Sheena Iyengar (5:52)

Thank you for having me, Sheena.

Shankar Vedantam (5:54)

On September 13, 1940, a large steamship named the SS City of Benares left the United Kingdom on a 2,500mile voyage. Who was on board? Sheena and where was the ship headed?

Sheena Iyengar (6:08)

There were about 400 people on this ship. They, they were Britishers and they were headed to Canada.

Shankar Vedantam (6:17)

Why were they leaving the United Kingdom in the middle of World War II?

Sheena Iyengar (6:21)

Well, this was at a point of British history during the war where they were really in a bad situation. It looked like they were going to lose. And so they were very quickly trying to evacuate a large number of particularly children. The original plan was to evacuate around 210,000 children.

Shankar Vedantam (6:42)

Wow.

Sheena Iyengar (6:42)

But they were just trying to get the children out of the way before bombing started so that the adults would Be ready to fight.

Shankar Vedantam (6:51)

So around this time, the Germans had drawn something of a chokehold around shipping lanes to and from England. How had they done this, Sheena?

Sheena Iyengar (7:01)

Well, essentially no food or military supplies or fuel could come in and out of England because the Germans had these U boats, which were boats that could be on top but could also go underwater, at which point they could very stealthily, you know, torpedo the Allied ships. And they were just very good at this. The Allies had better accuracy in being able to launch torpedoes that every time they would launch a torpedo, their communications would get jammed because the Germans had really good technology at that time for jamming the communications. And they would essentially intercept the torpedoes so they wouldn't get hurt, but they would manage to take down many Allied ships.

Shankar Vedantam (8:01)

So four days into this voyage, a panic breaks out on the ship. It's been torpedoed by a German U boat. Do we have any accounts of what that was like on the ship that night, Sheena?

Sheena Iyengar (8:14)

It was pretty terrible. It was a rough weather that night as well. And so even the people that did manage to get into those lifeboats, even those, many of them did still die because the waters were quite rough. Somewhere around 80 children potentially died. We don't have the exact numbers, but upwards of about two hundred and fifty people died in total.

Shankar Vedantam (8:48)

So this tragedy makes news all over the world and it catches the attention of a woman named Hedy Lamarr. We may need a minute to back up and explain who Hedy Lamarr was. I understand she has an interesting backstory that starts in Vienna, Austria.

Sheena Iyengar (9:03)

Yes, Hedy Lamarr was born in 1914. She was a very famous actress. And when she's about 17, 18 years old, maybe 19 years old, she. She is married to an Austrian arms provider who becomes her first husband. And so she, a Jew, becomes the wife of somebody who provides arms to the Germans and the Italians. And so at these dinners that her husband would host, she would learn a lot about weaponry that was being used by the Nazis.

Shankar Vedantam (9:45)

Wow.

Sheena Iyengar (9:45)

And so even though she wouldn't be allowed to speak at these dinners, she was actually absorbing all of that information. And it said that she even helped advise her husband at night, you know, when people were gone about. About his business dealings. Now, of course, over time, it's obviously becoming more and more anti Semitic. She's feeling more and more uncomfortable with this and so she runs away. She's obviously beautiful. She already is known as an actress. So she does get picked up by Hollywood producers, mgm, and takes a ship from London and goes to Hollywood.

Shankar Vedantam (10:23)

Wow. So she's now working in Hollywood. She's widely seen as a star and sometimes described as the most beautiful woman in the world. But because of her backstory, she also wants to help defeat Nazi Germany. She hears about the sinking of the SS city of Benares, and she talks about it with her friend George Antheil. Was George Antheil also an entertainer, Sheena?

Sheena Iyengar (10:48)

Well, he was a composer and piano player. He was the son of German immigrants, so he was an American, but he certainly had a German heritage. They both learn about what just happened. They're both distressed. They're friends, and they are also people that happen to, as a hobby, play duets together on the piano. She was also an accomplished pianist when growing up in Vienna.

Shankar Vedantam (11:22)

Legend has it that Hetty and George were sitting at the piano one day when they got an idea that would appear to be well outside their area of expertise, how to keep the Nazi U boats from jamming Allied radio signals and sinking their ships.

Sheena Iyengar (11:37)

So let's keep in mind that Hedy does know something about the German technology and how it was able to jam the communications between the Allies. She's now doing a duet. So she also knows about music, and so does George. And as they play, they both have this inspiration or flash of insight. You might say, hey, look, we're both playing different keys, and yet we're in tune, and we know what we're doing, and it's flowing seamlessly. And that's because we both know what's song we're playing. Even though we are using different chords, we're holding on to the same rhythm. So we're able to do this great with great synchrony. And so the question is, wait, if we could do that with music, is that something we could do with communications that would travel via radio?

Shankar Vedantam (12:48)

And how would this work? So you have these two musicians now who are now playing the same song. And because they know they're playing the same song, even though they're in different keys, they can stay in sync with one another. How would this work with torpedoes and communications between Allied ships?

Sheena Iyengar (13:04)

So the way the Allied ships would send communications. Right, so you're an Allied ship and you're sending a torpedo to do damage to this U boat that's headed your way. And as you're sending the communication for this torpedo to head towards the U boat, what does the U boat do? It intercepts and jams that communication. And that's because the communication between the Allies and the torpedo are going along one frequency, or we could say like one, you know, one chord. And so their insight was, what if. What if we were to transmit the message from one radio to. From a transmitter to a receiver in a way that it keeps moving just like music can keep moving. So it's essentially hopping. While it would appear like garbage to somebody else, to the people who know what the message is and what it's trying to do, they would be able to follow it along. So it'll keep hopping in synchrony.

Shankar Vedantam (14:23)

So in other words, instead of transmitting just on one frequency, if I keep changing my frequency as I'm sending my message, but you know, the order in which I'm going to be changing frequencies, you can keep up, the message comes through. But someone trying to jam any one frequency is not going to have any success jamming my message.

Sheena Iyengar (14:42)

That's right. It's like a constantly changing symphony. And they referred to it as frequency hopping.

Shankar Vedantam (14:53)

Now, it's worth pointing out, of course, that George Antheil was the son of German immigrants, as you said, and Hedy Lamarr was from Austria. When they go to the US Navy to say, we've come up with a way to fight Nazi U boats, what happens, Sheena?

Sheena Iyengar (15:07)

Well, they get a patent, and then they take it to the Navy, and the Navy actually decides that they're spies and they didn't do anything with it. It could have actually saved a lot of lives, but they didn't do anything with it. They just didn't trust it.

Shankar Vedantam (15:24)

So Hedy Lamar's invention is not used during the Second World War, but I understand that 20 years later, the military sort of wisens up.

Sheena Iyengar (15:32)

Yeah, they used it during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and it is an amazing invention. I mean, it is the basis behind Bluetooth gps. Wouldn't have been possible without this.

Shankar Vedantam (15:49)

Hedy Lamarr died in 2000. She was 85 years old. Along with George Antheil, she was inducted posthumously into the National Inventors hall of fame in 2014. Solutions to complex problems sometimes come out of nowhere. Who would think two people playing a piano have anything useful to say about halting Nazi submarines? When we come back, the science and the psychology behind light bulb moments. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. The most innovative companies are going further with T Mobile for business, like Delta Airlines. Together with T Mobile for business, Delta Air lines is putting 5G into the hands of ground staff so they can better assist on the go travelers with real information. From the Delta Sky Club to the JetBridge, this is elevating customer experience and tractor supply trusts. 5G Solutions from T Mobile for business to connect over 2200 stores around the country with 5G business Internet plus T Mobile is powering AI solutions so tractor supply team members can match shoppers with the products they need faster. This is enriching customer experience. Take your business further@t mobile.com now. Support for Hidden Brain comes from BetterHelp. What's your perfect night? Is it curling up on the couch for a cozy, peaceful night in therapy can feel like that. Your comfort place where you replenish your energy. And hey, you can even do it from that same comfy couch. This season is the perfect time to give therapy a try. Right from the comfort of home with BetterHelp. Get matched with a tailored therapist based on your needs needs. It's convenient, flexible and suited to your schedule. Find comfort this season with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com hidden to get 10% off your first month. That's betterhelphelp.com hidden this is hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. When we think of aha moments, we tend to think of them as miracles. Isaac Newton watched an apple fall from a tree and bam. He came up with a theory of gravity. The Greek mathematician Archimedes lowered himself into a relaxing bath and came up with insights about density and buoyancy. He is said to have jumped out of the bath and run naked through the streets exclaiming Eureka. Or I have found it. At Columbia University business school psychologist Sheena Iyengar has studied the steps that lead to light bulb moments. Sheena, I want you to walk us through some of the components that you say are behind big ideas, and I want to use an iconic example. Many of us today marvel at the Statue of Liberty. We think it's meaningful, that it represents a powerful vision of the United States of America. We think of it as being a beacon of hope and freedom. But the story of the Statue of Liberty actually starts in a small town in France in the middle of the 19th century. A young man named Frederick Auguste Bartholdi seems to have had artistic talent, so his mom moves the family to Paris to give him more opportunities. Can you tell me Frederic Bartholdi's story?

Sheena Iyengar (19:30)

So Frederick Bartholdi was born in the countryside of France. When he was 2, his father passed away, and shortly thereafter his mom moved them to Paris because she noticed that Frederick had some real artistic talent and she wanted to give him those opportunities. And so he was raised in Paris and he learned the skills of art and in particular, sculpting. When he was a young man, he was among A group of artists that was selected, and they were sent to Egypt. And he was mesmerized by the colossal sculptures that were guarding the ancient Egyptian tombs.

Shankar Vedantam (20:14)

So some years later, after he returns to France, he hears about an interesting project involving the Suez Canal. Tell me a little bit about this. The Suez Canal was being built, and they put out a call for sculptors.

Sheena Iyengar (20:29)

Well, they put out a call for proposals so that people could suggest a sculpture that would be put there. And, you know, the idea was this was going to be at the opening of the Suez Canal, and they invited lots of different proposals. And Frederick Bartholdi submitted a proposal for a colossal woman dressed in robes, carrying a light. He called it the light to Asia. Now, despite having collected multiple proposals, in the end, they decided to just build a small lighthouse there, which is what stands there today.

Shankar Vedantam (21:13)

So the Suez cannot project goes nowhere. But Frederic Bartholdi returns to Paris, and he gets in touch with a friend of his. And this friend of his has an idea about a statue that he once built in America. Why America, Sheena?

Sheena Iyengar (21:28)

Well, as we know, the French have this way of creating republics and then dissolving them. He wants to try to restore the faith of the French people in freedom and democracy. So at this point, the United States is actually proving to be a much better success story than the French. So he has this idea that in order to restore the French people's faith in freedom and democracy, he's going to build a statue and give that as a gift to the United states, honoring the 100 years of the Declaration of Independence. And then he asks Frederick Bartholdi to build the statue.

Shankar Vedantam (22:19)

And what is the idea that Frederick Bartholdi comes up with?

Sheena Iyengar (22:26)

Well, we all know what Lady Liberty looks like. And so the question is, where did Frederick Bartholdi get the idea of Lady Liberty? Well, certainly the idea of this colossal statue comes. You can see that in his initial proposal that he submitted for the Suez Canal, while he's building this sculpture, getting the idea. At that time, there was a very famous painting that was hanging in Museo de Orsay, and it was this painting called Leverite by the famous painter Le vev. Now, Leverite means the lady of Truth. And if you were to see this painting, the lady of Truth has some similarities. So the positioning is very similar to Leverite. Now comes the crown. Now, the French were really enamored of concepts like liberty, right? And so the. The seal for the Second Republic was Libertas, the Roman goddess. And that was actually probably jingling in Bartholdi's pocket in the form of a 5 franc coin which had Libertas on it. And then finally, you know, when you look at the face of Lady Liberty, many people have commented on the likeness between the face of Lady Liberty and the face of the most important woman in Bartholdi's life, and that was his mother. And when he was asked whether that was the face of his mother, he did not deny it.

Shankar Vedantam (24:17)

Wow. So, to summarize, a French artist draws on Egyptian sculptures to design something for the Suez Canal. When that plan falls through, he teams up with a friend in France to raise money for a sculpture in America, he draws on a local coin and his mother's face to design the sculpture. But the story doesn't end there. Today we see the statue, especially with its location in New York harbor, as a symbol of hope for immigrants and refugees. How did that transformation come about, Sheena?

Sheena Iyengar (24:46)

Yeah, that's interesting, right? Because certainly when you look at Lady Liberty, there is a broken shackle at her feet, which is supposed to commemorate the abolition of slavery. But yet, as you're correct, it came to become a symbol of freedom that was more than freedom from slavery. Now, at the unveiling, there was a woman by the name of Emma Lazarus.

Shankar Vedantam (25:16)

Emma was a descendant of Spanish and Portuguese refugees.

Sheena Iyengar (25:20)

They were Jews. They were escaping the Inquisition. And she's asked to write something for the opening. Now, she draws on her family's experience and essentially writes that famous poem that we all associate with Lady Liberty, who welcomes the yearning masses to her golden threshold. She writes that poem, and that is read at the time of the unveiling. So you have Lady Liberty, and now you have a poem that is giving it an interpretation, a meaning. Now, the poem actually may not have gone anywhere, but years later, around early 1900s, the great grandchild of Alexander Hamilton wants to give even more meaning and more attention to Lady Liberty. She finds the poem written by Emma Lazarus collecting dust in an old bookstore. And she then essentially was responsible for having the poem hung on the pedestal upon which Lady Liberty now stands. Wow. And I think if you put those pieces together right, the story of the sculpture, the poem, then its association with the original forefathers. And as you know, Hamilton himself was an immigrant who came here for refuge. And so if you put these pieces together, you have what becomes a very powerful symbol of hope and freedom. And certainly her location ends up welcoming the yearning masses that come from all across the globe seeking refuge in New York's harbor.

Shankar Vedantam (27:16)

You know, it's striking, Sheena. I've seen the statue of Liberty a few times. And it's really, you know, so dramatic, so iconic. And of course, when I think of it, I have all these associations already in my head. But really what you're showing here is that this was less of one, you know, magic moment of epiphany and more about a series of recombinations of past ideas and past events.

Sheena Iyengar (27:42)

Sure. One person has one combination, and then the next person creates a new combination, and then the next person takes those combinations and recombines yet again. And that's how you get a really big idea. A big idea is not just one person. The one person might has the inspiration. They create the initial combination. But in order for that initial combination to go places, you essentially need other people to be able to see that idea and reimagine the potential of that idea. And that's how it scales.

Shankar Vedantam (28:31)

Now, of course, lots of people had seen giant Egyptian sculptures before. Frederick Bartholdi, but he did not just look. He actually noticed something. He filed it away in his memory. You tell another wonderful story about the power of observation. In the late 19th century, a physical education teacher in Springfield College, Massachusetts, was dealing with a problem. James Naismith. Students played football, baseball, lacrosse, rugby, and soccer. But in the winter, they were all cooped up. How did he solve this problem, Sheena?

Sheena Iyengar (29:00)

So he was basically a teacher, a gym teacher, and he was given a task by his boss to do the following. He had a whole bunch of teenagers. We all know what teenagers are like, and he had to get rid of their energy. And so he needed to make sure that he created a sport that could be done indoors. Because this was in the winter, and it's Massachusetts. You needed to make a sport that would have the same amount of. Required the same amount of speed and effort and would tucker them out, like soccer, lacrosse, or rugby. You also needed to make sure that it wasn't so rough that they could get hurt. And you wanted to make sure that it was a team sport. Okay, so those were his tasks. So first he drew on pieces that he could sort of essentially steal from sports that already existed. And so sports like football, soccer, he says, okay, what we'll do is we'll have two teams, and they have to get a ball into some kind of a goal. But, you know, he said, look, we can use the ball like a. Like what you would use in soccer. But, you know, they can't use. They can't use their feet and all that. They gotta pass the ball. So he was able to get a lot of his pieces just by stealing from things like soccer and lacrosse and rugby. But the main hurdle that he had to then cross is, how do I create a game that can be played indoors that's competitive, that's going to feel really competitive and hard to achieve, but at the same time, safe? And so now his experience with another sport, which most people hadn't heard of, it was like a, you know, a sort of hobby sport that very few people played at the time, which was called Duck on the Rock, where you would have to throw a stone and topple a stone off of a bigger stone so it would fall into the water. Now, in his case, what he's thinking, okay, well, what if I use a peach basket? And that is exactly what he used in the original game. And what we're going to do is we're going to use the soccer ball and throw the soccer ball such that it has to fall into this peach basket. And essentially, thus was born basketball.

Shankar Vedantam (31:31)

One thing this suggests, though, and it's striking, as you talked about his process, his process was not just, I have a task. I've been set a challenge. I'm just going to sit inside my head and try and figure out this challenge on my own. He actually looked at everything that he knew from his past life. He looked at examples from soccer, from rugby, from lacrosse, and he recombined them. It's worth pointing out that in some ways, I think we have this illusion that the inventor is the person who sits in a room by himself or herself and comes up with a genius idea. This paints a very different picture of it. Sheena.

Sheena Iyengar (32:06)

There's only so much you can do with the pieces that you have in your head, right? You can take the pieces and you can scan your mind for all kinds of prior experiences. And, you know, you might get lucky and remember something that you hadn't earlier thought to use. But chances are, if you're repeatedly stuck, it means there's a piece you're missing. And that means you gotta start searching outside of yourself to find that missing piece.

Shankar Vedantam (32:39)

You see that besides a capacity to observe the world carefully, multiple studies have found that creative people tend to have one personality trait in common. Can you talk about the power of curiosity?

Sheena Iyengar (32:51)

Well, curiosity is the trait that is most associated with creativity. And the reason why it's such a powerful force is because when you're curious, you start searching in lots of little corners for things, and you discover all kinds of unique bits of information that can be helpful when you're trying to get a new idea.

Shankar Vedantam (33:21)

I returned myself recently from A visit to Paris, where I went to the Louvre and I fought through crowds to get a look at the Mona Lisa. You say that the painter Leonardo da Vinci is one of the most iconic examples of curiosity driving creativity. How so?

Sheena Iyengar (33:38)

So this was a guy who, you know, clearly is most famous for things like the Mona Lisa and the Last Supper. But what he did was he just kept studying stuff. I mean, it's like back in the 1500s, right? And yet, you know, he's studying everything. He even would take dead bodies and try to examine the anatomy. He. If you look at his notebooks, he essentially was so interested in all kinds of things that he began to make rough drafts of drawings that sort of are like robots and helicopters. A driverless car, in fact, the first driverless car that was showcased in New York City in Manhattan, in fact, in the early 1900s. It was a failure at the time, but it was building off of some of the original drawings by Leonardo da Vinci. He was very much a polymath in some ways.

Shankar Vedantam (34:37)

I think one of the things you're pointing to, Sheena, is that when we're searching for a solution, it might not be sufficient just to look in the domain in which the problem exists. Part of what made Leonardo da Vinci so successful was he was voracious in terms of where he was looking for ideas. He didn't care about limiting himself to one particular domain.

Sheena Iyengar (34:58)

Yes. Now you want to be careful about something, which is that we often think that all we have to do is just expose ourselves to lots and lots and lots of information bits, particularly in the modern age, mindlessly consuming lots of random bits of information without having any understanding of the why, the what isn't going to make you more creative. It does have to be driven by your curiosity and your curiosity. The reason why it's so important is because when you're curious, you know what question is leading you to search wherever you've searched. And that then means that you now know why you're looking at this information, why it matters, which then enables you to organize and categorize that information in your brain in a way that you can later access it.

Shankar Vedantam (35:56)

You say that persistence turns out to be another driver of creativity. And you and others demonstrate this through the use of an exercise called the toothpick test. What is this test, Sheena?

Sheena Iyengar (36:07)

It's a beautiful illustration of a very basic insight about human creativity. If I ask you to come up with as many different uses as you can think of for how to use a pile of toothpicks, and I give you Two minutes and you'll come up with a whole bunch of ideas. Typically anywhere from two to. I've seen somebody get as many as 30 different ideas in two minutes. And then I ask you, you know, look, if I gave you another two more minutes, how many more ideas would you come up with? You know, some people might say 5, 6, 7, but most people will say, I've run out of ideas. But it turns out they do come up with more ideas than they expected to in the second round of two minutes. And then if I ask them again, hey, how many more ideas do you think you would be able to come up with if I gave you another two minutes? At this point, they really feel like they've burnt out, they've run out of ideas. They're down to zero. They still come up with more ideas than they originally predicted. Now, what's interesting here is that in the very beginning of, let's call it mind wandering or creativity exercise, ideas do come to you fast and furious. And it feels amazing. You're in the zone, you're in the flow. You love it. However, that's actually when you're most likely to have your most redundant ideas with others. So you're least likely to be your most creative because you're just coming up with the same ideas that everybody else is coming up with as you're forced to persist or as you force yourself to persist. Even though the ideas will come out in less volume, the quality of the ideas is going up. And as the quality goes up, it means you're more likely to have ideas that are less redundant with others, that are the true pearls.

Shankar Vedantam (38:15)

From medical breakthroughs to great works of art, we like to believe that creativity, invention and innovation happen in an instant. That artists and inventors draw from a mystical source of creativity. And then inspiration strikes. But moments of inspiration do not necessarily strike in an instant. It's more accurate to say they are a process of gradual cultivation and recombination. When we come back, how to plant the seeds of inspiration to cultivate your own eureka moments. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. Support for Hidden Brain comes from World Wildlife Fund. Time is running out to protect our planet, our species and our future. But together, we can stop the greatest threats to life on this planet and protect the natural resources that sustain and inspire us. Your gift to World Wildlife Fund helps people and nature thrive. World Wildlife Fund works to achieve lasting conservation results like protecting tiger populations from habitat loss, poaching and the illegal wildlife trade. And WWF is working to secure a future future for other species, too, because so many of them are in need. World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet report estimates that wildlife populations have plummeted by 73% since 1970. But it's not too late for nature to recover, and even small changes can make a world of difference this holiday season. Choose a gift that gives back. Donate to WWF at MyWWF. Hey, I'm Yara Shahidi and I'm the host of the Optimist Project. This is the podcast that asks what gives you hope. Each week I sit down with change makers you may or may not know from comedy, music, academia, and more to uncover what inspires them to create a better tomorrow. Join us as we find out ways that we can cultivate optimism in our own lives. You can find the Optimist Project wherever you get your podcasts. Don't forget to follow the show so you never miss an episode. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedanta. The famous French sculptor Frederic Auguste Bartholdi got his inspiration for the Statue of Liberty from ancient Egyptian sculptures, a silver coin and his mother's eyes. The actress Hedy Lamarr came up with a way to target torpedoes while playing the piano with a friend. Nancy Johnson invented the hand crank ice cream freezer using spatulas in her kitchen and a bathroom tub. In many stories of human invention, there are common threads. Innovators take inspiration from outside sources, and they remember these sources as they are combining ideas. At Columbia University, Sheena Iyengar says all of us can learn from these insights. She is the author of Think how to Innovate. Sheena, we've talked about how even the most prolific artists borrow from others and take inspiration from the outside world. But very often, inspiration doesn't come from the familiar, but the unfamiliar. In 2007, the researchers Lee Fleming, Santiago Mingo, and David Chen made a list of over 35,000 inventors who had worked on patents with at least one other person. Tell me about the study and what they found.

Sheena Iyengar (42:00)

Usually when you have a patent, it's not usually by yourself. In fact, they isolated those patents that were collaborations. Then they asked the question, which patents are most likely to be more creative, meaning cut across multiple boundaries. And they looked at the patents between individuals that had known each other for a lifetime, maybe been working together for many, many years, versus patents that were between individuals that we say have weak ties, meaning they don't know each other very well. It turned out that it was weak ties, meaning they didn't know each other very well, typically came from different worlds. They were the ones who were most likely to come up with patents that cut across different boundaries, different categories, and were most creative. They were also more successful.

Shankar Vedantam (42:52)

I understand there was a similar study that looked at the television series Doctor who.

Sheena Iyengar (42:57)

Yeah, that's a cool. One of the longest running sci fi shows. Right. And so what the scientists did with Doctor who is, you know, so the producer of shows like that typically remain constant. But what'll happen from, you know, different across different series is that the directors and the writers might change. And it turned out again that when you have weak ties, those shows just did better. They were, you know, got way more interesting.

Shankar Vedantam (43:34)

Why would this be the case, Sheena?

Sheena Iyengar (43:36)

Well, when you and I know each other for a while, we just create our own little, you know, echo chamber. And so unless we are actively going out to collect different experiences, you know, you're just going to keep producing similar variations of the same stuff. And so if you want a new way of framing a problem or new information, it really does come from somebody that just sees the world in a different way and they have different experiences.

Shankar Vedantam (44:14)

I want to talk about another component of innovation, and that is about identifying the right problem. In 2020, Stacy Boland was an engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab. She was working on a project that had her tracking different types of air pollution. At that point, Covid struck and her office shut down. And like many of us, Stacy went home. Can you tell me the story of what happened next, Sheena?

Sheena Iyengar (44:38)

Well, that's a really inspirational story. This was a team that was on the campus of Caltech, but they work for NASA. They go home and they're, you know, bored, and they feel like they should be doing something to make themselves more useful. And every afternoon on Zoom, they're saying, okay, well, let's think about all the problems that we're seeing in the newspaper. And they would just make a list. You know, they were reading the same thing you and I were reading. You know, how do we get more masks? How do we get people to stop touching their face? How do we deal with the ventilator crisis? How do we deal with the supply chain crisis? There were all kinds of crises going on at the. At the time. And every day they would make a list and then they would say, well, which of these problems do we think we might be able to help with? And I think that's what. That's a really important question, right? Because we all want to help on lots of things. But they asked, which one would we have the ability to Help with. And so they're saying, okay, well, we do know something about breathing, right, because they dealt with breathing in outer space. And so they say, well, is it possible that we might be able to help with the ventilator crisis? And so Stacy Boland was the one who led that. And, you know, it's very impressive. I mean, she didn't have any medical degrees. She did have family members who were in medicine. And she took advantage of that. And so she began to. First, they collected a lot of information from the doctors. What parts of the ventilator were really necessary. You know, what were the stumbling blocks as to why we didn't have more ventilators available to people. And so, little by little, in the space of 37 days, they were able to create a miracle. They created a briefcase size ventilator to Mount Sinai, and that was their first test case. And it turned out that it worked. Now, you and I both know that ultimately it turned out the ventilator wasn't as important as they originally thought. But it's still in circulation, this ventilator. It's still used in remote parts of Africa.

Shankar Vedantam (47:01)

Sheena says that one of the keys to the NASA team's success was that they picked the right problem. The researcher Paul Knott at Ohio State University has done research on this issue. He and others have found that half of the ideas and strategies that companies come up with fail.

Sheena Iyengar (47:18)

And the reason why their new strategic visions fail is most often because they end up creating a solution to the wrong problem. And they often only discover that when it's kind of too late, after they've started the implementation, then they'll realize, wait, this isn't what we were trying to do. And so it is. I mean, we understood. Underestimate the importance of really taking that time to understand and define your problem. Well, I mean, Einstein put it succinctly when he said that if I have an hour to save the planet, I would spend the first 55 minutes thinking about the problem and the last five minutes thinking about the solution. You really have to understand that problem. Well.

Shankar Vedantam (48:11)

Inspiration often involves bringing together different ideas from our past. It involves learning and memory. But things often come together in novel forms in unexpected moments. Researchers call this mind wandering, which is basically a fancy term for daydreaming.

Sheena Iyengar (48:28)

Overall, we as humans do need to do some amount of it. That's when we do a lot of our problem solving. That's why you often have flashes of insight in the shower, when you're taking a nap, or when you're doing some other sort of routinized task like exercise or cooking. It's when our minds are wandering that we're more likely to sort of naturally try out different combinations of information bits to try out different solutions. Again, your ability, though, to come up with a really good solution with what you have in your head depends on what you've got up there. If you don't have the relevant pieces, then no amount of mind wandering is going to magically give you the answer.

Shankar Vedantam (49:16)

So me just hanging out in the shower and waiting for inspiration to strike, that's not going to do it, Sheena?

Sheena Iyengar (49:21)

I mean, you might get some ideas for a story, but if it's something you know nothing about, then, yeah, no, I don't think so.

Shankar Vedantam (49:30)

One of the curious things about creativity is that we often believe that the more options and tools we have at our disposal, the better off we're going to be. Can you talk a moment about how constraints might not be the enemy of creativity?

Sheena Iyengar (49:45)

Well, it's well known that artists, even jazz musicians, will say that you don't want to give people complete freedom that creates noise. What you want is to give it constraints. And so that even when people break boundaries and go against them, they still just end up erecting new boundaries. Now, when you do studies and you give people unlimited options versus just a few options. So, for example, there's a very famous set of studies that were done by colleagues at nyu and you have them make paintings or scarves, it turns out that if they're given a few materials to work with, like six different materials versus like 12 to 15 materials, it turns out that the ones who were given fewer materials end up making things that are far more creative. And, you know, of course, there's a long history of research that I've been a part of that shows that in general, giving people more options doesn't actually lead to all the benefits that we often associate think it will give us.

Shankar Vedantam (51:03)

Yeah. I have to ask you to tell me again about that study you ran many years ago at a gourmet grocery store in Northern California. We've talked about it the last time you were on Hidden Brain. But can you tell me again about your famous jam study, Sheena?

Sheena Iyengar (51:20)

Oh, sure. It was done in this store called Drager's, which is located in Menlo Park, California. It's still there if you're a Californian and want to visit. And this store in the 90s was really special because it offered people an unusual amount of variety. So like 250 types of mustards, vinegars, mayonnaises, over 500 different types of fruits and vegetables. And so I did what has now been dubbed as the quote jam study. So at that time, they had 348 different types of jam in the jam aisle. We created a tasting booth where we either put out six different flavors of jam or 24 different flavors of jam. And we looked at two things. First, we looked at in which case were people more likely to stop and taste some jam. More people stopped when there were 24, 60% than when there were 6, 40%. And then we looked at in which case were people more likely to buy a jar of jam. And it turned out that of the people who stopped when there were 24 on display, only 3% of them bought. Whereas of the people who stopped when they were 6, 30% of them bought. So people were clearly more attracted to more options, but when it came down to making a choice, they were more likely to make a choice when they encountered less than when they encountered more. There's been over a thousand studies now that have looked at the consequences of offering not just people, actually even non humans, more and more choice. And it turns out that the more choices you have, all kinds of interesting negative consequences associated with it. You know, like even crickets and frogs, the more mate options they have, the less likely they are to mate.

Shankar Vedantam (53:28)

And they don't even have Tinder and Grindr.

Sheena Iyengar (53:31)

No.

Shankar Vedantam (53:44)

What do you think it is about the multiplicity of choices that has negative effects on our minds? And in the context of creativity, what do you think it is about constraints that actually might aid us, Sheena?

Sheena Iyengar (53:56)

Well, okay, so let's start with the premise, right, that in general, we have cognitive limitations, right? And the thing is, for you to be able to be creative, think about the exercise of creativity. It requires you to have a bunch of pieces and to not only be able to have them in your memory bank in a way that you can kind of see, say, what they are, but to be able to keep manipulating them in lots of different ways. And that means in order for your mind to be able to be facile enough to do that, it is going to need fewer pieces.

Shankar Vedantam (54:41)

Yeah. It makes me think, as you're saying that, Sheena, that there are in some ways two problems. One is we might not have enough information, especially perhaps, you know, non domain information in domains that we're not less familiar with. We might not have all the information we need in unfamiliar domains. So that's a story about a lack of pieces that we can manipulate in our heads. But there's also a twin problem, which is we may have too many, and if we have too many, they all end up, you know, swirling around in our heads and we don't know which ones to pick to actually recombine.

Sheena Iyengar (55:13)

That's right. And in fact, when you look at the marketplace of products, there is something that's now been dubbed as featuritis, which is that products that have too many features are actually less likely to be bought.

Shankar Vedantam (55:31)

Sheena Iyengar is a psychologist at Columbia University. She's the author of Think how to Innovate. Sheena, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain.

Sheena Iyengar (55:42)

Thank you.

Shankar Vedantam (55:47)

Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy, Paul Kristen Wong, Laura Kwerel, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer. I'm Hidden Brain's Executive editor. For more ideas about creativity and many other topics, please consider joining our podcast subscription Hidden Brain Plus. You can access a free seven day trial of Hidden Brain plus, including episodes that you won't hear anywhere else by going to support.hiddenbrain.org if you listen to the show on Apple Podcasts, you can find Hidden Brain in that app or by going to Apple Co HiddenBrain. Your subscription helps us to bring you this show week in, week and week out, and we truly appreciate your support. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.