Mindframe

Where do great ideas come from? Often, the answer is “other great ideas, sort of mashed together.” The term “remix culture” was coined after the invention of technologies that made hiphop possible: literally sampling pre-existing recordings. Sugarhill Gang’s landmark “Rapper’s Delight” samples the bass riff from Chic’s “Good Times,” a riff which has since been sampled dozens of times, by everyone from Grandmaster Flash to Will Smith to Daft Punk. Of course, the concept of using someone else’s work to make something new has been around since nearly the dawn of music. In his classic Folk Songs of America , historian Alan Lomax takes a moment to defend “cowboy music” from “book-learned folklorists” who at the time alleged that it didn’t count as a true folk movement, since so many of the songs were reworkings of older ballads. “To my mind these critics have merely pointed to the fact that the West was a cultural melting pot,” Lomax wrote in 1960. “…That this evocative and self-...

Here’s one way in which all that talk about big-city glamor may be backed up by fact. Statistically, large cities yield a far higher number of patents and inventions than towns or suburbs. At first glance, there may seem to be an obvious reason: a higher headcount means a higher total output. Surely, the two would increase proportionally. However, according to theoretical physicist Geoffrey West, the truth is more complicated—and more interesting. According to Steven Johnson in Where Good Ideas Come From , West’s research showed “the average resident of a metropolis with a population of five million people was almost three times more creative than the average resident of a town of a hundred thousand.” In other words, it wasn’t just an overall rise in creativity, but a rise among individuals as well. So, what’s going on? Researchers from MIT Media Laboratory’s Human Dynamics Lab think they know the answer. Their work indicates that greater population density leads to higher rates...

What is the most practical method for generating creativity? Despite our growing understanding of those neural processes, that question haunts every scientist, writer, artist, filmmaker, athlete, inventor, and any other person hoping to make something great. Much has been written about the connection between creativity and what’s called the default network: the mental mechanisms associated with mind wandering and daydreaming. The default network is the soup de jour. This might be because there is something inherently alluring about the idea of epiphany, that bolt-out-of-the-blue inspiration seen as the mind fruit of spontaneous genius. What doesn’t get as much airtime is the role of domain knowledge—that is, the breadth and depth of your familiarity with a given field, including the contents of your associative memory and the sum total of your practice regime. One of the best-known epiphany stories occurred around 1666 when Sir Isaac Newton was allegedly conked on the h...

The human brain is one of the true wonders of the world; after all, it contained the source material for building each of the seven famous Wonders.  From Twinkies to arugula, just about any scrap of digestible matter can power it: a machine that runs nonstop for an average of seventy years, somehow composed largely of fat. So it's no wonder that we're fascinated. Understanding how the brain works is front and center for the scientific community. In April of 2013, President Obama announced that the U.S. government had budgeted a hundred million dollars to begin a project to map the human brain, his call to action nearly an echo of Kennedy's imperative to land on the moon some fifty years before. Brain exploration leads us to Michael Gazzaniga. Not exactly a household name—and no, he's not latest new Republican candidate for presidency.) He is, however, one of the founding fathers of cognitive neuroscience, a field which seeks to find the connection betwee...

When you think about Seinfeld, it's likely you think of his perpetually rerun TV show by the same name. His comedy was built on seemingly offhand observations, which came off as effortless but belied an incredible amount of hard work. Love it or hate it, Seinfeld's sitcom "about nothing" reportedly managed to earn him a cool 267 million dollars in 1998 alone, according to James Clear—and it turned him into an icon. Bee Movie aside, his name still carries a certain cachet. For instance, perhaps you've heard of the Seinfeld Productivity Program? James Clear quotes software developer and aspiring comedian Brad Isaac about a chance encounter in a comedy club, wherein Isaac had a chance to ask advice from the comedy legend and future animated bee himself: He said the way to be a better comic was to create better jokes and the way to create better jokes was to write every day. He told me to get a big wall calendar that has a whole year on one page and han...

  Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, in examining the lives of Sigmund Freud, Albert Einstein, Pablo Picasso, Igor Stravinsky, T. S. Eliot, Martha Graham, and Mohandas Gandhi, suggests that there is a certain Faustian bargain to genius level mastery that is often required, sacrificing other important things in your life in order to harness your full focus and attention towards your passion. “My study reveals that, in one way or another, each of the creators became embedded in some kind of a bargain, deal, or Faustian arrangement, executed as a means of ensuring the preservation of his or her unusual gifts. In general, the creators were so caught up in the pursuit of their work mission that they sacrificed all, especially the possibility of a rounded personal experience.” [1] That idea has been forever immortalized in the story of bluesman Robert Johnson. In 1935, Robert Johnson went to a lonely crossroads at midnight and sold his soul to the devil in order to become t...

One thing's for sure: Americans love their coffee. According to the National Coffee Association, we drink an average of 3.1 cups a day and spend a total of 40 billion dollars every year on it. We depend on our caffeine, for that boost in the morning or for an after-lunch second wind. What you might not know is that the buzz you feel after slamming a latte is not actually the caffeine. Adenosine, the circadian rhythm hormone that helps usher in sleep, starts as a slow trickle when you wake up in the morning and slowly builds in your system so that by nightfall, you're ready for a little shut-eye. Caffeine is adenosine's doppelgänger, essentially mimicking its shape and grabbing up all the adenosine receptors when it hits your brain. Once the adenosine supply is cut off, the naturally occurring stimulants dopamine and glutamate act like a couple of kids with mom and dad on vacation, which is to say: it's party time. That surge of energy is just your dopamine and...

General Patraeus, Tiger Woods, Lance Armstrong, Jonah Lehrer, Tanya Harding: an incomplete list of those who, at the peak of their careers, and the peak of their honors and accolades, fell from grace. The names and details may change, but scandals are forever. No matter what, you can rest assured that someone somewhere is about to take a tumble in the eyes of their local community—or the public at large. Yet each time it happens, many of us are stunned. Those we saw as the embodiment of a myriad of virtues—courage, self-restraint, fair-mindedness, perseverance, and humility—fail to live up to the ideal.  It can feel almost like a betrayal: just who are these individuals, and how did they manage to dupe us?   A more realistic question might be, “Why do we believe virtuous traits are immutable? Why are we convinced that, once demonstrated in one arena, a quality will apply across the board to a variety of very different circumstances?” Tiger Woods shows amazi...

When it comes to Carol Dweck’s concepts of mindset, northwestern Alabama might not be the first region that leaps into your mind. And yet sitting on the north bank of the Tennessee River is an unlikely success story, almost a perfect illustration of just how much can go right when growth-minded attitudes are in place.   Growth mindset, of course, is the attitude that skill and intelligence can always be improved with effort. It frames challenges as opportunities, failures as lessons to be learned, and success as a result of pushing oneself. On the other hand, fixed mindset holds talent as something inborn and innate. The prospect of failure is a terrifying specter lurking over every risk, threatening to show you were never that great after all.  Even if you're familiar with these ideas, the story of Muscle Shoals, Alabama is a beautiful illustration of the importance of attitude.   In 1965, songwriter and musician Rick Hall opened up a recording studio ...