A powerful way to unleash your natural creativity Tim Harford
Transcriber: Ivana Korom
Reviewer: Joanna Pietrulewicz
“To do two things at once
is to do neither.”
It’s a great smackdown
of multitasking, isn’t it,
often attributed to
the Roman writer Publilius Syrus,
although you know how these things are,
he probably never said it.
What I’m interested in, though,
is – is it true?
I mean, it’s obviously true
for emailing at the dinner table
or texting while driving or possibly
for live tweeting at TED Talk, as well.
But I’d like to argue
that for an important kind of activity,
doing two things at once –
or three or even four –
is exactly what we should be aiming for.
Look no further than Albert Einstein.
In 1905, he published
four remarkable scientific papers.
One of them was on Brownian motion,
it provided empirical evidence
that atoms exist,
and it laid out the basic mathematics
behind most of financial economics.
Another one was on the theory
of special relativity.
Another one was
on the photoelectric effect,
that’s why solar panels work,
it’s a nice one.
Gave him the Nobel prize for that one.
And the fourth introduced an equation
you might have heard of:
E equals mc squared.
So, tell me again how you
shouldn’t do several things at once.
Now, obviously, working simultaneously
on Brownian motion, special relativity
and the photoelectric effect –
it’s not exactly the same
kind of multitasking
as Snapchatting while
you’re watching “Westworld.”
Very different.
And Einstein, yeah, well,
Einstein’s – he’s Einstein,
he’s one of a kind, he’s unique.
But the pattern of behavior
that Einstein was demonstrating,
that’s not unique at all.
It’s very common
among highly creative people,
both artists and scientists,
and I’d like to give it a name:
slow-motion multitasking.
Slow-motion multitasking
feels like a counterintuitive idea.
What I’m describing here
is having multiple projects
on the go at the same time,
and you move backwards and forwards
between topics as the mood takes you,
or as the situation demands.
But the reason it seems counterintuitive
is because we’re used to lapsing
into multitasking out of desperation.
We’re in a hurry,
we want to do everything at once.
If we were willing
to slow multitasking down,
we might find that it works
quite brilliantly.
Sixty years ago, a young psychologist
by the name of Bernice Eiduson
began a long research project
into the personalities
and the working habits
of 40 leading scientists.
Einstein was already dead,
but four of her subjects won Nobel prizes,
including Linus Pauling
and Richard Feynman.
The research went on for decades,
in fact, it continued even after
professor Eiduson herself had died.
And one of the questions that it answered
was, “How is it that some scientists
are able to go on producing important work
right through their lives?”
What is it about these people?
Is it their personality,
is it their skill set,
their daily routines, what?
Well, a pattern that emerged was clear,
and I think to some people surprising.
The top scientists
kept changing the subject.
They would shift topics repeatedly
during their first 100
published research papers.
Do you want to guess how often?
Three times?
Five times?
No. On average, the most
enduringly creative scientists
switched topics 43 times
in their first 100 research papers.
Seems that the secret
to creativity is multitasking
in slow motion.
Eiduson’s research suggests
we need to reclaim multitasking
and remind ourselves
how powerful it can be.
And she’s not the only person
to have found this.
Different researchers,
using different methods
to study different highly creative people
have found that very often
they have multiple projects in progress
at the same time,
and they’re also far more likely
than most of us to have serious hobbies.
Slow-motion multitasking
among creative people is ubiquitous.
So, why?
I think there are three reasons.
And the first is the simplest.
Creativity often comes when you take
an idea from its original context
and you move it somewhere else.
It’s easier to think outside the box
if you spend your time clambering
from one box into another.
For an example of this,
consider the original eureka moment.
Archimedes – he’s wrestling
with a difficult problem.
And he realizes, in a flash,
he can solve it, using
the displacement of water.
And if you believe the story,
this idea comes to him
as he’s taking a bath,
lowering himself in, and he’s watching
the water level rise and fall.
And if solving a problem
while having a bath isn’t multitasking,
I don’t know what is.
The second reason
that multitasking can work
is that learning to do one thing well
can often help you do something else.
Any athlete can tell you
about the benefits of cross-training.
It’s possible to cross-train
your mind, too.
A few years ago, researchers took
18 randomly chosen medical students
and they enrolled them in a course
at the Philadelphia Museum of Art,
where they learned to criticize
and analyze works of visual art.
And at the end of the course,
these students were compared
with a control group
of their fellow medical students.
And the ones who had taken the art course
had become substantially better
at performing tasks
such as diagnosing diseases of the eye
by analyzing photographs.
They’d become better eye doctors.
So if we want to become
better at what we do,
maybe we should spend some time
doing something else,
even if the two fields
appear to be as completely distinct
as ophthalmology and the history of art.
And if you’d like an example of this,
should we go for a less intimidating
example than Einstein? OK.
Michael Crichton, creator
of “Jurassic Park” and “E.R.”
So in the 1970s,
he originally trained as a doctor,
but then he wrote novels
and he directed
the original “Westworld” movie.
But also, and this is less well-known,
he also wrote nonfiction books,
about art, about medicine,
about computer programming.
So in 1995, he enjoyed
the fruits of all this variety
by penning the world’s
most commercially successful book.
And the world’s most commercially
successful TV series.
And the world’s most commercially
successful movie.
In 1996, he did it all over again.
There’s a third reason
why slow-motion multitasking
can help us solve problems.
It can provide assistance
when we’re stuck.
This can’t happen in an instant.
So, imagine that feeling
of working on a crossword puzzle
and you can’t figure out the answer,
and the reason you can’t is because
the wrong answer is stuck in your head.
It’s very easy –
just go and do something else.
You know, switch topics, switch context,
you’ll forget the wrong answer
and that gives the right answer space
to pop into the front of your mind.
But on the slower timescale
that interests me,
being stuck is a much more serious thing.
You get turned down for funding.
Your cell cultures won’t grow,
your rockets keep crashing.
Nobody wants to publish you fantasy novel
about a school for wizards.
Or maybe you just can’t find the solution
to the problem that you’re working on.
And being stuck like that
means stasis, stress,
possibly even depression.
But if you have another exciting,
challenging project to work on,
being stuck on one is just an opportunity
to do something else.
We could all get stuck sometimes,
even Albert Einstein.
Ten years after the original,
miraculous year that I described,
Einstein was putting together the pieces
of his theory of general relativity,
his greatest achievement.
And he was exhausted.
And so he turned to an easier problem.
He proposed the stimulated
emission of radiation.
Which, as you may know, is the S in laser.
So he’s laying down the theoretical
foundation for the laser beam,
and then, while he’s doing that,
he moves back to general relativity,
and he’s refreshed.
He sees what the theory implies –
that the universe isn’t static.
It’s expanding.
It’s an idea so staggering,
Einstein can’t bring himself
to believe it for years.
Look, if you get stuck
and you get the ball rolling
on laser beams,
you’re in pretty good shape.
(Laughter)
So, that’s the case
for slow-motion multitasking.
And I’m not promising
that it’s going to turn you into Einstein.
I’m not even promising it’s going
to turn you into Michael Crichton.
But it is a powerful way
to organize our creative lives.
But there’s a problem.
How do we stop all of these projects
becoming completely overwhelming?
How do we keep all these ideas
straight in our minds?
Well, here’s a simple solution,
a practical solution
from the great American
choreographer, Twyla Tharp.
Over the last few decades,
she’s blurred boundaries,
mixed genres, won prizes,
danced to the music of everybody,
from Philip Glass to Billy Joel.
She’s written three books.
I mean, she’s a slow-motion
multitasker, of course she is.
She says, “You have to be all things.
Why exclude?
You have to be everything.”
And Tharp’s method
for preventing all of these different
projects from becoming overwhelming
is a simple one.
She gives each project
a big cardboard box,
writes the name of the project
on the side of the box.
And into it, she tosses DVDs
and books, magazine cuttings,
theater programs, physical objects,
really anything that’s provided a source
of creative inspiration.
And she writes,
“The box means I never
have to worry about forgetting.
One of the biggest fears
for a creative person
is that some brilliant idea will get lost
because you didn’t write it down
and put it in a safe place.
I don’t worry about that.
Because I know where to find it.
It’s all in the box.”
You can manage many ideas like this,
either in physical boxes
or in their digital equivalents.
So, I would like to urge you
to embrace the art
of slow-motion multitasking.
Not because you’re in a hurry,
but because you’re in no hurry at all.
And I want to give you one final example,
my favorite example.
Charles Darwin.
A man whose slow-burning
multitasking is so staggering,
I need a diagram to explain it all to you.
We know what Darwin
was doing at different times,
because the creativity researchers
Howard Gruber and Sara Davis
have analyzed his diaries
and his notebooks.
So, when he left school, age of 18,
he was initially interested in two fields,
zoology and geology.
Pretty soon, he signed up to be
the onboard naturalist on the “Beagle.”
This is the ship
that eventually took five years
to sail all the way around
the southern oceans of the Earth,
stopping at the Galápagos,
passing through the Indian ocean.
While he was on the “Beagle,”
he began researching coral reefs.
This is a great synergy
between his two interests
in zoology and geology,
and it starts to get him thinking
about slow processes.
But when he gets back from the voyage,
his interests start to expand
even further: psychology, botany;
for the rest of his life,
he’s moving backwards and forwards
between these different fields.
He never quite abandons any of them.
In 1837, he begins work
on two very interesting projects.
One of them: earthworms.
The other, a little notebook
which he titles
“The transmutation of species.”
Then, Darwin starts
studying my field, economics.
He reads a book
by the economist Thomas Malthus.
And he has his eureka moment.
In a flash, he realizes how species
could emerge and evolve slowly,
through this process
of the survival of the fittest.
It all comes to him,
he writes it all down,
every single important element
of the theory of evolution,
in that notebook.
But then, a new project.
His son William is born.
Well, there’s a natural
experiment right there,
you get to observe
the development of a human infant.
So immediately,
Darwin starts making notes.
Now, of course, he’s still working
on the theory of evolution
and the development of the human infant.
But during all of this,
he realizes he doesn’t really know
enough about taxonomy.
So he starts studying that.
And in the end, he spends eight years
becoming the world’s leading expert
on barnacles.
Then, “Natural Selection.”
A book that he’s to continue working on
for his entire life, he never finishes it.
“Origin of Species” is finally published
20 years after Darwin set out
all the basic elements.
Then, the “Descent of Man,”
controversial book.
And then, the book about
the development of the human infant.
The one that was inspired
when he could see his son, William,
crawling on the sitting room
floor in front of him.
When the book was published,
William was 37 years old.
And all this time,
Darwin’s working on earthworms.
He fills his billiard room with earthworms
in pots, with glass covers.
He shines lights on them,
to see if they’ll respond.
He holds a hot poker next to them,
to see if they move away.
He chews tobacco and –
(Blows)
He blows on the earthworms
to see if they have a sense of smell.
He even plays the bassoon
at the earthworms.
I like to think of this great man
when he’s tired, he’s stressed,
he’s anxious about the reception
of his book “The Descent of Man.”
You or I might log into Facebook
or turn on the television.
Darwin would go
into the billiard room to relax
by studying the earthworms intensely.
And that’s why it’s appropriate
that one of his last great works
is the “Formation of Vegetable Mould
Through The Action of Worms.”
(Laughter)
He worked upon that book for 44 years.
We don’t live in the 19th century anymore.
I don’t think any of us could sit
on our creative or scientific
projects for 44 years.
But we do have something to learn
from the great slow-motion multitaskers.
From Einstein and Darwin
to Michael Crichton and Twyla Tharp.
The modern world seems
to present us with a choice.
If we’re not going to fast-twitch
from browser window to browser window,
we have to live like a hermit,
focus on one thing
to the exclusion of everything else.
I think that’s a false dilemma.
We can make multitasking work for us,
unleashing our natural creativity.
We just need to slow it down.
So …
Make a list of your projects.
Put down your phone.
Pick up a couple of cardboard boxes.
And get to work.
Thank you very much.
(Applause)