Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Creativity
“Generating interesting connections between disparate subjects is what makes art so
fascinating to create and to view… We are forced to contemplate a new, higher
pattern that binds lower ones together.”
By Maria Popova
Much of this capacity relies on our working memory — the temporary storage that
holds these primitive pieces of information in order to make them available for
further processing — and yet what’s most striking about our ability to build such
an “amazingly rich” model of the world is that the limit of our working memory is
hardly different from that of a monkey, even though the monkey’s brain is roughly
one-fifteenth the size of ours: Experiment after experiment has shown that, on
average, the human brain can hold 4 different items in its working memory, compared
to 3 or 4 for the monkey.
What makes the difference, Bor argues, is a concept called chunking, which allows
us to hack the limits of our working memory — a kind of cognitive compression
mechanism wherein we parse information into chunks that are more memorable and
easier to process than the seemingly random bits of which they’re composed. Bor
explains:
To illustrate the power of chunking, Bor gives an astounding example of how one man
was able to use this mental mechanism in greatly expanding the capacity of his
working memory. The man, an undergraduate volunteer in a psychology experiment with
an average IQ and memory capacity, took part in a simple experiment, in which the
researchers read to him a sequence of random digits and asked him to say the digits
back in the order he’d heard them. If he was correct, the next trial sequence would
be one digit longer; if incorrect, one digit shorter. This standard test for verbal
working memory had one twist — it took place over two years, where the young man
did this task for an hour a day four days a week.
But how, exactly, was an average person capable of such a superhuman feat? Bor
sheds light:
This volunteer happened to be a keen track runner, and so his first thought was
to see certain number groups as running times, for instance, 3492 would be
transformed into 3 minutes and 49.2 seconds, around the world-record time for
running the mile. In other words, he was using his memory for well-known number
sequences in athletics to prop up his working memory. This strategy worked very
well, and he rapidly more than doubled his working memory capacity to nearly 20
digits. The next breakthrough some months later occurred when he realized he could
combine each running time into a superstructure of 3 or 4 running times — and then
group these superstructures together again. Interestingly, the number of holders he
used never went above his initial capacity of just a handful of items. He just
learned to cram more and more into each item in a pyramidal way, with digits linked
together in 3s or 4s, and then those triplets or quadruplets of digits linked
together as well in groups of 3, and so on. One item-space, one object in working
memory, started holding a single digit, but after 20 months of practice, could
contain as much as 24 digits.
This young man had, essentially, mastered exponential chunking. But, Bor points
out, chunking isn’t useful only in helping us excel at seemingly meaningless tasks
— it is integral to what makes us human:
Although [chunking] can vastly increase the practical limits of working memory,
it is not merely a faithful servant of working memory — instead it is the secret
master of this online store, and the main purpose of consciousness.
[…]
There are three straightforward sides to the chunking process — the search for
chunks, the noticing and memorizing of those chunks, and the use of the chunks
we’ve already built up. The main purpose of consciousness is to search for and
discover these structured chunks of information within working memory, so that they
can then be used efficiently and automatically, with minimal further input from
consciousness.
Perhaps what most distinguishes us humans from the rest of the animal kingdom
is our ravenous desire to find structure in the information we pick up in the
world. We cannot help actively searching for patterns — any hook in the data that
will aid our performance and understanding. We constantly look for regularities in
every facet of our lives, and there are few limits to what we can learn and improve
on as we make these discoveries. We also develop strategies to further help us —
strategies that themselves are forms of patterns that assist us in spotting other
patterns, with one example being that amateur track runner developing tactics to
link digits with running times in various races.
But, echoing Richard Feynman’s eloquent lament on the subject, Bor points to a dark
side of this hunger for patterns:
One problematic corollary of this passion for patterns is that we are the most
advanced species in how elaborately and extensively we can get things wrong. We
often jump to conclusions — for instance, with astrology or religion. We are so
keen to search for patterns, and so satisfied when we’ve found them, that we do not
typically perform sufficient checks on our apparent insights.
Still, our capacity for pattern-recognition, Bor argues, is the very source of
human creativity. In fact, chunking and pattern-recognition offer evidence for the
combinatorial nature of creativity, affirm Steve Jobs’s famous words that
“creativity is just connecting things”, Mark Twain’s contention that “all ideas are
second-hand”, and Nina Paley’s clever demonstration of how everything builds on
what came before.
The arts, too, generate their richness and some of their aesthetic appeal from
patterns. Music is the most obvious sphere where structures are appealing — little
phrases that are repeated, raised a key, or reversed can sound utterly beguiling.
This musical beauty directly relates to the mathematical relation between notes and
the overall logical regularities formed. Some composers, such as Bach, made this
connection relatively explicit, at least in certain pieces, which are just as much
mathematical and logical puzzles as beautiful musical works.
But certainly patterns are just as important in the visual arts as in music.
Generating interesting connections between disparate subjects is what makes art so
fascinating to create and to view, precisely because we are forced to contemplate a
new, higher pattern that binds lower ones together.
What is true of creative skill, Bor argues, is also true of our highest
intellectual contribution:
Some of our greatest insights can be gleaned from moving up another level and
noticing that certain patterns relate to others, which on first blush may appear
entirely unconnected — spotting patterns of patterns, say (which is what analogies
essentially are).
Best of all, this system expands exponentially as it feeds on itself, like a muscle
that grows stronger with each use:
Though some parts of The Ravenous Brain fringe on reductionism, Bor offers a
stimulating lens on that always fascinating, often uncomfortable, inevitably
alluring intersection of science and philosophy where our understanding of who we
are resides.