Optional Interview with Dr. Robert Bilder on Creativity and Problem Solving

Dr. Robert Bilder directs the consortium for Neuropsychiatric Phenomics, which is a team of more than 50 investigators most centered at the University of California in Los Angeles.

This consortium aims to understand neuropsychological phenotypes on a genome wide scale.

Through a combination of human research, basic research, and informatic strategies.

Basically, Dr. Bilder is digging to create a fundamentally new understanding of how to look at personality disorders and diseases that have an effect on personality.

In this regard, Dr. Bilder also directs and co-directs a slew of other important centers.

But of the most interest to us, Dr. Bilder is the Director of the Tennenbaum Center for the Biology of Creativity one of the most important programs in the country involved in the study of creativity.

So with that, it’s a pleasure to speak here with Dr Robert Bilder.

Thank you so much for joining us here today Dr Bilder.

You’re one of the world’s foremost experts on creativity.

So I have a question for you, sometimes my students will tell me. Now, wait a minute. Other people have solved this problem before.

So, if I think about it and figure out how to solve this problem, I’m actually not being creative while I’m solving this problem, because other people have already solved this problem.

What are your thoughts on that situation?

Well, I think until you’ve solved the problem yourself you haven’t exercised your brain and made the unique connections in your brain, that are needed to solve that problem. So, we could distinguish between those things that are created for the world, which that may not be creative with respect to everything else that’s been done before. But if we think about what’s been done that’s unique for you, something new for you and that has value to you, then that satisfies a criteria for creativity.

And it’s important for your, your brain to do that in order to pursue other creative problems.

Well, I couldn’t agree more. So I, I’m glad you made that point. When you’re trying to learn something new, and you speak publicly, sometimes you, like everyone, is criticized for it. What advice do you have for handling this kind of criticism?

You know, someone told me something that I’m surprised I only heard a few weeks ago. And they said leadership is the ability to disguise panic.

And I think that if I had to think of all of the occasions i’ve had when i’ve had great concerns about what was going on, or about handling criticisms, and I think that it may only be through repeated experience that one learns how to cope with that a little bit better.

Always difficult but I think the only advice I can give to others is to always adopt the same kind of curiosity about your own shortcomings and your own difficulty getting the big picture and understanding the entire scope of the problem that you would apply to others and to, to any problem in general.

I like that too, sort of be, be willing to accept discomfort sometimes because that’s necessary.

You know, some people would say that it’s only when you experience some discomfort that you’re actually accomplishing some kind of change.

So, to the extent that one wants to make progress, it’s necessarily going to involve some degree of discomfort.

That’s the nature of change.

Physical change in the brain has to involve some work and that work has to involve some, some discomfort.

But I couldn’t agree more.

I’m reminded, my old swimming coach used to say no pain, no gain.

Yes, indeed.

And that may also be true of the brain.

Sometimes those old proverbs are really so true. You know, that’s why they’re proverbs. You have some very interesting insights regarding creativity and being disagreeable. Could you give our viewers just a little bit of insight about that.

Sure, sure so it’s interesting that when we have studied personality it turns out that their.

Our various models of personality, or temperament or character. But they pretty much all boil down to five factors, and these have been very reliably seen over time. And the way that I find easiest to remember those five factors is to use the acronym OCEAN, which stands for openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticisim. And now that we’ve looked at that personality characteristics of people and then tried to relate their personality characteristics to their degree of creative achievement. We find that there are two correlations here one of them’s not surprising at all. Openness to a new experience is associated with great achievement. But then we find something that’s perhaps not quite as intuitive, there is a correlation also with agreeableness but that correlation is negative. So it means that people who are less agreeable or more disagreeable tend to show higher creative achievement. And I think that we might consider this to be a facet of nonconformism. Those who tend to challenge the status quo, challenge models, and don’t believe things just because other people have said them.

I think that these are our folks who are more likely to be creative achievers. I think so, too. That’s, that’s a very interesting and it’s a counter-intuitive finding.

Yes. Usually people think agreeableness is, you know, a nice, positive trait. And, indeed, agreeableness is a nice, positive trait yet, there are occasions when disagreeableness, Can push the envelope, help us to challenge prior conventions and make the kinds of pushes forward you know, that are outside the box.

I think sometimes it’s just, it’s hard to walk that fine line between being being a, being agreeable, Because things make sense.

And then sometimes stepping back and being willing to be disagreeable because it doesn’t make sense to you, and then sometimes you find out, actually, it does make sense, But sometimes, you’re right to be disagreeable.

So finding that fine line of where to agree and where to disagree, and being willing to disagree if you think that something is not quite right, I think that’s an important line to find.

Yeah, it’s, it’s difficult to know how to balance the correct approach.

And indeed, I think that’s one of the cornerstones of creativity, just by following from the root definitions of, of creativity.

Which typically emphasize on the one hand whatever the product is, to be considered creative has to be new. But then it also has to be useful or valued by someone. So, this involves a kind of attention between doing something that may be totally driven by your own vision of things, and those things that are going to end up being adopted or used by others. So it means that you can create things that may be novel, wonderful, and strange. But if they’re too novel, too strange, then they’re not going to be considered wonderful by others.

So finding this sweet spot in the range between what you find to be the newest and most valuable and exciting. And what others believe is I think that’s a life long process of, of deliberation and balance.

That’s so true. I, I think writers in particular, writers and inventors are both, they have to face what other people’s opinions of their work are.

And sometimes it’s just surprising what they’ll come back with, something that you thought was perfect, a real gem.

People will come back and, and give you insights that allow you to understand that maybe your perceptions weren’t quite right.

That’s right, yeah. I’ve gotten that feedback you know quite routinely, and may be a little defensive at first. And then, you know try to warm up to it, and try to understand well, what, what do they have in mind.

Any particular tips on how you learn most effectively?

Well, I think people vary a lot in terms of the degree to which they are dominated by words or images. You know some verbal versus visual learning styles. And so I find that I do best if I can go between the two. Because I love words and language. I was actually once accused by my students of being a sesquipedalian and got a little plaque from them. I didn’t know what sesquipedalian meant until I got the plaque. And then anybody who watches this can then look it up. Anyhow I love words, and so there’s a nuance there that I really like.

But at the same time I feel like I don’t have a complete understanding unless i’ve somehow mapped it, graphed it. Or visualized it. And so I like to go back and forth between those two kinds of approaches.

The other thing that I really like to do, and sometimes we’ve recommended this in exercises to enhance creativity.

Is to do a powers of ten exercise. And for those who haven’t seen it, there’s a great video You can easily get it online.

Well you just look up powers of ten video I think that will do the job. It basically starts with an imagine of a man sitting or lying in a hammock.

And then the camera zooms ten feet above, then 100 feet above, then 1,000 feet above, it goes by powers of ten. Ultimately you’re exploring the cosmos in outer space. And then it zooms back down into the man.

Then it goes powers of ten inside the skin. Goes into the cell, goes down and reveals the molecules, and then finally, and what’s really mind blowing, is how far you have to go when you start getting into subatomic space.

Where you’re really surrounded by nothingness. More vast than the universe itself.

So I think that getting that kind of exercise, getting that perspective. Trying to figure out what’s the higher altitude view, stepping back from a problem and thinking about well, why am I doing this? What’s the bigger picture? But then also drilling into individual facets and details, by zooming in and zooming out from a problem. I usually find I get a much better idea of the problem scope and different perspective on that problem.

That is very worth while. I’ve never really thought of problem solving in that perspective.

I think that’s maybe a little bit what you do, A bit subconsciousness or is it just naturally when you get away from the problem. I mean, do you get new perspective when you’re just going out for a walk.

Or something like that? But that’s an interesting perspective. Zooming in and zooming out.

I think the brain probably does some of this spontaneously and particularly during sleep.

Because if you think about what happens during sleep.

You’ve got a washing away of all of the conscious, top down, cognitive control over your thoughts. And it probably permits different neural networks to assemble themselves in ways that may make sense spontaneously, but are free from the guided process of our top down mind.

And so I think that’s one of the reason why people will awake from sleep, dreams, or other relaxed states, when they’re not thinking about problems. And all the sudden have come up with a solution.

All components were there that required a release at least temporarily of the constraints, that would be applied to the problem to recognize a new solution.

That may be how August KekulĂŠ recognized the benzene ring, from seeing that snake biting it’s tail.

Yeah I think it’s sometimes, I like to think of it as an octopus of attention, and turns off during sleep. And so the tentacles of the octopus can randomly go about and that’s what helps create some of the innovative new ideas.

Well, that’s interesting. You were, I think you were reading my mind because when I was thinking of August KekulĂŠ, who dreamt about a snake biting his tail, I was also thinking of well, what if instead of a snake biting it’s tail, he imagined a spider, or it could have been an octopus. But, then we’d have a completely different structure of organic chemistry before us. We would never have discovered the benzene ring.

Well that’s what they say, insights that rise from the subconscious like that, they are, they can sometimes be invaluable. But you always gotta check ‘em because sometimes they may seem right, but they’re not actually right. That’s right, yeah.

And there, you know, I’m mindful of speaking of spiders, the fantastic experiments that were done in the early investigation of LSD, the hallucinogen, where different drugs were given to spiders and see what impact it had on their webmaking skills.

And while many people felt that they became incredibly creative while under the influence of LSD, and while many people felt they had great insights while they’re under the influence of LSD, the spiders it turns out, made really lousy webs when they were under the influence of LSD.

And I think a lot of people who had been putting down what they were thinking about at the time that they were doing LSD, found later, when they were no longer under the influence, that the products that they had created were not exactly what they had hoped.

That’s, that’s, I think that’s true, there’s interesting perspectives from history of different people’s insights whilst under drugs and not under drugs, and sometimes I think it’s, it’s actually surprisingly good.

But other times, it’s surprisingly terrible.

So so there’s definitely a mixture there.

This is, this is true. I was just reviewing with a class different kinds of visual representations of dualities or balances between opposing forces.

So we were talking about the yin yang symbol, the Tibetan eternal knot. But one of the symbols that’s one of my, one of my favorites probably because I understand it the least, is the intersecting gyres or intersecting cones that were described by Yeats and his wife George.

And those, those images were probably created while they were under the influence of opium.

I will definitely have to go look those up now. .

So, Doctor Bilder, I, I, I so appreciate your, your an abecedarian polymath.

So I greatly appreciate your insights here, and on behalf of all the students of learning how to learn.

I, I thank you.

Thank you, Barb.

It’s always great talking to you.