In this episode we discuss the surprising science of creativity. We begin with a fascinating look into how your brain create reality around you and assigns meaning to things that often have no meaning at all, then we examine the unlikely relationship between doubt, ambiguity, and creativity. We ask how you can chip away at your assumptions so that you can open spaces of possibility to be more creative, we explore the foundations of asking truly good questions, and examine the way that doubt can be a powerful force for unleashing creative insights and more with our guest Dr. Beau Lotto. 

Dr. Beau Lotto is neuroscientist, author, and the founder of the Lab of Misfits. His studies in the science of human perception have led him to work in several fields including education, the arts, business, and more. Beau has given multiple TED talks, has spoken to companies such as Google, and his work has been featured on the BBC, PBS, Natural Geographic, Big Think, and much more!

• Do we see reality as it really is? Do we see the world as it really is?

• We have no direct access to the world except through our senses 

• Raw data from the senses is all the information the brain gets 

• Data by itself is pointless - any piece of data could mean literally anything

• You can conflate so many different things from your senses 

• Information is ambiguous - it conflates multiple aspects of real world objects 

• The brain relies on history - on context - to interpret all the information it collects - the history of your life, your culture, your evolution, your family, and much more

• Most of your life happened without you even being there - you inherited most of the context and history for how you interpret the world

• Your brain has effectively encoded biases and assumptions that filter and shape your perception of reality 

• You can never step outside your biases and assumptions 

• There is a real world - made of energy (and chemicals) that it out there - you’re detecting parts of that 

• Even visible light - what you see only a tiny fraction of the energy and electro magnetic waves out in the world

• “The four color map problem"

• Pain is not a function of the world - there is nothing in the world that is painful - pain doesn’t exist without humans there to sense it - pain is the perceived value of information 

• What do illusions means? When you see an illusion is your perception of reality being fooled?

• We didn’t evolve to see the world accurately, we evolved to see it usefully - evolution didn’t optimize for accuracy, it evolved for utility 

• Because of this conclusion we can constantly update and adapt our perceptions

• We can increase or decrease illusions by making things consistent (more or less) with what we expect 

• Language is an illusion - light house is different than lighthouse 

• Context is often irrelevant - the key is how your perceptions relate to the past - to HISTORY 

• What do you know about KiKi and BuBu?

• Can simple shapes demonstrate the power of biases to shape our thinking?

• We have no direct access to another person and their behavior and their motivation

• Every personality that you perceive is inside you, projected outward

• Poetry creates a level of ambiguity that enables people to construct meaning for themselves and reflect onto that 

• We’re always doing these interpretations of the world - but the upshot is that we can change and adapt our perceptions. 

• This isn’t postmodernism - it’s science. Some things are better than others. You have to come and figure it out yourself. 

• Your brain does not create meaning by passively receiving content - it makes meaning by physically engaging with the world 

• The brain evolved in our body and the body evolved in our world 

• Feedback is essential for synapse and brain connections to be made and re-made. The world changes, the world is dynamic.

• We're constantly updating and redefining reality 

• Your brain never makes a big jump - you can’t get from one side of the room to the other without crossing the space in between 

• Change your assumptions and you change your perceptions - and start to see differently 

• We think of creativity as putting two things that are far apart together - of a eureka moment or moment of insight - for YOU these ideas are far apart - the creative person is making the next logical step of assumption 

• Creativity is only creative from the outside not the inside 

• Creative people are making small steps to the next most likely possible. The key to creativity is to CHANGE what’s possible and change your perceptions and assumptions of what’s possible

• What makes creativity hard is the updating and changing of biases and assumptions

• When you take a step - what’s the reference to that step? It has to be your previous step 

• Creativity is a search algorithm of searching your space of possibility by taking the next possible step 

• The KEY is to expand your space of possibility 

• Nothing interesting begins with knowing - it begins with not knowing, it begins with doubt, it begins with a question

• The first step from going from A to B is going from A to not A - to step into UNCERTAINTY 

• The problem is that we hate uncertainty

• The KEY is to expand your space of possibility / HOW do we change our assumptions? 

• The best person to reveal your biases to you is usually not you it’s someone else 

• It’s very scary to question your biases and assumptions 

• The need for closure, the need for certainty is so strong that we constantly need closure 

• In essence, uncertainty is the key to creativity 

• The surprising evolutionary solution to creating uncertainty in your life (to be more creative) 

• Play is evolutions solution to uncertainty - it’s a way of being, a way of interacting, that celebrates uncertainty

• The reward is the activity itself - intrinsically motivating 

  1. What’s the reward of Skiing? It’s Skiing. 

• Creativity = Play + Intention

• Awe and wonder are also key skills to embracing uncertainty. When you experience awe and wonder you feel connected to the world, you feel curious

• What is it that you care about that is bigger than yourself? We will go further, we will tolerate more pain, we will walk further across the desert for someone else than for ourselves 

• How do we bring creativity to specific challenges in our lives?

• Ask questions 

  1. You only ever learn if you move or change

  2. You shouldn’t enter conflict with certainty - you should enter conflict with doubt and with questions 

  3. Asking certainty-based questions like “What, where, and when” - what we really want to get to is the WHY - what you want to get are the principles that transcend context 

  4. You get to principles by understanding WHY something does what it does 

• Find out what you care about, have the desire to shift/move/change, and ask the right question - then engage other people

• The most interesting questions are between Naive and Expert

• Naive are great at asking questions, but don’t know it

  1. Experts can recognize great questions, but can’t ask them 

• How do we celebrate doubt? How do we chip away at our assumptions so that we can open spaces of possibility to be more creative?

• Thinking is hard - which is why we so often don’t do it - we try to avoid it (either consciously or subconsciously)

• Creativity begins with humility - it begins with not knowing 

• Science doesn’t begin with a problem - it begins with a QUESTION

• The real challenge is to find good questions and ask better questions

• A KEY to asking good questions is to Doubt what you assume to be true already

• Iteration is not about finding better solutions, its about iterating to better questions 

• Questions can create uncertainty 

• Design thinking is starting with questions - questions that you care about deeply - or questions that are relevant to the challenge at hand 

• The best questions EXPAND the space of possibility and help you go from thinking in 2D to thinking in 3D

• Wisdom is knowing when to be on one side of the edge of chaos or the other

• Innovation is the cycle between efficiency / utility and creativity

• Moving from high spaces of possibility to low spaces of possibility 

• Increase the dimensionality of your search space

• Add another person

  1. Increase idea diversity

  2. The best solutions come in a COMPLEX search space not a simple search space

  3. Question assumptions

  4. Celebrate doubt

• Homework: Take ownership of your own biases and assumptions. Engage in a person you care about with a question of your assumptions next time you have a conflict

• Homework: Go from A to “Not-A” - Let go of reflexive meanings. Take a cold shower and feel the cold water, don’t attach the significant of uncomfortableness - just feel the coldness as neutral.

• Homework: Change the meaning of what’s happened in the past (which will change your assumptions and perceptions). The brain is a time machine - we can never change what happened, but we can change the MEANING of what happened. You can change history of your past meanings. That’s what therapy does. 

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Show Notes, Links, & Research

• [Video] Beau Lotto: "Deviate" | Talks at Google

• [Book] Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson

• [Website] Lab of Misfits

• [Book] Deviate: The Science of Seeing Differently by Beau Lotto

Episode Transcript