 Innovation has basically two sides, it has creativity and it has efficiency, okay? And almost everything we do, especially in businesses, even in education, actually focuses on one side of this equation, focuses on efficiency, trying to get more for less, focus on answers. In schools, we don't teach children how to ask questions. We don't even teach them what a good question is. We teach them how to follow recipes, right? We teach them to be efficient because that's how our organizations run. The problem is that the world changes, okay? To be efficient is a really good idea if your world is constantly static. And in biology, the best environment for efficiency is competition, okay? But in a world that changes, you have to adapt. In fact, the most successful systems in nature are the most adaptable. They're not the most efficient, right? To give you an example, in 2010, the top 10 in-demand jobs didn't actually exist in 2004. It's not that they became more popular, they weren't even there. We had no idea what they were going to be. So imagine what's going to happen in just the next 10 years, right? So we're educating kids now, for instance, for a world that doesn't even exist. They're going to have 8 to 10 different careers through their lifetime, okay? So the future focus is not to bias everything towards creativity. Because if a bus is coming at you, you don't want to think, oh, I wonder if there's a different way I can see this, right? You want to get out of way as fast as possible. Wisdom is being at the edge of chaos on average. It's moving back and forth across. But today we're going to focus mainly on creativity. So what is at the heart of creativity? And it's perception. Why perception? Because perception underpins everything you know, you believe, the clothes you wear, the people you fall in love with, everything begins with perception. So to understand perception is to not only understand the brain, it's to understand what it is to be human. So we're going to talk about perception. And in thinking about it, I have one aim. It's the same aim I have in every single talk, which is, I want you to know less at the end than you think you know now, all right? And I always succeed, no matter how well I do. Okay, why? Because nothing interesting begins with knowing. Anything interesting begins with doubt. It begins with not knowing, all right? And I want you to doubt at the most fundamental level, even your level of the perception of reality. So how many of you, when you woke up this morning, thought you saw the world as it really is? I think you probably all have the assumption that you're seeing the world accurately. And I'll demonstrate by asking you, do you believe in illusions? Do you believe illusions exist? Yeah, okay. So you believe that you see the world accurately. Why? Because the definition of illusion is to see the world differently from the way it really is. So if you believe in illusions, you think that sometimes you see the world differently than the way it is, which means most of the time you're seeing the world as it really is. So we're gonna do a quick test. How many of you can see the predator that's about to jump out at you? And if you haven't seen it yet, you're dead, right? So 90% of the information your brain uses to see comes from lightness. It's staring right at you, literally. So let's add 10% of the information. Yes, for those who still haven't had their cup of coffee, there it is. Okay. So if we go back, all right. So this makes a fundamental point, right? That when it comes to vision, your eyes have very little to do with what you see. I work at the Institute of Ophthalmology. They love it when I say that, right? The eyes are like the keyboard is to a computer. It's just the way to get the stuff in. Has very little to do with what you actually see. But maybe at the level of lightness, surely at the level of lightness, we see the world accurately. Because nothing's easier than seeing the intensity of light. That is our most basic visual sensation, right? If that's true, then things that are different should look different, right? And these four squares are in fact different in their intensity. This one has less intensity than that one. They look different, right? Agreed? So it seems like we're seeing the world as it really is. Which means two squares are physically the same, should also look the same. And they do. But what happens if we don't change those squares, we just change what surrounds them? Do they still look the same? Everyone probably sees this one is lighter than that one. Yes? This is our most basic illusion. And we don't know how it works. What it demonstrates, though, is that context is everything when it comes to seeing the world. Your brain evolved to find relationships. Your brain did not evolve to find absolutes. In fact, this is so much so that right now, as you're looking at me, your eyes are actually constantly moving. You're not consciously aware of it. It's called micro-sacals. They're constantly jittering. If you could stop your eyes from moving, which you can by sticking your finger right inside here and holding it there, you can do it home with your kids. So what happens? Your eyes are open. They're not moving. What do you think happens? The whole world disappears. You go blind. Because your brain evolved to find difference. It's interested in change. It's not interested in static. To live is to move. So even if I stop my eyes from moving the whole world, you can actually experience what it is to be blind. Context is everything. Change is everything. We know this. Artists have known this for hundreds of years. A far more fundamental question is why is context everything? And to understand this is, again, to understand what it is to be us. In fact, it's to understand what it is to be a living system. Because it's not just true for us. This is true for bumblebees. This is true for any living system. This is true for a company. Context is everything. So why? Because information is meaningless. There is no inherent value in any piece of data. And this is true even at the level of our senses. So if it's true there, it has to be true all the way up. If you take a light object and put it under dark light, it'll generate the exact same stimulus as a dark object under bright light. Or a loud sound far away versus a quiet sound up close. Your brain has no direct access to the physical world. So it has no way of knowing what's the source of this information. So information is meaningless because it could literally mean anything. It could be something large and far away or small and up close and will have no access to that world. Nor does that information come with instructions. It doesn't tell you what to do. So how does your brain make meaning? What's the other kind of information your brain has access to other than through its senses? Memory. It has its history. The functional structure of your brain is literally a physical manifestation of your past interaction with the world. That's what your brain represents. How do you actually make sense of the world? How do you make sense of meaningless information is by physically engaging with the world, okay? So in my lab we also grow brain cells. And what's fascinating is that the molecules that are responsible for this brain growth are activity dependent. The more active your brain, the more these molecules are released, the more your brain cells grow. Way back when I was at Berkeley, my advisor, Marian Diamond, absolutely brilliant person, she raised rats in different kinds of environments, an enriched environment and a deprived environment. And then she looked at the brain cells inside these rats and found that the ones in the enriched environment had grown tremendously. Whereas the ones in the deprived environment had actually atrophied. So your brain evolved to continually redefine normality. A more complex world, a more complex brain. Your brain matches the complexity of its world. What's interesting is that if she raised rats in an over-enriched environment, the brain cells look like the ones from the deprived environment. So you can actually do too much, okay? But what's too much is relative. So I'm gonna show you how quickly your brain can redefine normality by looking first at these two desert scenes. Notice that they're the same. But now I want you to stare at the dot between the red and the green. Don't look anywhere else, just look at that dot. We're gonna do it for about 30 seconds. Okay? What's happening is your brain is learning. This is becoming its current history. It's learning that its left side of its visual field is under green light and the right side is under red. That's becoming its new reality. Which means everything you see after this will be a function of this recent history. You're also getting very sleepy. Okay, now keep looking. When I tell you to, I want you to look at the dot between the desert scenes. Five, four, three, two, one, look there. Do they still look the same? No, for some men they will because you might be color deficient. Seven percent of the male population confuses red and green, right? But now as you look around, they start going back to the way they were, right? Because your brain is constantly redefining normality. Now this is just color, right? And this is what your brain is constantly doing all the time. So when you open your eyes, what do you see? You can't see the world, it's physically impossible. Rather, you see a meaning that was once useful to see in the past. That's all you see. And what was once useful may no longer be useful. Which is why your brain's constantly adapting, okay? So in the next few slides, we're gonna do, show you an example, what I mean by seeing meaning. We're gonna read what you see. In the next few slides, we'll do it all together, okay? Ready? One, two, three, very good. One, two, three, all right. One, two, three, okay, some of you. Okay, one, two, three. Okay, now class, remember the instructions. I said read what you see, you all failed, right? There are no words there. That says what are written? There's no law of physics that tells you you have to put an H between that W and A. Why do you do so? Because your brain has evolved, your brain has learned to encode the statistics of co-occurring letters in English and other languages. So when you're presented with that context, you see what was useful to see in the past. You don't put an H there because it wouldn't have been useful, right? Which is why during World War II, Americans translated their codes into Navajo before they sent them across because Navajo has a different statistical structure, right? And notice none of you read what you're dreaming. Why? Because I had you reading. So you're primed to read it that way, right? So this is true even at the level of seeing color. You're seeing the meaning of the information on the screen now. You're not seeing the information itself. Notice you have a dark brown tile at the top and a light orange tile at the side. That is your perceptual reality. But what's your physical reality? It's that they're exactly the same. So nothing changes on the screen except in your mind. You're seeing the meaning of the information based on your history. And what's true for color is also true for form. So these two tables are the same. Agreed? They are, okay? The red table is simply the green table on its side. They have the exact same dimensions, right? The only thing that differs is the angles at the corner. Again, you're seeing the meaning of the information based on your history. You don't see the information itself. And what's true for color, what's true for form, is in fact true for perception of other people. Other people are simply sources of stimuli. In fact, we're our own source of stimuli. We don't see the person. We see the meaning of the person based on our history. Okay? So what's true for color is true all the way up. Now, I'll show you what I mean by just watching this little video. Oh, it's day to day. I think I might turn. Who's that, Alan? Alan! Oh, Alan! No, I don't think any of you know. Alan! Alan! Alan! Alan! Alan! Oh, Alan! Alan! Alan! Alan! Alan! Alan! Oh, so that's not Alan. Steve, that's Steve. Steve! Steve! Steve! Steve! Steve! Steve! Oh, no, that's not Steve, that is Alan. Alan! Alan! How? Alan! You can see him thinking, can't you? Right? Suddenly, he has a whole different persona, right? You are projecting that onto him. That's your meaning of him based on your history. That doesn't belong to him. That's what we do to other people. Literally. Okay? So, when it comes to saying the world, we're just like this frog. And I don't mean we're similar to this frog, or metaphorically like this frog, we are literally like this frog. Okay, this is virtual reality for a frog. Ah! I so love that. We're so like that frog in so many ways. Right? So, some of you are thinking, I'm not a frog, right? I've got free will. And if we have time, we'll come to free will at the end. Right? So, let's test your free will. Let's test how independent you can be from other people around you. Right? And we're going to basically play a game of free will. So, I'm gonna show you two shapes. They have no name. They're not circles, diamonds, or squares. Right? They're meaningless. Agreed? Never really seen, they're just abstract. I'm gonna give you two abstract sounds. That also have no meaning. Kiki and boo-boo. Okay? Now you independent three thinking people, tell me which of these shapes is kiki, which has no name? And which of these shapes is boo-boo? How many people say this one's kiki? And that one's boo-boo? Yes, like 99% of the population around the world. Right? Independent of age, sex, everything. Right? Why is this happening? Right? So, I read your mind. Okay? Why is this happening? It has to do with your assumption of pain. Your brain has an over-representation of sharpness and roundness because that's behaviorally useful. So you're representing the meanings of these sounds. So if I give you the word love and hate, how many of you say this is love? And this is hate, depending on the state of your relationship, right? Okay? If I give you the word odio, many of you will say that that's odio. But Spanish speakers will say no, that one's odio because it means hate, even though it's a rounded sound. If I say hate and I prick your hand, I activate the same part of your brain. It's about pain, right? What's fascinating is you don't know this when you're doing it, right? Which is because most of the reasons why we do stuff, we're blind to it. And even more than this, we have a safety bias. More than a frog, we're actually biased towards safety. Our assumptions, which guide our behavior, are biased because there are more ways to die in the world than the artist stay alive. Okay? What is this cat? Turns around. Happens quickly, we'll do it again. Why? Because it's better to assume that's a snake than a cucumber. Right? You can actually do this at home if it's your own cat. Right? And many people have. So even more than this, right? We have a cognitive bias. Our brain evolved to find evidence that confirms what we assumed to be true already. Why? There's a really important reason why we do this, which is I'm gonna come to now, which is what, how is it possible to see differently? If everything you're doing right now is simply response grounded in your history, you have no control over what you're seeing or the decisions you make. How is it possible to see differently? And the answer is that it's a question. Seeing differently does not begin with answers. It begins with a question. All revolutions begin with a joke. You mean it could be different. What do questions actually do inside your head? If this is you, you're that red spot. What happens next? Now all things are possible. There are only a few things that are possible given where you are now. What's next is determined by your assumptions. We call it your space of possibility, right? And we can represent the next possible according to size and proximity to where you are. If the best solution is that green dot at the top, you literally can't see it. It is not possible given your space of possibility. It falls outside your biases, your assumptions. What's possible is say this blue dot, right? Your brain never makes big jumps. It only ever makes small steps and it steps to what the next most likely possible is given your history. And the shape of this structure is determined by your biases. Your assumptions come from your history. Everything you do is a consequence of your assumptions which are ingrained in your brain. The functional structure of your brain represents these assumptions, these biases, which means the only way I could ever see that green dot is by moving it and putting it, making it the next possible. So how can I change from this space of possibility to that one is by questioning my assumptions. And that's what questions do, right? They change what's possible. I'm gonna show you how basic this is even at the level of just seeing motion. So almost all of you will see this spinning from left to right. And that's because your brain has an assumption that you're looking down onto that central surface. I want you to change that assumption, question it and imagine looking up at that surface. You can mentally flip it. And at some point it'll go in the opposite direction. If you blur your eyes, blink and look around it, sometimes it helps. So who can get it to flip? Yes? Keep looking around it, we have a literalist. Keep looking around it, okay? And every time you blink, it's gonna go in the opposite direction. All you're doing is changing your assumptions. When it's flipping one way, it's impossible to see it go the other way. But as soon as you change your biases, now that becomes the next possible and the previous one becomes impossible. And so which direction is it actually rotating? Both, at the same time. How many people say it's spinning to the right? To the left? I don't care, right? What if I were to tell you that there's no motion on the screen at all? Nothing is actually moving. It's true. Nothing's actually moving, there's no motion. Yeah, you're looking at animation. And animation is nothing but a series of still images that are slightly different from each other. Your brain is taking those small physical differences in stationary images and perceiving the meaning of that change as motion, right? Because that's what makes sense based on its history, right? If I made those changes less consistent with your history, you would just see a flickering, okay? So your brain is taking a series of still images, seeing them move and changing it from one direction to the other depending on what your biases are, right? Which means that when it comes to creativity, it isn't this chaotic, messy, serendipitous, mysterious process because we never bring things together that are far apart, right? It only appears that way when other people do it, which means there's nothing creative about creativity, right? It's only creative from the outside. When you see pulling two things that are far apart together, for them, they sit right next to each other. It's just that their space of possibility is different because their assumptions, their biases, their history is different. For them, they're just taking small steps. They're just changing their space of possibility around them by the questions they ask, okay? So if this is the case, what makes creativity difficult? And there are four things, in fact. I'm only gonna talk about one of them. But the first one is we walk through life thinking we have an objective view of the world, right? And if you walk away with anything, walk away with the fact that everything you're doing now is grounding your assumptions, your biases, right? You do not have an objective view of the world, which isn't to say your view of the world is wrong, it's useful, okay? The second thing is almost everything we do, we have no idea why we do it, which is why questionnaires and marketing don't work, people give you aspirational answers. They don't know why we do what we do, but you put it on a polygraph and I'm gonna give you an answer and I'm gonna believe it, okay? But the main reason is that we hate not knowing. Uncertainty is an awful thing for your brain. If you're not sure that was a predator, it's too late. Your brain evolved to take what is uncertain and make it certain. C-sickness is a consequence of uncertainty. When you go down below in a boat and your eyes are moving and registered to the boat and your eyes are saying, oh, we're standing still. But your inner ears are saying, no, no, no, we're moving, right? And you get ill. Your brain cannot deal with that conflict, which is why if you go above deck, look at the horizon and your eyes and inner and ears are now moving and register, okay? So we literally hate uncertainty. In fact, it's pathological to seek uncertainty. If everything was fine during evolution, you had your food, you had your shelter, what a stupid idea to go and see what's on the other side of that hill, right? Because there are more ways of dying than there are staying alive. And the irony is that that's the only place we can go if we're gonna do something new, is to step into uncertainty. So, because to not know was to die. So fortunately, evolution gave us a solution. What is the one human behavior? In fact, it's not just human. Where uncertainty is not just tolerated, it's salt. We actually love uncertainty in this context. It's play. Play actually evolved as a solution to uncertainty. Play is not just an activity. It's actually a way of being. It's a way of being that's defined by celebrating uncertainty, right? To not know the punchline of a joke is what makes it funny. To not know who's gonna win is why the game is fun. We seek uncertainty in play, right? It encourages diversity. And this is in fact how we create diversity and diversity is the engine of change. It's open to possibility. In fact, it creates our possibilities, inherently cooperative and it's intrinsically motivated. Almost everything we do in the world, we do for something else. I do A in order to gain B. The reward for play is play. Why are people out there skiing? What's the value of that? The reward of skiing is skiing, right? It's intrinsically motivated, right? It's the driver for curiosity. So, and we're not the only ones who play. The most adaptable systems in nature are the ones that play into adulthood. There's no intrinsic value in these rings other than to make them. If we add intention to play, we get science. Science is nothing other than play with intention. Science is a way of being. It's not defined by its methodology. That's the craft of science, right? But science, true science is a way of being. And if you, when we apply this in schools, we've created a whole education program where our science in schools and it resulted in the youngest published scientist in the world at age eight to 10 years old, right? And the youngest main stage Ted speaker who was Amy here, okay? And we're not doing this in order to create little scientists. We're doing this in order to enable to teach these children how to step into uncertainty which they can then apply in anything in their lives. So in fact, we're working now to create the world's first science institute that is just for young girls from most deprived areas in Santiago, Chile. So what this means is that in order to be creative, the environment, the ecology of creativity is fundamental. And key to that is the leader, the teacher, the head teacher, the leadership of a company, of a lab. And if you ask people what defines a good leader, you get all these descriptions, right? All of them make sense, but there are only three that are associated with the success of any one company. Lead by example, admit mistakes and see quality in others. Why these three? The first one, because play does not happen outside of space that's trusted, right? Lead by example, creates a secure trusted space. The second is admit mistakes. That's a space that celebrates uncertainty. And thirdly, see qualities in others. That's a space that's open to diversity. So these three aspects of leadership are actually directly to a tie to creativity. And in particular, this way of being that enables. So the next greatest innovation is not gonna be a technology. It's a way of being that will enable technologies and other adaptations. Which means what defines a good leader is how you lead others into uncertainty. So we'll just finish with two videos showing you examples of leadership. Here's one. Lead by example, supportive, trusting, right? That's one. Here's the other, right? Looks up for reassurance. Yes? So what kind of leader are you? And the point is you have to be both. Because it's being at the edge of chaos on average.