Runaway Species

David Eagleman

Description

Our relentless drive to create makes us unique among living creatures. What is special about the human brain that enables us to innovate? Why don't cows choreograph dances? Why don't squirrels build elevators to their treetops? Why don't alligators invent speedboats?Weaving together the arts and sciences, neuroscientist David Eagleman and composer Anthony Brandt explore the need for novelty, the simulation of possible futures, and the social components that drive the inventiveness of our species. Taking us on a tour of human creativity from Picasso to concept cars to umbrellas to lunar travel, Brandt and Eagleman explore the cognitive software that generates new ideas, and illuminate the key facets of a creative mentality. Through understanding our ability to innovate - our most profound, mysterious, and deeply human capacity - we can meet the challenge of remaking our constantly shifting world.

Sujets

• Sciences et techniques
• Popular science
• Neuroscience
• Neurosciences

Informations

• Publié par: Canongate Books
• Date de parution: 05 octobre 2017
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780857862099
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 6 Mo

Extrait

The Runaway Species
How Human Creativity Remakes the World
Anthony Brandt and David Eagleman
Published in Great Britain in 2017 by Canongate Books Ltd, 14 High Street, Edinburgh EH1 1TE
www.canongate.co.uk
This digital edition first published in 2017 by Canongate Books
Copyright © Anthony Brandt, 2017 Copyright © David Eagleman, 2017
Extract from ‘The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T S Eliot reprinted by kind permission of Faber & Faber. © Set Copyrights, 2015
Extract from ‘Complete Poems: 1904-1962’ reprinted by kind permission of Liveright Publishing Corporation. © 1950, 1978, 1991 by the Trustees for the E. E. Cummings Trust, from COMPLETE POEMS: 1904-1962 by E. E. Cummings, edited by George J. Firmage.
The moral right of the author has been asserted
While every effort has been made to trace the owners of copyright material produced herein, the publishers would like to apologise for any omissions and will be pleased to incorporate missing acknowledgements in any further editions.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available on request from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 85786 206 8 Export ISBN 978 0 85786 2 075 eISBN 978 0 85786 2 099
To our parents, who brought us into a life of creativity
Nat & Yanna Cirel & Arthur
our wives, who fill our lives with novelty
Karol Sarah
and our children, whose imaginations summon the future
Sonya, Gabe, Lucian Ari and Aviva
C ONTENTS
Introduction: What do NASA and Picasso have in common?
Part I: New Under the Sun
1. To innovate is human
2. The brain alters what it already knows
3. Bending
4. Breaking
5. Blending
6. Living in the B-hive
Part II: The Creative Mentality
7. Don’t glue down the pieces
8. Proliferate options
9. Scout to different distances
10. Tolerate risk
Part III: Cultivating Creativity
11. The creative company
12. The creative school
13. Into the future
Acknowledgments
Image Credits
Bibliography
Notes
Index
INTRODUCTION

WHAT DO NASA AND PICASSO HAVE IN COMMON?
S everal hundred people scramble in a control room in Houston, trying to save three humans ensnared in outer space. It’s 1970 and Apollo 13 is two days into its moonshot when its oxygen tank explodes, spewing debris into space and crippling the craft. Astronaut Jack Swigert, with the understatement of a military man, radios Mission Control. “Houston, we’ve had a problem.”
The astronauts are over 200,000 miles from Earth. Fuel, water, electricity and air are running out. The hopes for a solution are close to zero. But that doesn’t slow down the flight director back in NASA Mission Control, Gene Kranz. He announces to his assembled staff:
When you leave this room, you must leave believing that this crew is coming home . I don’t give a damn about the odds and I don’t give a damn that we’ve never done anything like this before … You’ve got to believe, your people have got to believe, that this crew is coming home. 1
How can Mission Control make good on this promise? The engineers have rehearsed the mission down to the minute: when Apollo 13 would reach the moon’s orbit, when the lunar module would deploy, how long the astronauts would walk on the surface. Now they have to shred that playbook and start over. Mission Control had also prepared abort scenarios, but all of those assumed that the main parts of the spacecraft would be healthy and the lunar module expendable. 2 Unfortunately, the opposite is now true. The service module is destroyed and the command module is venting gas and losing power. The only working part of the craft is the lunar module. NASA has simulated many possible breakdowns, but not this one.
The engineers know that they have been dealt a nearly impossible task: save three men locked in an airtight metal capsule, hurtling at 3,000 miles an hour through the vacuum of space, their life support systems failing. Advanced satellite communication systems and desktop computers are still decades away. With slide rules and pencils, the engineers have to invent a way to abandon the command module and turn the lunar module into a lifeboat bound for home.
The engineers set about addressing the problems one by one: planning a route back to Earth, steering the craft, conserving power. But conditions are deteriorating. A day and a half into the crisis, carbon dioxide reaches dangerous levels in the astronauts’ tight quarters. If nothing is done the crew is going to suffocate within a few hours. The lunar module has a filtration system, but all of its cylindrical air scrubbers have been exhausted. The only remaining option is to salvage unused canisters from the abandoned command module – but those are square. How to fit a square scrubber into a round hole?
Working from an inventory of what’s on board, engineers at Mission Control devise an adaptor cobbled together from a plastic bag, a sock, pieces of cardboard and a hose from a pressure suit, all held together by duct tape. They tell the crew to tear off the plastic cover from the flight plan folder, and to use it as a funnel to guide air into the scrubber. They have the astronauts pull out the plastic-wrapped thermal undergarments that were originally meant to be worn under spacesuits while bouncing on the moon. Following instructions relayed from the ground, the astronauts discard the undergarments and save the plastic. Piece by piece, they assemble the makeshift filter and install it.
To everyone’s relief, carbon dioxide levels return to normal. But other problems quickly follow. As Apollo 13 draws closer to re-entry, power is growing short in the command module. When the spacecraft was designed, it had never crossed anyone’s mind that the command module batteries might have to be charged from the lunar module – it was supposed to be the other way around. Fueled by coffee and adrenaline, the engineers in Mission Control figure out a way to use the lunar module’s heater cable to make this work, just in time for the entry phase.
Once the batteries are recharged, the engineers instruct crew member Jack Swigert to fire up the command module. On board the craft, he connects cables, switches inverters, maneuvers antennas, toggles switches, activates telemetry – an activation procedure beyond anything he’d ever trained for or imagined. Faced with a problem they hadn’t foreseen, the engineers improvise an entirely new protocol.
In the pre-dawn hours of April 17, 1970 – eighty hours into the crisis – the astronauts prepare for their final descent. Mission Control performs their final checks. As the astronauts enter the Earth’s atmosphere, the spacecraft radio enters blackout. In Kranz’ words:
Everything now was irreversible … The control room was absolutely silent. The only noises were the hum of the electronics, the buzz of the air conditioning, and the occasional click of a Zippo lighter snapping open … No one moved, as if everyone were chained to his console.
A minute and a half later, word reaches the control room: Apollo 13 is safe.
The staff erupts into cheering. The normally stoic Kranz breaks down in tears.
***
S ixty-three years earlier, in a small studio in Paris, a young painter named Pablo Picasso sets up his easel. Usually penniless, he has taken advantage of a financial windfall to purchase a large canvas. He sets to work on a provocative project: a portrait of prostitutes in a brothel. An unvarnished look at sexual vice.
Picasso begins with charcoal sketches of heads, bodies, fruit. In his first versions, a sailor and male medical student are part of the scene. He decides to remove the men, settling on the five women as his subjects. He tries out different poses and arrangements, crossing most of them out. After hundreds of sketches, he sets to work on the full canvas. At one point, he invites his mistress and several friends to see the work in progress; their reaction so disappoints him that he sets aside the painting. But months later he returns to it, working in secret.
Picasso views the portrait of the prostitutes as an “exorcism” from his previous way of painting: the more time he spends on it, the further he moves from his earlier work. When he invites people back to see it again, their reaction is even more hostile. He offers to sell it to his most loyal patron, who laughs at the prospect. 3 The painter’s friends avoid him, fearing he’s lost his mind. Dismayed, Picasso rolls up the canvas and puts it in his closet.
He waits nine years to show it in public. In the midst of the First World War, the painting is finally exhibited. The curator – worried about offending public taste – changes the title from Le Bordel d’Avignon (The Avignon Bordello) to the more benign Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (The Ladies of Avignon). The painting has a mixed reception; one reviewer quips that “the Cubists are not waiting for the war to end to recommence hostilities against good sense …” 4
But the painting’s influence grows. A few decades later, when Les Demoiselles is exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the New York Times critic writes:
Few paintings have had the momentous impact of this composition of five distorted nude figures. With one stroke, it challenged the art of the past and inexorably changed the art of our time. 5
The art historian John Richardson later writes that Les Demoiselles was the most original painting in seven hundred years. The painting, he says,
enabled people to perceive things with new eyes, new minds and awareness … [It is] the first unequivocally twentieth-century masterpiece, a principal detonator of the modern movement, the cornerstone of twentieth-century art. 6
What made Pablo Picasso’s painting so original? He changed the goal that European painters had subscribed to for hundreds of years: the pretense of being true to life. In Picasso’s hands, limbs appear twisted, two of the women have mask-like faces, and the five figures seem to have been painted in five differen