Your Brain on Fiction

By ANNIE MURPHY PAULMARCH 17, 2012

AMID the squawks and pings of our digital devices, the old-fashioned virtues of reading novels can
seem faded, even futile. But new support for the value of fiction is arriving from an unexpected
quarter: neuroscience.

Brain scans are revealing what happens in our heads when we read a detailed description, an
evocative metaphor or an emotional exchange between characters. Stories, this research is
showing, stimulate the brain and even change how we act in life.

Researchers have long known that the classical language regions, like Brocas area and Wernickes
area, are involved in how the brain interprets written words. What scientists have come to realize in
the last few years is that narratives activate many other parts of our brains as well, suggesting why
the experience of reading can feel so alive. Words like lavender, cinnamon and soap, for
example, elicit a response not only from the language-processing areas of our brains, but also those
devoted to dealing with smells.

In a 2006 study published in the journal NeuroImage, researchers in Spain asked participants to
read words with strong odor associations, along with neutral words, while their brains were being
scanned by a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. When subjects looked at the
Spanish words for perfume and coffee, their primary olfactory cortex lit up; when they saw the
words that mean chair and key, this region remained dark. The way the brain handles
metaphors has also received extensive study; some scientists have contended that figures of speech
like a rough day are so familiar that they are treated simply as words and no more. Last month,
however, a team of researchers from Emory University reported in Brain & Language that when
subjects in their laboratory read a metaphor involving texture, the sensory cortex, responsible for
perceiving texture through touch, became active. Metaphors like The singer had a velvet voice
and He had leathery hands roused the sensory cortex, while phrases matched for meaning, like
The singer had a pleasing voice and He had strong hands, did not.

Researchers have discovered that words describing motion also stimulate regions of the brain
distinct from language-processing areas. In a study led by the cognitive scientist Vronique
Boulenger, of the Laboratory of Language Dynamics in France, the brains of participants were
scanned as they read sentences like John grasped the object and Pablo kicked the ball. The
scans revealed activity in the motor cortex, which coordinates the bodys movements. Whats more,
this activity was concentrated in one part of the motor cortex when the movement described was
arm-related and in another part when the movement concerned the leg.

The brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and
encountering it in real life; in each case, the same neurological regions are stimulated. Keith Oatley,
an emeritus professor of cognitive psychology at the University of Toronto (and a published
novelist), has proposed that reading produces a vivid simulation of reality, one that runs on minds
of readers just as computer simulations run on computers. Fiction with its redolent details,
imaginative metaphors and attentive descriptions of people and their actions offers an especially
rich replica. Indeed, in one respect novels go beyond simulating reality to give readers an
experience unavailable off the page: the opportunity to enter fully into other peoples thoughts and
feelings.
The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional
life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and
movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as
something like real-life social encounters.

Raymond Mar, a psychologist at York University in Canada, performed an analysis of 86 fMRI

studies, published last year in the Annual Review of Psychology, and concluded that there was
substantial overlap in the brain networks used to understand stories and the networks used to
navigate interactions with other individuals in particular, interactions in which were trying to
figure out the thoughts and feelings of others. Scientists call this capacity of the brain to construct a
map of other peoples intentions theory of mind. Narratives offer a unique opportunity to engage
this capacity, as we identify with characters longings and frustrations, guess at their hidden motives
and track their encounters with friends and enemies, neighbors and lovers.

It is an exercise that hones our real-life social skills, another body of research suggests. Dr. Oatley
and Dr. Mar, in collaboration with several other scientists, reported in two studies, published in
2006 and 2009, that individuals who frequently read fiction seem to be better able to understand
other people, empathize with them and see the world from their perspective. This relationship
persisted even after the researchers accounted for the possibility that more empathetic individuals
might prefer reading novels. A 2010 study by Dr. Mar found a similar result in preschool-age
children: the more stories they had read to them, the keener their theory of mind an effect that
was also produced by watching movies but, curiously, not by watching television. (Dr. Mar has
conjectured that because children often watch TV alone, but go to the movies with their parents,
they may experience more parent-children conversations about mental states when it comes to
films.)

Fiction, Dr. Oatley notes, is a particularly useful simulation because negotiating the social world
effectively is extremely tricky, requiring us to weigh up myriad interacting instances of cause and
effect. Just as computer simulations can help us get to grips with complex problems such as flying a
plane or forecasting the weather, so novels, stories and dramas can help us understand the
complexities of social life.

These findings will affirm the experience of readers who have felt illuminated and instructed by a
novel, who have found themselves comparing a plucky young woman to Elizabeth Bennet or a
tiresome pedant to Edward Casaubon. Reading great literature, it has long been averred, enlarges
and improves us as human beings. Brain science shows this claim is truer than we imagined.

Annie Murphy Paul is the author, most recently, of Origins: How the Nine Months Before Birth
Shape the Rest of Our Lives.
The Humanist Vocation
David Brooks JUNE 20, 2013

A half-century ago, 14 percent of college degrees were awarded to people who majored in the
humanities. Today, only 7 percent of graduates in the country are humanities majors. Even over the
last decade alone, the number of incoming students at Harvard who express interest in becoming
humanities majors has dropped by a third.

Most people give an economic explanation for this decline. Accounting majors get jobs. Lit majors
dont. And theres obviously some truth to this. But the humanities are not only being bulldozed by
an unforgiving job market. They are committing suicide because many humanists have lost faith in
their own enterprise.

Back when the humanities were thriving, the leading figures had a clear definition of their mission
and a fervent passion for it. The job of the humanities was to cultivate the human core, the part of a
person we might call the spirit, the soul, or, in D.H. Lawrences phrase, the dark vast forest.

This was the most inward and elemental part of a person. When you go to a funeral and hear a
eulogy, this is usually the part they are talking about. Eulogies arent rsums. They describe the
persons care, wisdom, truthfulness and courage. They describe the million little moral judgments
that emanate from that inner region.

The humanists job was to cultivate this ground imposing intellectual order upon it, educating the
emotions with art in order to refine it, offering inspiring exemplars to get it properly oriented.

Somewhere along the way, many people in the humanities lost faith in this uplifting mission. The
humanities turned from an inward to an outward focus. They were less about the old notions of
truth, beauty and goodness and more about political and social categories like race, class and
gender. Liberal arts professors grew more moralistic when talking about politics but more tentative
about private morality because they didnt want to offend anybody.

To the earnest 19-year-old with lofty dreams of self-understanding and moral greatness, the
humanities in this guise were bound to seem less consequential and more boring.

So now the humanities are in crisis. Rescuers are stepping forth. On Thursday, the American
Academy of Arts and Sciences released a report called The Heart of the Matter, making the case
for the humanities and social sciences. (I was a member of this large commission, though I certainly
cant take any credit for the result.)

The report is important, and you should read it. It focuses not only on the external goods the
humanities can produce (creative thinking, good writing), but also the internal transformation
(spiritual depth, personal integrity). It does lack some missionary zeal that hit me powerfully as a
college freshman when the humanities were in better shape.

One of the great history teachers in those days was a University of Chicago professor named Karl
Weintraub. He poured his soul into transforming his students lives, but, even then, he sometimes
wondered if they were really listening. Late in life, he wrote a note to my classmate Carol Quillen,
who now helps carry on this legacy as president of Davidson College.
Teaching Western Civ, Weintraub wrote, seems to confront me all too often with moments when I
feel like screaming suddenly: Oh, God, my dear student, why CANNOT you see that this matter is a
real, real matter, often a matter of the very being, for the person, for the historical men and women
you are looking at or are supposed to be looking at!

I hear these answers and statements that sound like mere words, mere verbal formulations to me,
but that do not have the sense of pain or joy or accomplishment or worry about them that they
ought to have if they were TRULY informed by the live problems and situations of the human beings
back there for whom these matters were real. The way these disembodied words come forth can
make me cry, and the failure of the speaker to probe for the open wounds and such behind the text
makes me increasingly furious.

If I do not come to feel any of the love which Pericles feels for his city, how can I understand the
Funeral Oration? If I cannot fathom anything of the power of the drive derived from thinking that he
has a special mission, what can I understand of Socrates? ... How can one grasp anything about the
problem of the Galatian community without sensing in ones bones the problem of worrying about
Gods acceptance?

Sometimes when I have spent an hour or more, pouring all my enthusiasm and sensitivities into an
effort to tell these stories in the fullness in which I see and experience them, I feel drained and
exhausted. I think it works on the student, but I do not really know.

Teachers like that were zealous for the humanities. A few years in that company leaves a lifelong
mark.
Picasso, Kepler, and the Benefits of Being an Expert Generalist
If you develop an appetite for learning and openness, you're more likely to be able to draw ideas
from multiple disciplines - and be more creative.

By Art Markman, +- 2012

One thing that separates the great innovators from everyone else is that they seem to know a lot
about a wide variety of topics. They are expert generalists. Their wide knowledge base supports
their creativity.

As it turns out, there are two personality traits that are key for expert generalists: Openness to
Experience and Need for Cognition.

Openness to Experience is one of the Big Five personality characteristics identified by psychologists.
The Big Five are the characteristics that reflect the biggest differences between people in the way
they act. Openness to Experience is the degree to which a person is willing to consider new ideas
and opportunities. Some people enjoy the prospect of doing something new and thinking about
new things. Other people prefer to stick with familiar ideas and activities.

As you might expect, high levels of Openness to Experience can sometimes be related to creativity.
After all, being creative requires doing something that has not been done before. If you are not
willing to do something new, then its hard to be creative.

However, creativity also requires knowledge. In order to do something that has not been done
before in some area, you have to know a lot about that discipline. Creative painters need to know a
lot about art and painting. Creative scientists need to be skilled in their science.

At the same time, creativity often requires drawing analogies between one body of knowledge and
another. Pablo Picasso merged Western art techniques with elements of African art. He was struck
by the way African artists combined multiple perspectives into a single work, and that helped lead
to the development of cubism. Similarly, great scientists often draw parallels between different
areas to create new ideas. In the history of science, Johannes Kepler struggled to understand how
the planets could move around the sun, and drew on his knowledge of light and magnetism to try to
understand the force that moved the planets.

In order to have deep knowledge about a discipline as well as a wide base of knowledge that can be
mined later for analogies, it is important for someone to enjoy thinking. Learning new things can be
difficult and frustrating, and so those people who like to think will stick with a new topic long
enough to acquire good knowledge about it. Psychologists John Cacioppo, Richard Petty, and their
colleagues have identified the Need for Cognition characteristic, which reflects how much people
like to think.

Some people are driven to think about topics deeply, while others avoid situations that require
them to think. People high in Need for Cognition routinely spend the time and effort necessary to
learn new things, simply because they enjoy the process of learning.

Creativity often requires drawing analogies between one body of knowledge and another.

The combination of high Openness to Experience and high Need for Cognition is powerful. People
with this combination of characteristics develop the habit to learn about a wide range of topics.
They watch documentaries and follow up by reading articles. They engage in conversations about
new subjects and ask lots of questions to ensure they understand.

I call these individuals expert generalists, because they have a wide variety of knowledge. They are
able to use this knowledge to suggest new ways to look at problems. They are also good at
translating across areas of expertise. So, when a group gets together to solve a problem, they can
help different members of that group to see how their knowledge inter-relates.

Of course, if you dont happen to be high in Openness to Experience and Need for Cognition, you
can still develop habits to help you to be more creative. If you tend to resist new ideas, recognize
the value in new experiences and work to open yourself up to more opportunities. If you are the
kind of person who often avoids thinking in favor of other activities, add a little more time to your
day where you focus on learning something new. The more that you broaden and deepen your base
of knowledge, the more opportunities you will have to be creative.

How About You?

Would you consider yourself an expert generalist? How have you broadened your knowledge base?

==========

05.14.13LEADERSHIP NOW

Steve Jobs, Nate Silver, And Pablo Picasso: Why The Most Creative
People Are Generalists
The compelling case for why a breadth of knowledge and a depth of expertise spur innovation.

BY DRAKE BAER2 MINUTE READ

In the summer of 1982 a 27-year-old Steve Jobs accepted an award at the Academy of
Achievement. During his brief speech, he hit what would become Jobsisms: the nature of
intelligence, the inheritance of one generation to the next, how Walt Disney one time took LSD and
thought up Fantasia.

Lets zoom in on intelligence: Jobs says that the difference between you and your dumb friend is the
bag of experiences that you carry around with you. Innovation, intelligence, and the awards that
follow all spring from being able to make connections that other people dont see, he says. So if you
have the same experience-bag as everyone else, you will make the same connections as everyone
else.

For Jobs, having a bigger bag of experiences is like being atop a skyscraper versus being stuck on
street level: Rather than fussing with a map to figure out how things connect, you can observe
those connections firsthand.

You can make connections that seem obvious, he says, because you can see the whole thing.

WHO MAKES NEW?

As psychologist Art Markman writes for 99u, there are two main traits that predispose people to
creative thinking: openness to experience and need for cognition.

As the term suggests, if you have a high level of openness to experience, you like to try new things
and think novel thoughts. This is a part of creativity, Markman notes, but not the whole story. You
also need knowledge: The writer studies writing, the painter studies painting, the teacher studies
teaching.

But, as any student finishing finals can tell you, learning is hard. Some people, it turns out, like to
think more than others: This allows them to stick to a subject long enough to absorb it. And while
some people try to avoid thought-heavy situations, others are thought junkies: These are those with
a high need for cognition.

HOW TRAITSAND IDEASCOMBINE

Markman notes that creativity is often a process of drawing analogies between one body of
knowledge and another: Picasso ferried his love of African art into Cubism, Van Gogh imported
Japanese floral patterns into his portraits, and astronomer Johannes Kepler drew from his
understanding of magnetism to inform his understanding of the planets movement. To use
Markmans language, knowledge from one field inter-relates to the other, which is exactly what
statistician/baseball nut and Most Creative Person Nate Silver says predicts startup success.

This is why, as Kleiner Perkins partner Bing Gordon notes, innovations often come when disciplines
meet: Look at video games, iPhones, or hip-hop. This is the power of the intersection: Since new
ideas are combinations of old ideas, you want to have as diverse a reservoir as possible. For more
on this, check Frans Johanssons The Medici Effect.

GROSS GENERALIZATIONS

Markman writes that if you are open to new experiences and love to think, you can learn deeply
about a range of fields and cross-pollinate between them. You can mine your knowledge in one area
for a solution that untangles a problem in another. And when you work in a team, you can act as an
epistemic interpreter, helping your colleagues understand how anothers understanding informs
theirs.

Developing a breadth of knowledge and a depth of expertisein yourself and in a teamgives you
the sky-scraping perspective that the young Mr. Jobs talked about. So explore, and keep your bag of
experiences full.

Picasso, Kepler, and the Benefits of Being an Expert Generalist

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Drake Baer was a contributing writer at Fast Company, where he covered work culture. He's the co-
author of Everything Connects, a book about how intrapersonal, interpersonal, and organizational
psychology shape innovation.
Anthropology Inc.
Forget online surveys and dinnertime robo-calls. A consulting firm called ReD is at the forefront of a
new trend in market research, treating the everyday lives of consumers as a subject worthy of
social-science scrutiny. On behalf of its corporate clients, ReD will uncover your deepest needs,
fears, and desires.

GRAEME WOOD MARCH 2013 ISSUE

on a hot austin night last summer, 60 natives convened for a social rite involving stick-on
mustaches, paella, and a healthy flow of spirits. Young lesbians formed the core of the crowd. The
two organizers, who had been lovers for a couple months, were celebrating their birthdays with a
Spanish-themed party, decorated in bullfighting chic. It was a classic hipster affair, and everyone
was loose and at ease, except for one black-haired interloper with a digital camera and a tiny
notepad.

This interloper was Min Lieskovsky, a 31-year-old straight New Yorker who mingled freely and
occasionally ducked into a bathroom to scribble notes. Shed left a Ph.D. program in sociocultural
anthropology at Yale two years earlier, impatient with academia but still eager to use the
ethnographic skills shed mastered. Tonight, that meant she partied gamely and watched her
subjects with a practiced eye, noting everything: when the party got started and when it reached its
peak, who stuck mustaches on whomand above all, what, when, and how people drank.

For Lieskovsky, it was all about the booze. The consulting firm she worked for, ReD Associates, is at
the forefront of a movement to deploy social scientists on field research for corporate clients. The
vodka giant Absolut had contracted with ReD to infiltrate American drinking cultures and report
back on the elusive phenomenon known as the home party. This corrida de lesbianas was the
latest in a series of home parties that Lieskovsky and her colleagues had joined in order to write an
extended ethnographic survey of drinking practices, attempting to figure out the rules and rituals
spoken and unspokenthat govern Americans drinking lives, and by extension their vodka-buying
habits.

Theres a huge amount of vodka thats sold for drinking at home, Lieskovsky says. But no one
knew where it was really goingapart from down someones throat eventually, and on a bad night
perhaps back up again. Was it treated as a sacred fluid, not to be polluted or adulterated except by
an expert mixologist? Some Absolut advertising and iconography suggested exactly this, assuming
understandably that buyers of a premium vodka would want laboratory precision for their
cocktails. Another possibility was that the drinkers might not care much about the purity of the
product, and that bringing it to a party merely lubricated social interaction. We wanted to know
what they are seeking, Lieskovsky says. Do they want the perfect cocktail party? Is it all about
how they present themselves to their friends, for status? Is it collaboration, friendship, fun?

Over the course of the companys research, the rituals gradually emerged. One after another, you
see the same thing, Lieskovsky told me. Someone comes with a bottle. She gives it to the host,
then the host puts it in the freezer and listens to the story of where the bottle came from, and why
its important. And then, when the bottle is served, it goes right out onto the table with all the
other booze, the premium spirits and the bottom-shelf hooch mixed together, in a vision of
alcoholic egalitarianism that would make a pro bartender or a cocktail snob cringe.
What mattered most, to the partygoers and their hosts, were the narratives that accompanied the
drinks. We found that there is this general shift away from premium alcohol, at least as its defined
by price point, toward something that has a story behind it, Lieskovsky says. They told anecdotes
from their own lives in which a product played a central rolehumorous, self-deprecating stories
about first encountering a vodka, or discovering a liqueur while traveling in Costa Rica or Mexico.
The stories were a way to let people show humor, or to declare that theyre, for instance, the kind
of Austin lesbians who, upon finding exotic elixirs in far-off lands, are brave enough to try them.

ReD consultants fanned out and shadowed drinkers at about 18 different parties, trying to see
which drinking practices held constant, whether in Austin, New York, or Columbus. This is one that
did. Which meant that if a premium vodka brand tried to market itself solely as a product with
chemistry-lab purity, it risked misunderstanding the home-party market and leaving money on the
table.

the corporate anthropology that ReD and a few others are pioneering is the most intense form of
market research yet devised, a set of techniques that make surveys and dinnertime robo-calls (This
will take only 10 minutes of your time) seem superficial by comparison. ReD is one of just a handful
of consultancies that treat everyday lifeand everyday consumerismas a subject worthy of the
scrutiny normally reserved for academic social science. In many cases, the consultants in question
have trained at the graduate level in anthropology but have forsaken academiaand some of its
ethical stricturesfor work that frees them to do field research more or less full-time, with huge
budgets and agendas driven by corporate masters.

The world of management consulting consists overwhelmingly of quantitative consultants, a group

well known from the successes of McKinsey & Company, the Boston Consulting Group, and Bain &
Company. ReDs entry into consulting represents an attempt to match the results of these titans
without relying heavily on math and spreadsheets, and instead focusing on what anthropologists
call participant observation. This method consists, generally, of living among ones research
subjects, at least briefly. Such immersive experiences lead not only to greater intimacy and trust,
but also to a slowly emerging picture of the subjects everyday lives and thoughts, complete with
truths about them that they themselves might not know.

Absolut, which paid ReD to observe home parties, is using both quantitative analysis and this new
form of ethnographic research. We are intensive consumers of market research, Maxime
Kouchnir, the vice president of vodka marketing for Pernod Ricard USA, which distributes Absolut,
told me. The McKinseys and BCGs of the world will bring you heavy data. And I think those guys
sometimes lack the human factor. What ReD brings is a deep understanding of consumers and the
dynamics you find in a society. That means finding out not only what consumers say they want in a
liquor, but also what their actions reveal about the social effect they crave from bringing it to a
party. If you observe them, they will be humans, exposed with all their contradictions and
complexities, Kouchnir says. At the end of the day, we manufacture a spirit, but we have to sell an
experience.

The method dates back nearly a century in academic anthropology, though its pedigree in the
business world is somewhat more recent. Xerox parc, the legendary Palo Alto think tank that
birthed many of the ideas that made the personal-computing revolution possible, employed
anthropologists as early as 1979. Leslie Perlow, a Harvard Business School professor who has
applied participant observation in corporate environments, says, There is a long history of doing
this in the study of organizationtaking the ethnographic method from anthropology and, instead
of taking it to faraway places, trying to understand the culture of our own work worlds.

Now a handful of consultancies specialize in ethnographic research, and many companies (including
General Motors and Dell) retain their own ethnographers on staff. Microsoft is said to be the
second-largest employer of anthropologists in the world, behind only the U.S. government.

Tech firms, certainly, appear to be major consumers of ethnographic research. Technology

companies as a whole are in danger of being more disconnected from their customers than other
companies, says Ken Anderson, an ethnographer at Intel. Tech designers succumb to the illusion
that their users are all engineers. Our mind-set is that people are really just like us, and theyre
really not, Anderson says. Ethnography helps teach the techie types to understand those
consumers who arent living and breathing the technology the way an Intel engineer might. (A
curious exception to this cautious embrace of ethnographic methods is Apple, whose late co-
founder, Steve Jobs, trusted his designersand especially himselfmore than he trusted
consumers or researchers. It isnt the consumers job to know what they want, he famously said.)

min lieskovsky, the red consultant on the Absolut project, has been a friendly acquaintance of mine
for nearly a decade. Christian Madsbjerg, a co-founder of ReD, gave me access to ReD consultants
on two other projects, one on home appliances and the other on health care, and allowed me to tag
along while they did their research. I agreed not to disclose the clients behind these two projects,
and to change the names of the two women whose households the company was studying. In each
case, ReD paid the households a nominal amount to answer its consultants questions.

Microsoft is said to be the second-largest employer of anthropologists in the world.

Both interviews I attended felt unusually intrusive. As a journalist, Ive interviewed people about
sensitive topics, such as their murderous past, or their fondness for sex with children. But a six-hour
ethnographic interview felt in many ways even more intimate. After all, the corporate clients who
commissioned these studies already knew the type of consumer information they could get through
phone or Internet surveys. They knew everything except their customers naked, innermost selves,
and now they wanted ReDs ethnographers to get them those, too.

The first ReD anthropologist I went into the field with was Esra Ozkan, an MIT Ph.D. who had joined
the company less than a year earlier. She wrote her dissertation on the study of corporate culture in
the U.S., but she was a trained ethnographer, and spoke fluently about how Michael Fischer, a
cultural anthropologist at MIT, and Joseph Dumit, an anthropologist at the University of California at
Davis, had influenced her work. By birth a Muslim from eastern Turkey, Ozkan is married to an
American Jew, whose family provided the connection to the woman shed be interviewing.

The household we were about to visit was in Forest Hills, New York, and Ozkan said it was a home
kept so strictly kosher that it had two kitchens, one for daily use and another, ultraclean one for
Passover. The plan, she said, was to ask the ranking female, a 50something working mother Ill call
Rebecca, how she and her family used their living spacehow they negotiated the kitchens, the
bedrooms, the living rooms; what rules they followed and, more important, which ones they
sometimes broke. We want to hear them describe their homes, both for functionality, but also to
hear what emotion they use to describe places, Ozkan said.
She said much of her method involves noting which objects are assigned special importance.
Interviewees carefully select the parts of their lives they exhibit to an ethnographer, and sometimes
they will pause over a certain itemsay, a kitchen utensil that cost $5 at Walmart, but that carries
with it the memories of 30 Passoversindicating that the objects meaning is greater than its utility.
Those moments, when something is more than itself, are the ones I pay attention to, Ozkan told
me.

We drove to the house, a detached two-story Tudor in a quiet wooded neighborhood, and parked
on the street. Upon exiting the car, Ozkan immediately whipped out an iPhone and began
photographing everything, from the front lawn to the windows to the mezuzah on the doorjamb.
Rebecca answered the door before we had a chance to knock, and introduced her poodlea little
yapper named Sir Paulbefore introducing herself.

We walked into the house, where the childrens photos and religious decorationsevery room in
the public areas of the house showed signs of Jewish practicegave a clear sense of self-
presentation and values. Upstairs, away from the area most visitors would see, she showed us her
room-size shrine to the Beatles, packed floor-to-ceiling with concert posters, guitars, and other
memorabilia.

Rebecca sat us down in a slightly messy dining room adjoining a large and well-used kitchen, and
Ozkan set up a camera to record everything. Our host dove right in, pointing to various appliances
and explaining what each one meant to her, and where it fit in with kosher law. For every note I
made, Ozkan made two. Although she knew Jewish practice well through her husband and past
research, Ozkan asked Rebecca to explain the holidays and purity laws, just to see how she talked
about them.

Rebecca confessed without any prompting that she would occasionally let her kosher vigilance slip
slightly when she ate out, and that her husband, also Jewish, would drop the kosher thing entirely
without her. Hed eat a bacon cheeseburger if I werent around, she said, perhaps half-joking. But
Rebecca also said that inside the house itself, and especially around the inner-sanctum Passover
kitchen, she never considered defying kosher law. Its like breathing, for us, she said.

Over lunch the next day, I asked Ozkan what she had concluded from the visit. She noted all the
things that Rebecca had never stated explicitly, but that were clearly what mattered most in her life.
She treats the kitchen as a holy place, Ozkan said. That made three holy places in the house, if you
count the two kitchens separately, and the Beatles shrine upstairs. Her deviance on the outside
was, Ozkan said, a point well worth noting. If you listen really carefully, youll find some things that
dont quite match the super-ideal framework of kosher, she said. And its always great to see that.
Its a way to see how people deal with practicalities and challenges in life, and how they choose to
break that ideal image. Listen to people talk about how they break the rules, in other words, and
youll figure out what they consider the important rules in the first place.

Ozkans questions had hinted at product ideas that ReDs client, a home-appliance maker, was
considering. Would Rebecca contemplate buying an automated fridge that would advise her when
she was running short on orange juice? And as Rebecca responded, her implicit consecration of her
kitchen became evident. She seemed to care less about whether her kitchen remained well stocked
or running smoothly than whether it remained her sacred space, controlled by her for her family,
and not by, say, a talking robot. As with the vodka drinkers, the key elements were emotional
ownership and connection.
The clients goals were, in this case, never made fully clear to me. But Rebeccas was only one of 21
homes the consultants would visit, and the only kosher one on the list. The visit would, however,
begin to tell a story about Americans who love and hate their own kitchens, fetishizing some
gadgets while simultaneously viewing them as instruments of their own enslavement.

If you're selling a personal computer in China, the whole concept of "personal" is culturally wrong.

If the lessons were indistinct, they were deliberately so. ReD is gleefully defiant of those who want
clear answers to simple questions, and prefers to inhabit a space where answers tend not to come
in yes/no formats, or in pie charts and bar graphs. We know numbers get you only so far, the
companys Web site announces. Standard techniques work for standard problems because theres
a clear benefit from being measured and systematic. But when companies are on the verge of
something new or uncertain those existing formulas arent easily applied.

Jun Lee, a ReD partner, says that when clients are confronted with the companys anthropological
research, they often discover fundamental differences between the businesses they thought they
were in, and the businesses they actually are in. For example, the Korean electronics giant Samsung
had a major conceptual breakthrough when it realized that its televisions are best thought of not as
large electronic appliances, measurable by screen size and resolution, but as home furniture. It
matters less how thoroughly a speaker system rattles the bones and eardrums of its listeners than
how these big screens occupy the physical space alongside ones tables, chairs, and sofas. The
companys project engineers reframed their products accordingly, paying more attention to how
they fit into living spaces, rather than how they perform on their technical spec sheets.

christian madsbjerg co-founded red almost a decade ago, after a brief stint in journalism. He
dresses the part of the Nordic intellectual, alternating slick minimalist threads (think Dieter from
Saturday Night Lives Sprockets) with modish Western wear that no American could really pull off.
After more than 30 years in London and his native Denmark, he fled for New York, where ReD
operates out of a wood-paneled Battery Park office once occupied by John D. Rockefeller.

The founding story of ReD sounds more like the genesis of a doctoral dissertation than of a
multimillion-dollar company. Madsbjerg says he became enamored first with post-structural theory,
and then with the 20th-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger, who argued that the
distinction between objects and their beholders needed to be effaced. When we consider a
hammer, we might naturally think of its objective scientific properties: a certain weight and balance,
a hardness, a handle with a rubber grip that has a particular coefficient of friction. What Heidegger
posited is that these objective attributes are in fact secondary to the hammers subjective
relationship with the person wielding it. The hammer has uses (a weapon, a tool), meanings (a
symbol on the Soviet flag), and other characteristics that do not exist independently of the meeting
of subject and object. A common mistake of philosophers, he claimed, is to think of the object as
distinct from the subject. If all of this sounds opaque, I can assure you that in the original German it
is much, much worse.

NowThisNews explores how Heideggers philosophy helps drive American marketing.

But before long, Madsbjerg had a list of clients desperate for Heideggerian readings of their
businesses. The service he provides sounds even more improbable to a scholar who knows his
Heidegger than to a layperson who does not. Many philosophers spend their lives trying and failing
to understand what Heidegger was talking about. To interest a typical ReD clientusually a
corporate vice president who is, Madsbjerg says, the least laid-back person you can imagine, with
every minute of their day divided into 15-minute blocksin the philosophers turgid, impenetrable
post-structural theory is as unlikely a pitch as could be imagined.

But its the pitch Madsbjerg has been making. The fundamental blindness in the sorts of consulting
that dominate the market, he says, is that they are Cartesian in their outlook: they view objects as
the sum of their performance and physical properties. If you are selling personal computers, you
look at the machine and say its this many gigahertz, this many pixels, he says. And you then
determine whether a potential new market needs computers that perform faster than the ones
currently on offer, and how big that market will be.

These specs, as well as data about how many households in, say, China will reach income levels that
will allow a personal-computer purchase, fit nicely into spreadsheets and graphs. But they overlook
human elements that exist in plain sight, the things the Anglo-Polish founder of the ethnographic
method, Bronisaw Malinowski, called the imponderabilia of actual life. These are, he wrote,
small incidents, characteristic forms of taking food, of conversing, of doing work, [that] are found
occurring over and over again.

These imponderabilia turn out to have huge consequences if you want to sell a personal computer
in China. We find that these objects have meanings, not just facts, Madsbjerg says, and that the
meaning is often what matters. So to sell a personal computer in China, for example, what matters
is the whole concept of a personal computer, which is culturally wrong from the start. Household
objects dont have the same personal attachment [in China as they do in America]. It has to be a
shared thing. So if the device isnt designed and marketed as a shared household object, but
instead as one customized for a single user, it probably wont sell, no matter how many gigahertz it
has.

China is a huge potential market, and every corporation with any ambition wants its piece of that
pie, on the idea that if you make a dollar off each man, woman, and child in China, youve just made
$1 billion. A source told me, for instance, that Coca-Cola approached ReD after years of trying and
failing to sell bottled tea in China. (ReD would not confirm that the client in question was Coca-
Cola.) The beverage company had imagined that this would be a simple variant on the fizzy-sugared-
water business that had made it a global icon. Instead, it failed to seize a respectable market share,
even though it was competing with lightweight local competitors.

Long-term observation revealed that when it comes to tea in China, what is for sale isnt merely a
tasty beverage. Instead, the consumption of tea takes place in a highly specific web of cultural rules,
some of them explicit but many others not. For instance, you might serve strong tea to close
friends, or to people you want to draw closer. But you would never serve strong tea to new
acquaintances. That meant that no tea, however tasty, would sell if its strength was uniform. Let
the consumer choose the strength, however, and you may be able to sell the product within the
culture. Coca-Colas Chinese tea products are now on course to change accordingly.

to sell the red ideathat products and objects are inevitably encrusted with cultural meaning, and
that a company that neglects to explore social theory is bound to leave profits on the table
Madsbjerg has evangelized with great success, giving what are surely the only successful corporate
sales pitches salted with words like hermeneutics and phenomenology. Most of his consultants
dont have the usual business pedigree; M.B.A.s are very scarce (tend not to fit in, he says).
Rather, many employees come from academia, and some from another interview- and observation-
based realm: journalism. (I came to know the firm first through Lieskovskythe former
anthropology student on the Absolut projectand through another employee, who is a former
editor at GQ.)

The second consultant I followed, Rachel Singh, also came from academia. A native of Manitoba,
shed joined ReD a year and a half earlier, after doing ethnographic work for Intels Ireland office
and attending graduate school in digital anthropology at University College London.

We met a few blocks from the apartment of the days interview subject, at a caf in the Los Angeles
suburb of Tarzanaa concrete jungle named after the principal literary creation of Edgar Rice
Burroughs, an early celebrity resident of the area. It occurred to me that in a previous era, before
anthropologists discovered that their own societies were as irrationally rule-bound as so-called
primitive ones, Singh might have aspired to perform fieldwork in actual jungles, and to study actual
Tarzans.

The view of anthropologists as tourists in exotic lands is old and tired, which is not to say dead.
Singh surprised me with her candor several times over the course of the day, but the first occasion
was when she described her entry into the world of anthropology, which sounded to me like exactly
that sort of romantic vision. I came to university as a premed, and one day I just wandered into a
lecture hall and heard a guy giving a lecture about his fieldwork with the Kwakiutl of British
Columbia. He went on a vision quest, and after falling asleep on a secluded beach, he woke up
surrounded by seals. He returned to the village and was told by an elder that he had found his
guardian animal. Then, she said, the lecturer hiked up his sleeve to reveal a seal tattoo. Singh was
hooked on the study of culture. She changed her major, and she sees continuity between her
academic work and what she does now as an ethnographic hired gun.

In Tarzana, Singh was scheduled to meet, on behalf of a ReD client in the health-care field, a woman
Ill call Elsie. It was 10 a.m. on a beautiful Southern California Sundaya perfectly awful time to sit
inside and discuss the days topic, the visible precancerous skin lesions from which Elsie suffers. It
makes me feel like a leper, Elsie confided after we began, and Singh nodded sympathetically, like
an old friend. It makes me feel like hiding.

The interview started much the same way the previous one had, with the anthropologist
documenting the setting in minute detail. With her iPhone, Singh snapped shots of the street, the
parking garage, the squares of grass and the tropical trees in the neighborhood. Once inside, her
eyes darted over every surface, and she noted the vacuum track marks on the floor; the drawers full
of tubes of prescription creams; the European posters. Singh set up a video camera to record every
minute of the six-hour interviewthe better to capture the moments when Elsies responses
revealed traces of unexpected emotion or meaning. Singh asked Elsie, a hefty, sun-spotted redhead
of 52, about her medical regimen, then about the basic details of her lifewhat her childhood had
been like, where she had lived, when she woke up every morning, what she ate, and whom she
spoke with.

Singh unpacked Elsies responses methodically, adding an occasional compassionate or sympathetic

word. When Singh asked about Elsies lesions, she phrased the questions carefully, suggesting that
she could feel Elsies pain. How would I get this condition? she asked. What would be the
symptoms?
Elsies was the first of perhaps two dozen similarly in-depth interviews, Singh told me later. The
client had created a product to treat one of Elsies conditions. The company knew very well what
would happen to a lesion if it were frozen, zapped, or rubbed with cream. But what about the
person attached to the lesion? A simplistic model of patient behavior might say that patients want
whatever the most effective treatment is. But the conversation with Elsie revealed a much more
fraught human experience. She had her taboos, such as being forced to even say the word lesion.
She wanted to escape not just her lesions, but the shame they brought on.

once singh had completed the interview, before we parted ways, she made clear that there was at
least one argument within anthropology that she was tired of hearing about: Just dont make this
another story about the clash between practicing anthropologists and academics.

The politics of anthropologists in academia tends to the Marxist left, even more so than the politics
of academics in general. And to many of them, the defection of young scholars to the corporate
world looks like a betrayal at best, and a devils bargain at worst. I told Singh that academic
anthropologists had already shared some harsh words for their applied-anthropology brothers and
sisters. Well, theyre endangered, she said of the academics, a little snootily. Were doing work
thats needed. Were dealing with human issues.

ReD offers businesses Heideggerian analysis, which sounds even more improbable to a scholar than
to a layperson.

The corporate anthropologists I met generally come across as people who acknowledge the limits of
what they do. Ken Anderson, the Intel ethnographer, co-founded a conference called epic for
corporate ethnographers. Over the phone, he was warm and jokey, seemingly without rancor when
he told me about his failed quest for an academic job out of graduate school (At the time, the
employment opportunities for white guys in academic anthropology were pretty darn slim). He
found instead a corporate career that has encouraged anthropological workas long as it could
hold relevance to the corporation at some point. He has spent weeks in London hanging out with
bike messengers for Intel, and hunkered down in the Azores as digital technology reached remote
settlements. Sure enough, his research sounds very blue-sky, and on a recognizable continuum with
the anthropological research cultivated in the groves of academe.

A few years ago, he conducted an ethnographic study of temporality, about the perception of the
passage and scarcity of timenoting how Americans he studied had come to perceive busy-ness
and lack of time as a marker of well-being. We found that in social interaction, virtually everyone
would claim to be busy, and that everyone close to them would be busy too, he told me. But in
fact, coordinated studies of how these people used technology suggested that when they used their
computers, they tended to do work only in short bursts of a few minutes at a time, with the rest of
the time devoted to something other than what we might identify as work. We were designing
computers, and the spec at the time was to use the computer to the max for two hours, Anderson
says. We had to make chips that would perform at that level. You dont want them to overheat.
But when we came back, we figured that we needed to rethink this, because peoples time is not
quite what we imagine. For a company that makes microchip processors, this discovery has had
important consequences for how to engineer productsnot only for users who constantly need
high-powered computing for long durations, but for people who just think they do.
Among the luxuries of working for a corporate master is, of course, deliverance from the endless
hustle to find funding. My partner is an academic anthropologist, and she goes from year to year
having to pull together funding for trips to field sites in the Central African Republicwhich, unlike
China, is not a hotbed of corporate interest. (By contrast, Madsbjerg told me, Our resources are
not infinite. But almost.)

But the bigger issue for academics is the fear that corporate anthropology is an ethical free-fire
zone. If there isnt an IRB [institutional review board], a sort of neutral third party that watches out
for the interests of those who are being researched, then obviously there is cause for concern, says
Hugh Gusterson, a George Mason University professor who has led anthropologists in opposing
cooperation with certain U.S. military projects. He pointed to fury among his colleagues a few years
ago, when it became known that Disney had paid ethnographers to study teenagers spending
habits, the better to sell them Disney products. They were learning about peopleand not just any
people, but minorsso they could exploit them, for profit.

To get a research project approved at a modern university, a researcher faces a review board of
professors commissioned to scrutinize the proposal and check for ethical sticking pointsways the
project could hurt the people it studied, disrupt their lives, or take advantage of them. ReD,
meanwhile, is bound only by the sense of decency of its senior partners. Luckily, they are Danish. I
asked Madsbjerg if he had ever turned away a contract on account of scruples, and he told me the
military of a South American country had approached him to discuss an ethnographic project on
weapons design. He refused, on the grounds that helping people shoot other people wasnt what
ReD was about. Nor would he do work for a company that wanted to sell junk food to children. On
the other hand, even contracts that are less obviously perilous, ethically speaking, could raise the
hackles of an academic review board. Helping Coca-Cola feed sweetened beverages to 1.3 billion
Chinese, for example, will probably not have a healthy impact on that countrys incidence of
diabetes.

Roberto Gonzlez, a cultural anthropologist who teaches at San Jose State University, goes so far as
to argue that those who dont follow the American Anthropological Associations code of ethics
should no longer be considered anthropologists at all. Part of being an anthropologist is following a
code of ethics, and if you dont do that, youre not an anthropologistjust as youre no longer fit
to call yourself a doctor if you do unauthorized experiments on your patients. Of course, Hugh
Gusterson adds, we dont license anthropologists, so we cant un-license them either.

Some anthropologists caution against assuming that the work done by ReD consultants and their
corporate brethren is really ethnography at all. During the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan,
the U.S. Army convened a team of purported ethnographers to staff a group called the Human
Terrain System, which was tasked with producing militarily significant ethnographic reports and
providing cultural advice. Professional anthropologists raised hell, condemning the participants for
using their training inappropriately, but in time it became clear that there werent many
anthropologists on the HTS staff at all. (One team member I knew had a doctorate in Russian
literature.) The civilians on the staff were, for the most part, just a bunch of well-educated people
reading up on Iraqi and Afghan tribes and writing reports that were quasi-anthropological at best.

That, it seems to me, is probably the best way to view much of what ReD does as well. The value the
firm brings to clients comes partly from anthropology, practiced in a way that may or may not
please those still in academia. But the value is also just an effect of putting an impressive
ethnographic sheen on the work of many smart, right-brained individuals in a sector that overvalues
quantitative research. Much of what I encountered while shadowing ReDs consultants seemed like
the type of insight that any observant interviewer might have produced, with or without an
anthropology degree or a working knowledge of Heidegger.

Madsbjergs admiration for Heidegger does, however, show something of his genius for self-
marketing. Many consulting firms plot growth curves and recommend efficiency strategies, but few
offer the kind of research ReD does. Still fewer firms immerse themselves so happily in academic
language, and only Madsbjerg has the cojones to walk into a corporate boardroom and tell his
audience that the impenetrable works of a long-dead German philosopher hold the keys to financial
success.

I asked Madsbjerg how he would sell his firm to a potential employee currently teaching at a
university, and he leaned toward me with a smile, slipping comfortably into the Marxist lingo of
academia. Do you want to sit and write about the world, he asked, or do you want to do
something in it?

I couldnt help but think of Steve Jobss famous entreaty to John Sculley, then the president of
PepsiCo, asking him to join Apple in 1983 as CEO. Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of
your life?, Jobs asked. Or do you want to come with me and change the world?

The irony, of course, is that ReD is changing the world in part by helping a global beverage company
sell more sugared water.
Openness to Experience and Creative Achievement
Openness to experience the drive for cognitive exploration of inner and outer experience is the
personality trait most consistently associated with creativity.

By Scott Barry Kaufman on November 25, 2013

Openness to experience-- the drive for cognitive exploration of inner experience-- is the personality
trait most consistently associated with creativity.

But there are many different forms of cognitive exploration.

Just to name a few, openness to experience comprises intellectual curiosity, complex problem
solving and reasoning, imagination, artistic and aesthetic interests, and emotional and fantasy
richness.

Recent research suggests that the various forms of engagement that comprise openness to
experience can be broken down into two main aspects:

Intellect: cognitive engagement with abstract and semantic information primarily through
reasoning.

Openness: cognitive engagement with sensory and perceptual information.

But can we break down openness to experience even further, and are the distinctions useful for our
understanding of creative achievement?

I think so.

Four Factors of Openness to Experience

That was the main question motivating my recent paper "Opening up Openness to Experience: A
Four-Factor Model and Relations to Creative Achievement in the Arts and Sciences."

I administered multiple measures of cognitive ability, personality, and thinking styles to 146 British
high school students. I intentionally used a wide-ranging test battery, including measures of verbal,
spatial, and fluid reasoning, working memory, the NEO Personality Inventory, Big Five Aspect Scales,
and Rational-Experiential Inventory.

Using a statistical technique called the Bass-Ackwards technique, I found that openness to
experience can be most parsimoniously broken down into four factors:
Explicit Cognitive Ability: This factor consisted primarily of traditional measures of intelligence (i.e.,
IQ tests), including fluid reasoning, mental rotation, verbal analogical reasoning, and working
memory. I called this factor "Explicit Cognitive Ability" instead of "Intelligence" because I don't think
that traditional measures of intelligence do a good job capturing implicit forms of cognition. For
instance, I've shown that implicit learning ability is not well correlated with performance on
traditional measures of intelligence (see "Implicit Learning as an Ability"). This factor didn't show
any relations to any personality variables other than openness to experience.

Intellectual Engagement: The essence of this factor was a drive to engage in ideas, rational thought,
and the search for truth. Those scoring high on this factor tended to be more industrious, assertive,
and persevering-- dispositions associated with goal-directed behavior. Note that there was no
correlation between this factor and compassion.

Affective Engagement: The essence of this factor was a preference for using emotions, gut feelings,
and empathy to make decisions. Those scoring high on this factor tended to be more volatile,
compassionate, enthusiastic, assertive, and impulsive. In fact, the correlation between this factor
and compassion was quite high-- .64.

Aesthetic Engagement: The essence of this factor was a preference for aesthetics, fantasy, and
emotional absorption in artistic and cultural stimuli. A common theme of this factor was a search
for beauty. Those scoring high on this factor tended to be more compassionate, enthusiastic,
assertive, and impulsive, but they also tended to be less conscientious -- particularly less industrious
and orderly. Also, this factor wasn't as strongly related to compassion as affective engagement.

Creative Achievement
Now that we have a good feel for the flavor of these four factors, let's see how they are related to
different forms of creative achievement.

I investigated ten different domains of creativity: Visual Arts, Music, Dance, Architectural design,
Creative writing, Humor, Inventions, Scientific Discovery, Theater and film, and Culinary Arts.

Collapsing across the arts and sciences, this is what I found:

The two main factors most strongly associated with Intellect-- Intellectual Engagement and Explicit
Cognitive Ability-- were more relevant to creative achievement in the sciences than the arts,
whereas the two main factors most strongly associated with Openness-- Affective Engagement and
Aesthetic Engagement-- were more relevant to creative achievement in the arts than the sciences.
What's more, these results suggest that Affective Engagement may be detrimental to creative
achievement in the sciences.

Interestingly, when I considered all four factors at the same time, I found that Intellectual
Engagement was a better predictor of scientific creative achievement than Explicit Cognitive Ability.

Implications

I think these findings have some important implications. The first thing that jumped out at me is the
importance of separating IQ from intellectual curiosity. While Explicit Cognitive Ability and
Intellectual Engagement were related, the more important variable driving high levels of creative
achievement in the sciences was Intellectual Engagement. These findings are consistent with the
work of Sophie von Stumm and colleagues who found that a "hungry mind" was a core predictor of
academic achievement.

Another thing that jumped out at me were the different associations with compassion. The two
factors that were most strongly associated with compassion-- Affective Engagement and Aesthetic
Engagement-- were also the factors most strongly associated with creative achievement in the arts.
I'd like to see much more research on the linkages among openness to experience, compassion, and
creativity, including a wider range of creative domains (e.g., leadership, social entrepreneurship).

My findings also have implications for dual-process theories of human cognition.

In recent years, dual-process theories of cognition have become increasingly required for explaining
cognitive, personality, and social processes. Although the precise specifications of the theories
differ, there are some unifying themes.
Type 1 processes consist of a grab-bag of different (and not necessarily correlated) processes,
including affect, intuition, evolutionary evolved modules, implicit learning, latent inhibition, and the
firing of learned associations. According to Keith Stanovich and Maggie Toplak, the defining feature
of Type 1 processing is autonomy: the execution of Type 1 processes is mandatory when their
triggering stimuli are encountered, and they are not dependent on input from high-level control
systems."

In contrast, the defining feature of Type 2 processes is the ability to sustain decoupled
representationsin other words, to sustain thinking while keeping real-world representations
separate from cognitive representations. According to Stanovich and Toplak, decoupling processes
enable one to distance oneself from representations of the world so that they can be reflected upon
and potentially improved.

The results of my study suggest that Intellect-- Explicit Cognitive Ability and Intellectual
Engagement-- is more strongly related to Type 2 processing relative to Type 1 processing, whereas
Openness-- Affective Engagement and Aesthetic Engagement-- is more strongly related to Type 1
processing relative to Type 2 processing. Although one notable exception is engagement with
fantasy and imagination, which most certainly recruits more of a balanced mix of Type 1 and Type 2
processes.

It might be fruitful for researchers to place openness to experience within this dual-process
framework.

Conclusion

These results support the need to separate different forms of cognitive engagement when trying to
predict creative achievement. Different forms of engagement are related to different modes of
information processing. What's more, people differ in their drive to engage in various aspects of the
human experience, and these drives are related to different forms of creative achievement.

2013 Scott Barry Kaufman, All Rights Reserved

Note: My colleagues and I have since replicated the basic associations among Intellect and
Openness with creative achievement in the arts and sciences across multiple samples, using wider
age ranges. We are currently writing up those results for publication, and I will be happy to share
them with you once the data is published.

Scott Barry Kaufman is scientific director of the Imagination Institute and a researcher and lecturer
at the Positive Psychology Center at the University of Pennsylvania. He conducts research on the
measurement and development of imagination, creativity and play and teaches the popular
undergraduate course Introduction to Positive Psychology at Pennsylvania. Kaufman is author of
Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined (Basic Books, 2013) and co-author (with Carolyn Gregoire) of Wired
to Create: Unraveling the Mysteries of the Creative Mind (Perigee, 2015).