Everyone knows we should be concerned about ecosystems, but what about the ecosystem inside your skull? Research suggests that new ideas and solutions to problems often arise when our minds are not focused on a particular task, but running in the high-connectivity state recently identified as the “default network”. Yet in an age of smartphones, social media and other electronic crack-pipes, it is all too easy to keep focusing on one trivial thing after another, and so never allow the brain enough of this fecund time. There is, then, some scientific basis to the increasing advice for us to unplug, at least partially, which is becoming formalised within a young discipline with the nice name of “ecopsychology”. Just as ecology aims to bolster biodiversity in physical spaces, ecopsychology aims to help us keep our minds fertile terrain for the green shoots of constructive thinking.
That is one of the lessons of this elegant and interesting book, which adopts the commercial form of the “smart thinking” airport manual but works with ideas at a higher level. Leonard Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist who has also worked as a writer on Star Trek, so he is obviously annoyingly good at the kind of boundary-hopping cognition he champions. “Elastic thinking” is the name he gives to the way new and creative ideas pop up into the conscious mind in moments of insight. It is contrasted with “analytic thinking”, which is our rule-led, logical, conscious thought. Other writers (such as Malcolm Gladwell) have rhetorically downgraded analytical thinking in order to champion the elastic or “intuitive” kind, but as Mlodinow emphasises, you need both. Elastic thinking generates a lot of rubbish as well as a few gems; the job of analytic thinking is to sift for the diamonds in the rough and then polish them. A new scientific idea, for instance, is generated through elastic thinking, but then must be tested and worked out fully with the analytic mind.
The problem, as the author sees it, is finding the right balance. A purely logical reasoning style is not creative; a purely elastic one is all over the shop. But most people could do with a larger proportion of elastic thinking. Hence the advice to manage one’s info-consumption according to the precepts of ecopsychology. Particularly in the modern world, Mlodinow argues, we need more of elastic thinking’s “capacity to let go of comfortable ideas and become accustomed to ambiguity and contradiction”.
This is not exactly a new recommendation, being very like what John Keats called “negative capability”. But Keats did not have a brain scanner, and the results of modern investigations suggest some useful new tips. It turns out that we might approach problems more creatively if our executive, conscious brain is exhausted from having focused on lots of boring choices: so a few hours doing your accounts might help you write a better sonnet afterwards. Alternatively, if you find the world to be a fuzzy place in the mornings due to sleep inertia, which Mlodinow charmingly admits is true of him (“in my morning stupor I have done things like crack an egg into the sink and then start to fry the shell”), you will do your best writing soon after waking up.
The book is packed with other insights, puzzles and philosophical interludes – about how we often follow “scripts” in our social behaviour, rather like video game characters; about how thinking itself is a bodily pleasure, something that is too rarely remarked on; and about the authentic “intellectual beauty” that can be appreciated even in ideas that turn out to be wrong. Mlodinow notes that we have been able to program computers to emulate analytic thinking in very specific domains (such as chess), but elastic thinking is something no artificial system has ever demonstrated, regardless of any PR jargon about “deep learning” and the like. If you want to create a general problem-solving brain, he concludes happily, “the best way is still to find a mate and create a new human being”.
There is no shortage of popular books making exaggerated claims about science’s understanding of creative thinking – including the now-notorious Imagine by Jonah Lehrer, which invented Bob Dylan quotes – but as a scientist himself, Mlodinow is laudably careful not to overstate his case. (“It is an oversimplification,” he warns for example, “to chalk up anything as complex as a personality trait to a single gene.”) His book, while nodding to the business market, is refreshingly free of the curious moralising that often accompanies such how-to guides, which conflate imaginative thought with being a healthy 21st-century citizen-employee in all the approved productivity-enhancing ways. Not many other authors will advise the reader to try getting drunk – or, better, totally baked – if they have a tough problem to solve. It even turns out that procrastination helps, in which case I am sorry, because this review might have been better if I’d missed my deadline.
• Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Constantly Changing World is published by Publisher. To order a copy for £14.44 (RRP £16.99) go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
