Monday, November 16, 2015

The 3-Pipe Solution: The Underrated Creativity of Sherlock Holmes

http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/the-3-pipe-solution-the-underrated-creativity-of-sherlock-holmes/266843/

Holmes is often portrayed as a mechanical logician, but his approach depends more on outside-the-box thinking that, according to modern research, really does help solve problems.



When most people think of Sherlock Holmes, they see a paragon of calculating logic: a chilly, computer-like machine with endless powers of reason. As the UK'sTelegraph put it, "If Holmes is not cold, inhumanly calculating ... he's just not Holmes"—echoing the words of such prior Holmesians as David Grann, who wrote in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes that "Holmes is a cold, calculating machine, a man who is, as one critic put it, 'a tracker, a hunter-down, a combination of bloodhound, pointer, and bull-dog." Even Holmes's creator, Arthur Conan Doyle, tried to dismiss him as "inhuman as a Babbage's calculating machine" when he tired of his creation, just a year before he tried to kill him off entirely in "The Final Problem." But in reality, that perception is far from the truth. In working on my new book Mastermind: How to Think Like Sherlock Holmes, it occurred to me that what allows the detective to attain the heights of deduction that he does is the very thing a computer lacks entirely: the power of imagination.

Consider: When Sherlock Holmes is asked to investigate a mysterious death on the shores of a small village in Sussex, he realizes that the cold-blooded, vicious murderer—the victim has terrible weals all along his back, "as though he had been terribly flogged"—is not exactly of the human variety. While the police focus their efforts on Ian Murdoch, a competitor for the affections of the dead man's fiancée, Holmes follows instead a lead of a different sort: the dead man's last words, "lion's mane." Those words, in turn, lead him to the real killer, none other than a deadly jellyfish.

How does Holmes come upon his solution? He not only opens his mind to the possibility of the nonlinear and improbable, the very hallmarks of creativity, but he makes certain that he has that mind stocked with the most esoteric of knowledge. It's easy to remember Holmes's famous rant to Dr. Watson on the necessity of keeping a pristine mind attic (Holmes's metaphor for the human mind). Far harder is recalling the major asterisk that is attached to that warning: A mind attic is only as useful as its contents and how you use them. If you store only the essentials, and follow only the most obvious path, you can be a t-crossing, i-dotting Scotland Yard detective bar none, but aren't likely to advance much beyond that. Your mind will never be able to make those elusive connections that could lead you to identifying a fish as a killer if you don't have the requisite knowledge base to begin with—and if you aren't willing to risk the possibility of letting a killer go free while you take the time to figure things out.

We remember Holmes's organized logic. We forget that in his mind space, there dwell not only jellyfish with stings that kill, but polyphonic motets and obscure paintings, tomes on bee keeping and discussions of philosophy. Holmes knows that the earth goes round the sun, and then some. And he isn't afraid to employ that knowledge in a non-traditional way. How can he discover the real killer unless he is willing to consider a possibility so seemingly outlandish that it makes him look like a doddering old man? Over and over, his is not the approach of a ruthless logician, but rather one of someone who knows all too well the power of the creative mind.

Why, then, do we tend to forget this essential element of Holmes's approach? As it turns out, it's not at all uncommon to sweep aside the uncertainty of imaginative meandering in favor of the certainty of hard science. Nobel-winning physicist Richard Feynman often expressed surprise at just how often people did that very thing: forget how central creativity is to the scientific method. "It is surprising that people do not believe that there is imagination in science," he once told an audience, echoing the lament of fellow physicist Albert Einstein who, too, bemoaned our propensity to embrace logic at the expense of imagination and intuition—and did so as early as 1929. Now, there is evidence that this tendency to dismiss the imagination of the scientific approach goes much deeper than mere observation. In their frustration, Feynman and Einstein captured what appears to be a basic tendency of the human mind.

In 2011, a team of psychologists led by Jennifer Mueller decided to test a common paradox: Even though we say we value creativity, we often tend to reject creative ideas. The problem, they hypothesized, might lie in our inherent distrust of uncertainty. To test their assumption, they asked a group of participants to take part in a task known as the IAT, the implicit association test. Originally designed to test racial biases, the IAT has since been used to look at bias in any number of areas—age, sex, weight, and the like—by measuring the time it takes for someone to react to a given characteristic that's been paired with a label of either "good" or "bad" by pressing a previously designated key. If we're slower to respond when the trait of interest is paired with negative labels than when it's paired with positive ones, that discrepancy is taken as evidence of bias. In this particular instance, the target concept was creativity.

The researchers first assigned participants to either a certain or an uncertain condition. In the one, subjects had no opportunity to earn extra money, while in the other, they were told that they would potentially receive extra payment, as determined by a future lottery. Both groups then completed the IAT, where creativity-related words, like "novel" or "original," and practicality-related words, like "constructive" and "useful," were paired with positively and negatively valenced stimuli, like "rainbow" and "vomit," respectively. They were then asked to rate their explicit attitudes toward creativity.

What the psychologists discovered might seem counterintuitive, in the age of Apple and Steve Jobs's "Think Different" motto: When faced with uncertainty, we tend to be biased against creative thought. Despite their explicit assertions to the contrary, participants in the uncertain condition—the one in which they believed they had a chance to win money—repeatedly favored practicality over creativity.

Perhaps it's not so surprising, then, that we forget the very thing that makes Holmes, Holmes: his willingness to embrace that uncertain path. The view of Holmes-as-machine is both simpler and safer. It is a line of thinking more in tune with our implicit biases than its alternative—after all, isn't the world as uncertain a place as they come?

Creativity requires novelty. Imagination is all about counterfactuals and untested possibilities that don't yet exist. It is, in short, all about uncertainty. And uncertainty is as frightening as it is potentially embarrassing (there's never a guarantee of success, is there?). Why do you think Conan Doyle's inspectors are always so loath to depart from standard protocol, to do anything that might in the least endanger their investigation or delay it by even an instant? Holmes's imagination frightens them. They aren't willing to take a step back, pause in their headlong pursuit of the culprit, and see whether their path is in fact the best one to take.

But that shortsighted linearity need not be the status quo. After all, many a thinker realer than Holmes manages to overcome to overcome that fear of uncertainty and failure to come up with ideas of incredible daring and imaginative reach. So, how to master that unacknowledged predilection for the tried and true? The answer, once again, might come from Holmes's habits, specifically, from his practice of mindfulness.

When faced with a problem, Holmes often favors the three-pipe solution: Rather than spring into action, he sits with his pipe and allows his mind the time and space to process the case at hand. Such mindful concentration, new research shows, may lead to increased connectivity in the brain's default network, the connections that are active when our brain is in its so-called resting state, in between overt, directed activity. And that connectivity? It may, in turn, allow us to be more creative.

In a study published this fall in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers from the University of Oslo found that connectivity in the default network was related to the quality of past recollection and future speculation in a group of more than 100 children and adolescents: The greater the neural ties, the better the subjects performed on a standard cue-word task, where they had to either recall a past event or imagine a future scenario as prompted by neutral prompts like "forest" or "travel."

Could increased creativity, then, be a mere quiet pipe away? If we rush too quickly to be scientific, to begin our experiment or catch our criminal as soon as possible, we risk never getting to the answer at all. But if we not only remember just how central imagination is to the very scientific method, but then make a habit of quietly reflecting on whatever problem confronts us instead of jumping right in, we may find ourselves over time becoming more creative to begin with, strengthening those very neural connections that will in turn allow us to arrest that jellyfish—and avoid the very embarrassment that we thought we'd escape by sticking only to the path of the tried and true.

Saturday, November 14, 2015

10 Irish Inventions that Changed the World

https://www.thinkbusiness.ie/articles/10-world-changing-irish-inventions/?utm_source=facebook.com&utm_medium=social_paid&utm_campaign=business%20planning_site_content

Here are ten amazing Irish inventions that had a global impact.

Colour photography, invented by John Joly in 1894

Modern day photographers owe a debt of gratitude to a man from the Irish midlands. John Joly was born near the village of Bracknagh in Co. Offaly and was an engineering graduate from Trinity College. In 1894, Joly invented a system of colour photography that was based on taking viewing plates with many narrow lines in three colours. Joly would mark the viewing plate with thin coloured lines and would then place the glass in the camera in front of the picture; the photograph could then be taken. This process was much simpler than anything that had come before. It is now widely accepted that he was responsible for the first practical method of colour photography.

The Guided Torpedo, invented by Louis Brennan in 1877

Would you believe that the world’s first guided missile originated from Castlebar? Louis Brennan, a talented engineer from Castlebar, created a directable torpedo that could be controlled by guide wires. The first design of the torpedo was produced when Brennan was 25. He received funding from the British Navy. In 1887, a government factory began producing “Brennan’s” in Kent. The “Brennan” would go on to be used as a defence mechanism by the British Coastal Defence Forces until the early 20thcentury. However, so far as is known, it was never fired in anger.

The Hypodermic Syringe, invented by Francis Rynd in 1844

Francis Rynd, a Dublin doctor, performed the world’s first subcutaneous injection with his homemade hypodermic syringe. Rynd had been treating a woman who had pain in her face for years and was taking morphine pills without relief. Rynd decided to place the morphine directly under her skin and near the nerves. He created a narrow tube and a cutting implement known as a trocar. Four punctures holes were made, the morphine flowed through the tubes and the rest, as they say, is history.

The Binaural Stethoscope, invented by Arthur Leared in 1851

One of the most important tools in modern medicine, the binaural stethoscope, was invented by a man from the South-East of Ireland. The stethoscope was originally invented in 1819 by a Frenchman, namely, Rene Laennec. Arthur Leared, a Wexford native, realised that Laennec’s instrument could be more effective, so he connected two earpieces to the listening cylinder with rubber tubes. Leared went on to display the stethoscope at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851 and received critical acclaim. The binaural stethoscope paved the way for the development of the modern stethoscope.

The Induction Coil, invented by Rev. Nicholas Callan in 1836

Believe it or not, the induction coil was invented by a priest. Rev Nicholas Callan, a professor of science at St. Patrick’s College Maynooth. Rev Callan was one of Ireland’s greatest inventors. For the induction coil, Callan wound two long wires around the end of an electromagnet and connected the ends of one wire to a battery. When he interfered with or interrupted the current from the battery he received a spectacular spark from the end of the second unconnected coil and consequently the induction coil was born. Funnily enough, the Reverend managed to knock a future archbishop of Dublin unconscious while carrying out tests for his induction coil. Callan’s creation, which is over 170 years old, is still used in car ignitions today.

The Ejector Seat, invented by Sir James Martin in 1946

Bond fans might be surprised to learn that the inventor of the ejector seat was an Irishman. In July 1946, the first live test of an ejector seat took place. The test proved to be a success when an explosion blew away the pilot’s cockpit and a second explosion propelled the pilot out of the plane that enabled him to parachute to safety. As a result, the RAF approved Martin’s idea and within 12 months the entire RAF fleet had been fitted with ejector seats. It is believed that Martin’s invention saved over 5,000 lives by the time of his death in 1981.

The Submarine, invented by John Philip Holland in 1878

It was a rebel from Liscannor, Co. Clare, who completely changed the way war could be conducted at sea, as well as deep sea exploration. Holland, a school teacher, emigrated to Boston in 1872. His first prototype sank on its launch. However, in 1881 Holland launched the ‘Fenian Ram’, funded by the Fenian Brotherhood. It proved to be a success. In the following years, Holland won three competitions run by the US Naval Department to design and build submarines. However, political factors meant that this was an unsuccessful venture. Finally, after successful trials, the US Navy purchased the ‘Holland VII’, its first submarine, and proceeded to order six more. The submarine was now a must-have in naval warfare.

The Bacon Rasher, invented by Henry Denny in 1820

An essential part of the ‘full Irish’, the bacon rasher, was invented by Henry Denny, a Waterford butcher. Denny patented several bacon-curing techniques and completely re-invented the process of how to cure bacon. Before this, bacon was cured by soaking large chunks of meat in brine. Denny decided to use long flat pieces of meat instead of chunks and substituted the brine for dry salt. Soon after, Denny began exporting to mainland Europe, the Americas and as far afield as India. The overall quality and shelf-life of the bacon was dramatically increased. It was an ingenious but simple innovation for its time.

The Cream Cracker, invented by William and Robert Jacob in 1885

Like the bacon rasher, the cream cracker was also invented by a Waterford family in the 1800s. In 1885, the Jacob Family produced this biscuit from yeast dough that was left to ferment for 24 hours. It was flattened and then folded numerous times to create a layered biscuit. Jacob’s Cream Crackers that have been a family favourite since their inception are now produced by machines that can create approximately one million crackers an hour. They are also available to buy in over 35 countries worldwide.

Flavoured Potato Crisps, invented by Joseph ‘Spud’ Murphy in 1954

Luckily for us, Joseph ‘Spud’ Murphy had an enormous distaste for plain crisps. It was the 1950s that saw the introduction of the flavoured potato crisp. Murphy, the founder of Tayto, developed a cheese and onion flavoured crisp in 1954 which would prove to be a success, both at home and abroad. By the 1960s, ‘Spud’ had become a millionaire and was described by Sean Lemass as the very acme of Irish entrepreneurial spirit. Gratefully, we still have manufacturers experimenting with flavours, something that we have ‘Spud’ Murphy to thank for.