85 | How lazyness invites discovery – Robert Root-Bernstein

So Bob, can you give us a kind of opening statement about how you see the creative process in general and in science in particular?

Sure.

So I tend to look at it from two lenses.

One is creative process itself.

I think I probably put more emphasis than most people on problem finding as the driver, that if you find the right problem, you define it in the right way, it actually tells you what tools you need.

It sets the criteria for what a solution's gonna look like, and in some ways, it actually creates an aesthetic, I guess.

I studied with Thomas Kuhn, who talked about paradigms, and when you have the right problem, it's either within the paradigm, so you know how to go about addressing it, or it's outside the paradigm, in which case you literally have to create a whole new way of looking at something and, and thinking about it and evaluating it.

And then the other lens is the tools for thinking, the idea that what people often call intuition-

Mm

... is critical to navigating that creative process.

If you look at the scientific literature, there's a number of people, Peter Medawar, Roald Hoffmann, some others who have written about the scientific paper being, in a sense, a lie.

It's the logic.

You guys talk about it as being the, the day science that, that you s-set upon the process afterwards to convince-

Yeah

... everybody that you're smart and logical.

You sanitize it at the end.

[laughs]

Yes.

[laughs] Exactly.

So much of what you've had in your podcast is about that night science, where you just have these ideas in, I'm gonna call it a non-logical way.

It's not illogical, but it's non-logicalAnd the work that my wife and I did together for Sparks of Genius was trying to understand what are the elements that go into that intuition.

Yeah.

So, you know, there are rules to it.

There are, you know, we can learn to observe better and find patterns better and make better analogies and things like that, but only if we practice and break it down and teach it that way.

You know, Bob, I've heard you say that, of course, if you knew how discoveries were systematically made, then you would make them more systematically.