A Fresh Set of Eyes

I should start by admitting that Malcolm Gladwell is pretty brilliant. For those who have read Blink or The Tipping Point, this isn't big news. His article from this May, "In the Air: Who says big ideas are rare?" published in the New Yorker only reinforces the fact. The article supposes that, much as he has done, insight is the result of looking at things in new ways.

His claim is that brilliant ideas are a dime a dozen. Some geniuses have the ability to come up with lots of them, hence their genius, but put enough smart people in a room and you can create the same effect. The article begins with a discussion of paleontology. Specifically, one man who decided to look in an area, Montana, that had been thoroughly scavenged for bones. Most people see sandy gravel and think rocks. He saw gravel and thought bones.

"People weren’t finding dinosaur bones, and they assumed that it was because they were rare. But...it was our fault. We didn’t look hard enough."

Maybe we didn't look hard enough. Or maybe we didn't look with the right eyes.

He then talks about Alexander Graham Bell's idea of the telephone and where it originated.

"A large tree had blown down here, creating a natural and completely private belvedere, which [he] had dubbed his 'dreaming place.' Slouched on a wicker chair, his hands in his pockets, he stared unseeing at the swiftly flowing river below him. Far from the bustle of Boston and the pressure of competition from other eager inventors, he mulled over everything he had discovered about sound."

The answer came from relaxation, thought, and perspective. I think of the movie Pi by Darren Aronofsky, where the older mathematician was giving advice to his stressed colleaque on the verge of a huge discovery. He said,

"The king asks Archimedes to determine if a present he's received is actually solid gold. Unsolved problem at the time. It tortures the great Greek mathematician for weeks - insomnia haunts him and he twists and turns in his bed for nights on end. Finally, his equally exhausted wife - she's forced to share a bed with this genius - convinces him to take a bath to relax. While he's entering the tub, Archimedes notices the bath water rise. Displacement, a way to determine volume, and that's a way to determine density - weight over volume. And thus, Archimedes solves the problem. He screams "Eureka" and he is so overwhelmed he runs dripping naked through the streets to the king's palace to report his discovery."

He asks his younger colleague Max what the point of the story is and Max responds, "That a breakthrough will come." Wrong, he says, the point is that he needs to relax. The point is, "listen to your wife, she will give you perspective."

Kind of makes you want to ditch the computer, cell phone, and ipod to enjoy those few precious moments of solitude doesn't it?

But before you run off and seclude yourself in a room waiting for that million dollar idea, Gladwell comes back with another point. He contends that "a scientific genius is not a person who does what no one else can do; he or she is someone who does what it takes many others to do. The genius is not a unique source of insight; he is merely an efficient source of insight."

Alluding to a group of inventors that get together frequently called Intellectual Ventures, which was founded to test the theory that with enough brilliant people in a room ideas would flow like beer at a bachelor party, Gladwell suggests that this sort of insight can be engineered.

Their success is overwhelming, with patents coming so fast they can hardly handle the logistical demands.

These individuals aren't checking their Blackberry's while making love to their wives. They work hard and spend hours on their research and talking over what must be exhausting dinners about how to bring these ideas to fruition.

Noting all the discoveries that seemed to happen at the same time (the list is long: Bell and Elisha Gray submitted patents for the phone on the same day, Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution. Three mathematicians “invented” decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley, in Wiltshire, in 1774, and by Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in Uppsala, a year earlier. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France. Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Bürgi in Switzerland. “There were four independent discoveries of sunspots, all in 1611; namely, by Galileo in Italy, Scheiner in Germany, Fabricius in Holland and Harriott in England"), Gladwell suggests that maybe there is something in the air, the culmination and climax of years of groundwork with the right social setting, that creates the proper climate for invention.

Ideas come in waves, perhaps, but bold thinking creates those moments. Whether that means holding a human ear from a cadaver and running up a mountain or putting physicists and surgeons at the same table, it means looking at something in a way that hasn't been done before.

And that, I'm afraid, requires perspective.