Stretch your mind a little
Stop trying so hard and you may find your problems are solved.
Leonard Mlodinow loves a trippy factoid. The one about the invention of the jumbo movie popcorn bag (David Wallerstein, a 1960s cinema executive, realised that people were too embarrassed at looking piggish to buy two small ones); the one about your 30-day survival rate after a visit to A&E being better if all the top doctors are on holiday; the one about it taking Google 1000 computers networked together to be able to recognise an animal, even though a child ‘‘can do it by age 3’’.
By the middle of Elastic, he’s telling you about Roger Sperry, an American neuropsychologist who in the 1950s split the brains of cats into two halves (OK . . .), made them wear eye patches (good luck) and realised he could teach one half of these cleaved cat brains to distinguish triangles from squares (wait, what?), while the other half remained in feline oblivion. You get the feeling that this is the sort of book that will just go on talking to itself, forever.
There is a point. It is basically that humans are at their very best when they can escape established patterns of thinking and instead let their thoughts become stretchy (elastic) and left-field. No other animal can do this, and it is the secret to our success.
To advance this point, he distinguishes between top-down analytical ‘‘tree’’ thought and bottomup insightful ‘‘pattern’’ thought. When Garry Kasparov was beaten by the chess machine Deep Blue in 1997, he notes, this was inevitable, due only to processing speed, and the way the machine could decide between a billion moves in the time it took Kasparov to contemplate one. Yet the manner in which the rivals thought was vitally different.
The bot, being top-down, would analytically consider every option, even terrible ones, following the branch of the tree that led to the best. Kasparov, being bottom-up, was doing something far more ineffable, and it’s a testament to the power of human thought that it could give sheer number-crunching heft a run for its money. It’s the difference between maths and thought. Or, put another way, ‘‘Where is Paris?’’ is a question a computer could answer. ‘‘Where do you like to vacation?’’ is not.
Mlodinow dismisses the determinist idea that brains are just flicking switches. It is our left brain that analyses and our right brain that creates. The book drifts into self-help with its various suggestions for escaping the tyranny of your left brain and embracing the creativity of your right. In a nutshell, stop trying so hard and you may suddenly find that your problems are solved. – The Sunday Times.