emotional state.

The results indicated that the state of flow occurred most often when people were doing their favorite activities but three times more often during work than during leisure. It also occurred while driving and talking to others, but not during passive activities. The activity that produced flow most often had clear goals, opportunities for concentration, experiential feedback, and rules of performance. People who read books reported it more often than people who watched television. People who were depressed, fatigued, or bored did not report any flow experience. “Each of the flow-producing activities,” Csikszentmihalyi concluded, “requires an initial investment of attention before it begins to be enjoyable.”25

The surprise is this: while we think that flow occurs spontaneously, it can actually be harnessed into a regular experience. People who control their inner experience, Csikszentmihalyi claims, can determine the quality of their lives. To make it happen, we should seek a challenge that stimulates our perceived level of skill, because it would keep us interested in a given task. However, the challenge must be manageable. If it's weak, it's not stimulating. If too hard, it's anxiety provoking or demoralizing. (One group of researchers found that only those employees with a high need for achievement found the combination of high skill/high challenge to be flow producing; unmotivated employees apparently did well enough with low challenge but did not report task interest or work reward.) As we see with Martin Cooper and Kary Mullis, challenges that feel reachable encourage us to develop new skills and think in fresh ways. And this is where brainstorms occur.

Achievement-oriented employees reported not only a more positive mood and greater task interest than other employees; they also showed greater organizational spontaneity. They were more creative when it counted: they looked for ways to improve the effectiveness of their work, made constructive suggestions to improve overall work environment, offered creative suggestions for company objectives, and encouraged other employees to be innovative. People who were able to turn dull jobs into something of a game or to ponder novel improvements described more experiences of flow.

Housewife-turned-entrepreneur Joy Mangano is an example. She'd been envisioning products to improve her daily experience since she was a teenager. She'd once thought up a luminescent dog collar to help owners see their dogs at night, but then watched in disappointment as a pet company put a similar idea into production. She vowed to find ways to make her ideas a reality. Yet as a divorced single mother of three, she was struggling just to pay the rent. Until she could dig out, she had to be content to keep her projects small. Still, she kept spinning ideas, reinventing daily products in her mind. Then one day in 1989, during a waitressing stint, Mangano was engaged in the nasty business of wringing dirty water from a rag mop. As she concentrated on her task, she suddenly envisioned a very different type of mop, one that would keep her hands clean: “It came to me,” she says. “A self-wringing mop.” She could see exactly how it should be designed and, more important, how superior it was to what was currently available—and what she was using that day. She got investment money and created the Miracle Mop^® prototype, which became a hit on a home-shopping program. Inspired by her ability to snap on ideas, and with her new financial grounding, Mangano established a company, Ingenious Designs. Currently, she holds patents and trademarks for over one hundred products.26

Csikszentmihalyi believes that focus can become a habit—and can be improved—to better the quality of our lives. He is talking about “mindfulness,” the practice of being present and attuned, even vigilant, no matter what one might be doing. He suggests keeping a diary to take stock of our day and learn about the influence on our moods of various things we encounter, so that we make awareness a habit. When we see which activities produce the high points, we can experiment by increasing the frequency of the positive encounters.

Innovators like Cooper, Mullis, and Mangano care about making their time count. They prioritize, organize, and figure out how best to achieve their goals. They protect their mental energy and let it play where it will be most effective. Developing a sense of serious playfulness, their focus is clear, and they remain alert to how life's clues appear for their advantage.

In terms of human consciousness, flow operates at the deepest level of conscious awareness, where it seems to merge with trancelike conditions. To better understand this, we need to see how each level of consciousness and focus functions in our lives.

The first level—day-to-day consciousness—provides the background for everything we do. Sit quietly for a moment and then pick something—a chair, a lamp, or a framed photograph—on which to focus. Notice how the background recedes to allow you to see the item. Now refocus on just the backdrop and notice how the item blurs. The point is, focusing helps us to get a defined perception. Not focusing gives us only a blur. We do need background to see a figure, but we would hope for more in our daily lives than just this monotone as a backdrop.

The second level occurs when we pay attention. Since we cannot perceive everything at once with the same level of awareness (we'd soon be overwhelmed), we tend to move to the second level only when we need to. For example, we concentrate on one specific building on a city block only when we have business there. Or we concentrate on reading a stop sign or yield sign while driving, attending to the specific lyrics of a song, or sniffing an odor before we step into a room. We notice that one manhole is different from the next one down the street, or that a counselor is saying just what we need to hear. We might also be pulled into the second level of awareness when startled, such as hearing a car run into something, awakening to a noise in the night, or having a toothache.

When we pay attention voluntarily, this is “top-down” attention. When something draws our attention, it's “bottom-up.” The second level involves varying degrees of attention, on a continuum from passive interest to mildly attentive to full consciousness. We are more engaged than at the first level, although unless we exercise this focus, we may derive only short-term benefits. As we develop a defined or vigilant awareness, we notice more things. We become more attuned to the immediate world. Small details take on more meaning.

Think of it as seeing a female friend in a crowd of people. This person stands out because of what she means to you. Active, or top-down, perception means you grow more alert to looking for a friend in a crowd. What turns one thing rather than another from background into figure is the attention we pay—the significance we attribute to it. We become more mindful as a habit. We look and we see. The habit of focus keeps us awake and alert.

Dino Zaharakis, just eleven years old, liked to invent things. He noticed something awkward about a stand his father had rigged for a new iPad^® and believed he could create a better one. After several trials, he came up with a device that he called the dzdock^®. His father helped him create a prototype and set up a website to market it. They founded a company to produce them, and from Dino's alert eye, a new business was born.27

The third level of consciousness makes the art of focus more a part of us. We move from energy and excitement into periods of quiet joy. Flow stretches people beyond their perceived limits. It bonds them with the activity, yielding both stamina and euphoria. “Flow,” wrote Csikszentmihalyi, “is the way people describe their state of mind when consciousness is harmoniously ordered, and they want to pursue whatever they are doing for its own sake.”²⁸

Yet flow has a paradoxical character. Although it may appear effortless, flow does evolve from discipline and skill. It's a sort of relaxed intensity, which clearly aligns the experience with the eureka moment. The best conditions for flow derive from a balance of focus, motivation, organization, vision, energy, and the ability to allow inner resources to be freely expressed. “I have to be committed to it and prepared for it,” said an entrepreneur, “or I won't get the full experience.”

We are all capable of achieving peak performance in the pursuit of quality and creativity. Those who make it a priority are more apt to develop the frame of mind, neurologically speaking, that snaps. Let's look at one of the first people to articulate how this process occurs.

MUTUAL IMPACTS, NEW COMBINATIONS

“Universalists” make significant contributions in many different fields because they are fully versed in each field and they allow their knowledge bases to merge. Whereas most people see only distinct subjects, universalists spot and exploit productive connections. Leonardo da Vinci was such a person. So was Jules Henri Poincaré, an engineer who was a mathematical savant, adept in astronomy, topology, and theoretical physics. His mind has been compared to a bee flying from flower to flower because he pollinated ideas in so many different areas. An initiator of relativity thinking and the father of chaos theory, Poincaré had all the right stuff for snapping. When he did, he transformed paradigms. He was also the first scientist to notice how and when an aha! insight occurred, and he delved into psychology to spell out its conditions.29

Born in 1854 in Nancy, France, into a prominent political and intellectual family, Poincaré was top in his class in all subjects except drawing and sports. He entered university to become an engineer but excelled in mathematics, publishing his first professional paper at the age of twenty. He had a penchant for novelty, always looking for new ways to achieve a result. Poincaré would pace while he pondered thorny problems, and he often worked out something in whole before committing it to paper. “If I have the feeling, the intuition…so as to perceive at a glance the reasoning as a whole,” he once wrote, “I need no longer fear lest I forget one of the elements.”³⁰ However, he tended to ignore questions about his reasoning process as well as suggestions for greater compositional elegance. He was a pathfinder: let others decorate the path he left in his wake.

While still at school, Poincaré became a mining inspector in northeastern France. Then he was invited to become a lecturer in mathematics at Caen University, although he remained chief engineer of the Corps de Mines. This activity gave him a respite from his intellectual work, while the change of venue provided fertile ground for a snap. His most famous snap occurred when he was working on his dissertation on differential equations. One day he'd reached an impasse, so he went on a “geologic excursion” for the school of mines. As he traveled to different parts of France, his mental work receded. One morning, he went to the bus stop. The bus arrived, the door opened, and he lifted his foot to step inside. Out of nowhere, he had the elusive solution, fully formed. “As I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it.”31 He felt complete certainty about it, so much so that he got on the bus, sat down with his companion, and continued their conversation without taking any notes. On his return, he verified the result.

Poincaré knew he had an idea that would neutralize one of the most vexing problems of modern mathematics. The equations he'd been considering were formally identical to those that characterized the non-Euclidian geometry proposed by Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky. Poincaré believed that Euclidian geometry was a tidier system because it started with obvious truths and used deductive logic to produce certain results. Lobachevsky had proposed a different set of axioms that offered bizarre results, so he'd inspired hostile resistance among intellectuals. They hoped to prove that his non-Euclidian system was self-contradictory, and many mathematicians—Poincaré among them—were looking for its internal contradictions. But his aha! moment transformed his perception of the task. He'd been looking at it all wrong. When he returned home, he created a relative consistency proof that allowed the axioms from Lobachevsky's system to be as acceptable as the axioms in the Euclidian system. That is, each system yielded valid conclusions based on the axioms of the particular system, Euclidean or non-Euclidean. Neither system was inherently true or false. Each yielded conclusions based on its own axioms. While this realization challenged classical notions of truth, it provided a new frontier for mathematics.

It was clear to people around Poincaré that he could become occupied with many things at once, seeking solutions with passion but indifferent to the finer points of the process. He had a reputation for being disorganized and forgetful, but his perception was highly intuitive and his memory acute. Thus, he earned increasing respect. He was a fairly young scientist when he impressed an international audience of his peers.

Since Isaac Newton's time, scientific societies have offered prizes to lure clever men into solving the world's most vexing mathematical problems. This practice provided a means for young scholars to make a mark, even, perhaps, to shift things in new directions. Sometimes the contests were highly political, so the solutions might be roundly disputed.

The nineteenth-century king of Sweden and of Norway was Oscar II. To honor his approaching sixtieth birthday in 1889, Professor Gösta Mittag-Leffler devised an intellectual contest in which mathematicians were to address one of four questions that featured a key issue at the frontier of current research. One question asked for proof within the frame of Newton's celestial mechanics of the solar system's stability. That is, could someone show that influences on planetary bodies in our solar system would alter their courses only slightly or temporarily, such that Earth's residents could expect things to remain status quo indefinitely?

This question was the result of a tantalizing remark from a mathematical scholar, Peter Gustav Lejeune Dirichlet. Reportedly, Dirichlet had told his top student, Leopold Kronecker, that he could prove with differential equations the solar system's stability. Differential equations express the physical laws that govern relationships among our solar system's planets. From these equations, mathematicians tried to deduce the various trajectories, past and future. Figuring out each instant, piecemeal, and putting them all together should yield the future's Big Picture—how the solar system will behave into eternity.

Yet Dirichlet had not divulged his actual work before he died, and the elusive proof had tormented mathematicians from America to Russia. Many had tried but failed to figure out the solution that Dirichlet had taken to the grave, but they were convinced that if he'd done it, one of them could too. Mittag-Leffler believed that a contest that challenged the best minds would finally lift the rock beneath which this mystery was hidden. They could be on the verge of new and significant knowledge.

While on the face of it, the idea of such a contest seemed a simple matter, a problem arose when Mittag-Leffler tried to convene an international jury of renowned mathematicians who could achieve a consensus—without impaling one another. There was no shortage of self-important divas among accomplished mathematicians, so planning the event soon became a political nightmare. The situation worsened when Kronecker, who viewed himself as the foremost expert on “the Dirichlet question,” announced that he had discovered it to be impossible to answer. The contest, he said, would only humiliate the scientific community and embarrass the king, and he planned to reveal this to Oscar. Mittag-Leffler thwarted a grand disaster by inviting Kronecker onto the esteemed jury.

The planning proceeded and the prize was announced: a gold medal and 2,500 crowns. Mathematicians from all over the world sent in their entries, among them Poincaré, now thirty-five. His complex paper on the use of differential equations to address the behavior of multiple bodies in free motion was over two hundred pages in length.

With his preference for topology and holistic reasoning, Poincaré had been the perfect person to approach the imposing problem. He adopted a unique geometrical perspective to address the nine simultaneous equations. He also proposed the notion of dynamical chaos; that is, order and randomness might mix together so intimately that it would be impossible to clearly distinguish them. Thus, no one could know the laws of nature so exactly as to predict accurately all successive moments of the universe. Since the laws can be known only approximately, we would need a formula that allowed us to predict the future with the same uncertainty. However, miniscule differences during early stages can increase exponentially and thus become much greater at later stages. So, the prediction of stability has a sensitive dependence both on the initial conditions and on the measuring instrument. Poincaré stated that there would always be an element of irreducible uncertainty in the calculation process.

Although he did not complete the solution to The Question, he had proposed such an important new idea that he was awarded the prize anyway, along with worldwide acclaim. One judge stated that what Poincaré had achieved would inaugurate a new era for celestial physics.

Poincaré's approach is now regarded as the birth of chaos theory. Essentially, he demonstrated that there was room in deterministic systems for the unpredictable. His indirect, qualitative approach via geometrical pictures shattered the more rigid framework of quantitative calculations. What he was mentally able to construct more than a century ago is now re-created with high-powered computers. Thus, he demonstrated the transformative nature of a eureka moment.

Poincaré asserted that the best way to work on a complex problem is to first immerse in it until you hit an impasse, and then distract yourself. He'd known success from such experiences in his own life. Apart from his eureka moment on the bus, he described several more in a lecture in 1908, given in Paris to a group of psychologists. It's among the earliest self-reflective descriptions of the creative process—and a rare illumination from Poincaré. He believed that mathematical creation should be of interest to psychologists, because “it is the activity in which the human mind seems to take least from the outside world, in which it acts or seems to act only of itself and on itself.”32

Aside from the experience on the bus during his mining expedition, Poincaré described among his enlightened moments how he'd striven for two weeks during his doctoral research to prove that “Fuchsian functions” could not exist. (Today they're called automorphic functions.) He sat at his worktable each day for an hour, maybe two. Although he tried and tried, he reached no result. Then one evening, he changed his regular habits and drank a cup of coffee, which gave him a case of insomnia. “Ideas rose in crowds; I felt them collide until pairs interlocked, so to speak, making a stable combination.”33 By the next morning, he had established a class of Fuchsian functions. “I had only to write out the results, which took but a few hours.”³⁴ He believed that the caffeine stimulant had no influence on his ability to mentally wrangle with his ideas; it had merely made him more present to the material his unconscious produced than if he'd been sleeping.

On another occasion, after reaching an impasse on a series of arithmetical questions, he went to the seaside to relax. He went for a walk one morning when the idea he needed struck him at once. It was brief, sudden, and “immediately certain.” Upon returning, he got back to work, but there was one aspect of this problem that remained stubbornly mysterious. He worked on it systematically, day after day, to no avail. Again, he went on a trip for military training, and while walking on the street, the solution came to him. After his training stint ended, he was able to easily reproduce the insight.

Comparing unconscious ideas to atoms, Poincaré said, “During a period of apparent rest and unconscious work, certain of them come unhooked from the wall and put in motion. They flash in every direction through the space where they are enclosed…. Then their mutual impacts may produce new combinations.”³⁵ Conscious work was needed to unhook them from the wall, but it could go only so far. This is the moment that divides the conscious reasoner from the innovator. “We think we have done no good because we have moved these elements in a thousand different ways in seeking to assemble them and have found no satisfactory aggregate. But after this shaking up imposed on them by our will, these atoms do not return to their primitive rest. They freely continue their dance.”³⁶ Those who grasp the function of the work-rest interplay know when to sit back and let it occur in its own way.

For the psychologists, Poincaré listed five distinct points about creativity that involved the interplay of two distinct egos. “The conscious self is narrowly limited, and as far as the subliminal self, we know not its limitations, and this is why we are not too reluctant in supposing that it has been able in a short time to make more different combinations than the whole life of a conscious being could encompass.”37

Creativity that produces insight begins with a period of conscious work, Poincaré explained, followed by unconscious work. Then the unconscious work must be verified, that is, put on a “firm footing.” Third, one had to trust the “delicate intuition” of the unconscious, which “knows better how to divine than the conscious self, since it succeeds where that has failed.”³⁸

For the fourth point, he offered a conjecture: the unconscious mind could present an unfruitful direction that was nevertheless elegant, so the conscious mind had to make a decision about its usefulness. Wrapping up his lecture with his fifth point, he cautioned that whatever the unconscious mind does present is not full and complete but only a “point of departure.” The rest can be worked out with the discipline of the more logical conscious mind.

Poincaré's first biographer, Édouard Toulouse, was a psychologist at the School of Higher Studies. He noted Poincaré's exceptional ability to recall verbatim passages he'd read or things he'd heard, as well as his routine work pattern: a regular schedule of short periods of concentrated intellectual work that always began with basic principles, and that added breaks. Poincaré did not waste long hours on a resistant problem because he trusted that his subconscious would continue working on it. He resisted the limiting structure of logical thought and preferred the free play of visual imagery.

It is certain that the combinations which present themselves to the mind in a kind of sudden illumination after a somewhat prolonged period of unconscious work are generally useful and fruitful combinations…all the combinations are formed as a result of the automatic action of the subliminal ego, but those only which are interesting find their way into the field of consciousness.…A few only are harmonious, and consequently at once useful and beautiful, and they will be capable of affecting the geometrician's special sensibility I have been speaking of; which, once aroused, will direct our attention upon them, and will thus give them the opportunity of becoming conscious.…In the subliminal ego, on the contrary, there reigns what I would call liberty, if one could give this name to the mere absence of discipline and to disorder born of chance.39

VIGILANCE AT PLAY

Putting the whole brain in play is not, of itself, sufficient to spark insight. For serendipity to be productive, we must have knowledge about the context of the problem. That is, we can be rewarded with a eureka moment only when we're prepared for it. Kary Mullis was immersed in DNA technology when he snapped on the PCR process. Martin Cooper was a long-time engineer with Motorola when he put two and two together for the mobile phone. Poincaré knew math and physics backward and forward. All three understood how important it is to stay immersed, to utilize challenges for optimum performance, and to keep the radar up at all times. All three let their minds tumble with a problem as both work and play. All three could move into flow and snap a significant solution that had long-range effects. On the other hand, Joy Mangano was just washing a floor. However, she had developed a habit of looking for ways to improve her life, so her vigilant mind was at work on even that mundane task.

Thus, the best way to inspire effective snap judgments is (1) to be diligently working within the parameters of the problem, (2) after intense effort, relax, and (3) let the brain play with what it already knows. The impasse, or “plateau moment,” as frustrating as it may feel, is an important part of the process. Giving up the effort of thinking offers a way to clear the mind and make room for a breakthrough. The snap is there; it's just incubating.

KEY POINTS

The right hemisphere is instrumental in producing the aha! moment.
Letting the mind wander revs up its resources.
Flow is a full engagement with a task that lets the mind play while it works.
Flow occurs most often when we're engaged in a challenge from activities that we enjoy.
Eureka moments are associated with people who can get “in the zone.”
Snapping comes from knowledge, mental play, memory, and the alert mind.