couldn’t solve any of the CRA problems given to him by the scientists. “This guy went through thirty or so of the verbal puzzles and just drew a blank,” Kounios says. “He assumed the way to solve the problems was to think really hard about the words on the page, to really concentrate.” But then, just as the meditator was about to give up, he started solving one puzzle after another; by the end of the experiment, he was getting them all right. It was an unprecedented streak. According to Kounios, this dramatic improvement depended on the ability of the meditator to focus on not being focused so that he could finally pay attention to all those fleeting connections in the right hemisphere. “Because he meditated ten hours a day, he had the cognitive control to instantly relax,” Kounios says. “He could ramp up those alpha waves at will, so that all of a sudden he wasn’t paying such close attention to the words on the page. And that’s when he became an insight machine.”
2.
While 3M’s flexible attention policy is a pillar of its innovation culture, the company doesn’t rely on relaxation and distraction alone to generate new insights. As Wendling notes, “Sometimes, you’ve got to take a more active role . . . We want to give our researchers freedom, but we also want to make sure the ideas they’re pur-36
A L P H A W A V E S ( C O N D I T I O N B L U E ) suing are really new and worthwhile.” This is where horizontal sharing, the second essential feature of the 3M workplace, comes in. The idea is rooted in the company’s tradition of inventing new products by transplanting one concept into different domains. Just consider the invention of masking tape. Drew’s fundamental insight was that even a simple product like sandpaper — nothing but sturdy paper coated with a sticky glue — could have multiple uses; Drew realized that those same ingredients could be turned into a roll of adhesive. This led William McKnight, the executive who turned 3M into an industrial powerhouse, to insist on sharing among scientists as a core tenet of 3M culture. Before long, the Tech Forum was established, an annual event at which every researcher on staff presents his or her latest research. (This practice has also been widely imitated. Google, for instance, hosts a conference called CSI, or Crazy Search Ideas.) “It’s like a huge middle-school science fair,” Wendling says. “You see hundreds of posters from every conceivable field. The guys doing nanotechnol-ogy are talking to the guys making glue. I can only imagine what they find to talk about.”
The benefit of such horizontal interactions — people sharing knowledge across fields — is that it encourages conceptual blending, which is an extremely important part of the insight process.
Normally, the brain files away ideas in categories based on how these ideas can be used. If you’re working for a sandpaper company, for instance, then you probably spend most of the day thinking about sandpaper as an abrasive. That, after all, is the purpose of the product. The assumption is that the vast store of mental concepts work only in particular situations and that it’s a waste of time to apply them elsewhere. There’s no point in thinking about sandpaper if you don’t need to sand something down.
Most of the time, this assumption holds true. However, the same tendency that keeps us from contemplating irrelevant concepts also keeps us from coming up with insights. The reason is that our breakthroughs often arrive when we apply old solutions to new situations; for instance, a person thinking about sandpaper when he needs something sticky. Instead of keeping concepts separate, we start blending them together, trespassing on the standard boundaries of thought.
The best way to understand conceptual blending is to look at the classic children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon. The premise of the book is simple: Harold has a magic crayon. When he draws with
2.
While 3M’s flexible attention policy is a pillar of its innovation culture, the company doesn’t rely on relaxation and distraction alone to generate new insights. As Wendling notes, “Sometimes, you’ve got to take a more active role . . . We want to give our researchers freedom, but we also want to make sure the ideas they’re pur-36
A L P H A W A V E S ( C O N D I T I O N B L U E ) suing are really new and worthwhile.” This is where horizontal sharing, the second essential feature of the 3M workplace, comes in. The idea is rooted in the company’s tradition of inventing new products by transplanting one concept into different domains. Just consider the invention of masking tape. Drew’s fundamental insight was that even a simple product like sandpaper — nothing but sturdy paper coated with a sticky glue — could have multiple uses; Drew realized that those same ingredients could be turned into a roll of adhesive. This led William McKnight, the executive who turned 3M into an industrial powerhouse, to insist on sharing among scientists as a core tenet of 3M culture. Before long, the Tech Forum was established, an annual event at which every researcher on staff presents his or her latest research. (This practice has also been widely imitated. Google, for instance, hosts a conference called CSI, or Crazy Search Ideas.) “It’s like a huge middle-school science fair,” Wendling says. “You see hundreds of posters from every conceivable field. The guys doing nanotechnol-ogy are talking to the guys making glue. I can only imagine what they find to talk about.”
The benefit of such horizontal interactions — people sharing knowledge across fields — is that it encourages conceptual blending, which is an extremely important part of the insight process.
Normally, the brain files away ideas in categories based on how these ideas can be used. If you’re working for a sandpaper company, for instance, then you probably spend most of the day thinking about sandpaper as an abrasive. That, after all, is the purpose of the product. The assumption is that the vast store of mental concepts work only in particular situations and that it’s a waste of time to apply them elsewhere. There’s no point in thinking about sandpaper if you don’t need to sand something down.
Most of the time, this assumption holds true. However, the same tendency that keeps us from contemplating irrelevant concepts also keeps us from coming up with insights. The reason is that our breakthroughs often arrive when we apply old solutions to new situations; for instance, a person thinking about sandpaper when he needs something sticky. Instead of keeping concepts separate, we start blending them together, trespassing on the standard boundaries of thought.
The best way to understand conceptual blending is to look at the classic children’s book Harold and the Purple Crayon. The premise of the book is simple: Harold has a magic crayon. When he draws with
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