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玩耍、做梦、走神，这些听起来都像是不认真学习工作的代名词。但正是这些行为，得以让大脑思维放飞，不经意间就能提供许多问题的答案。神经学家和心理学家正将玩耍和创造力联系到一起，认为玩耍能激发人类的创造力。而许多著名作曲家和科学家的例子，也印证了这一观点。  ?“前路走不通时，我会选择往后退一步，然后重新规划路线，这样能让我走的更远。”在解决问题的见解上，19世纪物理学家赫尔曼·冯·亥姆霍兹将自己比作登山运动员，他自省问题的方式也为我们提出了一个问题：创造性思维是如何克服低谷到达下一个高峰的？ 与生俱来的玩耍能力 思维不像是有组织的生命体或者可以自我组装的分子，它是很抽象的东西，不可能用常规的物理或化学手段来前进。但思维也会千方百计地去实现向前推进的目的，这其中最重要的一种方式就是“玩耍”。 这种玩耍不是指有规则的棋盘游戏或足球竞技，而更像是随心所欲，没有规则的游戏，比如像孩子玩乐高积木，这种玩耍不带目的性，没有利益关系，甚至没有失败。 玩耍对于生命个体来说很重要，它的存在要远远早于人类出现的时间。玩耍或许是幼年动物练习交配的手段，几乎所有的幼年哺乳动物都会玩耍，鸟类中的鹦鹉和乌鸦、一些爬行类动物、鱼类，甚至蜘蛛中都曾有过玩耍的记录。但是说到最会玩耍的动物，还是非宽吻海豚莫属，它们曾被记录过有37种不同的玩耍方式。圈养海豚会孜孜不倦地玩球和其他玩具，野生海豚则会玩羽毛、海绵和从气孔中喷出的“水圈”。 但是玩耍是要付出代价的。年轻的动物会把一天20%的能量预算花在玩耍上，这就意味着这些能量不能用于捕食。此外，玩耍还会带来一些生存相关的问题：因为互相追逐或跟在母亲身后玩耍，猎豹幼崽会吓跑猎物；因为贪玩而陷入泥潭的大象；被仙人掌刺钉住的大角羊等。有的动物甚至还会因为玩耍误杀了自己或者同伴。在一项1991年的研究中，剑桥研究院的Robert Harcourt观察了一群南美海狗。一个季节内，群落里有102只幼崽被海狮攻击，其中26只死亡，而且超过80%的幼崽是在玩耍时被攻击而死亡的。 既然玩耍的代价如此之高，那肯定也会带来很多好处。甚至有时，玩耍可以决定生与死。举例来说，新西兰的野马越贪玩，它们在第一年就存活得越好。阿拉斯加棕熊的幼崽一岁时候的游戏行为，能让它们安稳地度过冬天。 另外，某些玩耍行为也不是单纯地为了放松精神。马会在玩耍过程中让肌肉变得更强；狮子幼崽们玩打斗的游戏，实则是为日后争夺部落首领的斗争打下基础；海豚吹空气泡泡，是在训练迷惑和捕捉猎物的技巧；雄性蜘蛛练习怎样在交配后快速远离雌性，以防被其他雄性攻击。 至少在哺乳动物中，玩耍的作用不只是单纯地练习某项行为，当它们跟踪、捕猎和逃跑时，它们能够发现自己处在前所未有的新环境中。科罗拉多大学研究员Marc Bekoff一生都在研究动物行为，他认为玩耍扩大了动物的行为范围，能让它们灵活适应不断改变的周遭环境。换句话说，动物的玩耍是具有创造性的，不管这是否能马上被利用上，但正是这些玩耍行为让动物能为不可预知的意外做好准备。 在1978年一项以幼鼠为对象的试验中，为阻止同龄伙伴之间的沟通玩耍，小鼠在笼子中被网隔开。经过一段时间的隔离后，研究人员教所有小鼠通过拉出一个橡皮球来换取食物，随后将食物获取的方法从“拉出球”换成“抛球”。与自由玩耍的小鼠相比，被剥夺了玩耍的小鼠需要花费更长的时间来学习获取食物的新方法。 玩耍与创造力 剑桥大学的动物行为专家Patrick Bateson则更直接地将观察到的动物行为与创造力联系了起来。他认为，玩耍能够让人从一些思想上的死胡同中走出来，当你卡在某个点想不通的时候，还会让你茅塞顿开，并产生新的想法。 在这种观点中，玩耍对个人创造力来说，就像基因漂移对演化或者热量对分子自组装的作用。如果玩耍真的与创造力有关，那我们就不会惊讶，为什么有创造性的人总是把看似枯燥的工作描述得趣味性十足。 青霉素的发现者Alexander Fleming经常被上司指责他过于散漫的工作态度，但Fleming说，“我会跟显微镜做游戏......打破规则，发现没人注意的东西是非常有趣的。”2010年诺贝尔物理学奖得主Andre Geim曾宣布“工作中保持游戏态度一直是我的特点。除非你碰巧在对的时间、对的地点刚好获得了想要的结果，或者你有别人没有的捷径。否则，我们只能冒险来寻找出路。” James Watson和Francis Crick发现了DNA双螺旋，但是他们却是从彩色小球中获得了启示，这些彩色小球可以像积木一样粘在一起，就这样他们建立了双螺旋模型。用Watson的话说，他们要做的不过是“开始玩耍吧”。 短暂停止玩耍行为，会让我们的判断能力停滞，因此我们会失去选取好主意的能力，但是恢复玩耍时这种能力又会回来。这就是为什么我们有时会跌入不完美的低谷，然后又会再次爬上完美的顶峰。玩耍只是达到目的的一种方式而已。 梦也是同样强大的。心理学家Jean Piaget将做梦比作玩耍，他的开创性研究帮助我们理解了儿童的成长过程。正是在梦中，我们的大脑才会自由地将最奇异的思想和图像片段组合成小说中的人物和情节。著名歌手Paul McCartney曾在梦中听到了一首歌曲，在梦里他认为这是别人创造出的歌曲，因此他将其作曲出来后，询问了音乐界人士是否知道这首歌，结果当然是没人听过。就这样，这首梦中的歌 Yesterday 成为了20世纪最成功的歌曲之一；德国生理学家Otto Loewi在梦到了一个重要实验的想法，这个实验在日后证明了神经递质的交流功能，这为他赢得了诺贝尔奖。 Paul McCartney在梦中创造出了金曲Yesterday 即使在半睡眠状态下，我们的大脑也足够开启想象。在这种状态下，August Kekule发现了苯的结构；Mary Shelley构思了《弗兰肯斯坦》；Dmitri Mendeleev发现了化学元素周期表。 玩耍和做梦都是我们放飞思维的方式。据报告，96%的美国成年人每天都会放飞思维，也就是走神，而另外4%的人可能只是因为心不在焉而没注意到而已。要判断一个人在做一件事情时走神的频率很简单，直接问他们就好了。打断正在工作的人，问问他们在想什么；在任意时间给研究参与者发一条短信，询问他们在想什么。当心理学家这样做时，他们发现人类走神的频率高得惊人，大部分人的大脑在三分之一到一半的时间里是都在走神。 走神通常被认为是无害的，但不代表这没后果。心不在焉的人很难集中注意力，比如他们会在阅读理解测试中表现得很差。更令人担忧的是，他们在考试中的表现也更差，其中包括许多大学入学要求的学业能力测试。如果你有职业抱负的话，最好还是不要挂科。 但是走神也有有利的一面——至少对于训练有素的头脑来说是这样。事实上，像爱因斯坦、牛顿和著名数学家亨利·庞加莱这样的人，他们解决了许多重要的问题。但是，很多时候他们并没有刻意钻研这些问题，比如阿基米德在进入浴缸时发现了应该如何测量物体的体积。阿基米德这一最重要的发现，是由他进入浴缸时不断上升的水中获得的。庞加莱曾描述了他有一段时间在数学问题上没有取得成功的心态: 我对自己的失败感到厌恶，于是去海边玩了几天，想了些别的事情。一天早晨，当我走在悬崖上时，我突然产生了一个想法，简单地、突然地，而且我立刻确定了：不定三元二次型的算术变换和非欧几何的变换方法完全一样 控制玩耍，获得无限创造力 在灵光一现，想法到来之前，我们会把这段看似空闲的时期叫做思维孕育期。当你在努力工作，却没有获得什么结果后，来一些不需要注意力高度集中的活动（比如散步、烹饪、洗澡），大脑思维就能自由地漫游了。而当思维漫游到你开始解决不了的问题时，就可能会偶然得出解决办法。 这个所谓的思维孕育过程是无意识的，但却能增强创造力。在一项实验中，135名大学生参加了一项关于创造力的心理测试，他们被分为三组，测试要求他们找到日常用品的不寻常用途，比如砖头或铅笔。测试开始几分钟后，心理学家打断了第一组学生，并给他们布置了一项不相关的任务，给学生们看一系列的数字，并让他们分辨出哪些是偶数，哪些是奇数，这项新任务比较简单，但这分散了学生们对测试的注意力。在被打断之后，学生们继续进行创造力测试，他们的答案比没有被打断的第二组学生更具创造力。 图片来源：pixabay 第三组学生也被打断了，但他们被分配了更困难的任务，需要注意力更集中的任务。他们的答案则没有第一组那么有创意。所以，结论是，简单到几乎不需要注意力的“打断“可以解放思想，从而创造性地解决问题。 如果走神会影响创造力，那么反过来冥想就应该有相反的效果。事实也确实如此。2012年的一项研究表明，人们在冥想过程中会减少走神，因此可以提高学术考试的分数。但在创造力测试中，冥想的人却明显不如那些走神的人。 正如生物演化与自然选择之间会达到一个微妙的平衡，创造力同样也需要平衡。当你冥思苦想而没有进展时，也许某些想法就在手边，你要做的就是停下手头的工作，去玩，去做梦，让思绪漫游起来。 来源：环球科学 翻译：董依明 By Andreas Wagner June 6, 2019? The 19th-century physicist Hermann von Helmholtz compared his progress in solving a problem to that of a mountain climber “compelled to retrace his steps because his progress stopped.” A mountain climber, von Helmholtz said, “hits upon traces of a fresh path, which again leads him a little further.” The physicist’s introspection provokes the question: How do creative minds overcome valleys to get to the next higher peak? Because thinking minds are different from evolving organisms and self-assembling molecules, we cannot expect them to use the same means—mechanisms like genetic drift and thermal vibrations—to overcome deep valleys in the landscapes they explore. But they must have some way to achieve the same purpose. As it turns out, they have more than just one—many more. But one of the most important is play. I don’t mean the rule-based play of a board game or the competitive play of a soccer match, but rather the kind of freewheeling, unstructured play that children perform with a pile of LEGO blocks or with toy shovels and buckets in a sandbox. I mean playful behavior without immediate goals and benefits, without even the possibility of failure. AN EASY GAME TO PLAY: Paul McCartney has said he dreamed the tune for “Yesterday” and “woke up one morning with this tune in my head.” In dreams, as in play, writes Andreas Wagner, “our minds are at their freest.”Shutterstock Play is so important that nature invented it long before it invented us. Almost all young mammals play, as do birds like parrots and crows. Play has been reported in reptiles, fish, and even spiders, where sexually immature animals use it to practice copulation. But the world champion of animal play may be the bottlenose dolphin, with 37 different reported types of play. Captive dolphins will play untiringly with balls and other toys, and wild dolphins play with objects like feathers, sponges, and “smoke rings” of air bubbles that they extrude from their blowholes. Such widespread play must be more than just a frivolous whim of nature. The reason: It costs. Young animals can spend up to 20 percent of their daily energy budget goofing around rather than, say, chasing dinner. And their play can cause serious problems. Playing cheetah cubs frequently scare off prey by chasing each other or by clambering over their stalking mother. Playing elephants get stuck in mud. Playing bighorn sheep get impaled on cactus spines. Some playful animals even get themselves killed. In a 1991 study, Cambridge researcher Robert Harcourt observed a colony of South American fur seals. Within a single season, 102 of the colony’s pups were attacked by sea lions, and 26 of them were killed. More than 80 percent of the killed pups were attacked while playing. With costs this high, the benefits can’t be far behind. And indeed, where the benefits of play have been measured, they can make the difference between life and death. The more feral horses from New Zealand play, for example, the better they survive their first year. Likewise, Alaskan brown bear cubs that played more during their first summer not only survived the first winter better, but also had a better chance to survive subsequent winters.
Some purposes of such play have nothing to do with mental problem solving. When horses play, they strengthen their muscles, and that very strength can help them survive. When lion cubs play-fight, they prepare for the real fights that will help them dominate the group. When dolphins play with air bubbles, they are honing their skills at confusing and catching prey. And when male spiders play at sex, they practice how to copulate fast enough to get away from a female before other males attack them. But at least in mammals, play goes beyond mere practice of a stereotypical behavior, like that of a pianist rehearsing the same passage over and over again. When mammals stalk, hunt, and escape, they find themselves in ever-new situations and environments. Marc Bekoff, a researcher at the University of Colorado and a lifelong student of animal behavior, argues that play broadens an animal’s behavioral repertoire, giving them the flexibility to adapt to changing circumstances. In other words, animal play creates diverse behaviors, regardless of whether that diversity is immediately useful. It prepares the player for the unexpected in an unpredictable world. That very flexibility can also help the smartest animals solve difficult problems. A 1978 experiment demonstrated its value for young rats. In this experiment, some rats were separated from their peers for 20 days by a mesh in their cage, which prevented them from playing. After the period of isolation, the researchers taught all the rats to get a food reward by pulling a rubber ball out of the way. They then changed the task to a new one where the ball had to be pushed instead of pulled. Compared to their freely playing peers, the play-deprived rats took much longer to try new ways of getting at the food and solving this problem. University of Cambridge ethologist Patrick Bateson linked observations like this more directly to the landscapes of creation when he argued that play can “fulfill a probing role that enables the individual to escape from false endpoints, or local optima” and that “when stuck on a metaphorical lower peak, it can be beneficial to have active mechanisms for getting off it and onto a higher one.” In this view, play is to creativity what genetic drift is to evolution and what heat is to self-assembling molecules. If that is the case, it is hardly surprising that creative people often describe their work as playful. Alexander Fleming, who would discover penicillin, was reproved by his boss for his playful attitude. He said, “I play with microbes ... It is very pleasant to break the rules and to find something that nobody had thought of.” Andre Geim, 2010 Nobel laureate in physics, declared that “a playful attitude has always been the hallmark of my research ... Unless you happen to be in the right place and the right time, or you have facilities no one else has, the only way is to be more adventurous.” When James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix, they had help in the form of colored balls they could stick together—LEGO-like—to build a model. In Watson’s words, all they had to do was “begin to play.” And C.G. Jung, one of the fathers of psychoanalysis, said it best: “The debt we owe to the play of imagination is incalculable.” One hallmark of play is that it suspends judgment so that we are no longer focused on selecting good ideas and discarding bad ones. That’s what allows us to descend into the valleys of imperfection to later climb the peaks of perfection. But play is only one means to get there. Less deliberate but just as powerful are the dreams that we experience in our sleep. It is no coincidence that the psychologist Jean Piaget, whose trailblazing research helped us understand how children develop, likened dreaming to play. It is in dreams that our minds are at their freest to combine the most bizarre fragments of thoughts and images into novel characters and plotlines. Paul McCartney famously first heard his song “Yesterday” in a dream and did not believe that it was an original song, asking people in the music business for weeks afterward whether they knew it. They didn’t. “Yesterday” would become one of the 20th century’s most successful songs, with 7 million performances and more than 2,000 cover versions. Another dream whispered to the German physiologist Otto Loewi the idea for a crucial experiment, which proved that nerves communicate through chemicals that we now call neurotransmitters. It would win him a Nobel Prize.
Even in the state of half-sleep—psychologists call it hypnagogia—our minds are sufficiently loose to descend from those lowly hills. In this state, August Kekule, saw the structure of benzene, Mary Shelley found the idea for her iconic novel Frankenstein, and Dmitri Mendeleev discovered the periodic table of the chemical elements. Similar to playing and dreaming is the wandering of our minds. Ninety-six percent of adult Americans report that it happens to them daily—the other 4 percent may be too absent-minded to notice. To quantify how often any one mind wanders during a task is simple: Ask. Interrupt people who work on the task and ask what’s on their mind. Or let mobile phones do the work for you. Program them to send study participants a text asking what they are thinking about at random times of the day. When psychologists do that, they find that mind-wandering is staggeringly frequent. The typical mind is absent between a third and half the time. Mind-wandering is often considered a harmless quirk, as in the cliche? of the scatter-brained professor. But it has real consequences. Let’s begin with the bad ones. Absentminded people perform less well on tests that require focused attention, such as reading comprehension tests. More worrisome, they also perform more poorly on tests that you better not flunk if you have any career aspirations. Among them is the Scholastic Aptitude Test that many colleges require for admission. But mind-wandering also has an upside—at least for well-trained minds. Indeed, many anecdotes of creators like Einstein, Newton, and eminent mathematician Henri Poincaré, report that these scientists solved important problems while not actually working on anything. The common wisdom that the best ideas arrive in the shower is exemplified by Archimedes’s discovery of how to measure an object’s volume. (OK, he was in a bathtub.) But while Archimedes’s discovery was triggered by the rising water as he entered the tub, other breakthroughs surface apropos of nothing. Take this well-known quote from the Poincaré describing a period in his life when he had worked without success on a mathematical problem: Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of something else. One morning, walking on the bluff, the idea came to me, with … brevity, suddenness, and immediate certainty, that the arithmetic transformations of indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry. The apparently idle period before such insights arrive has a name: incubation. If hard and seemingly futile work on a difficult problem is followed up with a less demanding activity that does not require complete focus—walking, showering, cooking—a mind is free to wander. And when that mind incubates the problem, it can stumble upon a solution. Incubation is as unconscious as it is real, and it enhances creativity. In one experiment making that point, 135 college students took a psychological test for creativity that required them to find unusual uses for everyday objects, like bricks or pencils. A few minutes into the test, the psychologists running the experiment interrupted some students and gave them an unrelated task. The new task did not take much effort—the students were shown a series of digits and had to tell which of them were even or odd—but it distracted the students from the test. After that interruption, the students continued with the creativity test, and they found more-creative answers than a second group of students who had not been given the distracting task. Students in a third group got a break like the first, but they were given a harder task that required more focus. And, lo and behold, their answers were less creative than those of the first group. The conclusion: Undemanding tasks—easy enough to require little attention, but hard enough to prevent conscious work on a problem—can free a mind to wander and solve a problem creatively. If mind-wandering impacts creativity, then its opposite, the control of attention practiced in mindfulness meditation, should have the opposite effects, both good and bad. And indeed it does. A 2012 study showed, for example, that mindfulness meditation, by reducing mind-wandering, can improve scores on standardized academic tests. In contrast, less mindful individuals perform better on creativity tests like that just mentioned. The message is clear: Just as biological evolution can require a balance between natural selection, which pushes uphill, and genetic drift, which does not, so too does creativity require a balance between the selection of useful ideas—where a focused mind comes in handy—and the suspension of that selection to play, dream, or allow the mind to wander. Andreas Wagner is the author of Life Finds a Way: What Evolution Teaches Us About Creativity. He is a professor and chairman at the Institute of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich and an external professor at the Santa Fe Institute. He is also the author of four books on evolutionary innovation. |
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