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NEW PERCEPTIONS

Physicist Gordon Gould had worked on amplified optics for two decades, struggling to develop a laser when, during a relaxed Saturday night, he envisioned it: “The whole thing suddenly popped into my head,” he said.1 He went right to work sketching the components for a model and listing the practical applications, which eventually included weapons systems, supermarket scanners, and even DVD players. Gould had the answer the whole time in the type of data he'd collected over the course of his career. He just needed to mine it in the right way.

Try this puzzle and see if you can find the pattern.

Which is the next word in this sequence? Base, Minor, Upstart, Helicon, Curate. Choose from Flute, Icon, Hexagon, Meridian, and Tumbler.

Give it a moment—remember, relaxing the brain lets it feel safe to play a little. Everything you need is right in front of you. Don't peek until you've given this a try, because this chapter is about the ability to pull out answers from the data you know.

OK, here's the answer: the five vowels repeat through the words in alphabetical order. The next word, then, would be icon.

Data mining is the process of extracting hidden patterns from information—seeing or organizing it in a unique new way, usually for decision making, marketing, or prediction. This generally involves sorting through large caches of information so as to efficiently retrieve the information needed. Fortunately our brains are equipped to perform this task. To achieve effective mining for a specific purpose, we must usually analyze data from a variety of different perspectives. Computers have software for this purpose, which allows users to access information from many different angles, categorize it, and summarize the relationships among different aspects or types. Technically, data mining is the process of finding correlations or patterns among dozens of fields in large relational databases. For example, companies use computers to sift through volumes of supermarket scanner data to create market research reports. In the business world, data mining has identified successful employees and customer habits. It has also yielded numerous discoveries in medicine, education, and bioinformatics. Snapping relies on effective data mining, and effective snappers have plenty of data available from their training and experience. Once they succeed with invention, they keep looking for ways to do it again—especially when they appreciate how snapping wor

Many myths surround the figure of Eugène François Vidocq, the founder of the world's first undercover agency. But his ability to effectively transform data from his experience and from wherever his curiosity led him is beyond dispute. He went from a convict with a hopeless life sentence to one of the world's most respected law enforcement officials, first by being inventive with opportunity and then by being vigilant in his occupation. He was a top-down type of guy. Such novelists as Victor Hugo, Alexandre Dumas, and Honoré de Balzac celebrated his exploits, as well as Edgar Allan Poe, whom he also inspired.

A resourceful visionary, Vidocq insisted in his memoir that his prison experience had given him advantages that had one day made him successful. Born in Arras, France, on July 23, 1775, Vidocq was the son of a baker. Still, from a young age he yearned for adventure. One day, he killed a man in a duel. Since King Louis XVI and Queen Marie Antoinette were in need of an army to resist the movement for a new republic, Vidocq was given a choice: go to prison or join the military. He chose the latter, but his impetuous nature got him arrested again…several times.

During his first actual prison stint, Vidocq met a farmer who had been arrested and incarcerated for stealing grain to feed his family. Taking pity on him, Vidocq forged a pardon. Prison officials discovered the deception and increased Vidocq's sentence to eight years. Incensed, he escaped, was caught, and escaped again. The challenge became a game to him, and he became quite adept at charming, deceiving, and eluding his guards, often with clever disguises. At one point, his reputation for breaking out was so great that officials forbade him any excursions from his cell. Still, he got past them. Yet for all his escapes, he was no good on the run, and each time Vidocq was caught, his sentence increased in severity. Finally, he was sentenced to life in a corrections hellhole so brutal that many men who were sent there buckled from the treatment and died. Vidocq remained hopeful that he could rely on his reason to prevent this from happening to him.

According to one tale, Vidocq managed to get an audience with the prefecture of police at Lyons. He claimed that his original offense did not merit such harsh treatment, and he wanted a chance to prove that he could go straight. He offered something that could help reduce crime in the city: he could be an informant. He knew French criminals better than anyone, having lived among them for so many years. He was familiar with their gang associations, their plans for future crimes, and their associates on the outside. As the story goes, the prefecture said he had no choice but to send Vidocq to prison, so Vidocq snapped on an idea and proposed a deal: if he should succeed in escaping, he would show he meant business by returning to the prefecture's office. In this way, he would demonstrate his honesty and cleverness at the same time. The prefecture agreed but then added extra guards to escort Vidocq to prison. Vidocq was soon back in his office.

In a less imaginative account, Vidocq explained his plight to the head of the Lyons police, Jean-Pierre Dubois. When Dubois looked into the matter, he decided that Vidocq was guilty of a minor misdeed, so he (not Vidocq) offered the deal for him to become a police informant in exchange for freedom. No matter who came up with the plan, Vidocq was quick to grasp his advantages. He could move freely among criminals, who knew him as one of them, listening to them brag about crimes and learning the details of their future plans. These he reported to Dubois, and the arrest rate greatly improved.2

Eventually Vidocq moved to Paris, where Napoleon reigned, and in 1809 continued there as an informant for the Criminal Division of the prefecture of police. His work gained him an audience with Napoleon, who encouraged Vidocq to continue as an undercover informant. He agreed to be “arrested” so he could gain access to the hardened offenders in La Force prison. From there, he made regular reports and even solved several murders. After nearly two years, Vidocq, who wanted a street assignment, was taken out in irons and managed to “escape.” He merged seamlessly into the Parisian underworld and surreptitiously offered information for hundreds of arrests.

But he aspired to do something much more ambitious, and he created one innovation after another. Vidocq proposed a bureau of undercover informants like himself. When he got the green light, he snapped a quick succession of ideas, mined from his experience, with which he could improve law enforcement. He organized the first-ever card file system on offenders and required his agents to file written reports. He also included women as agents because he realized that they could get into places and get information that male agents could not. The operation proved to be a success. In October 1812, Napoleon signed a decree that made Vidocq's Brigade de la Sûreté into the world's first national security force. The Sûreté brought respect to law enforcement in Paris, and branches were soon established in other areas of France.3

Teaching his associates that “observation is the first rule of investigation,” Vidocq mined his background to snap a system of clever techniques for acquiring information. By this time, the criminal underground had caught on to who Vidocq was, so he invented other tactics: he and his agents went among criminals in various disguises. He also exaggerated his reputation for getting men to talk, hoping to influence a perception of his skill that could provoke confessions. In addition, Vidocq used deception. When he arrived to search a place, he might fabricate the reason he was there so as to give the suspect false confidence that Vidocq was on the wrong trail. Once inside, Vidocq would then look for evidence of the actual crime.

His focus on a systematic approach inspired several forensic inventions that are still in use today: he kept detailed records, he performed bullet comparisons, he preserved footprint impressions with plaster of paris, he compared samples of handwriting to forged notes, and he suggested that fingerprints might be a viable form of identification. Vidocq also created forge-proof paper and indelible ink, and for the courts, he invented a form of plea bargaining. In other words, he was always attentive for ways to make his knowledge and experience produce something that would improve his profession.

Even after he resigned in 1833, Vidocq hardly retired. The following year, he established Le Bureau des Renseignements, the world's first private detective agency. Having no trouble attracting clients, he remained active until he was eighty years old. Despite the resistance among established law enforcement to Vidocq's “new” ways, he made such an impression and was so successful that he inspired many novelists—and thus, became the archetype of the forensic sleuth.4 As a resourceful data miner, he left a powerful legacy.

THE SPEED OF THOUGHT

When psychologist Nancy Koehn studied entrepreneurs, she noted that they keep learning throughout their lives, in whatever situations they find themselves.5 They are perpetually collecting and processing; they see the same things that others see, but they notice more and are more apt to make some use of the information. As a result, they gain perspective that illuminates new patterns in the information at hand. They're also more inventive than the average person. It's the difference between the person who tosses the can after drinking the juice inside and the person who turns the can into a vase, a planter, or some other useful object.

Take James Watt, for example. From his expertise as an ordinary mechanic for the University of Glasgow, his brain was able to mine the data and extract something that he instantly recognized as a brilliant idea and a much-needed invention. Although the story is told secondhand, from what we know about aha! moments, there is no reason to disbelieve that the experience happened as reported.

Watt was taking a walk one Sunday afternoon in 1765 around Glasgow, Scotland. From Charlotte Street, he went through a gate into the Glasgow Green and passed a washing house. All the while, Watt was pondering a repair he'd been asked to make to a Newcomen steam engine, invented fifty years earlier. The machine used vacuum power inside a cylinder when steam was condensed to liquid form. The resulting pumping action had made it possible to remove water from mines. But the machine was inefficient. To make it work to produce cycles of heating and cooling required a lot of fuel, because the same cylinder that contained the steam also condensed it.

Suddenly, Watt snapped on a more efficient device: use two cylinders: one to heat water to steam and the other to cool steam to water. They could thereby cut their fuel use by half. “The idea came into my mind, that as steam was an elastic body it would rush into a vacuum, and if a communication was made between the cylinder and an exhausted vessel, it would rush into it, and it might be there condensed without cooling the cylinder.”6 He realized exactly what he needed to do. “I had not walked farther than the Golf-house when the whole thing was arranged in my mind.”

With this new technique, Watt was able not just to double the efficiency of the steam engine but also to make it more useful in many other applications. What he knew about the engine had provided the data he had needed to see and understand the contraption and then view it from a different angle. This had allowed him to envision a separate condenser. His tacit knowledge, given a bit of space, had popped forth. As philosopher of science Michael Polanyi said in The Tacit Dimension, we know more than we can tell.7 Watt was walking around with the engine's mechanisms in his head, as well as with the need to repair one. He was apparently also concerned enough about the engine's design to mull it over. From this, a new way of seeing had evolved faster than the speed of thought—something Watt knew, but did not know that he knew, until it emerged as a full-blown idea.

Watt also demonstrated another principle that we have seen throughout this book: when he was in a relaxed mode, daydreaming, his brain generated the insight.

MINING MINDS

In Rhetoric, Aristotle said that ordinary words convey only what we know already. He viewed metaphor as the best medium for seeing things in a fresh way.

What happens in the brain when we're inspired to see beyond the surface of what we know to extract something fresh? We've seen in earlier chapters how the brain is set up, how it relies on focus and expectation, and how it gathers its resources for the pop of inspiration. Now we'll add to this.

Neurologist Alice Flaherty teaches at Harvard Medical School and specializes in mood and movement disorders at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston. She has studied the biology of creativity and produced a book on the intriguing subject of hypergraphia, or the overwhelming compulsion to write (from which she unexpectedly suffered following a tragic incident in her life). In the process of writing, she developed an appreciation for the ability to generate metaphors as “one of the most magical aspects of language.”8 With metaphors, we realize similarities among otherwise disparate things. In Greek, the word means “transfer,” and it is this ability to transfer that inspires creative data mining. This enhances the ability to generate a new perspective on a problem.

“Synetics” is the process of connecting seemingly unrelated elements while searching for a creative solution to a problem. To achieve this, we might imagine ourselves playing a role in finding a solution to a problem. Watt, for example, could have imagined himself as the single cylinder. Another person might ignore all restrictions and imagine that the impossible is now possible, looking for a solution in fantasy (as Martin Cooper did in chapter 5). Symbolic analogies help people view the thing on which they're working as something else altogether.9

Creating metaphors involves the linguistic cognitive brain and the emotional brain, as well as the infusion of excitement over novelty. Metaphor brings together the two important elements of a snap in that playful manner discussed in chapter 7—the dance. Creating an enlivening metaphor engages the limbic system's emotional music with the cognitive system's knowledge of the steps. To attract the muse, the brain must connect in the right way. Otherwise, it could produce substandard work or inhibit creative expression altogether.

Flaherty's own snap, which inspired her book on hypergraphia, occurred during physical activity that directly followed immersion in her work. She had been at her lab one morning and was bicycling back home. Around her, she felt a sense of harmony that filled her with joy. “Suddenly by the Charles River Dam,” she wrote, “the phrase ‘the opposite of writer's block’ came into my head. I was immediately convinced that I had to write a book about hypergraphia. The words of my revelation…seemed to me as if they came from some higher power…. Some limbic force still believes it absolutely and has driven me to work on the manuscript nearly every day for the past four years, with a single-mindedness that seems abnormal even to me.”10 She produced a singular work on a rare disorder that shed new light for clinicians, physicians, and sufferers. It also illuminated the writing process in a unique new way, especially for the most prolific.

The temporal lobes assist with language comprehension, especially its emotional layers, as well as the perception of music and visual objects. It connects to the limbic system, where emotions are generated. The frontal lobes, which on the left recognize speech, appear to help screen, organize, and edit content. On the right, they recognize melody and assist in visuospatial thinking. Functional MRI (fMRI) scans, which measure oxygen use in various brain areas, show the brain's activities. In addition, some researchers are using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) to cause neurons to depolarize, which makes the cell membrane more positive or less negative and thus alters activity in different parts of the brain. With a handheld magnetic device, they use low frequencies to inhibit brain activity (sometimes to block inhibitions) and high frequencies to stimulate it. They are attempting to find out how rTMS affects inspiration, mood, and logical calculations.

Researcher Allan Snyder, director of the Centre for the Mind in Sydney, Australia, and fellow of the Royal Society of London, has expertise in biology, neuroscience, optical physics, and information technology. He received the Marconi International Prize in 2001 for his ideas about optical fibers for telecommunication. (He points out, like a good data miner, that this insight came not from engineering or communications but from his research on animals eyes.) “It seems that the more different pictures you have of the world, the better,” he said in an interview. “Somehow our mind unconsciously juggles these different pictures, rearranging them for a new synthesis.”11

In some circles, Snyder's work with rTMS has led to predictions of a revolution in our understanding of the human brain. He has envisioned the invention of a thinking cap that would improve our memory, remove perceptual blinders, and inspire creativity—the aha! moment. He believes that savants have better access than most to information before it gets taken up into the more holistic thinking processes that normal brains perform. Savants may not filter their thoughts as much, which gives them access to more information in the brain. In Snyder's lab, scientists have induced savant-like performances, from art to math, in ordinary subjects, who also show a reduced susceptibility to false memories. The researchers use rTMS and transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) to inhibit the anterior temporal lobe, which is important for processing concepts, semantics, labels, and categories. The aim is to reverse inhibition, which allows subjects greater access to more literal detail. They eclipse the neurons that apply meaning in order to see just how the process occurs at the unconscious level. That is, we tend to build knowledge via the Big Picture, which is a good survival mechanism for quick anticipation and decision making. However, this can prejudice information toward a certain perspective and shut off access to flexibility and even creativity. Thus, switching off parts of the brain allows others to activate, producing skills that were not otherwise exercised. They call this “paradoxical functional facilitation.”

Snyder views the holistic approach to knowledge as a bottleneck to our ability to focus on literal details, which we might otherwise join in novel ways. “We have a predisposition to impose prior connections,” he explained. “But, creativity would seem to require that we, at least momentarily, free ourselves of previous interpretations, enabling us to link disparate ideas into a new synthesis.”12 Snyder points to Leonardo da Vinci as the exemplar of the person who seemed to be able to switch between holistic conceptual ways of thinking and unfettered literal ways of knowing. This might arise, Snyder believes, from da Vinci's immersion in so many different fields. In fact, many of those who have experienced aha! moments have cultivated such flexibility.

ALWAYS AWARE

Dr. Joseph Bell was Queen Victoria's personal physician whenever she was in Scotland because she liked the way he ran his wards. In addition to his surgeries at the Royal Infirmary, he taught medical students at the University of Edinburgh. He gained renown among them for what he called “the Method”—a disciplined approach to deducing subtle facts about patients through nothing more than keen observation. Arthur Conan Doyle became a student and assistant of Bell's in 1877. He was sufficiently impressed to turn his mentor into a fictional character: Sherlock Holmes. In Conan Doyle's only filmed interview, he firmly attested to Bell's influence, and in a letter to Bell he once wrote, “It is most certainly to you that I owe Sherlock Holmes.” Bell even wore a cloaked coat and deerstalker cap.13

Bell grew up during the mid-1800s in a medical family and became protégé to a renowned Scottish physician, Dr. James Syme. He understood the art of cross-fertilization of information, as when he was not at work, he practiced several avocations. He was an amateur poet, bird-watcher, and avid shooter. Aware of the needs of patients, he organized systematic lectures for nurses and agreed to defy considerable prejudice to teach the first female medical students.

Bell was quite effective at gathering data from which to mine his insights about patients. As he developed his medical practice, he noticed the kinds of people who came to him, so he set himself the task of learning about their habits and occupations. He made a study of tattoos. He also read everything possible about skin disorders, scar shapes, the use of tobacco, how the habitual use of different implements made marks on hands, and even subjects as seemingly mundane as the different types of soil around Scotland. Bell knew as much about disease as any of his colleagues, and he worked long hours at matching behaviors, postures, facial expressions, and other subtle clues to physical ailments. He also devoted considerable time to handwriting analysis and the identification of accents, linguistic oddities, and speech patterns.

As he grew adept, he left the interviewing of patients to his students. They would ask questions and take notes, but to their surprise, Bell could spot the problem with a patient without asking a single question. Invariably, he was correct. In other words, he had educated and trained himself sufficiently to prepare his brain to snap to a diagnosis. From within his studied expertise, he had created the conditions for an aha! experience with nearly every patient.

For twenty-three years, Bell edited the Edinburgh Medical Journal as a firm proponent of science, and he authored several medical texts. This work, too, enhanced his mental database. The successful diagnosis, he believed, derived from three things: “Observe carefully, deduce shrewdly, and confirm with evidence.” For him, the Method—the “accurate and rapid appreciation of small points in which the diseased differs from the healthy state”—was one of the most important things he could impart to young medical minds. It was paramount, then, to make a study of people.14

One day a woman came to Bell's clinic and handed him a vial. It had a stopper, around which was wound a bit of black thread. Bell commented that her husband was a tailor and asked her how long he had been ill. She confirmed that it was her husband who was sick, and after she left, Bell's students wanted to know how he had deduced this. He told them that she was too healthy to be the patient, and that she wore a wedding ring but not a widow's dress. She had plugged the vial with a stopper made of paper—the same kind a tailor uses for thread. In fact, some thread was still on it. None of the deductions was difficult for an observant person. He urged the students to use their eyes, ears, brain, and power of deduction.

“Nearly every handicraft writes its sign-manual on the hands,” Bell once stated. “The scars of the miner differ from those of the quarryman. The carpenter's callosities are not those of the mason. The soldier and sailor are different in gait.”15 Ornaments, tattoos, and clothing added more dimension, as did posture and demeanor. However, “mere acuteness of the senses” was not sufficient to achieve this degree of expertise. One had to study in minute detail, and with great diligence, those subjects that would aid in making distinctions: the diverse odors of poison, for example, or of tobacco or different perfumes.

Bell would walk energetically around the crowded lecture room, urging students to recognize the importance of performing a close and critical study before diagnosis. There was always a danger of jumping too soon to a conclusion that could be wrong. To demonstrate, he would ask an assistant like Conan Doyle to escort one of his waiting out-patients into the room. This would be someone he had not yet met. He would then demonstrate the Method: from many different clues, Bell would describe the person's occupation and health status, perhaps his or her family concerns or recent activities. In one case, Bell discussed what he could see on an elderly woman. She said nothing. He then asked her, “Where is your cutty pipe?” Startled, she stared at him and then dug into her purse and brought one out. The students wanted to know how Bell had known she would have a pipe at all, let alone this particular kind of pipe, and he told them that he had seen an ulcer on her lower lip. Coupled with a smooth scar on her cheek where the pipe would curve in, he had rightly surmised from what he knew about the various implements used for smoking and the marks they made that she smoked a short-stemmed pipe.

Bell asserted that nothing was more useful to medical work than finely honed sensory observation, guided toward a specific purpose. Whenever he called on students to try the Method, he'd urge them not to touch a patient, but to “use your eyes, sir, use your ears, use your brain, your bump of perception…” and “never neglect to ratify your deductions.”16 What he meant was that after they had deduced something, they had to check each notion with the patient.

To keep students on their toes, Bell had a few tricks. One story holds that he would bring in an amber-colored fluid, which he described as a potent drug that tasted quite bitter. He would offer a preamble about the need to sometimes engage in unpleasant acts to develop one's knowledge. Among them was to smell and taste things they might not like. He would then tell them to follow his example. Bell would dip a finger into the fluid, stir it a little, and bring it to his mouth to taste it. He would make a face to show them that what he had said about the fluid was true: it wasn't sugar-water. As the students looked at each other, Bell would pass it to the first one and urge him to taste it. Of course he would, and Bell was right. The fluid was foul. One student after another dipped a finger in and tasted. When the flask made its way around the room, with Bell ensuring that each student obeyed, he would take it back. Then Bell would inform them that they had missed the most important part of the experiment: observation. He'd shown them that he'd used one finger to dip into the liquid, but had then placed an unaffected finger into his mouth. They had seen but had not “truly observed” him.

Although Bell's skills were primarily in the surgery, in 1892, he admitted in an interview to a reporter that the Crown had engaged him on numerous occasions in medical jurisprudence—the investigation of crimes. One such case involved Elizabeth Dyer. Because Bell did such an extraordinary job with vigilant observation, he spotted some key items that helped to solve it.

Dyer had been a fifteen-year-old student of Eugene Marie Chantrelle, a French immigrant, who had seduced her and was then forced to marry her. He abused her for ten years, often threatening to kill her. In 1877, Chantrelle insured Elizabeth for a considerable sum. Three months later, she fell ill. Alone in her room, she might have died if her maid had not discovered her and run for the doctor. When they entered, Chantrelle was in the room, standing at the window. The observant maid noticed that a half-full glass of lemonade was now empty and several orange segments were gone, although Elizabeth had not moved. Also, there was now a strong smell of coal gas in the air.

The doctor surmised that Elizabeth had suffered from accidental coal gas poisoning. She later died without ever waking up. The maid confided her suspicions, so the doctor invited a toxicologist from the university, Sir Henry Littlejohn, who in turn invited Bell. They thought Elizabeth's symptoms were more consistent with narcotic poisoning, so Chantrelle was soon under arrest. But the officials needed proof.

Littlejohn and Bell returned to Elizabeth's room and collected vomit from the pillow, as well as from the nightgown she had worn when she died. Under microscopic analysis, it appeared to contain a solid form of opium. The police learned that Chantrelle had recently purchased thirty doses of opium. Protesting his innocence, he said that when he'd entered the room, he had smelled gas. The maid's report backed him up, and an employee from the gas company located a broken gas pipe just outside the victim's bedroom window.

Now Bell went into action. He snapped on another idea, mined from what he knew about illnesses and people. He located a gasfitter who had once repaired this very pipe under Chantrelle's watchful eye. The man described Chantrelle's interest in how it worked. This testimony strengthened the charge of murder: insurance, opium, symptoms of narcotic overdose, and Chantrelle's awareness of how the pipe under the window worked. The circumstances seemed clear: Chantrelle had staged his wife's “accidental death” from a burst gas pipe. If not for Bell's firm command of symptomology, coupled with his study of behavior, the murderer might have gone free. After a four-day trial, Chantrelle was convicted.

Bell's legacy, immortalized in the stories of Sherlock Holmes, keeps his method and his concern about tunnel vision alive for students of many generations. The Joseph Bell Centre for Forensic Statistics and Legal Reasoning in Edinburgh honors the late pathologist and promotes his ideas.

Vigilance like that advocated by Bell and demonstrated by Gould, Watt, and Vidocq, is a habit of intentionality. Most people relax their focus until they need it, whereas people who notice nuances practice mindful engagement with the world around them. They do so with a sense of purpose, often fueled by curiosity. After a while, it becomes second nature, and their reward is heightened preparation for an aha! moment. Chance favors the prepared mind, and they're always ready. They're the first to see opportunities, first to ponder possibilities, and first to move toward them. Often, they're also bolder and more optimistic about the outcome than less mindful individuals.

Yet solitary study goes only so far; interacting with others, especially across disciplines, is a significant factor in snapping. Next, we'll explore this component.

KEY POINTS