Thinking Inside the Box (with David Epstein)

David Epstein: It’s wonderful to be back.

David Epstein: I think the main idea is that it’s never been easier to do too much in our work lives, in our personal lives, and that we often overvalue complete freedom–a problem that is a newer problem in human history–and undervalue the ability of smart boundaries to make us more creative, to make us more productive, and to make us more satisfied in our lives, more meaningful.

David Epstein: Yeah, Mendeleev. So, Siberian genius–it’s a tough one. In the winter of 1869, supposedly he has this feeling that there’s an order to the elements, to all of the chemical building blocks of the universe. But he can’t find it. And he stays up for three days, where he doesn’t sleep. And finally, he can’t stay awake any longer, and he drifts off into the most impactful nap in human history. And, he dreams of the elements swirling around until they snap into columns. And then the columns snap into place next to one another. And, he realizes that as you move along those columns, the chemical and physical properties of elements recur, periodically–which is why it’s called the Periodic Table.

And, he wakes up; he supposedly wakes up and writes it down exactly as he saw it, fully formed. And, so, it’s the perfect kind of eureka moment; and it’s been celebrated by scientific societies. Matthew Walker in his blockbuster, Why We Sleep, held it up as the ultimate proof that our dreaming brains, loosed from the bounds of reality, can accomplish what our waking brains can’t. The mattress company, Casper, used it in their marketing. I learned about it in college chemistry, so that’s how I was attuned to it.

David Epstein: That’s right. And, I should say, by the way, just so people know: If you think of the Periodic Table as something that just hangs in high school classrooms, it actually was incredibly important at the time, because it not only pointed the way to where new elements should be–because we only had discovered about half of the ones that we’ve discovered now at the time–but it also motivated the search for the underlying reason for this order, which was atoms. And so, it motivated the search for atoms.

So, the real story: can I share with you the real story?

David Epstein: And, I don’t think it’ll spoil it too much anyway. But–

David Epstein: So, the real story is, Mendeleev had a book contract to write a two-volume intro-to-chemistry textbook, and he had only gotten eight of the then 63-known elements into Volume One. So, he had to get the other 55 into Volume Two. And he had a customer problem, which was: it had to make sense for intro students.

So, it was in thinking about how could he save space and organize things in a logical way for introductory students that he started experimenting with groups, so he didn’t have to explain one element at a time but could kind of pick an element that represented a full family. And in doing that, that’s where he started thinking of elements in terms of families, and essentially stumbled onto the periodic pattern.

I mean, he eventually realized that he had found this underlying law of nature, and in fact said, ‘Oh, there are gaps in my table here, which means this is where we should look for new materials.’ So, it led him to make these very bold predictions that were so accurate that when–he called the gaps–so he labeled these gaps, like, eka aluminum and eka silicon. Eka is the Sanskrit word for one, meaning one spot away from this other element. And, when other chemists would find some element and report that they found some element and it would be similar to what he predicted but not the same, he would write them and say, ‘Check your calculations again.’ And, they would, and he would be right.

So, it was a pretty amazing story. But I think the gap between the myth and the reality is symbolic of something important, which is that we overvalue this complete freedom and undervalue the power of constraints to make us, to launch us into productive exploration.

David Epstein: That’s correct, yeah.

David Epstein: You know, Russ, speaking of dreams though, I realized as I was doing this reporting, there’s a whole lineage of people in chemistry, at least, supposedly discovering stuff in dreams. And, it’s usually they’re doing that because they’re in a priority dispute and they want to claim, ‘I could not have possibly seen this other person’s work.’ It’s, like, ‘It came to me in a dream.’ And so there’s this whole long lineage in chemistry of discoveries that were supposedly made in dreams. Very dubious, almost all of them.

David Epstein: That’s right.

David Epstein: No, I mean, absolutely. And, this is in this chapter where I’m writing about what’s called multiple discovery, which is basically the idea–the kind of pioneering sociologist of science, Robert Merton [Robert K. Merton–Econlib Ed.], first started to attune people to the fact that even though one person was typically or one team was typically credited with world-changing scientific breakthroughs, that if you actually dug into it, there were often multiple people or multiple teams basically arriving at the answer the same day. It’s not always as dramatic as Elisha Gray and Alexander Graham Bell filing their patent on the same day–probably there were like a half dozen other people that were there about the same time–but it’s usually quite close.

And so, when you mentioned Darwin, I think one of the important things is–you know, a discovery like that, or maybe that one in particular, is you did such a break from everything that came before that it’s just a complete paradigm shift. This person was just thinking, as I would say, outside the box of their whole time, and obviously it was an incredible breakthrough. But Darwin was so grounded in the thinking of his day. I mean, there were people, he had about 240 penpals that he would pepper with all sorts of questions, and they helped him set up these kind of pretty well-known mysteries of the day, like: Why are we finding marine fossils on mountains? And, why are we finding fossils of species that we don’t see around us? Why do the bones in a wing of a bat, and the flipper of a whale, and the arm of a human have so much in common? So, he was really collecting–even, he would write to breeders, and they would tell him, ‘We know that there are inherited variations when we’re breeding.’ They called them ‘sports,’ actually.

So, all of these ideas were percolating. And then he would read other thinking of the day. So, you’d appreciate this one, he was reading Adam Smith, which attuned him to the idea of competitive pressures and how does organization occur naturally out of competitive pressures? And, it was really synthesizing all those things into a coherent view that gave him this frame to think through.

And, of course, he wasn’t the only one. You mentioned Malthus, where he was reading the Reverend Malthus on population, and Malthus’s argument was that–and this had a lot to do with the British Poor Laws of the day. Malthus was arguing that if we basically do a lot of charity, essentially, that there will just always be more mouths to feed because population will grow geometrically and the food supply will not. And–

David Epstein: He absolutely did. He missed some things that were coming. But that’s one of the points I try to make in the chapter, is that these people who set up really interesting questions don’t necessarily have to be right, because they frame a question for someone else–for a lot of other people–that leads them to think differently.

So, it was both Wallace and Darwin read Malthus–the same essay–and it crystallized something for them, where they then essentially came up with the exact same theory.

So, I think one of the points I was trying to make was that these lightning strikes of inspiration are not what they seem. They’re actually really people who are tuned into the thinking of the day, paying attention to these well-defined questions. And, that’s why even the most world-changing breakthroughs are arrived at by multiple people at the same time, almost always.

David Epstein: That’s not what you do in your leisure time, reading Malthus?

David Epstein: Of the 19th century?

David Epstein: Clausewitz.

David Epstein: Wait, wait, would you have really?

David Epstein: Yeah, I was going to say, he’s a good writer–

David Epstein: Absolutely. And, it’s really tuning into–I think tuning into the thinking of the day and looking for really well-defined questions. And, I should say, to your point also, I think it’s just easier to tell a story with one person, right? In many cases in these priority disputes, somebody fought much harder to become the person in history books.

David Epstein: Right. Not to do a huge spoiler in the book, but you mentioned the Periodic Table story comes back: it recurs throughout the book. And, Mendeleev–eh, whatever, it’s not a spoiler, it’s still interesting–Mendeleev is the person credited in the history books, and there’s some reasons; but again, he made these bold predictions that others didn’t make, and his system was very complete.

But, so, there were no Periodic Tables before 1860, and there were six in the 1860s, all of which, again, Mendeleev’s I say had some advantages, but all of them got the main idea. And, some of them were forgotten because the diagram was horrific. And, one of them, the diagram was what the creator called a ‘telluric screw.’ It was basically like a barber pole with the elements winding around it, and if you looked at it straight down, you would see the periodic pattern. And so, the publisher was, like, ‘What is this?’ and just left it out, so it didn’t get published, so that got no notice. But, it was really these other things that were setting up the context.

Not that Mendeleev and these other people–actually most of them were not chemists, were not geniuses. They were, but there were these other forces of the time, including very importantly, an Italian guy who said, ‘You’re all measuring the weights of elements differently. Here’s how we’re going to do it from now on,’ and handed out a pamphlet, which allowed work to communicate across space, because people could reference one another’s work. That really set people up and defined the problem for them.

And, one of the examples I love from that chapter involved a mathematician, David Hilbert, arguably the most influential of the 20th century. And, one of the things he’s most remembered for–genius, luminary genius–but that he decided to go survey the math landscape and collect two dozen problems that he thought were important and define them really specifically and then hand those out to his colleagues. And, it set an agenda for math in the 20th century, and many of them got solved, because he looked around at what was going on in really well-defined problems. And that made a whole bunch of other people look like geniuses because it focused their energies.

David Epstein: Yeah, yeah. In the paper–in his famous relativity paper–he has a footnote in the second paragraph where he’s noting, ‘By the way, I hadn’t read this paper’–I think by Lorentz–and he’s basically saying–was it Lorentz that it was–

David Epstein: And, he’s basically saying, ‘Yes, I realize this guy came up with some of the same things, but just so you know, I hadn’t read that yet,’ basically.

David Epstein: Yeah. So, I will say Einstein, I think, did have some unique, what seemed to me at least, fully unique physical interpretations of some of the discoveries, but was not the only one alighting on these equations at the same time.

David Epstein: Yeah. I appreciate you asking about that. Nobody’s asked me about that, as yet. So, this particular injury, the specifics was an uncommon phenomenon where in eighth grade, I was a very good athlete, and so I was playing quarterback in some gym class–touch football–in middle school. And, instead of kicking off, you would just have someone throw as hard as they could to the other side. And, in doing this, I reared back and threw as hard as I could, and my arm snapped on the follow through of the throw–my upper arm bone, the humerus–in a spiral. And, it was such a bizarre injury, nobody would believe that my arm was broken. I think I kind of went unconscious for a second; it shocked my system.

And, by the time someone took me to the hospital, I remember them laying me on a table, basically taking an x-ray, and I’m laying on my back, and they told me to put my hand up perpendicular, as if I were shaking hands. And, I had my eyes closed because I was nauseous, and I did it, and they said, ‘Put your hand up.’ And, I thought I was doing it. And, it turned out that the bone was totally separated from the shoulder, so I was turning my shoulder and feeling a phantom hand out in front of me.

We’ll never know what happened. The doctor said that if there hadn’t been witnesses, they would have thought one of my parents had twisted my arm until it broke. But, he said maybe there was a bone weakness or an air pocket or something like that, but we’ll never know because once it broke, the evidence is gone.

And, I’ve only seen this happen one other time, and it was a major league pitcher, and he had to have his arm amputated. So, that ruined my life at the time because I had to have my arms strapped to my torso. So, a cast running all the way up to my shoulder and arms strapped to my torso.

And so, I couldn’t play sports anymore. And my life revolved around sports. That was the only thing I was interested in.

But, it led to some changes. Like, in school at the time, I was taking French class, and we had these tests where you had to listen to a recording of a French person speaking and then you follow along on a worksheet and there are blanks, and you have to follow well enough to fill in the blanks with the word that they said. And, I was okay at this, but with the broken arm, I couldn’t write fast enough–because it was my writing hand–to keep up. And so, I started realizing I’d have to try to memorize the words as I went through and then go back and write them down with my left hand. And, I started using sports-related mnemonics, like, attaching the words as I heard them to some sports image. And, I started knocking these tests out of the park, doing better than I’d ever done before. And, I started using mnemonics for everything in school.

Decades later, I would read one of the most famous memory studies ever done that involved a Carnegie Mellon undergrad. And, in this research, they took him from being able to memorize only seven digits to 80 digits using sports-related mnemonics. And, he was also an athlete. And so, this–

David Epstein: That’s right.

But, it turns out, people have known this for a long time; a lot of people do memory palace and things like that. And, I use that to this day: If I memorize an hour long keynote talk, I’m using mnemonic. And, people will ask me if I have a photographic memory when I’m done with a talk sometimes, and–because I talk into slides, so it’s clear that I’ve memorized everything. If I put my keys down and spin in a circle, I lose them. I do not have a photographic memory. It’s that I learned to use these mnemonics, and I was forced to do that because my typical tactic was taken away.

It’s called a preclude constraint, where when the typical tactic is blocked, you start looking for something different, and oftentimes, it’s better. It also led to me taking up running because I was barred from contact sports for a year, and I ended up becoming something I never would have thought of–I ended up becoming a college runner and a university record holder, and all these things.

And so, it was just interesting in retrospect that this thing that blocked my normal modes of being led me to explore learning strategies and athletic activities that I just never would have explored in the past.

And, I think that’s kind of a theme. In some ways, I hope this book is maybe an emotional reframe for people asked to do more with less, but also part of that reframe is to look at limits as opportunities to clarify your priorities and launch productive exploration. And, that’s what happened in my personal life.

David Epstein: Yeah. It really reminds me of–maybe you know this study–the famous London Underground study where there was a strike and certain lines were down for a few days, and so commuters had to find new ways to work. And, these are people who are doing this every day; you would assume they would have optimized the path. And yet a significant portion of commuters found a different path and stuck with it. It saved, like, 1,500 commuting hours per day, just a two or three day strike that led people to experiment with different paths.

So, I think arguably we don’t experiment enough, and we tend to follow what cognitive scientists call the path of least resistance, where we do the convenient thing or the thing we’ve always done. Because, as the cognitive scientist, Daniel Willingham, says, ‘You may think your brain is made for thinking, but it’s actually made to prevent you from having to think whenever possible, because thinking is energetically costly.’ And so, unless the thing you’re used to is blocked, you’re probably not going to explore as much as you should. [More to come, 28:15]