Free Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently by Gregory Berns Ph.d.

distinct from His white creatures in the game that has given me all I own,” Rickey’s motives were also economic. 13 He needed talent, and the Negro League was the last source. As the historian, Jules Tygiel, wrote, “Rickey clearly perceived that being the first to sign blacks would propel the Dodgers to pennants.” 14 Maybe it was more than that. Rickey, known as “the Mahatma” among sportswriters, also aspired to be an agent of social change. Here was an opportunity to really change the social landscape of America.
    Despite the commissioner’s statement, the unwritten rule was that blacks could not play for a major league team. The dogma was that the fans would rebel. Rickey became a true iconoclast the moment he setplans in motion to topple this dogma. But Rickey didn’t get to be the head of a baseball team without knowing something about owners. The year after arriving in Brooklyn, he started planting seeds in the owners’ minds about recruiting black players. The timing was right. Despite the unwritten rule of segregation, they responded favorably and swore each other to secrecy. Keeping a secret like that wasn’t going to be easy. Rickey knew that whoever he recruited would have to be a special type of person. Yes, he would have to have the talent to play with the whites, but he would also need something more. Rickey needed someone who could play at a high level for a long period of time while simultaneously being subjected to intense public abuse. By May 1945, Rickey’s scouts had focused his attention on the twenty-six-year-old shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs, Jackie Robinson. But that is a story for later chapters.
    Years later, Rickey remarked, “The utter injustice of it always was in my mind—in St. Louis a negro was not permitted to buy his way into the Grandstand—and it has only been in recent years that he has been permitted to go into the Grandstand and of course there was no negro player in baseball—I felt very deeply about that thing all my life and within a month after I went to Brooklyn I went to Mr. George McLaughlin [one of the owners] and had a talk with him about it and found he was sympathetic with my views about it.” 15
    Although Rickey had always had a talent for management, it is the Robinson story that propels him into the ranks of iconoclasts. Here, we see the iconoclast’s imagination in action. In fact, it was the war itself that triggered Rickey’s perception of blacks to run in reverse and imagine the possibility of a black playing for the Dodgers. No doubt, part of this was motivated by the desire for a pennant. Rickey also had deep-seated feelings about integration that he traced to his Midwestern upbringing. It simply took the catalyst of the war and the need to recruit talent to unleash his perceptual system from the shackles of segregation in baseball and imagine how to do it.
    Breaking Out of Categories
     
    The relationship between perception, insight, and imagination goes well beyond basic psychology or historical debates. To recap the neuroscience view, imagination comes from using the same neural circuits used to perceive natural objects. In this way, imagination is like reverse perception. Perception, however, is constrained by the categories that an individual brings to the table. Although categories may not be absolute, they are learned from past experience, and because of this relationship, experience shapes both perception and imagination. In order to think creatively, and imagine possibilities that only iconoclasts do, one must break out of the cycle of experience-dependent categorization—or what Mark Twain called “education.” For most people, this does not come naturally. Often the harder one tries to think differently, the more rigid the categories become. There is a better way, a path that jolts the brain out of preconceived notions of what it is seeing: bombard the brain with new experiences. Only then will it be forced out of