JONAH

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>>Male Presenter: Hello everyone, thank you guys for coming. I'm very happy and very proud to welcome Jonah Lehrer who is the author of three books, 'How We Decide', 'Proust Was a Neuroscientist' and most recently 'Imagine', which is about the science behind creativity. Hopefully you all will have a chance to read it after this with the free copies. But I think it's particularly applicable to us because it talks about what some of the scientific underpinnings are both at an individual level and an organizational level in terms of fostering creativity, what are some of the blocks and what are some of the enablers behind them. So, with that, I will hand over to Mr. Lehrer and we'll have time for a Q&A session afterwards. >>Jonah Lehrer: Thank you all for coming. It's a pleasure to be back at Google, I was just at the New York office a couple weeks ago and every time I'm in a Google office I always get the intense urge to apply for a job here. [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: Cause it always smells so good and the offices are so beautiful. Um, I don't want to step in that. I'd like to begin today with a story about Bob Dylan. We heard when I walked into the room one of his better songs playing. So, it takes place in the early summer of 1965 when Dylan was just finishing up his tour of England. It'd been a grueling few months for the singer as he had been struggling to maintain a nonstop performance schedule. He'd first traveled across the Northeast on a bus playing in small college towns and big city theaters. Then he crossed over the west coast to the states and crammed in a hectic few weeks of concerts and promotion. He'd been paraded in front of the press and asked an endless series of inane questions from, "What is the truth" to "Why is there a cat on the cover of your last album?" When Dylan wasn't surly, he was often sarcastic, telling journalists he collected monkey wrenches, was born in Mexico, that his songs were inspired by chaos, watermelon and clocks. That last line almost made him smile. By the time Dylan arrived in London it was clear the tour was taking a toll, the singer was skinny from insomnia and pills, his nails were yellow from nicotine and his skin had a ghostly pale pallor. Joan Baez said he looked like an underfed angel. He rare--, for the first time his solo shows felt formulaic as if he were singing the lines of someone else. He rarely acknowledged the audience or paused between songs, he seemed to be in a hurry to get off stage. Before long, it all became too much. While touring in England Dylan decided that he was leading an impossible life. The only talent he cared about, his ceaseless creativity was being ruined by fame. The breaking point probably came after a brief vacation in Portugal where Dylan came down with a vicious case of food poisoning. The illness forced him to stay in bed for a week, giving the singer a rare chance to reflect. "I realized I was very drained" Dylan would later say, "I was playing a lot of songs I didn't want to play. I was singing words I didn't really want to sing. It's very tiring having other people tell you how much they dig you if you yourself don't dig you." The last shows were in London. It was here that Dylan told his manager that he was quitting the music business. He was finished with singing and song writing. He was gonna move to a tiny cabin in Woodstock, New York. Although Dylan had become a pop icon, the prophetic poet of his generation, he was ready to renounce it all. He just wanted to be left alone. Dylan wasn't bluffing. As promised he returned from his British tour and rode his Triumph motorcycle straight out of New York City; he didn't even bring his guitar. Of course our story doesn't end here. Bob Dylan did not retire in 1965. After a few relaxing days in Woodstock, just when he was most determined to stop creating music, he was overcome with the familiar feeling. "It's hard thing to describe," Dylan would later remember. "It's just a sense that you've got something to say." So Dylan did the only thing he knew how to do, he grabbed a pencil and pad of paper and started to scribble. Once Dylan began his hand didn't stop for the next several hours. "I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit. 20 pages long," Dylan said, "I'd never written anything like that before and it suddenly came to me that this is what I should do." Vomit is the essential word here. Dylan is describing with characteristic vividness, the uncontrollable rush of creative insight, that flow of associations that can't be held back. "I don't know where my songs come from," Dylan said, "It's like a ghost is writing the song. It gives you the song and it goes away, you don't know what it means." In retrospect, we can see that this frantic composition, these words written by the ghost in Woodstock allowed Dylan to fully express for the very first time the full diversity of his influences. In his cryptic lyrics, we can hear his mental blender at work as he mixes together scraps of Blake, Fellini, Woody Guthrie and Robert Johnson. Songs are modernist and pre modern, avant garde and country western. What Dylan did, and this is why he's Bob Dylan, is find the strange thread connecting these different voices. In those first minutes of writing, he found a way to make something new out of this incongruous list of influences, drawing them together into a catchy song. When Dylan gets to the chorus and he knows this is the chorus as soon as he commits it to paper, the visceral power of his words becomes obvious. "How does it feel without a home? Like a complete unknown, like a rolling stone." The following week, on June 15th, 1965, Dylan would bring the sheaf of papers into the cramped space of Studio A Columbia records in New York City. After just 4 takes, the musician's only beginning to learn their parts, "Like a Rolling Stone" was cut on acetate. Those 6 minutes of raw music would revolutionize rock and roll. The story of "Like a Rolling Stone," the reason I'm talking about Bob Dylan today, is because it's a story about a moment of insight. At times, such stories can feel like romantic clichés, the sort of make believe breakthroughs that happened to Archimedes in the bathtub and Newton under the apple tree. And yet, insights do happen, they are a genuine mental event. They really are responsible for the theory of gravity and "Like a Rolling Stone." In recent years, cognitive psychologists and neuroscientists made some interesting progress trying to understand these most mysterious of mental moments in terms that there are two defining features to moments of insight. The first defining feature is the answer just arrives out of the blue, arrives when we least expect it. So we wrote our best song, our most influential song after we quit the singing and song writing business. The second defining feature is as soon as the answer arrives, as soon as we write those words down, we know this is the answer we've been searching for. That this is the solution we need. It comes attached with this feeling of certainty, it seems like a revelation. So those are the two defining features of moments of insight. And at first glance, it's not quite clear how one can scientifically study such things cause you can't just put undergraduates in a brain scanner, fMRI machine and say, "Have an epiphany we're ready for you." [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: That'd be very inefficient. So, instead, what scientists had to do is come up with a way to generate lots of moments of insight on the fly. And I'm talking today, primarily, about the research of Mark Beeman at Northwestern and John Kounios at Drexel University. And they came up with a set of word problems called compound remote associate problems. The acronym has been unfortunate, C-R-A-P. But they generated lots of moments of insight. So the problems go like this, I'm gonna give you three words, you have to find a fourth word that can form a compound word with these three words. So we'll do the first one together. The three words are pine, crab and sauce, the fourth word in this case is apple; pineapple, crab apple, applesauce. Here's one for you guys. The three words are age, mile and sand. What's the fourth word that can form a compound word with age, mile and sand? >>male audience member: stone. >>Jonah Lehrer: An answer that quick is most certainly a moment of insight. The answer is stone, stone age, milestone and sandstone. So the first thing Beeman and Kounios discovered when they gave people these compound remote associate problems inside an fMRI machine is that in the seconds before the insight appeared an obscure part of the brain called the anterior superior temporal gyrus in the back of the right hemisphere just behind your ear, showed a sharp spike in activity. It's a brain area nobody knows too much about. It's been previously associated with things like the processing of jokes and the interpretation of metaphors. And this begins to make a little sense, right? When Romeo says that Juliet is the sun, we know he's not saying that Juliet is a big flaming ball of plasma gas, we realize he's trafficking metaphor. And how we make sense of that metaphor is by looking past all the surface dissimilarities. The fact that Juliet and suns have literally nothing in common and, instead, searching for the underlying themes it actually shares. We're able to realize that Romeo is saying Juliet lights up his world the way the sun lights up ours. Now a similar process is unfolding when you need to make sense of pine, crab and sauce. Those aren't three words that go together very frequently, you've probably never used them in a sentence before, yet this one brain area, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, seems to be particularly good at finding the thin thread that binds them together. [Laughter] >>male offstage: they're at the other office >>Jonah Lehrer: Oh! [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: 21st century is amazing. [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: So it's able to find the one other word that binds them all together [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: Oh no, our friends, what happened? Oh they're still happening. Oh, that's too bad. [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: So it's able to find the one other word that binds them all together. Now when you need a moment of insight, when you're stuck and stumped, when you don't know what to do next, when you've just reached that block, chances are you also need to draw together a set of distantly related ideas. If the connections were on the surface, if they were literal, if they were obvious, you would have found them already. The fact that you need an epiphany suggests that they're hidden and you need to draw together a set of remote associations. And that's what this one brain are, the anterior superior temporal gyrus, seems to be so good at. Just the first that Beeman and Kounios discovered, second is found to be a bit more interesting. This they discovered when they hooked people up to an EEG, it's like wearing a big bulky shower cap that measures the waves of electricity pouring out of your head. What they discovered is they could predict up to 8 seconds in advance whether or not someone was gonna have a moment of insight. Now, just think how spooky this is. They could look at your brain waves. They could say, "Sorry, buddy, you could sit here all day trying to solve these word problems and you would get nowhere. You're wasting your time, go home." Or they could say, "You know what, in about 7 and a half seconds you're gonna have an epiphany so brace yourself." The question, of course, of what this predictive signal is, turns out to be something called alpha waves. Like most things in the mind, alpha waves are pretty mysterious but they are closely associated with states of relaxation. So, things that lead to the production of lots of alpha waves are things like taking a walk on the beach, having a beer on the couch, taking a long hot shower, playing foosball, whatever it is that gets you to stop thinking about those problems at work that you just can't solve, that puts your mind at ease, that allows you to daydream without constantly being interrupted, that's probably a place that's gonna generate lots of alpha waves. Now, the reason these states of relaxation are so important, Beeman and Kounios argue, is when we're not relaxed, when we're focused, when we're juiced on caffeine, when we're chained to our desk, staring at our computer screen, working late at the office, that's where our attention is. It's out in the world, we are consumed by the noise, we are thinking about pine, crab and sauce. Pine, crab and sauce and inspire a wrong answer, a common wrong answer for pine, crab and sauce is tree, that we just can't get past. And so we're frustrated, we're stuck, we're making no progress. That's why [inaudible] were in the warm shower, shampooing our hair, unable to check our email, that at long last we're able to turn the spot light of attention inwards and that's when we're able to hear that quite voice coming from the back of our head telling us, "the answer is apple", "the answer is apple." Maybe that voice has been there for hours or days or weeks, we just haven't taken a moment to listen. Beeman and Kounios tell this wonderful story about this trained Tibetan Buddhist monk who, this guy meditates 12 hours a day, so he's got exquisite control over the spotlight of his attention, and at first, he thought the way to solve these compound association problems was to stay very focused. He'd think about pine, crab and sauce and of course that's the wrong approach, so he went 0 for 30. Normally he's prompted about a twenty percent success rate, but he was going 0 for 30 cause he was just really, really focused. And then at a certain point he realized, "You know, I'm using the wrong strategy, maybe I should switch it up." And because he's a trained mediator he's able to- [Snapping] >>Jonah Lehrer: increase his alpha waves like that, on a dime. And they watch this abrupt spike in his brain waves and then he became an insight machine. He solved 25 in a row, a streak they had never seen before or since. That's because he was focused on not being focused. Now there is something counterintuitive about this work, right? I think we all assume on giving a hard problem that what we should do is work harder, pay more attention to it, chug that Red Bull, snort that Ritalin, do whatever it is that we need to do [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: to maintain our attention. But this research suggests that's the exact wrong thing to do. That we will be focused but we will be focused on the wrong answer. The next time you need a moment of insight you should take a break, take a warm shower, play an extended game of foosball or ping pong, find a way to get relaxed, the answer will only arrive after you stop looking for it. There's a wonderful line of Einstein's that, "creativity is the residue of wasted time," The next time you need a moment of insight you have to make time to waste time. Now it would be wonderful if I could stand up here and tell you that the way to solve every creative problem is to, you know, take a nap, get drunk. [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: Just last month a study came out showing that when you get undergraduates legally drunk, so too drunk to drive a car, it's a study out of the University of, University of Illinois at Chicago, they solved 30 percent more difficult creative problems, that require moments of insight, than their sober classmates. [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: So being drunk does make us more likely to have a moment of insight and it'd be wonderful if we could always walk around in a stupor. But, of course, we know that's not the case. In the real world sometimes you have to put in the work, sometimes you have to invest the attention that, yes, creativity involves inspiration, but it also involves a hell of a lot of perspiration. And sure enough when you talk to creative people they often begin by telling you this romantic story about that epiphany in the shower but then if you keep on pressing them they'll talk about all the hard work that came after. Even after they had their big idea, they still had to edit it and refine it and make it, you know, good enough for the real world. As Nietzsche once observed, "Creators have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so called inspiration shining down from the heavens as a ray of grace, but this is often a lie. In reality, all great artists and thinkers are great workers." To illustrate his point Nietzsche described Beethoven's musical notebooks which documented the composer's pain staking process of refining his melodies. It wasn't uncommon for Beethoven to experiment with 70 different versions of a single musical phrase before settling on the final one. The lesson here is that even Beethoven, the cliché of artistic genius, still needed to constantly refine his ideas, struggling with his music until the beauty shown through. Let's not sugarcoat this rejecting process, you know, the work process of Beethoven, it's not fun. It's the red pen on the page in a discarded sketch, the trash prototype and the failed first draft. Nevertheless, such a merciless process is sometimes the only way forward. We keep on thinking and paying attention because our next thought might be the answer. So what defines this kind of creativity? What allows some people to go through 70 different iterations of a single musical phrase? At first glance, it's not quite clear. I mean, you can look at these epic successful creators, people like Beethoven, like Bob Dylan, like Pablo Picasso, like Steve Jobs and ask, "Well, what makes them different from you and me? What makes them so successful?" And you give them a battery of intelligence tests and IQ tests and so on, and they'll all look pretty normal. They're not smarter than normal, they're often not smarter than the rest of us. You give them a battery of old fashioned personality test, Myers Briggs and all the rest, and once again, they'll look pretty standard. Maybe a little more open to experiences and a touch more extroverted but nothing too out of the standard range. But in recent years, it's become clear that these people are different from you and me. And there's one character, a new character trait that sets them apart. It's the character trait called grit. G-R-I-T, it's about stubbornness, it's about persistence, it's about single mindedness. And I'm thinking here of someone like J.K. Rowling who suffered through 12 rejections from publishers but kept on writing about this boy wizard in coffee shops while her baby daughter napped. It's that kind of stubborn refusal to give up. This single minded focus on seeing it through, that is grit. The best way to explain the importance of grit is to tell you about how it came about, how it was first studied. It's a story that takes place in 2005 at West Point Military Academy and for decades West Point had this problem. The first 6 weeks at West Point are known as Beast Barracks. It's a very tough time, you get yelled at, you get your head shaved, you get woken up at 5:30 in the morning, you go on long runs. And West Point had lost between 5 and 10 percent of its first year cadets [Snapping] >>Jonah Lehrer: right off the bat. In the first 6 weeks. This is a huge problem, right, because there are no transfer students at West Point. So these are future leaders of army who are just disappearing. They didn't wanna lose them. So West Point had searched for decades for some metrics, some measurements that would allow them to predict retention, to figure out who was most likely to drop out. They looked at SAT scores, they looked at grades, they looked mental and physical fitness, everything they could think of, nothing predicted retention. So in 2005, in desperation, they go to Angela, say, "Can you help us?" she comes up with a short survey called the Grit O Survey. You can take it on her website, just Google Angela and Grit O Survey. She asked questions in two different domains. The first domain is how single minded are you? Have you always wanted to go to West Point? Have you always wanted to work at Google? To be a computer scientist? To be a poet? To be a painter? To be an entrepreneur? Whatever it is, is this the goal you've had for a long time? Number two, how do you react to the inevitable frustrations and failures along the way? Are they the sign that you should give up? That this is the world telling you you're not cut out for this goal? Or are they a sign that you should try even harder, that you should double down and just give it your all? So those are the kinds of questions she asked. And what she discovered in 2005 is that her short Grit O Survey, given to every cadet at West Point on the second day at West Point, was the first survey that allowed them to predict retention. They've used it every year since and it works every single year. Now, since 2005, Duckworth has gone to show that in field after field, Grit is the single best predictor of success. So if you're trying to figure out which 12 year old is mostly likely to win the national spelling bee, turns out it's not the smartest ones, not the ones with the best grades, it's the ones with the highest levels of grit. Why? Because grit mediates deliberate practice, grit allows you to practice the right way, which is not the fun way. If you're trying to figure out who's most likely to become a U.S. army ranger, it's the ones with the highest levels of grit. Which amateur golfers are most likely to make the PGA tour in 5 years? Not the ones with the best drives, the longest drives, the best putts, it's the ones with the highest levels of grit. Which teachers are mostly likely to make it through an intercity school for the first year, the ones with the highest levels of grit? Which graduates of Wharton Business School are gonna make the most money 3 years from now. The ones with the highest levels of grit. That in field after field, grit explains, above and beyond, what intelligence and IQ scores explain. Now I would argue, and Duckworth would agree, that grit is particularly important in creative domains and that's because creativity by definition in the 21st century is gonna be hard. If it were easy that product would already exist, that patent would have been filed, that poem would have been written. So it's always gonna involve lots of frustration, lots of failure, lots of iteration, lots of people telling you you're not cut out for this, this will never work, here's all the reasons why this is a bad idea. In order to make it real, in order to make this idea become a tangible thing, you're gonna have to persist through all those naysayers, all that negative feedback and that takes grit. Woody Allen has this wonderful quote that, "80 percent of success is just showing up" well, grit is what allows you to show up again and again. So far I've been attempting to describe these two distinct forms of creativity which depend on very distinct patterns of activity in the brain. The more practical lesson though, is that different kinds of creative problems benefit from different kinds of creative thinking. The question, of course, is how do we adjust our thought process to the task at hand? When should we daydream and take warm showers? And when should we drink another cup of coffee? What requires relaxation and what requires grit? The good news, and this is very good news, the human mind has a natural ability to diagnose our problems, to assess the kind of creativity we need. These assessments have an eloquent name, they're called, feelings of knowing. And they occur whenever we suspect that we can find the answer if only we keep on thinking about the question. My favorite examples of feelings of knowing is when a word is on the tip of your tongue. On the one hand, so annoying, drives me crazy every single time, you know, you're walking down the street, you see someone, you know you know their name but you just can't quite place it. So frustrating, but it's also kind of profound because how do you know you know their name if you don't actually know it? [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: Why are you so convinced that memories in one of these overstuffed filing cabinets if you can't find the file? Well, that's a feeling of knowing. It's a hunch reminding you that if you just keep on searching for that name, in 5 minutes or 10 minutes, you will find it, you will locate the file. That feeling of knowing will become real will become actual knowledge. Now, when it becomes to creative problem solving, these feelings of knowing turn out to be an essential guide because study after study has found that when it comes to problems that don't require moments of insight, that people can actually diagnose, about 85 percent of the time, whether or not they can solve a problem within a given time frame. So I can show you analytical creative problem and say, "Can you solve this in an hour? Can you solve this in a day? Can you solve this in a week?" With 85 percent accuracy, and upwards of 85 percent accuracy in many domains, people can say, "Yep, I can do that, no problem." Or, "No, I can't." Now what makes these feelings of knowing even more useful is they come attached with a sense of progress. So as you're working towards that problem, you're able to say whether or not you're getting closer to the answer even though you don't know what the answer is, right? Which is kind of wondrous. It's like being dropped in a strange city, you have no idea where you're supposed to be going, yet you're able to say, "If I make this left hand turn, I'm getting closer. If I go right, I'm going a little further away." We're able to measure progress towards a destination when we don't know what the destination is. Now, I think we can use these feelings of knowing to help us diagnose our creative problems, then figure out, you know, should we drink a beer or drink a triple espresso. So, when we don't feel that we're getting closer to the answer, we've hit the wall, so to speak, there is no feeling of knowing, no sense of progress, then we probably need a moment of insight. Maybe we've had a sense of progress before, maybe we've been working on this problem for a month and we've gotten closer but now we are stuck and stumped. Now we are Bob Dylan in May 1965. In these instances we should rely on the right hemisphere which excels at revealing those remote associations. Focusing on the problem will be a waste of mental resources. We will stare at our computer screen and repeat our failures. Instead, we should find a way to relax. The most productive thing we can do is forget all about work. However, when those feelings of knowing are telling us we're getting closer, then we need to keep on struggling. We should keep paying attention until it hurts, to rely on those muscles of grit. Before long, that feeling of knowing will lead us to the actual answer. So far, I've been talking about individual creativity, about how we invent when we're alone, but I'll spend our remaining time talking about creative collaborations because this form of creativity is definitely becoming more important. The increasing necessity of creative collaborations is probably best demonstrated by the work of Ben Jones, an economist in Northwestern. He's data mined 20 million science papers, published over the course of the 20th century. When you go back to 1950 the most important papers in a field, those papers with more than 100 citations, are almost always the product of a scientist working by themselves. Some lone genius who managed to shift the paradigm all alone, you know, Einstein, Darwin, someone like that. You fast forward, though, to the 21st century and now science looks very different. Now the most important papers in a field are almost always the product of a team, of people from different disciplines coming together. Furthermore, the size of these teams is increasing by about 20 percent per decade. Jonah's explanation for this is quite simple, our problems are getting harder, all the low hanging fruit is gone, in fact, many of the problems that remain exceed the capabilities of the individual imagination. So we either learn how to work together or fail alone. This raises the obvious question, how should we work together? What's the ideal template for group collaboration? There's a lot to say on the subject such as don't brainstorm, brainstorming just doesn't work and it's important to seek out the input of outsiders who often see more because they know less. But today I'd like to focus on a single theme in successful group collaborations which is the important of spaces that bring a diverse mixture of people together in person. In person being the crucial addendum. One of my favorite examples of this is the Pixar Studios which were largely designed by Steve Jobs. People at Pixar refer to them as Steve's movies. The original plan for the studios called for 3 separate buildings, one building for the animators, one building for the computer scientists, one building for everyone else, the writers, directors, producers, and so on. Jobs, according to the legend, took one look at these plans and said, "That is idiotic" and tore them up in front of the architect. He realized that the success of Pixar would depend on all these different cultures finding a way to collaborate. So the animators would learn from the computer scientists and so on. So he said everyone should share the exact same space. They actually had to renovate the old Del Monte canning factory outside of Oakland. But Jobs realized, you know what, it's not enough to just put people in the same building, we need to force them to mix and mingle. So he carved out this big atrium and he put everything important in the atrium, he put the mailboxes there and the gift store there and the cafeteria there and the coffee shop there. And he realized, you know what, even that's not enough cause you can build people a gleaming cafeteria and serve delicious food but the animators would still have lunch with the animators, computer scientists would still have snacks with computer scientists and so on. So then in one of his moments of insight, he decided that there would only be two bathrooms in the entire Pixar Studios [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: And he put those in the atrium. So there's one place we all have to go every single day, it's the bathroom. And at first the people at Pixar thought this was the worst idea ever, right, it's a huge factory, it's a quarter mile long nearly, so if you're at the wrong end of the building, it can be a long walk to the bathroom. But now when you spend time at Pixar you hear again and again these stories of these bathroom epiphanies. The great conversation they had while washing their hands or that serendipitous chat they had in the hallway on the way to the bathroom. That, as Jobs once put it, "Creativity is just connecting things and most of those connections come from other people." Now, there's some neat empirical proof to this concept. This comes from the work of Isaac Kohane at Harvard. [Coughing] >>Jonah Lehrer: He analyzed 20 thousand papers produced by Harvard researchers. This took him several years and a small army of undergrads because he had to map out the physical location of every single Harvard coauthor down to the nearest meter. But what he discovered is that physical location, what he calls collocation, that it matters, it matters a lot. That papers produced when scientists were within 10 meters of each other, which meant they shared the same water cooler, the same coffee room and the same bathroom, that those papers were 3 times more likely to be highly cited than papers produced when scientists were a kilometer or more apart. The lesson here is that even in this age of wonderful technologies, our most important ideas often don't arrive on a screen. Rather they emerge from idle conversation, from too many people sharing the same space. Now, personally, I find this surprising. I mean, you go back ten years and you hear people making very convincing arguments, futurists making these convincing arguments, that it's the death of geography. We live in an age where geography and physical space are gonna become obsolete. Why should we all move to London? Why should we cram ourselves into these expensive, overcrowded, smelly, crime ridden places full of traffic and too many strangers? What's the possible value of that? Why should we even come to an office, why not just sit at home in our pajamas in the suburbs and telecommute? It's so much easier. It's so much more efficient. Needless to say, that hasn't happened. If anything, the opposite has happened. Cities are more valuable than ever before, more and more people are moving to cities. Urbanization is the great theme of the 21st century. That in the next 100 years more people will move to cities than have moved to cities in all of human history. So this is a huge and growing trend. One of my favorite factoids is that since the invention of Skype, attendance at business conferences has nearly doubled. That even though we live in this age that, in theory, we could sit at home and get the same content just on a screen, we know that it's important to come together in person, to rub up against strangers, to have those random chats. And I don't mean this is any way to dismiss the importance of these new tools, you know, to dismiss the importance of all these wonderful gadgets. To be able to search for anything on Google on this phone in my pocket, that is an amazing thing. But these tools, they tend to make our lives more efficient, they make it so much easier to find stuff. But creativity, when you look at it, it's not really about efficiency. It's about serendipity. It's about encountering that information you didn't even know to look for, about bumping into that person you didn't even know to meet, that, even in the 21st century, it is still the human friction that makes the sparks. The last idea I'd like to end with is a provocative one and I think it's especially provocative for a company like Google with such an incredibly rich history of innovation. And it speaks, I think, to the difficulty of maintaining this pace of creativity. In fact, it suggests that many of the things typical companies do with the best of intentions to make their workers more creative, actually get in the way. This is best demonstrated by the work of Geoffrey West, he's a theoretical physicist at the Santa Fe Institute. He studies cities and gathers vast tracks of data from governments from all across the world trying to understand what makes cities tick and why some cities tick better than others. He's done all sorts of peculiar correlations. One of my favorites is that when you're trying to find the most predictive variable of patents per capita in a given metropolis, it turns out to be the walking speed of pedestrians. First of all, who knew the census bureau in the states collected data on the walking speed of pedestrians. But, that's bizarre enough, but nobody knows what to make of this correlation. It could be a random accident, it could be just a statistical fluke, but West argues that it begins to make sense. The function of a city is to foster those bumps, to get people to just have those random interactions while waiting in line for a latte, on the sidewalk, so in a sense people are particles. You can model urban dwellers as particles. And if you increase the velocity of those particle, you make those pedestrians walk just a bit faster, you get more bumps and eventually those bumps add up and you get a new patent. But, West makes this very interesting comparison between cities and companies. He points out that from a certain perspective, cities and companies look quite similar, right? They're both big clusters of people in a fixed physical space, lots of infrastructure, yet cities and companies exhibit one very interesting difference. That cities, this form of social organization we call cities, they never die. They are immortal. You can nuke a city, comes back. You can flood a city, bounces back. You can have a devastating earthquake, burn the city to the ground and we still have San Francisco. Companies, on the other hand, die all the time. They are incredibly fragile. Fortune 100 firms, these huge multinational firms, their average lifespan is 45 years. Only two companies in the original Dow Jones index are still around. More than 25 percent of Fortune 500 firms die every decade. So West wanted to understand, what's the difference, why are cities immortal, resilient and perdurable? Why are companies so fragile and fleeting? Well, by analyzing lots and lots of data he found an interesting difference and the difference is this. As cities get bigger everyone in that city becomes more productive, by every metric we have, they're gonna look better, they're gonna make more money, invent more patents, invent more trademarks and so on. This is the trend, in fact, that's making our cities bigger. This is what's driving urbanization; it's called superlinear scaling. So urban productivity looks like this, like a roller coaster taking off into the sky. This is why West calls cities the most important invention in the history of human civilization, the idea that's unleashed so many of our ideas. You get this social multiplier effect in the cities. Companies, on the other hand, look very different. As a company gets bigger, everyone in that company becomes less productive. They bring in less profit per employee, fewer patents per employee, fewer trademarks and so on. This is called sublinear scaling. So companies look like this and over time this becomes a dangerous trend, right, because Wall Street there's all this pressure to keep on getting bigger to grow the bottom lines. That's what companies do. But that means you've got expanded bureaucracy, expanded fixed cost, but you're no longer innovating at the same rate. So you become more reliant on your old ideas for your new ideas, you have an expense of expensive acquisitions. But eventually, those old ideas are no longer useful, those acquisitions don't pan out and that's when you go belly up. Now what causes the difference, why are cities superlinear and companies are sublinear? West argues it's because companies get in the way. When you think about a city, the magic of a city is no one's in charge. It's a freewheeling chaotic place and a mayor's a pretty powerless figure. He can't tell you where to live or who to talk to or what to work on. It's just a bunch of particles, a bunch of strangers going about their business, bumping into each other. That because cities don't try to maximize creativity, that's exactly what they end up doing. Companies, on the other hand, try to micromanage the process. So, they tell us who to talk to, they tell us what to work on, you know, brainstorm, they tell us don't drink a beer in the afternoon, focus, focus, focus. They stifle horizontal interactions becoming these very vertical places; they silo knowledge and so on. And in all these things, many of which are done with the best of intentions, they actually get in the way, they hold us back. So West's advice is simple, when in doubt imitate the city. In closing, the imagination has always seemed like a magic trick of matter which is probably why we've always blamed our best ideas on the muses. The good news, that by finally understanding where our new ideas come from, we can hopefully have a few more of them. The science of creativity can make us just a little bit more creative. But we must also be honest. The creative process will never be easy no matter how much we know about neurons or cities. The science of the imagination doesn't fit neatly on a Power Point slide and it can't be summarized in a subtitle. If creativity were that easy, Picasso wouldn't be so famous and it wouldn't require so much grit. It's about all of the clever studies and rigorous experiments our most essential talent remains our most mysterious. The mystery is this; although the imagination is inspired by the everyday world, by its flaws and its beauties, we are able to see beyond our sources to imagine things that only exist in the mind. There was nothing, now there is something, it's almost like magic. Thank you all so much for having me at Google and thank you so much for listening today. I think we've got some time for Q and A, so that's my favorite part, so please have at it. [Applause] >>male #1: Thank you so much for that, so it's hard to choose whether I should ask a question on the individual side or the organizational side; I'll go with the individual side. Which is, when you think about alpha waves and more about the pervasiveness of technology, do you think those moments where we can actually detach have now gone away because we always have a phone in our pocket, a tablet and access to these things? Or is our only sanctum the shower now? >>Jonah Lehrer: I mean, it's a really interesting question and I always try to resist the urge to speculate on the forwarding effects of technology. I think it's so easy to be scared by it or think it's gonna change everything. You know, Google's either making us stupid or it's the salvation. And I think it's complicated, I mean, like I said, these tools are amazing. They're allowing us to connect and expose ourselves to information we never could have had before. I think they fuel our curiosity. But, in my own life, what I can say is that I have noticed that now when I'm bored, the first thing I do, no matter where I am, is I get out my phone and I check my email, I check Twitter, I check, you know, I go to Google News, whatever it is. So I'm always interrupting my daydreams. And that worries me simply because we've learned in the last few years that day dreaming, this mental state we've always told our kids not to practice, we've assumed it's like this form of thinking when we don't want to think at all. It turns out to be incredibly useful, that your brain consumes more energy while day dreaming than it does when you're focused. And that's because huge swaths of cortex are communicating and interacting, you're mashing up new associations, you're exploring counter-factuals and that's why people who daydream more score much higher on tests of creativity. So we now believe daydreaming is quite important. And being bored is a precursor to daydreaming, right, you daydream, you fall down that rabbit hole in your own mind after you're a little bit bored and so you entertain yourself. So I do worry, that in my own life, these, you know, having these computers in our pockets does sometimes interfere with our ability to go on these extended daydreams, that we're always interrupting them. So, you know, one way I've tried to compensate for this is, you know, when I'm really stuck and stumped at work, I'll go for a walk and just leave my phone behind. It makes me anxious for an hour [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: You know, to not be checking email. But that's kind of how I've solved it. And I think it's, when you talk about technology it's finding those kinds of tweaks. In general these tools are so wonderful and I love them so much but just finding ways to kind of give ourselves a break from that every once in a while. >>male #2: Hello, you mentioned that you shouldn't brainstorm. I was kind of interested in that cause we do an awful lot of that here. >>Jonah Lehrer: Yeah, this is classic brainstorming I'm talking about. Classic brainstorming was invented by a guy named Alex Osborn in the late 1940s. He's the O in BBDO; he's kind of the Don Draper, the star of Mad Men, of his day, very swank, dapper fellow. In the series of best selling business books he outlines this technique he called, he called brainstorming. There's really just one important rule to brainstorming as he described it, which is no criticism is allowed. That all ideas are good ideas, right? The logic here is quite straight forward that the imagination is meek and shy and fragile and if it's worried about being criticized it'll just clam up and not be able to say anything interesting at all. And this is a feel good productivity technique, right? We can all go into a room and free associate, we fill the white board with our ideas, we all contributed to the group, we all felt productive, no one had their feelings hurt, so there's a reason why people have done brainstorming for so long. The only problem with brainstorming is that it just doesn't work. That study after study over the last 60 years has shown that people who brainstorm in a group come up with fewer ideas, and less original ideas, than those same people who work on the problems by themselves. That we become less than some of our parts when we brainstorm and the reason brainstorming doesn't work returns us to the very first rule which is 'thou shall not criticize'. Cause it turns out that criticism is really important. The work of Charlan Nemeth at UC Berkeley, she's shown dozens of studies that groups that engage in debate and dissent, where they're encouraged to constructively criticize the ideas of other people, they come up with anywhere between 25 to 40 percent more ideas and those ideas are seen as more original. One of my favorite data points of hers is that you ask people, you know, you have three different conditions, one condition is brainstorming, one condition is do whatever the hell you want and third condition is debate and dissent. So you ask people to work on hard problems like reduce traffic in the San Francisco Bay area. Then you let them work on the problem and then you say, "Okay we're gonna bring you back in an hour or a day or a week." Give them some time and when you bring them back you ask them, "Okay, since the study was over, have you had any more new ideas since?" And it turns out that those who engaged in debate and dissent come up with, on average, 7 times more new ideas after the study is over. They can't stop thinking about it cause they're more engaged, invigorated, they're more surprised. That when we stick to our natural free associations, when there is no debate and dissent, we kind of float on the superficial surface and it turns out our free associations are pretty superficial. You know, over the last decade, psychologists have amasses these word association charts and so I'm able to predict, with pretty good accuracy, that if I ask you to free associate on blue, your first answer will be green, followed by ocean, sky, jeans, Smurfs, maybe Miles Davis and so on. But nothing too interesting, I mean, I can predict the vast majority of your free associations. That's because we're bound by language and language is full of clichés. The way we get passed that superficial surface is with criticism. That means we're fully engaged, we're digging down deeper, we've got some skin in the game, so even after the meeting is over we keep on thinking about it. So, we know brainstorming doesn't work, we've got some hints as to improve it, to encourage debate and descent but, of course, research comes with a huge caveat which is that all these studies are done with undergrads on a one off basis. You give them an experiment, they come together and they go away and they never see each other again. In a work place you're dealing with colleagues who come together every single day. And it's unclear how to actually implement debate and dissent. You see at Pixar where they're already struggling with it, every day there begins with what they call the shredding meeting. Which is where they review the few seconds of footage from the day before and they tear it apart, they dissect it. It sometimes, as Jobs put it, involves brutal honesty but I'm not sure that would work for every place. So I think it's still unclear how to actually translate debate and dissent to a collegial work environment. To make sure it's constructive, to make sure it's, you know, remains positive and it remains productive. Cause the last thing you want, obviously, is for people just going at it and getting personal and getting nasty. But what we can say now, I think with some fairly good certainty, is that brainstorming just doesn't work. That it's time to find ways to experiment with debate and dissent. >>female #1: Along the lines of inspiration, could you tell the story of your favorite, how you came up with the idea of one of your three books? >>Jonah Lehrer: Um, that's interesting, it sounds so grandiose to talk about my own ideas in terms of epiphanies especially after having just described "Like a Rolling Stone" that's quite intimidating. My first book really emerged from, I was working in a neuroscience lab at the time and we were studying memory, the chemistry of memory. >>Jonah Lehrer: And basically what that meant was you poke a sea slug over and over and over again until it gets bored by your touch. So it adapts, habituates, to the touch. And that's a form of memory and you can pull out its neurons and figure out what, you know, the chemistry with a long term potentiation is. Not most people think of it as a memory but it was that kind of work. I mean very reductionist neuroscience. At the time, by sure accidents, I was taking a course in French modernism. So, we were assigned Proust and I was reading Swann's Way and his first volume of the epic and that's really a novel all about memory. It's all about long term storage of memories. I mean, it's this novelist who famously dips his Madeleine, this buttery sea shell shaped cookie, into a lime floured tea and all of a sudden he remembers all these memories from his childhood that he'd thought he forgot. And they all come flooding back to him triggered by this scent of this childhood cookie. And so that got me thinking about here's this novelist describing this very rich, very detailed memory and, in particular, how these memories are triggered by the smell and taste of things. And at the time Proust had no idea how the brain actually worked. There wasn't a whole lot of neuroanatomy and yet, in the last decade, neuroscientists have come along and figured out that the reason why, it's not called the Proust effect, why our smells and tastes are more sentimental. And that's because the olfactory cortex, the part of the brain that processes smells and tastes, is the only sensory area directly connected to the hippocampus, the center of long term memory. This is really an accident of evolution, it's just cause for most primitive species, smell and taste are really, really important. We're more visual but this wire had never been cut. And, so, even though Proust didn't know about neuroanatomy, somehow he was able to intuit these wires and he was able to realize that, yes, smell and taste are uniquely nostalgic. And so I was reading that literally in the lab. And probably just because of where I was, I was thinking about this novel and these silly scientific terms and that's where I had the idea for my first book which is all about the intuitions of artists and how sometimes they, they presage the discoveries in modern neuroscience. I wasn't in a shower or anything. [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: I was actually quite bored. I was waiting for an experiment that I'd been trying to run for a month and it never worked and it turns out if actually never worked. And I kind of knew it would never actually work so that's why I was passing the time in the lab reading a novel, so maybe my alpha waves were going. But I don't know. Thanks for the question. >>male #2: Hello, I don't like the phrasing of this question but I can't think of a better one. Can grit be learned? >>Jonah Lehrer: Yeah, I don't know. >>male #2: Can we teach it to our kids? Can we teach it to ourselves? >>Jonah Lehrer: Yeah, um, nobody knows for sure, no one's on the detail genetic work to figure out the exact, you know, the exact breakdown of heredity in terms of grit. The presumption is that like just about every other personality trait it's about 50/50. 50 percent nature, 50 percent nurture. And that's good news, right? Cause that means you can really shift the curve. The question, of course, is how then to shift the curve, how actually teach grit. Duckworth is just beginning a ten year longitudinal study where she looks at students in the Philadelphia District schools, public schools in the inner city of Philadelphia and these are some sad statistics, but 45 percent of these kids drop out before graduation. She's focusing on the 55 percent of kids who stay in, who already show higher levels of grit than those who drop out. Of those 55 percent who stay in, 95 percent that the longer they stay in school the worse their test scores get, the farther they fall behind their peers in Pennsylvania. This is just, to me, depressed the hell out of me, right? The longer they are in these schools, the worse they get. 5 percent of these kids, though, in these same schools, in the same struggling community, with little household support, they make themselves better. They find a way to improve their test scores. So Duckworth is trying to figure out what sets these kids apart. Sure enough they score off the charts in grit but she wants to figure out how does that cash out? What does that actually mean? She's looking at their work habits, their routines and so on. She's pulled out some interesting stuff. They tend to focus on exemplars when they're frustrated. So they've got a model, maybe it's a sports star, maybe it's Martin Luther King, someone like that who they know persevered through difficulty and they think about them a lot, especially when they're going through a tough time. So, one of the first pieces of advice is give kids heroes, give them exemplars. She also found some interesting stuff like this one I didn't expect, these kids from a certain perspective are just more thoughtless that when they're doing their algebra homework they're not thinking about the ball game on TV, they're not taking the opportunity cost of their activity, they just do the algebra homework cause that's what they need to do. So they're not exploring counterfactuals, what else they could be doing, they're just doing it. So they think less about alternatives which is kind of interesting. They're more focused on tangible progress than the long term goal. Cause that goal is so distant that if you're just thinking about the long term goal you'll get demotivated very quickly. So it's very important to think about, "Well, I got better today. I'm doing a little bit better today than I was yesterday." And so on. But it's too early to say, I think, that these are the 5 things you need to do to build grit up in yourself or in your children. Right now Duckworth's best advice is this wonderful maxim she refers to, choose easy, work hard, which means that we should expose our kids and ourselves to a menu of possibilities. To a lot of things you might fall in love with. Maybe it's painting, maybe it's drawing, maybe it's computer programming, maybe it's marketing, who knows, just let yourself find something that feels like fun, that feels like play not like work. And then once you commit to it, you have to remind yourself every single day to work hard. To put in your ten thousand hours plus or minus five thousand hours, that it's not always gonna be fun, in fact, it'll rarely be fun. People who are really gritty, they find the un-fun stuff just as aversive as people who don't have grit, it's just they're able to push on through it. So, choose easy, work hard is, I think, the best advice we have right now. >>female #2: Can we take a question from Daniel in our Soho office? [Pause] >>Jonah Lehrer: Maybe this is why people still go to business conferences. [Laughter] >>male #3: Can't hear you Daniel. >>Jonah Lehrer: I wish I could lip read. [Pause] >>female #2: Okay, alright, we'll move on with another question and we'll come back to Daniel. >>male #4: Hi, um, you mentioned scientists going from working individually to working in larger and progressively larger groups. And you mentioned some of the scientists working individually, Darwin and Einstein and they had very revolutionary ideas. I'm wondering if the move to groups will lead to more evolutionary science as opposed to revolutionary science where if the ideas of energy as matter would get thrown out in a debate early on in a group? >>Jonah Lehrer: It's a really interesting question and it's something I've talked with Jones about extensively. And I think it's unclear to him whether or not, I think, I feel like physics if it's just too immature to still have those kinds of total paradigm shifts or if we now know enough about the structure of reality where it's just become an evolutionary science. Yes? >>male #4: The same was thought before Einstein >>Jonah Lehrer: Of course, in 1903 >>male #4: They've become a scientist, we know everything. >>Jonah Lehrer: Of course, they've been saying that, I'm sure Pythagoras was complaining about, ugh, all the interesting problems have been solved. [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: It's a refrain you see again and again but eventually it's gonna be true, right? Eventually we will have a good enough map of reality where, you know, our predictions line up. And, you know, I think it's unclear with all these super colliders coming out online, if, you know how much they'll change about our assumptions. So, I think there are many, many interesting problems to solve in a field like physics, in a field like neuroscience, the answers even more clear that we know nothing. That right now we know enough just to know how little we actually understand. Um, so I think there's absolutely revolutions waiting to happen. I don't think, necessarily, that teams, by definition, will make those paradigm shifts less radical. I mean, I think that's our old model of big paradigm shifts come from individuals. I think Jones would argue it's just now we need to be more interdisciplinary. When you look at a field like neuroscience, which I know better that physics, unfortunately, and you look at the kinds of problems we need to solve, they require people with backgrounds in, you know, like the Connectum, it's a big movement neuroscience to understand the actual wiring diagram of the brain. That requires people with backgrounds in computer science, computer programming, you know, molecular biology, neuroscience, neurology, I mean, it requires all these different people to come together. No single field, no single discipline can solve it by themselves. And what Jones argues is there simply are limits to how much knowledge the brain can hold. It takes ten years to even amass an expertise in one of those disciplines. We don't live long enough to become an expert in enough disciplines to actually tackle these very, very hard problems which is why they exceed our individual capabilities. But it's an interesting question. I think there's no good answer for it yet. I think we'll have to see how 21st century science plays out. >>female #3: Hello, um, I really enjoyed all your radio lab contributions. >>Jonah Lehrer: Oh, thank you. >>female #3: And I wanted to ask you, cause there was an article in the New York Times last Sunday about the brain and physical activity. I wanted to see if you can quote any studies on daydreaming and making all these connections with physical exercise. Thank you. >>Jonah Lehrer: It's interesting, I mean, a lot of people, it turns out physical activity when it comes to like daydreaming and alpha waves whether or not it's relaxing, it's very divisive. Some people, and people in these studies, some people find going to the gym very relaxing. They find the Stairmaster or the Treadmill or jogging outside, very relaxing. They'll talk about all the great ideas they have when they jog. Some people find it very stressful. So that's why it's tough, in general, to come up with a universal prescription for how to relax yourself. Maybe it's playing football, maybe it's playing foosball. It's different for everybody and that's why it's so important for each individual to seek out their own place that puts them at ease. I mean, on the larger subject of physical exertion, it's so essential. And I think it's been one of the big themes in modern neuroscience, which has surprised neuroscience, cause I think for a long time we like to flatter ourselves by thinking about the brain as somehow separate from the body, you know, just, we're just this, you know, ethereal brain in a vat, mostly un tethered and disconnected from this fleshly machine we gotta carry around. Well, it turns out that's not true at all. That's why neurogenesis, for instance, the birth of new brain cells in, you know, even the adult brain, is very closely connected with physical exercise. The single best way to increase neurogenesis is to get more exercise, to move about more. You see this is rodents and you see this in humans. Nobody knows why that is but we know it's just, it's important. Some new studies have come out looking at dementia and blood flow and simply blood flow to the brain increases with exercise. It's improving your cardiovascular system and so one of the best ways to save off dementia seems to be even better than playing bridge every day which used to be like the best prescription, is going for a walk, getting exercise, getting your blood going. Now one of the control studies, which I'm kind of fascinated to see how it turns out, there compared exercise to people that do headstands. Cause if it's just about blood flow, right, then a headstand should work pretty well. [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: So that'll be interesting, that'll be a better test to the causality. So, I think that's due to come out next year. Um, I mean, right now we can say it's important, I don't think we understand all the causal mechanisms, that's my release on the research. >>female #2: I think we're about running out of time but if we could just do two more questions. I've got one from Daniel in the Soho office. You talked about idle conversation in the online space and gave the example of Skype. What's your perspective on the rise of social and catalyzing serendipitous connections and is there any way of transferring serendipity into the online space? >>Jonah Lehrer: I have no doubt there is. I'd be the last person to ever bet against the future innovations of tech companies. I think it's astonishing how far we've come in a short amount of time. That's, I don't think we've found it yet. I think too often the online space, our interactions, and this is at least true with my interactions, they're driven by what psychologists call self-similarity principle. Where even a platform like Twitter, which I think could be used to foster some kind of serendipity. And I'm always depressed when I look at who I follow on Twitter, it's people a lot like me, people who are interested in the brain, interested in science, people who are good liberals, etcetera, etcetera. And this is the self similarity principle. This has been found in study after study that it's always easier to spend time with people who are just like us. And so, when given a choice, we seek out those who think like us, who talk like us, vote for the same politicians, speak the same languages, use the same acronyms and so on. That's more comfortable, that's easier, less tension. And I think that speaks to the importance of what cities do. Cities bring together a bunch of weirdos and throw us together. We can't choose who we bump into. And so, in a sense, I think that when you imagine a serendipitous online space, it would be kind of unpleasant. It's hard to imagine how you would have serendipity. You know, have that human friction but not have it be so unpleasant. Have us choose to go to a website that's gonna say, "I'm gonna confront you with strangers who think differently than you." I have no doubt it'll happen cause I think it's a really important next step, but I have yet to come up with a good plan of how to make it happen other than to randomly choose people to follow on Twitter. But I have no doubt that someday a company like Google will come up with a way to actually foster serendipity online, interpersonal serendipity especially. >> male off mic: the last one >>female #4: Hi, very fascinating speech, I've got a real interest in the grit thresholds neurologically. I'm wondering if any studies have been taken by people with respect to, you know, these highly focused, highly successful creative people who have a very high level of grit and those that also have a very high level grit that like certain sports stars and other people who get to that, you know, high level of grit and then get, you know, what is characterized as burn out, ME or chronic fatigue those sorts of things. How do you think that works, you know, neurologically in the brain? What differentiates between those two types of people? >>Jonah Lehrer: You mean what separates those with lots of grit from those who? >>female #4: Who had lots of grit but then the grit threshold is obviously too high and then the brain goes, "I can't take this anymore" and shuts down. >>Jonah Lehrer: I mean it's a great question. There's no, no one is really taking grit to the brain yet. It's a brand new character trait, at least in the context of character traits it's only been around since 2005. So, you know, we've got some sense of what underlies it from lots of work on self control cause grits in the self control family. But it's too soon to say what exactly parts of the brain fizzles out or kind of goes limp when people, who clearly were able to put in the work, just give up. It's also important to point out that it's not always great to just have endless grit resources that, grit, like all character traits, you can have too much of it. So you get increasing returns, it gets better and better and at a certain point you can have too much grit, right, you can be too single minded. Like, I may wanna be a professional basketball player, in fact, I do wanna be a professional basketball player. But someone's gotta pull me aside and say, "You know what, even if you're the greatest person in the world, look at yourself. You still won't get there." [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: So if I'm too gritty, I may devote my life to trying to accomplish an impossible goal. So grit is also about being a little strategic about saying like what are the goals that are worth pursuing given who I am? That's why Duckworth argues we have to be more realistic in talking to our kids. Like, right now we say, "If you can dream it, you can do it! Just go for it!" When, maybe that's kind of bad advice sometimes. Maybe we should make sure that, I know it sounds sad, right? [Laughter] >>Jonah Lehrer: It sounds so cynical but let's be honest. We can't all play in the NBA and that's just the fact of life. So we should make sure our kids, at the very least, have some kind of tangible plan for getting from, you know, where they are to where they wanna be. And maybe it'll mean just giving them better advice at an early age. And make sure they've got realistic goals too. Not that we shouldn't dream or anything, I should be the last person to suggest that, but that we should be realistic. So, you know, in terms of why some people give up, um, I think it's often that, one explanation that I might propose is that these are people that are actually very strategic about goal setting. Maybe they were a football star and they had a lot of grit and they put in those ten thousand hours and got really good at it but then they realized that I'm just, you know, my talents are fading, I'm not quite good enough, I should find a new goal while I still can and devote my grit to that resource. One of the important things about grit is the limited resource, it's a scarce resource. So, it's a bit like self control, you have to figure out how to allocate it depending on what you wanna do. So, sometimes you see people switching, a lot of gritty people will have just one goal for their entire life and do that, they're able to pivot but once they pivot they're able to commit to that goal. So grit isn't just about stupid persistence it's also about being strategic in how you're single minded. >>presenter: Unfortunately we're out of time. >>Jonah Lehrer: Thank you. >>presenter: I'm sure we could spend the next few hours peppering you with questions. But really just wanna thank you for coming and join me in a round of applause here. [Applause]