Imagine: How Creativity Works (31 page)

The reason chutzpah is so important has to do with the nature of new ideas, which are inherently precarious. As AnnaLee Saxenian notes, most successful entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley have failed with at least one previous start-up. Their failure, however, doesn’t prevent them from trying again. And again. Or look at NOCCA: the students at the school are always encouraged to take risks, to experiment with the possibility of embarrassment. When I walked into the classroom of Silas Cooper, a drama teacher at the school, I couldn’t help but notice the handwritten banner hanging above the door. This is what it said: fail big.

One way to illustrate the importance of encouraging risk is to compare the research strategies of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) — the largest funder of biomedical science in the world — and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute (HHMI), a large nonprofit set up to “push the boundaries of knowledge.” The NIH evaluates grant proposal in an exceedingly rational manner. A team of experts analyzes and scores each proposal to ensure that the project is scientifically sound and supported by plenty of preliminary evidence. Their explicit goal is to not waste taxpayer money — nobody wants to fund a failure.

HHMI, in contrast, is known for supporting avant-garde projects. In fact, it explicitly encourages researchers to “take risks, explore unproven avenues and embrace the unknown — even if it means uncertainty or the chance of failure.” HHMI does this by focusing on individual scientists, not particular experiments. (Instead of requesting a detailed proposal of future research, HHMI asks for an example of past research.) The assumption is that a creative scientist should be able to pursue ideas without having to justify them to a panel of experts. Sometimes, the experiments with the most potential are still lacking evidence.

A few years ago, a team of economists at MIT and UCSD analyzed the data from NIH and HHMI funded labs to see which funding strategy was more effective. The economists tried to control for every possible variable, such as outside scholarships and the quality of graduate students. Then they compared the output of NIH researchers to HHMI investigators with similar track records.

The data was clear: in every biomedical field, the risky HHMI grants were generating the most important, innovative, and infl uential research. Although HHMI researchers had similar qualifi cations as their NIH counterparts when they first applied for funding, they went on to produce twice as many highly cited research articles and win six times as many awards. They also introduced more new keywords into the scientific lexicon, which is a marker of highly original work.

The bad news, of course, is that all this creativity comes with a cost. This is why, according to the economists, the HHMI researchers also produced 35 percent more research papers that were cited by nobody at all. (These papers were abject failures.) The moral is that these scientists weren’t producing better research because they were smarter or more creative or had more money. Instead, they had more success because they were more willing to fail.

Bill James makes a similar point in terms of sports. He notes that American society has found a way to value athletic potential and not just achievement: “We invest in athletes that might be good, rather than simply paying them once they get to be among the best in the world.” Of course, not all of these prospects work out. Some draft picks are busts, and many highly paid players disappoint. (Athletes, in other words, are a lot like scientific grants.) Nevertheless, professional teams realize that this system is necessary, since it encourages young athletes to pursue the sport, to invest the time and energy needed to succeed. Betting on potential is always a risk, but that’s the only way to get a surplus of talent. And that’s why we need more foundations and government-funding agencies willing to imitate the bold model of Howard Hughes and professional sports teams.

The final essential meta-idea involves managing the rewards of innovation. Inventors should profit from their past inventions, but we also need to encourage a culture of borrowing and adaptation. This tension has been present ever since Queen Elizabeth began granting patents in the late sixteenth century. Although patents serve as an important source of motivation — Abraham Lincoln described the patent system as “adding the fuel of interest to the fire of genius” — they also make it harder for other inventors to build on the innovation. This is why, in 1601, the English government began revoking many of the patents most despised by the public, including those on glass bottles and starch. What the queen discovered is that there is nothing natural about the scarcity of ideas. Of course, just because ideas want to be free doesn’t mean they should be free. It just means that we have to get the price right.

Unfortunately, that isn’t happening. In recent years, American creativity has been undermined by an abundance of vague patents and the recurring extension of copyright claims. Let’s begin with patents. Between 2004 and 2009, patent-infringement lawsuits increased by 70 percent, while licensing-fee requests rose by 650 percent. Many of these lawsuits were brought by so-called patent trolls, those individuals and fi rms who buy patents in bulk and then aggressively hunt for possible infringements even though they have no interest in using the patented inventions. Or consider the length of copyright protection: when the fi rst copyright laws were passed in 1790, the length of protection was fourteen years. (As Lewis Hyde notes, the Founding Fathers were deeply invested in the notion that practically all created works should belong to “the commons.”) 
(One of America’s initial economic advantages was the weak grip of trade guilds. The primary function of these guilds, which dominated fi elds ranging from printing to soap making, was the restriction of technical knowledge. However, the relative weakness of guilds in the American Colonies meant that much of this valuable knowledge was widely disseminated, cheaply available to the public in the form of reference manuals and trade books. For instance, when Ben Franklin became publisher of the Philadelphia Gazette, in 1729, he declared that one of the main goals of the paper would be the dissemination of “such Hints . . . as may contribute either to the Improvement of our present Manufactures, or towards the Invention of new Ones.”) 
Since 1962, however, Congress has extended copyright protection eleven times, and the typical length of protection is now ninety-five years. The problem with these extensions is that they discourage innovation, preventing people from remixing and remaking old forms. There will always be a powerful business lobby for the protection of intellectual property — the 1998 copyright extension law was nicknamed the Mickey Mouse Protection Act — but we need to remember that the public domain has no lobby. And that’s why we should always think of young William Shakespeare stealing from Marlowe and Holinshed and Kyd. (If Shakespeare were writing today, his plays would be the subject of endless lawsuits.) It doesn’t matter if it’s a hip-hop album made up of remixes and music samples or an engineer tweaking a gadget in a San Jose garage: we have to make sure that people can be inspired by the work of others, that the commons remains a rich source of creativity.

Bob Dylan illustrates this point beautifully. In
Chronicles
, his autobiography, Dylan repeatedly describes his creative process as one of love and theft. The process begins when he finds a sound or song that “touches the bone.” He then tries to deconstruct the sound to figure out how it works. When Dylan was a young songwriter in New York City, for instance, he learned to write music by memorizing his infl uences, studying the melodic details of Robert Johnson, Woody Guthrie, and a long list of English folk ballads. (Dylan, in
Chronicles
: “I could rattle off all these songs without comment as if all the wise and poetic words were mine and mine alone.” ) But Dylan wasn’t just copying these tunes; his close study was an essential part of his creative method — learning an old song meant that he was on the verge of inventing a new one. Dylan describes how this worked in one of his first recording sessions:

I didn’t have many songs, but I was rearranging verses to old blues ballads, adding an original line here or there, anything that came into my mind — slapping a title on it.

One consequence is that virtually all of Dylan’s first seventy compositions, from “Blowin’ in the Wind” to “The Times They Are a-Changin’,” have clear musical precursors. In most instances, the original folk composition is obviously there, a barely concealed inspiration. While it would be easy to dismiss such songs as mere rip-offs — several of them would almost certainly violate current copyright standards — Dylan was able to transform his folk sources into pop masterpieces. T. S. Eliot said it best: “Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal.” Even at the age of twenty-one, Dylan was a mature poet. He was already a thief.

These are the meta-ideas that have worked before, unleashing the talent of past playwrights and inventors. They are the top-down policies that have set free our bottom-up creativity. But this list is not complete, not even close. As Romer notes, “We do not know what the next major idea about how to support ideas will be.” And this is why it’s so important to keep searching for the effective meta-ideas of the future, for the next institution or attitude or law that will help us become more creative. We need to innovate innovation.

Because here is the disquieting truth: Our creative problems keep on getting more difficult. Unless we choose the right policies and reforms, unless we create more NOCCAs and fix the patent system, unless we invest in urban density, unless we encourage young inventors with the same fervor that we encourage young football stars, we’ll never be able to find the solutions that we so desperately need. It’s time to create the kind of culture that won’t hold us back.

The virtue of studying ages of excess genius is that they give us a way to measure ourselves. We can learn from the creative secrets of the past, from those outlier societies that produced Shakespeare and Plato and Michelangelo. And then we should look in the mirror. What kind of culture have we created? Is it a world full of ideas that can be connected? Are we willing to invest in risk takers? Do our schools produce students ready to create? Can the son of a glover grow up to write plays for the queen? We have to make it easy to become a genius.

CODA

In the summer of 1981, Penn and Teller were struggling magicians plying their trade on the Renaissance Faire circuit, performing a set of middling tricks for little kids. Their costumes were embarrassing, getups of black tights, purple velour capes, fake leather vests, and belts made of rope. They were frustrated and fed up, tired of life on the road. “I was definitely on the verge of giving up the dream of becoming a magician,” Teller says. “I was ready to go back home and become a high-school Latin teacher.” But then, just as despair began to overtake the magicians, a breakthrough arrived in a highway diner. While waiting for his food to arrive, Teller wanted to practice his version of cups and balls, a classic sleight-of-hand trick first performed by conjurers in ancient Rome. The magician begins by placing three small balls underneath three cups. Then the magician engages in a series of vanishes and transpositions, making the balls repeatedly appear and disappear. Just when the spectator assumes he knows where the ball is — it’s inside the cup! — the ball is revealed to be elsewhere. “This trick is performed all over the world,” Penn says. “If you see a guy hustling on the street, he’s probably doing cups and balls.”

But Teller was in a diner — he wasn’t carrying his bag of magic supplies. And so he used what he had: rolled-up napkins for the balls, and clear plastic water glasses as cups. The epiphany arrived halfway through the trick. Although it was now possible to follow the crumpled napkins from cup to cup, Teller realized that the illusion persisted. “The eye could see the moves, but the mind could not comprehend them,” he says. “Giving the trick away gave nothing away, since people still couldn’t really grasp it.” Because watchers were literally incapable of perceiving the sleight-of-hand — Teller’s fingers just moved too fast — it didn’t matter if the glasses were see-through and the napkins were visible.

Penn and Teller worked this version of cups and balls into their traveling show. It was a huge hit. Before long, they were performing with clear plastic glasses on Letterman and playing to sold-out crowds in New York City. In the decades since, Penn and Teller have become two of the most successful magicians in the world — they now have their own theater in Vegas and a secret warehouse off the Strip where they develop new tricks. (“I no longer have to find my ideas in diners,” Teller says.) Nevertheless, this popularity hasn’t diminished their avant-garde spirit: Penn and Teller are still determined to deconstruct their own magic.

In their current show, for instance, Penn frequently shouts out the secret while Teller is performing the illusion: “This is just invisible string!” he might say, or “It’s only a mirror!” According to the magicians, their “skeptical shtick” can be traced back to that diner when Teller was forced to make magic with the only things around. “In many respects, that simple idea of clear glasses has come to represent what we’re trying to do,” Teller says. “The reason I will always love our version [of cups and balls] is that, even when you give away the trick — you hide nothing — the magic is still there. In fact, the illusion becomes even more meaningful, because you realize that it’s all in your head. There is nothing special about these glasses and napkins. The magic is coming from your mind.”

Creativity is like that magic trick. For the first time, we can see the source of imagination, that massive network of electrical cells that lets us constantly form new connections between old ideas. However, this new knowledge only makes the act itself more astonishing. The moment of insight might emanate from an obscure circuit in the right hemisphere, but that doesn’t diminish the thrill of having a new idea in the shower. Just because we can track the flux of neurotransmitters, or measure the correlation between walking speed and the production of patents, or quantify the effect of the social network, that doesn’t take away from the sheer wonder of the process. There will always be something slightly miraculous about the imagination.