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

is how Mullis came to the crucial insight. All the pieces of the puzzle had been known for several years, and so he didn’t discover a new process per se, but instead figured out how to link several existing technologies in a way that would have far-reaching ramifications. The insight did not occur as he was hunched over his laboratory bench. Instead, the eureka moment came at mile marker 46.7 on Highway 128. As with Lauterbur in the Big Boy restaurant, or Disney in the movie theater, the insight came in a novel environment.
    Novelty as a Trigger for Running the Perceptual System in Reverse
     
    In the previous chapter, we saw how novel experiences trigger new ways of seeing the world. Because imagination comes from the perceptualsystem, the same principle applies to imagination. Imagination is like running perception in reverse.
    The wrinkle, however, is that the brain operates under the efficiency principle, which means that it will do its job in a way that takes the least amount of energy. It is lazy. The efficiency principle dictates that the brain will take shortcuts based on what it already knows. These shortcuts, although they save energy, lead to perception being shaped by past experience. How you categorize objects determines what you see. And because imagination comes from perception, these same categories hobble imagination and make it difficult to think differently.
    The brain is extraordinarily efficient in using its resources. Too efficient. While in familiar surroundings, whether Mullis’s laboratory or Chihuly’s hotshop, the brain perceives things in ways that it has become accustomed to. Only when the brain is confronted with stimuli that it has not seen before, does it start to reorganize perception. This reorganization spills over and influences the internal images that can be held in the mind’s eye. So even though Mullis had been thinking about DNA and oligonucleotides for months, something happened in his car that evening that triggered a new perception of the problem that was previously unavailable to him in familiar surroundings.
    For the same reason, Disney didn’t imagine the possibilities of animation until he saw the novel juxtaposition of projected illustrations with moving pictures. Only then did his perception of drawing change from a static one to a dynamic one that could tell a narrative. And it took the realities of war to trigger the imagination of Florence Nightingale to change the sanitary conditions that were killing soldiers.
    Fortunately, the networks that govern both perception and imagination can be reprogrammed. The frontal cortex, which contains rules for decision making, can reconfigure neural networks in the visual pathways so that an individual can see things that she didn’t see before simply by deploying her attention differently. But it is difficult to do this under business-as-usual conditions. It typically takes a novel stimulus—eithera new piece of information or getting out of the environment in which an individual has become comfortable—to jolt attentional systems awake and reconfigure both perception and imagination. The more radical and novel the change, the greater the likelihood of new insights being generated. To think like an iconoclast, you need novel experiences.
    As in the last chapter, the surest way to evoke the imagination is to confront the perceptual system with people, places, and things it hasn’t seen before. Categories are death to imagination. So the solution is to seek out environments in which you have no experience. The environments may have nothing to do with the individual’s area of expertise. It doesn’t matter. Because the same systems in the brain carry out both perception and imagination, there will be crosstalk.
    Novel experiences, especially big changes such as relocations, figure prominently in the imagination of an iconoclast. Without losing sight of why novel experiences are so effective at unleashing the imagination (because