Transcriber: Tijana Mihajlović Reviewer: Mile Živković
Master of ceremonies: Our next speaker is going to help keep us in the brain.
So, David helped us open our brain wide,
and we're going to stay in there, and we're going to look around.
Who better to help us look around in the brain but a neuroscientist?
So, here with his talk,
"The neuroscience of eureka moments,"
is Andre Golard, a neuroscientist.
Andre.
Andre Golard: Everything you see around you,
at one point was an idea; a eureka.
More of the things that you see now, including this little clicker,
were not there just a few years ago.
How do you keep up?
How do you get the ideas you need to survive?
Is there a better place to look for ideas then where they happen; the brain?
Specifically, we need to look at the cortex.
The cortex is our higher brain.
This is what gives us fine motor skills,
language, and self-awareness.
It's a thin sheet, about this big, and about this thin,
and it looks about the same everywhere.
It's highly folded, so it will fit in here.
(Laughter)
Let's have a look at how it's organized.
To understand a cortex,
each of these little areas would be a little patch of the sheet.
It's easiest to understand when we look at the visual cortex,
where the lower level may react to edges.
The next one up basic shapes and on,
until you recognize grandpa.
(Laughter)
There is further integration between the senses,
and then we make associations:
looks like grandpa,
smells like grandpa
(Laughter)
I'm going to get candy.
(Laughter)
Let's look at one of those areas in a little more detail.
You have cells; neurons in columns and layers,
and when you receive an input, when you see something,
a small subsets of neurons are active.
Over time, this is what happens.
You have patterns, spatial and temporal patterns.
When those patterns are repeated, they become our memories.
The same cells are active
when you see something and when you remember it.
You may have heard of the Halle Berry neuron.
This was recording from the brain.
Scientists saw a single neuron
that was active only when the person saw a picture of Halle Berry.
(Laughter)
From that came the idea that a single neuron encodes a memory.
This is wrong.
Memories are encoded by networks, patterns.
When you take two patterns from different areas
and associate them, create a link between them,
this is an idea, this is a new network, this is what an idea looks like.
Neurologist Antonio Damasio created an experiment
with four decks of cards.
Two decks are good, give you small, steady rewards.
Two decks give larger rewards, but can also give you bad losses.
After just ten tries,
the hand shakes when it reaches for the bad decks,
but the person still reaches at random.
After about 50, the person will only reach for the good decks,
but won't be able to tell you why.
It takes 80 tries on average for the person to realize
why some decks are good.
Well, you don't need to be a neurologist
to understand we should pay attention to our shaking hands.
Over a hundred years ago,
poet Walt Whitman called this “the body electric."
Science has to catch up with poetry.
As we've seen from the experiments, our ideas are at first subconscious.
When an idea becomes conscious, it's what Freud called "an insight."
This is what happened to Darwin when he had his official eureka moment.
If you look at his notebooks, going back from that date,
his theory was fully formulated months earlier;
he just didn't know about it.
To have more of these insights,
we need to listen to our shaking hands,
to our emotions.
We were looking at the eureka that came from the inside;
ideas bubbling to the surface.
There is a different kind of eureka;
remember, a memory and something that you see are equivalent.
Here we have Isaac Newton, sitting under a tree,
thinking about the motion of planets, colliding with an apple.
To have more of these eurekas,
we need to put ourselves in rich environments.
We also need to be open.
The first one can be designed, the second one can be taught.
So, we have seen a eureka that came strictly from the inside.
We have seen one inside-outside.
Could there be a eureka that comes strictly from the outside?
You may think of an architect looking at the roof,
a bird flies by,
and his next roof may look like this.
So, could there be a eureka that comes strictly from the outside?
And the answer is most likely not,
because of the way the cortex is organized.
Even though the information flows up, we have more fibers projecting down.
And those fibers carry our filters, our high-level representations,
our high-level patterns,
we use as filters for the incoming information.
This is very useful.
This is what allows us to recognize grandpa hiding behind a tree.
The downside is, if you are presented something
for which you do not have an existing pattern,
you may literally not see it.
Call it eureka blindness.
There is another way to think about these filters,
and that is as models for filters in organizations,
because ideas really only matter if you hear about them.
So, we were looking at the cortex.
We're looking now at an Org chart.
(Laughter)
See anything familiar?
(Laughter)
The networks we create mimic the networks in our brain.
They're just not as efficient
because they haven't had a million years to evolve.
Organizations, the way we know them, have been around for 150 years.
Modern humans, a thousand times that long.
So, how can we do better?
In organizations, the inputs are ideas.
For every good green one, three are bad; maybe 50 per cent make it up one level.
Over time, this is what happens
in a typical organization.
If you're at the top, it's not pretty.
You're getting bombarded with bad ideas or irrelevant ideas,
and many of the good ones never reach you.
Here is how it would work
if the organization processed information the way the brain does.
How do we do it?
By applying the right filters.
Here, what this means, is telling the people who work for you
what you are going to do with the information they give you.
It needs to be specific, actionable.
In essence, it means teaching them your job.
Taking them as apprentices.
Apprenticeship has been around for centuries,
and has done very well; think of the craft guilds.
But what we're talking about here is apprenticeship for knowledge workers.
Some business leaders understand
a value of an apprenticeship in an organization.
Jack Welch, then CEO of GE,
taking Jeffrey Immelt and Larry Bossidy as apprentices.
Immelt went on to become a CEO of GE,
Bossidy, CEO of Allied Signal and Honeywell.
The route to their success was the exchange of ideas
when they worked together.
Our big opportunity is to do this at every level of the organization.
The brain is telling us how to get organized
to generate and recognize ideas.
The brain is giving us a road-map; our challenge is to use it.
Thank you.
(Applause)