Insights

“You are gifted with virtually unlimited potential for learning and creativity,” said author Michael Gelb.

In a keynote presentation at Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine Summit in San Diego this week, Gelb shared his insights for maximizing that potential—based on lessons from one of the greatest thinkers of history, Leonardo da Vinci.

Being more like da Vinci, Gelb said, can help us uncover hidden abilities, expand our minds, and accomplish more than we thought we could. Gelb used da Vinci’s notebooks, inventions, and artwork to come up with seven da Vincian principles, which he believes are the essential elements of genius.

The principles are detailed in his book How to Think Like Leonardo da Vinci. Here’s the condensed version.

1. Curiosita: An insatiably curious approach to life. “Da Vinci was the most curious person who ever lived,” Gelb said. “He was curious about everything. He wanted to know truth, beauty, and goodness.”

What can we all do to enliven and enrich our curiosity? Gelb asked the audience where they tend to be physically located when they get their best ideas. Some of the most common replies were in the shower, at the beach, and in the middle of the night. These are all places where we tend to be relaxed and calm. Being overly busy and stressed, on the other hand, doesn’t typically foster curiosity and creativity. Give yourself the time and space to think, wonder, and contemplate.

2. Dimonstratzione: A commitment to test knowledge through experience or demonstrate things in your own experience. Da Vinci signed his name ‘disciple of experience;’ he knew he had to be an original thinker. Back in his day and age, the biggest challenge to independent thinking was the church. “Today our challenge is too much information,” Gelb said. “How do you cut through the tsunami of spam and think for yourself?” He encouraged the audience to view the situations and challenges in their lives from different perspectives and make an effort to filter out the many distractions that surround us.

3. Sensazione: The continual refinement of the senses, especially sight, as the means to clarify experience. “Da Vinci trained his sensory awareness like an Olympic athlete trains their body for competition,” Gelb said. He added that mindfulness is the key to sharpening our senses as we get older. Mindful contemplation of beauty every day is also the secret to enjoying one’s life. “Ask yourself, ‘How can I make my life more beautiful every day?’

4. Sfumato: A willingness to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty. Taking on complex problems means there’s going to be a lot of uncertainty, and sticking too rigidly to established beliefs or norms isn’t likely to help solve those problems. “Highly creative people have an ability to embrace the unknown,” Gelb pointed out. “If you need a definite answer you’re not going to innovate.”

5. Arte/Scienza: Developing the balance between science and art, logic and imagination. Balancing apparent opposites gives us a more complete view of the world and allows us to think with our whole mind rather than just a portion of it. Gelb said elite scientists are highly likely to have a hobby involving arts and crafts; Nobel laureates are 2.8 times more likely to have an artistic pursuit than the average person. It’s all about balance.

6. Corporalita: The cultivation of ambidexterity, fitness, and poise. Similar to balancing the different parts of the mind, we must each balance our own body and mind in order to preserve our health. The choices we make have an effect on our wellness.

7. Connessione: A recognition and appreciation for the connectedness of all things and phenomena; “systems thinking.” Be aligned with your highest purpose, your big question. “We suffer from premature organization, which prevents conception,” Gelb said. The key to making progress on a big task, he said, is to generate first, then organize—and that means being aware of the big picture from the outset.

Gelb’s—and da Vinci’s—approach to unlocking human potential is closely aligned with modern-day holistic views of health. However, that doesn’t mean we’ve become skilled at implementing this advice in our lives. We may not all end up painting the next Mona Lisa, but keeping the da Vincian principles in mind each day may help us make the most of our own unique gifts.

If you’d asked farmers a few hundred years ago what skills their kids would need to thrive, it wouldn’t have taken long to answer. They’d need to know how to milk a cow or plant a field. General skills for a single profession that only changed slowly—and this is how it was for most humans through history.

But in the last few centuries? Not so much.

Each generation, and even within generations, we see some jobs largely disappear, while other ones pop up. Machines have automated much of manufacturing, for example, and they’ll automate even more soon. But as manufacturing jobs decline, they’ve been replaced by other once unimaginable professions like bloggers, coders, dog walkers, or pro gamers.

In a world where these labor cycles are accelerating, the question is: What skills do we teach the next generation so they can keep pace?

More and more research shows that current curriculums, which teach siloed subject matter and specific vocational training, are not preparing students to succeed in the 21st century; a time of technological acceleration, market volatility, and uncertainty.

To address this, some schools have started teaching coding and other skills relevant to the technologies of today. But technology is changing so quickly that these new skills may not be relevant by the time students enter the job market.

In fact, in Cathy Davidson’s book, Now You See It, Davidson estimates that,

“65 percent of children entering grade school this year (2011) will end up working in careers that haven’t even been invented yet.”

Not only is it difficult to predict what careers will exist in the future, it is equally uncertain which technology-based skills will be viable 5 or 10 years from now, as Brett Schilke, director of impact and youth engagement at Singularity University, noted in a recent interview.

So, what do we teach?

Finland recently shifted its national curriculum to a new model called the “phenomenon-based” approach. By 2020, the country will replace traditional classroom subjects with a topical approach highlighting the four Cs—communication, creativity, critical thinking, and collaboration. These four skills “are central to working in teams, and a reflection of the ‘hyperconnected’ world we live in today,” Singularity Hub editor-in-chief David Hill recently wrote.

Hill notes the four Cs directly correspond to the skills needed to be a successful 21st century entrepreneur—when accelerating change means the jobs we’re educating for today may not exist tomorrow. Finland’s approach reflects an important transition away from the antiquated model used in most US institutions—a model created for a slower, more stable labor market and economy that no longer exists.

In addition to the four Cs, successful entrepreneurs across the globe are demonstrating three additional soft skills that can be integrated into the classroom—adaptability, resiliency and grit, and a mindset of continuous learning.

These skills can equip students to be problem-solvers, inventive thinkers, and adaptive to the fast-paced change they are bound to encounter. In a world of uncertainty, the only constant is the ability to adapt, pivot, and get back on your feet.

Like Finland, the city of Buenos Aires is embracing change.

Select high school curriculums in the city of Buenos Aires now require technological education in the first two years and entrepreneurship in the last three years. Esteban Bullrich, Buenos Aires’ minister of education, told Singularity University in a recent interview, “I want kids to get out of school and be able to create whatever future they want to create—to be able to change the world with the capabilities they earn and receive through formal schooling.”

The idea is to teach students to be adaptive and equip them with skills that will be highly transferable in whatever reality they may face once out of school, Bullrich explains. Embedding these entrepreneurial skills in education will enable future leaders to move smoothly with the pace of technology. In fact, Mariano Mayer, director of entrepreneurship for the city of Buenos Aires, believes these soft skills will be valued most highly in future labor markets.

This message is consistent with research highlighted in a World Economic Forum and Boston Consulting Group report titled, New Vision for Education: Unlocking the Potential of Technology. The report breaks out the core 21st-century skills into three key categories—foundational literacies, competencies, and character qualities—with lifelong learning as a proficiency encompassing these categories.

From degree gathering to continuous learning

This continuous learning approach, in contrast to degree-oriented education, represents an important shift that is desperately needed in education. It also reflects the demands of the labor market—where lifelong learning and skill development are what keep an individual competitive, agile, and valued.

Singularity University CEO Rob Nail explains, “The current setup does not match the way the world has and will continue to evolve. You get your certificate or degree and then supposedly you’re done. In the world that we’ve living in today, that doesn’t work.”

Transitioning the focus of education from degree-oriented to continuous learning holds obvious benefits for students. This shift in focus, however, will also support academic institutions sustain their value as education, at large, becomes increasingly democratized and decentralized.

Any large change requires we overcome barriers. And in education, there are many—but one challenge, in particular, is fear of change. 

“The fear of change has made us fall behind in terms of advancement in innovation and human activities,” Bullrich says.

“We are discussing upgrades to our car instead of building a spaceship. We need to build a spaceship, but we don’t want to leave the car behind. Some changes appear large, but the truth is, it’s still a car. It doesn’t fly. That’s why education policy is not flying.”

Education and learning are ready to be reinvented. It’s time we get to work.

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By Alison E. Berman

This article originally appeared on Singularity Hub, a publication of Singularity University.

My optometrist once told me that a research job can be tough on the eyes. When you aren’t reading articles, you’re staring at data or puzzling your way though code on some blinking monitor. I wear contacts. She told me to bring my glasses to work, as a backup in case my eyes tired out. A few years ago, I noticed a pattern. On the days when I did remember to bring my glasses, I invariably needed them. By lunchtime, my eyes felt strained. When my glasses stayed on the nightstand, I never felt the urge to remove my contacts. Connecting those dots felt like a small eureka moment. Backup plans, like my glasses, can have strange and unexpected influences on our motivation and behaviour.

Over the past few years, I’ve worked with Alexandra Freund, a professor of psychology at the University of Zurich, to unpack how a backup plan (or Plan B) affects the way we pursue our goals. Our core thesis is that backup plans change the way people pursue their goals, even if they never use the backup plan at all. In other words, backup plans are not inert: as they sit in your ‘back pocket’, they influence the way you use your Plan A. This effect can be positive. A backup plan can boost confidence to tackle challenging goals. But backup plans can also subvert pursuit of your goals. Developing them costs resources that could have been spent perfecting Plan A. Choosing when and if to use a backup plan can distract you. It can provide an easy, but perhaps untimely ‘out’ during tough times. A backup plan could, perversely, cause you to fail.

But how can a backup plan, your buffer against failure, cause failure? Imagine being on the job market. Cash is tight: your goal is a new job this month. Plan A is to work for a tech firm. You know getting hired there is a challenge, so you’ve made a backup plan: a banking position. Does your banking backup plan help or harm your chances of getting a job this month?

To understand the impact, it’s important to realise that not all backup plans are the same. ‘Contingent’ backup plans are based around a possible contingency – if plan A does not work, then I will use Plan B. So our jobseeker, above, might focus entirely on securing the tech job, and only seek the bank job if the tech job falls through. This kind of contingency backup plan mitigates potential costs.

‘Redundant’ backup plans, the other type, are different. People develop them to maximise potential benefits. With a redundant backup plan, a person works towards the goal using Plan A, while actively comparing whether Plan A or Plan B is currently providing the best possibility for success. For our jobseeker, that would mean preparing materials and practising presentations in parallel, unsure of which job will be the best fit. If there are setbacks during the tech job interview, the temptation to shift to Plan B increases. The jobseeker might think: ‘I might have a better shot with the bank. Maybe I’d better focus there, and tell the tech firm that I’ve withdrawn my application.’

The key drawback to a contingent plan is also its key strength – it isn’t invoked until the main plan seems likely to fail. This is beneficial in some ways. A person isn’t distracted by actively comparing whether Plan A or B will be better. They simply substitute Plan B if Plan A fails. However, a contingent backup plan can backfire if that deadline comes too late, or never comes at all. Using contingent backup plans well requires knowing when to cut your losses with Plan A. In the case of the jobseeker, a backup plan is useless if you don’t have enough time to ‘change gears’ after bad news from the tech firm.

Redundant backup plans introduce different challenges. These backup plans are costlier to use. One must actively compare Plans A and B throughout the entire exercise, discerning the ideal time to make the switch or to stick to one’s guns. Redundant backup plans have a ‘boom or bust’ quality. In the best-case scenario, you have a well-elaborated alternative option ready to use at the exact moment that it might boost your chances for success. In the worst-case scenario, you could get caught in a morass of indecision, or change plans too early or too late – or put so much work into the backup plan that you compromise you chance for securing the primary goal. For the jobseeker, actively comparing the tech and bank options might result in under-preparing for both interviews and being forced to seek out some Plan C.

So what makes a good backup plan, and what is the best way to use it? Our research suggests that backup plans change the way goals are pursued, sometimes for the worse. As you think about your own Plan B, consider how it is affecting Plan A. Are your backup plans supportive safety nets? Or are they subversive investments that threaten your goal? For what it’s worth, I am sitting in my office, while my glasses are safely at home. Risky? Perhaps. But my eyes feel fresh.

Chris Napolitano

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

The Renaissance painter Albrecht Dürer was regarded by his friends as a master in the art of mind-wandering. He could become ‘enwrapped’ in his own pleasant reflections, wrote the German humanist Willibald Pirckheimer, at which times Dürer ‘would seem the happiest person on Earth’.

Many of us are familiar with mind-wandering in a number of guises: procrastination, reflection, meditation, self-flagellation, daydreaming. But while some mental meandering seems fruitful, on other occasions it has the unmistakeable bite of a bad habit, something that holds us back from reaching our full potential. Reverie can be a reprieve from reality and a font of inspiration, yes. But equally familiar is the mind’s tendency to devolve into sour and fruitless rumination when left to its own devices, especially when we’re in the grip of depression, anxiety or obsession.

Can art itself be a useful catalyst for nudging us towards more helpful emotions and mental states? Whether in the form of literature, rap or abstract oil painting, many of us know we can improve the tenor of our thoughts by contemplating art. The Germans have a lovely saying for the benefits of keeping an idle (or idling) mind: ‘die Seele baumeln lassen’, meaning ‘let the soul dangle’. Now, the emerging science of neuroaesthetics is beginning to reveal the biological processes that sit behind such ‘dangling’.

To begin with, contemporary cognitive science has presented a vast amount of evidence that mental states send and receive ripples of cause and effect across the rest of the body. Think how your mouth might water when you look at a photo of a tasty chocolate cake, or how tense you feel when watching a suspenseful TV drama. Thoughts, feelings and emotions, whether aimless or deliberate, are a somatic cascade of multiple biological events. And it’s this cascade that art somehow taps into.

Galen, the second-century Greek physician, was well aware of the connection between mind and body. He believed that mind-wandering was the result of physical and mental lassitude, and so prescribed a regime of logic and hard, structured work to avoid it. ‘Laziness breeds humours of the blood!’ Galen is believed to have said. The assumption here is that concentration is a kind of psychobiological discipline, something we have to work at to stop our wayward minds and bodies from veering out of our control.

However, there’s an even older tradition from Ancient Greece that views daydreaming as a boost to our wellbeing. Galen’s Hippocratic forebears argued that mind-wandering was in fact the best strategy for guiding us back into healthy states. And modern-day research in developmental psychology has shown that children and adults who engage in certain kinds of mind-wandering actually display more cognitive flexibility, and perform better when called upon to exercise ‘executive’ functions such as problem-solving, planning and managing their own thoughts and feelings.

Neuroimaging – a method of ‘seeing’ the brain in action – has started to reveal the brain processes that correlate with these mental states. Far from falling idle, the brains of people asked to stay still and think of nothing in particular continue to fizz and pop in patterns of activity known as the default mode network (DMN). These activations are closely related to those engaged during self-referential thinking, the experience of the self, and intuition. Moreover, they are observed alongside activation patterns in the prefrontal cortex (PFC) – the area typically associated with those important ‘executive’ functions. Strikingly, the greater the strength of the relationship between these two domains of the brain – intuition and executive function – the more creativity a person tends to display when asked to solve a problem. Brain scans demonstrate correlation, not causation; but even so, they hint at the possibility that reverie might help to prime us to think both productively and creatively by somehow cementing our sense of self, drawing body and mind together in a train of thought and biological action.

Art can be a catalyst for this sort of reverie, as well as a tool to regulate and control it. Both the basic properties of art (whether it’s in a minor or major key; the colours of a painting), as well as the complexities of its content (the lyrics of a song, the facial expression of a person in a painting), can induce reflections and emotions – and will invariably affect our body’s physiology. Thinking creatively, and engaging with works of art, have both been correlated with DMN activity – especially when people report that the aesthetic experience was particularly strong and meaningful to them. In these moments, our encounter with art seems to trigger an autobiographical daydreaming, a flow experience with a ‘me factor’.

Of course, art can also provoke unhelpful ruminative urges. Listening over and again to that song might not help you get over a heartbreak. But art-induced sadness doesn’t always make you slide into negative mental loops. In fact, art can help us adapt to the immediate source of pain by acting as a prop for emotional catharsis. We all know the strange, pleasurable, consoling feeling that comes after having a good cry. This experience appears to be precipitated by the release of the hormone prolactin, which has also been associated with a boosted immune system, as well as bonding with other people. The arts are a relatively safe space in which to have such an emotional episode, compared with the real-life emotional situations that make us cry. Even sad or otherwise distressing art can be used to trigger a kind of positive, psychobiological cleansing via mind-wandering.

History is full of examples of the relationship between reverie and creativity. Here is one, idiosyncratic example: the German art historian Aby Warburg (1866-1929) organised his library of 50,000 books with the aim of promoting mind-wandering. His collection was the kernel for the Warburg Institute in London, where we now work as researchers. Each of the library’s four floors is devoted to one of four themes – image, word, orientation, and action – and separated into sub-themes, such as ‘magic and science’, ‘transmission of classical texts’, and ‘art history’. Guided by Warburg’s ideas about what makes a good neighbour for a book, this unique approach to classification allows a withered 17th-century medical tome to cluster next to texts on mathematics, the cosmos and harmony. The shelves promote intellectual serendipity as you skip from the book (or thought) you thought you wanted, to another intriguing idea or topic that hadn’t even occurred to you.

Art appreciation is held in high esteem in most cultures and societies. It is often portrayed as a laborious cognitive exercise, but this is to forget that the arts provide an opportunity for intense emotional experiences, positive mind-wandering and psychobiological self-regulation. Dürer perhaps captures the activity of such inactivity best of all. ‘If a man devotes himself to art,’ he wrote, ‘much evil is avoided that happens otherwise if one is idle.’

Julia Christensen, Guido Giglioni & Manos Tsakiris

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.

While in graduate school in mathematics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, I took a logic course from David Griffeath. The class was fun. Griffeath brought a playfulness and openness to problems. Much to my delight, about a decade later, I ran into him at a conference on traffic models. During a presentation on computational models of traffic jams, his hand went up. I wondered what Griffeath – a mathematical logician – would have to say about traffic jams. He did not disappoint. Without even a hint of excitement in his voice, he said: ‘If you are modelling a traffic jam, you should just keep track of the non-cars.’

The collective response followed the familiar pattern when someone drops an unexpected, but once stated, obvious idea: a puzzled silence, giving way to a roomful of nodding heads and smiles. Nothing else needed to be said.

Griffeath had made a brilliant observation. During a traffic jam, most of the spaces on the road are filled with cars. Modelling each car takes up an enormous amount of memory. Keeping track of the empty spaces instead would use less memory – in fact almost none. Furthermore, the dynamics of the non-cars might be more amenable to analysis.

Versions of this story occur routinely at academic conferences, in research laboratories or policy meetings, within design groups, and in strategic brainstorming sessions. They share three characteristics. First, the problems are complex: they concern high-dimensional contexts that are difficult to explain, engineer, evolve or predict. Second, the breakthrough ideas do not arise by magic, nor are they constructed anew from whole cloth. They take an existing idea, insight, trick or rule, and apply it in a novel way, or they combine ideas – like Apple’s breakthrough repurposing of the touchscreen technology. In Griffeath’s case, he applied a concept from information theory: minimum description length. Fewer words are required to say ‘No-L’ than to list ‘ABCDEFGHIJKMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ’. I should add that these new ideas typically produce modest gains. But, collectively, they can have large effects. Progress occurs as much through sequences of small steps as through giant leaps.

Third, these ideas are birthed in group settings. One person presents her perspective on a problem, describes an approach to finding a solution or identifies a sticking point, and a second person makes a suggestion or knows a workaround. The late computer scientist John Holland commonly asked: ‘Have you thought about this as a Markov process, with a set of states and transition between those states?’ That query would force the presenter to define states. That simple act would often lead to an insight.

The burgeoning of teams – most academic research is now done in teams, as is most investing and even most songwriting (at least for the good songs) – tracks the growing complexity of our world. We used to build roads from A to B. Now we construct transportation infrastructure with environmental, social, economic and political impacts.

The complexity of modern problems often precludes any one person from fully understanding them. Factors contributing to rising obesity levels, for example, include transportation systems and infrastructure, media, convenience foods, changing social norms, human biology and psychological factors. Designing an aircraft carrier, to take another example, requires knowledge of nuclear engineering, naval architecture, metallurgy, hydrodynamics, information systems, military protocols, the exercise of modern warfare and, given the long building time, the ability to predict trends in weapon systems.

The multidimensional or layered character of complex problems also undermines the principle of meritocracy: the idea that the ‘best person’ should be hired. There is no best person. When putting together an oncological research team, a biotech company such as Gilead or Genentech would not construct a multiple-choice test and hire the top scorers, or hire people whose resumes score highest according to some performance criteria. Instead, they would seek diversity. They would build a team of people who bring diverse knowledge bases, tools and analytic skills. That team would more likely than not include mathematicians (though not logicians such as Griffeath). And the mathematicians would likely study dynamical systems and differential equations.

Believers in a meritocracy might grant that teams ought to be diverse but then argue that meritocratic principles should apply within each category. Thus the team should consist of the ‘best’ mathematicians, the ‘best’ oncologists, and the ‘best’ biostatisticians from within the pool.

That position suffers from a similar flaw. Even with a knowledge domain, no test or criteria applied to individuals will produce the best team. Each of these domains possesses such depth and breadth, that no test can exist. Consider the field of neuroscience. Upwards of 50,000 papers were published last year covering various techniques, domains of enquiry and levels of analysis, ranging from molecules and synapses up through networks of neurons. Given that complexity, any attempt to rank a collection of neuroscientists from best to worst, as if they were competitors in the 50-metre butterfly, must fail. What could be true is that given a specific task and the composition of a particular team, one scientist would be more likely to contribute than another. Optimal hiring depends on context. Optimal teams will be diverse.

Evidence for this claim can be seen in the way that papers and patents that combine diverse ideas tend to rank as high-impact. It can also be found in the structure of the so-called random decision forest, a state-of-the-art machine-learning algorithm. Random forests consist of ensembles of decision trees. If classifying pictures, each tree makes a vote: is that a picture of a fox or a dog? A weighted majority rules. Random forests can serve many ends. They can identify bank fraud and diseases, recommend ceiling fans and predict online dating behaviour.

When building a forest, you do not select the best trees as they tend to make similar classifications. You want diversity. Programmers achieve that diversity by training each tree on different data, a technique known as bagging. They also boost the forest ‘cognitively’ by training trees on the hardest cases – those that the current forest gets wrong. This ensures even more diversity and accurate forests.

Yet the fallacy of meritocracy persists. Corporations, non-profits, governments, universities and even preschools test, score and hire the ‘best’. This all but guarantees not creating the best team. Ranking people by common criteria produces homogeneity. And when biases creep in, it results in people who look like those making the decisions. That’s not likely to lead to breakthroughs. As Astro Teller, CEO of X, the ‘moonshoot factory’ at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, has said: ‘Having people who have different mental perspectives is what’s important. If you want to explore things you haven’t explored, having people who look just like you and think just like you is not the best way.’ We must see the forest.

The Diversity Bonus: How Great Teams Pay Off in the Knowledge Economy by Scott E Page is out now through Princeton University Press.

Scott E Page

This article was originally published at Aeon and has been republished under Creative Commons.