Stephen Shapiro explains why expert brains get stuck in familiar patterns. Your brain finds quick answers and stops searching, killing innovation. He uses a misplaced-keys story to show how the first solution blocks better ones.
Chapters
If we look at the brain, you will see that there are neural pathways, these grooves that get built to things that we think about a lot, we've thought about for a long time or we've thought about recently. The brain is designed for rapid recall of the past. Because here's the thing we need to get. The brain is not wired for innovation. The brain is wired for survival. And what the brain, in its infinite wisdom, says is, hey, we're sitting here in Providence. We're alive today. That's a good thing. Well, guess what? Whatever we did yesterday kept us alive. And whatever we did the day before that kept us alive. I could do things differently, I could do things better. But guess what? That's risky. So the brain chooses to replicate the past. So what ends up happening is if you're an expert in something, an expert in technology or whatever it might be, you will come up with an answer quickly based on those neural pathways. Now, here's the compounding issue, and I'm going to give you a simple analogy. I'm a somewhat disorganized person. People who know me know that I misplace things a lot. And I want you to think about the last time you misplaced something. So, like, literally two days ago, couldn't find my keys. I'm looking everywhere for them. Going through my pants, going through my briefcase, going through my laundry, going through my desk. Fifteen minutes goes by. You finally find the item you're looking for. What do you inevitably say to yourself, can you believe it? They were in the last place I looked? Well, of course, who finds something and keeps on looking for it? That'd be ridiculous. And the same thing is true of the brain. When you find an answer quickly, especially when you are an expert, you will stop looking. And that is one of the big issues of innovation. So what we're going to explore today in our time together is how do we speed up the brain? How do we overcome the brain's desire to focus on survival, not innovation? And how do we, importantly, do this in an efficient manner?
