The War on Creativity

The War on Creativity: There's an entire industry dedicate to creativity and innovation. But do people - and corporations-really want to "think outside of the box." Is there an inherent bias against creativity? Image credit: Guillermo Legaria/AFP/Getty Images

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:03):
Welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind from how Stuff
Works dot com. Hey, welcome to Stuff to Blow your Mind.
My name is Robert Lamb and my name is Julie Douglas. Julie,
we find ourselves in January, so they the Christmas has
once again died down. We don't have to worry with

(00:23):
that for another year. And we also don't have to
worry about the War on Christmas for another year. Right,
that's right? And what do you do in the absence
of the War on Christmas in these January duel drums? Yeah, well,
this is actually the perfect time to concentrate on another
ongoing war, and that's the war on creativity. And it's
really it's a good time to talk about it because

(00:44):
January is always it's a time of new beginnings. It's
a time of you know, of new corporate goals and
new personal goals, and a lot of times that incorporates
a certain amount of creative thinking. I want to think
more creatively, I want to be more creatively. I want
my company to figure out new and inventive ways to
go about our process. That's right. In fact, one of

(01:05):
the things we can pick from in our development goals
will fall under a theme of I think it was
like customer service innovation. All sorts of different categories, but
innovation that's one of them. Creativity essentially, And this is
a huge cottage industry in the marketplace, right, incorporations. Everybody
wants and out of the box thinker, someone who can

(01:26):
really come up with juicy new novel ideas. Yeah, and
one year we even had like the whole company was
like Creative Innovation Year, and we had like a fun
room in the in the office with like being back
chairs and all that stuff that nobody used. Yeah, well
because badly we're busy being creative at our desk. Um.
But it is one of those things that everyone thinks
they want anyway. I mean, everybody likes the idea of

(01:49):
being more creative, and everyone sees the fruits of it
with if you really cherry pick your examples, well that's
the problem. Everybody loves the after effects of creativity versus
the oddball ideas, the things that people put out there,
or even the sort of projects that people are working

(02:10):
on that seem you know, too strange or uncomfortable in
order to be accepted. Yeah, now we can. We can
name numerous individuals who are great examples of Oh they were.
They were ahead of their time. They were free thinkers,
and look how it paid off. The two that you
were mentioning were who Van Go and Jobs. You know,
at the time maybe a little too obsessive. Some people

(02:30):
might have thought, oh this is crazy, these ideas are
coming out of left field. Um. You know, these are
larger than life characters and they don't really drive with
everything else that's going on. But but of course now
and certainly after both their their deaths, they are held
up as as figures. I mean, Van Go is a is,
a is a legend of of the art world. Uh,

(02:52):
Steve jobs is is just cemented as an icon of
technological innovation. He is. But then you have some people who,
again they might be the oddball out. Um, I'm thinking
about Troy Hart to Bias. He is a Canadian scrap
metal dealer in nature enthusiasts who, after being attacked by
a bear, became obsessed with constructing a series of increasingly

(03:13):
elaborate bear proof suits designed to withstand any onslaught essentially
power armor like this crazy sci fi power armor, in
order for him to do battle with bears or hold
his own in the Company of Bears, and he said,
you know, he thinks that there are applications beyond just
trying to avoid being mauled by a grizzly. That he

(03:35):
thinks that government agencies could actually use this in war
warfare and whatnot. And he's been turned down again and again.
One there's the idea, because he just doesn't have the credentials.
And too it's because it's like this one guy who
became obsessed with a bear suit, right right, Yeah, there's
a documentary about him, Project Grizzly Who film produced by
the National Film Board of Canada. I have not actually

(03:57):
seen it. I really want to. I've seen the trailers
for it, and it looks like an amazing journey into
this individual's mind. If you want to check out the
stuff he's into now, you can go to his website.
That's www dot Inventor Troy, that's I n V E
N T O R t r o y dot com
and you can see that he is still really into

(04:18):
crazy sci fi looking combat armor. Yeah, and what does
this take. It takes innovation, it takes takes risks financially
his own really um, but we end up laughing at
it in the case of Troy, we end up saying
that guy's a goofball, he's out of touch. He has
these crazy inventive ideas, but none of them are landing anywhere.
This is not the kind of person where most big

(04:39):
corporations would say that's the brain we want setting in
on our brain storming meetings. That's right, because you know,
fifty years from now he might be celebrated. They might
say he really like he had some very crazy ideas.
And if you look back at Da Vinci and the
fact that he made this, what was a wooden automaton
that sat at his dining table, it's just one of

(05:01):
his many thought experiments. You know that people sat at
that dining table with him were like a little office rocker. Yeah,
but this is necessary. This, this kind of creativity, in
this idea that you can throw yourself into the void
and be comfortable with that. Just give this a little
more background. Here's here just a few noted individuals celebrated

(05:22):
geniuses who died penniless, who only after their death that
really people come back and say that person was a genius.
We should worship their example. We're talking about Nicola Tesla,
Vincent van Gogh, Edgar Allan, Poe, Socrates, Oscar Wilde, Herman Melville,
Stephen Foster, Johannes Guttenberg, and those are some pretty big

(05:43):
names and the sciences and the arts and in philosophy,
but world changers, world changers. But it was it was
only an after effect. And certainly, I'm sure they know
any number of these individuals had numerous contemporaries who did
not have that kind of impact, and it certainly would
be given more of the Project Grizzly view by corporations

(06:04):
or or or even people within their own field. The
reason for this is that we tend to as humans,
gravitate towards the middle terrain. And we'll talk more about that.
But creativity is big problem and why there's a war
on it is that it contains a risk factor. This
is really underlying the problem of why a lot of
people can't get behind it or commit to it. Yeah,

(06:24):
creative types are risk takers. They tend to buck accepted
and proven trends. They try new things, and they often
ignore warnings uh from the more cautious among us, even
after repeated failures. Uh. So you know, it's like the
grizzly Man. People have been telling him for ages, Hey,
let's stop making Maybe you should stop making arm and
maybe this isn't working out, maybe you should try something

(06:45):
a little more proven. He's not gonna do it. This
is his thing, this is his dream, and he's following that,
and he's gonna follow that into the grave, be it
at the hands of a grizzly bear or a grizzly
bear in armor. So so there's a there's a riskiness
in in hitching a ride on these particular stars, right,
because if you give someone a choice between a large,
uncertain reward and a certain smaller award, they're always gonna

(07:07):
go with something that's more of a sure thing. Yeah,
unless unless the situation is dire, then they're going to
roll the dice. But Barry M. Star he actually wrote
in uh. He wrote a great essay in the book
called Creative Action and Organizations Ire Tower Visions in Real
World Voices. He wrote that no one really wants creativity,

(07:27):
especially corporations, because just what you describe, we're talking about
someone who is deviating from the norm. They're vulnerable, they're obsessive,
they're sharing information, they're bucking the system. And he says
the average person may become intrigued when the glorious of
successful creativity are hailed by the media, but when presented
with the bald truth that most scientists never come up

(07:48):
with any earth shaking findings, most new businesses and in failure,
and most whistleblowers get demoted or fired. It's not surprising
that most people usually up for a safer, more normal
life than that followed by the creative. And if you
think about it, you know, you hear the corporations say
we want creativity, we want innovation. Well, that doesn't really

(08:09):
fit in the model of a lot of corporations because
uncertainty is that the basis here of creativity. And that's
kind of a dirty word, you know, incorporations. You wanna
you wanna have every nook and cranny of a corporation
sanitized of uncertainty, because that is when the presence of
it could usher in unforeseen costs and turn up revelations

(08:30):
that might not square with that corporation's culture. Yeah, we've
we've talked before about about movies and about trying new
things in Hollywood, and then's you know, the old adds
that Hollywood rather roll out the same thing every year
than try something new and but but then you have
to remind yourself that the production of any big budget film,
I mean, that's that's a that's a corporation, that's a
that's an event that involved lots of money, lots of

(08:52):
people's jobs. Uh some dudes. Yacht may even be on
the on the line, and all companies of that size.
It's essentially the same with an oil company. Whereas an
oil company gonna drill, are they gonna drill where they
know the oil is? Are they gonna drill where there
might be oil? And again, we it's just like with
the noted individuals, the creative outliers that we we look
back to him, they go, oh, that person was a genius.

(09:12):
That was a genius. That guy was ahead of his time,
that woman was ahead of her time. It's it's similar
with movies. You look at some of the films that
went on to be cult classics who went on to
be highly influential on other um filmmakers, and they were
flops at the time. Big Lebowski, Big Trouble, A Little China,
Two of my favorite films Clue, Office Space, Fight Club,
Citizen Kane. Those are all films that when they came out.

(09:35):
People really didn't know what to make of and they
didn't make that big of an effect, and they certainly
didn't make enough money to justify their their existence. It's
only afterwards that people gravitated towards them and they made
money and they made a name for themselves. Yeah, that's
because they were outside of the realm of what you know,
the usual sort of Hollywood products. Stamp out, uh was
a part of right, it was outside of that structure.

(09:57):
And so where that structure is certainty. Right, and again
talking about uncertainty and risk as being the enemy of creativity,
now that's not necessarily a bad thing because you think
about it this way. Are are Magdala's the part of
the brain that processes fear. They are ramped up in
situations of uncertainty. All right, this is sort of hardwired
inness to say, oh, we're not really sure, we're risk adverse.

(10:19):
We all want to survive. Now, this seems a little
silly on a Hollywood platform where they're just producing movies,
but still those people are tied to money, and money
is seen as survival in our society. Right. So Jack Nitchi,
a u W. Madison Professor of psychiatry found the uncertainty
intensifies a person's perception of a bad experience, at least

(10:41):
in the case of disturbing photos. Um Nitchi showed participants
and found that the emotional centers and the brain responded
much more strongly to the material if the person didn't
know what was coming. So again, we're talking about disturbing photos.
This is an extreme scenario, but I think that it
makes the case that in some ways we are overreacting

(11:04):
to uncertainty because we're hardwired to do that. Yeah, Because ultimately,
if you take things down to a primal you know,
life amid the saber tooth tigers example, you want certainty
in your life as much as you can possibly hoard
as much as you can possibly grab onto. You want
the certainty of food, and you want to avoid the
uncertainty of of a starvation or death at the hands

(11:26):
of some apex predator out there. And even uh, you know,
even in some of the small choices in life. As
much as we we try to think that we're creative
and we think, oh, you know, I love a highly
creative work. I love the uncertainty of a of a
really good book or a really good movie. How how
much uncertainty are we really comfortable with? Like if I
were to hand you a book right now and say

(11:46):
you should read this, I'm not gonna tell you what
it's called or what it's about, but devote you know
X and u X hours of your life to reading
it and just see what happens. You would be hesitant
to to take that challenge, I would imagine, and so
would I. I would know about the risk and reward ratio.
I would say to myself, not really certain here what
the outcome is going to be there for I will

(12:07):
default to the norm, which is to push it aside. Yeah,
I mean one of the big things that we turned
to the internet for so much is to the vet
stuff that's coming to us. So even if it is
a new film that might be dealing with the new idea,
we want to know who's behind it, who wrote it,
who's directing it, who start in it, what's their track
record with success in the past, what do noted critics

(12:28):
think of it, what do our friends think of it?
So we in a way, we we still want to
remove as much uncertainty from our consumption of creative products
as possible. You know, I was just thinking about the
normal ty biased episode that we did about how people
will underreact in a traumatic situation because they want there
to be that certainty, that the reality that they know.

(12:48):
Because at the end of the day, the sort of
patterned reality that we encounter over and over again, this
idea of normalcy takes a less of a cognitive load
on us then novel thoughts and uncertainty. So from a
survival perspective, you want to go with the thing that's
sort of known, albeit a little bit wrote and possibly boring.

(13:11):
You know, one of the tragedies is that some of
the most memorable experiences of our lives, assuming they're not
negative and kill us or our injurius or traumatize us,
are often situations that involve a lot of uncertainty. End
up going on this adventure, right, And the rare opportunities
that we do read something or view a film or
consume some piece of of media without any preconceived notions,

(13:33):
with with next to zero um in terms of anticipation, like,
some of those can be the most rewarding experiences because
you're just flying completely blind into the unknown. But if
given the choice, it's our our natural evolved instinct to
avoid those kinds of encounters. That's why every once in
a while you should submit to the crazy makers in
your life. You know, the people who tried to push

(13:54):
you into new experiences. Come out to this club, come
see this play. Yeah, just do it because you could
get the reward there. All right, let's take a quick break,
and when we get back, I'm gonna talk a little
bit more about this biased against creativity and some studies
that confirm that it exists. Alright, we're back. We're talking

(14:20):
about creativity and how no matter how much we cling
to it personally, no matter how much corporations and employers
will will celebrate creativity in the workplace or make a
show of it, ultimately we're all a little suspicious of
the topic to begin with. Yes, there is a paper
called the Bias against Creativity, Why people desire but reject
creative ideas and these This paper is by researchers from Cornell,

(14:44):
University of Pennsylvania and the University of North Carolina, and
they say, essentially, creative ideas make people uncomfortable. Now, this
paper is based on two studies from the University of Pennsylvania,
which involves more than two participants. Yeah, and two experiments.
They manipulated uncertainty during different models, and the results of
both experiments demonstrated the existence of negative bias against creativity

(15:07):
when participants experienced uncertainty. And furthermore, they found that the
bias against creativity interfered with participants ability to recognize the
creative idea to begin with. So the results the results
reveal a concealed barrier that creative actors may face, they say,
as as they attempt to gain acceptance for their incredible, crazy,
awesome ideas. Right, because what you're talking about is the

(15:30):
demand for more of that cognitive load on the brain.
And then you have the uncertainty factor, and then this
is so interesting to me that it could actually interfere
with the person's ability to perceive that as a creative idea. Yeah,
as it almost as if you know, I can't see
I've got, you know, hysterical blindness to this idea because

(15:51):
I'm so overloaded. Yeah, And again, coming back to the
films and fiction, you so often see like a highly
creative film that is following an accepted plot path, you know,
like like none of the plot points or the character
notes are really going to be that surprising, but it's
the wrapping that they're in. So even something that is

(16:11):
on the surface highly creative and highly original is is
structured in a way that it's very accessible and very uh,
non frightening. Now, in a nutshell, the paper is saying, Okay,
the corporations need to take note of this, and if
they truly want innovation and creativity in the workplace, then
they need to create a more supportive framework for creativity

(16:34):
rather than just saying, hey, I want a bunch of
creative ideas. Because again, if you think about how a
corporation is set up, um, it tends to default to
these these sort of norms in the language you hear
corporate speak all the time, and the way that people
dress right, um, bucking the system and and being you know,
sort of going off on your own is frowned upon.

(16:56):
Now unless you're looking at a business like Google, which
you know they there's a whole mandate for just go
off and do something that you're interested in, because the
idea is that later on they can take that person's
novel thinking or or crazy making in the workplace and
get something out of it later, even if it doesn't
fit into what's actually going on at that very moment. Yeah,

(17:18):
but for most of us, there's there's at least some
sort of if there's not an actual dress code in place,
and there's an implied dress code there, you know, unless
it's you know, freaky Friday or Halloween or whatever kind
of day you might have. Yeah, it's that you have
to wear pants rule in our office, which which totally
messes with my creative vibe. Okay, So we recently moved

(17:40):
to a new location and we are sharing a space
with one part of the business that is involved with sales,
and then the other part of the business is editorial us. Right,
and we have two different sides of this office space.
Did you know I recently found out that the sales
department calls us the dark Side. Well, that's interesting because
it reminds me very much of that episode we did

(18:03):
about the tidally locked worlds. Yes, and I mentioned an
old sci fi novel about a world where half the
world is in dark and as half the world is
in light and on the light side they're ruled by science,
and the dark side they're ruled by magic. So maybe
we're like that they're the science with the magic. Well,
I think initially they called us that because we are
all apparently sensitive to light, and so we don't have

(18:26):
any overhead lighting on our side. But you know, this
weird aversion to harsh artificial light. But we also dressed
maybe a little nutty, because we don't have to go
out on sales calls. I will venture to say that
the break room talk is bizarre just because of the
amount of topics we're covering. So I kind of I
sort of love that they have decided to call us

(18:47):
the dark side. I'll accept it, embrace that. Yeah, Yeah,
all right, that was a bit of a diversion. Let's
get back to this idea of creativity and particularly among children,
because we talked about this before. Children are great at
dealing with un certainty and making all sorts of new
associations between things. Yeah, and they are often a great

(19:07):
place to go for your creative thought. I mean, they'll
come up with this crazy ideas like I've mentioned. I
mentioned before going to Uncle Grahampa's the uh, the children's
puppet show UH that they do here in Atlanta, where
they let the children shout out ideas for the improv
puppeteers to then use and at one point to a
puppeteer said hey, all right, we need a name for
the princess. What would the princess's name be? And one

(19:29):
little girl shouted out Batman the girl which is which
was just hilarious at the time and and just not
the kind of idea you would expect an adult to
come up with. Or likewise, there's I think it's called
Axe Cop. There's like a whole like web series turned
cartoon series where the ideas originated with this little girl
and then her her father took the ideas and they

(19:50):
were you know, it was like goofy stuff, like here's
a cop and he's on the beat, but for some
reason he runs around with an axe instead of that
I've done. So on the surface of things, you would think,
all right, well, children are just a font if creativity.
They're just these you know, just wonderful, crazy abstract thoughts,
just just just bubbling out of the ground. But a
two thousand ten study, uh, gives us a little more

(20:11):
information to go on and shows that creativity at les
American children is actually down in recent years. Yeah, we're
gonna roll out from these stats here. Sorry about giving
you the sads, but we're talking about three hundred thousand
creativity tests going back to the nineteen seventies. Young He Kim,
a creative a creativity researcher at the College of William
and Mary, found creativity has decreased among American children, and

(20:33):
since children have become less able to produce unique and
unusual ideas, they're also less humorous, less imaginative, and less
able to elaborate on ideas, according to Kim, and the
researchers point to a tightly bound education environment like those
such as No Child Left Behind, an Act of Congress

(20:53):
pass in two thousand and one that requires schools to
administer annual standardized tests as a way to assess whether
they are meeting state educ catian standards. Now, this inadvertently
hamstrings what and how educators teach and in the scenarios,
typically teachers don't get to learn to spend a lot
of time exploring unexpected ideas, so kids as a result,

(21:16):
they begin to fall in line with the material that
they're teaching in a very stringent way and anticipating what
the teacher wants to hear, as opposed to really taking
that idea and showing it around in their mind and
um and exercising their critical thinking abilities. Yeah, they end
up teaching the tests. They end up teaching the expected

(21:36):
rather than celebrated the unexpected and the unknown. Uh. And
and as we've touched on before with creativity, this isn't
just a situation of all they're going to produce less
English majors and failed musicians. No, creativity is a is
an essential part of not only artistic endeavor, but scientific endeavor. Uh.
It's it's something that empowers just about any field. Um.

(21:58):
And one of these children may go into or dream
of going into when they reach adulthood. It's one of
the cornerstone indicators that predicts future success for a child.
So you look at this data and you'll say, okay,
well SAT scores are rising in these couple of decades,
but the scores on divergent thinking are tanking. And that

(22:19):
divergent thinking is what makes or breaks the ability of
a child to really think about a topic. Not just
with creativity, but but bring us sort of full three
sixty understanding to it. Yeah, save the tooth, tiger and
the bushes not a standardized test. The sciences, the arts
not standardized tests. So I mean it makes sense. It's sad,

(22:41):
but it makes sense. And again that the two study
is not just a study, but a study of studies
of the thousand different creativity tests going back to the seventies,
So again she was pulling from a vast well of data.
Now it gets even worse. It turns out that kids
creative students maybe discriminated against in the classroom. There's a

(23:01):
paper called creativity Asset or Burden in the Classroom, and
there are two studies that were conducted to examine teachers
perceptions of creative students. Study one was based on earlier
works that identified personality characteristics associated with creativity, so that
created the baseline. The prototypicality of these characteristics as they
applied to creative children was rated by college students. Elementary

(23:23):
school teachers were then asked to rate their favorite and
least favorite students based on these characteristics. So what happened
is that the teacher actually ended up favoring kids who
were pleasers or satisfiers and more readily followed directions and
did what they were told, which kind of makes sense
when we talk about this environment in which you have
very stringent requirements. Yeah, and just I mean also just

(23:45):
the reality of being a teacher. I mean, I don't
have a big background as a teacher. I only taught
for a very short period of time high school English.
I was not I was not really all that trained.
I was just kind of a warm body they could
put in when a teacher left. But but and you know,
with that brief experience, I can see you know you
want you don't want the kids that are behavior problem.

(24:06):
You want the kids that are gonna do what you
you say, and and by other rules and perform well.
And as much as you might hate to admit it,
you don't want kids that are gonna clog up the
gear work of the classroom with too many questions. I
guess yeah, But it's so sad because it's you know,
those are the times when the child is really trying

(24:28):
to grasp the topic by going outside of what you
would normally perceive as the Okay, here's the answer, um,
Because everybody knows that in a situation outside of the
classroom too. You could be in an office situation and
someone to ask invariably we'll ask that question that kind
of makes everybody have a headache. But the reason is
because they are truly thinking about it and trying to

(24:52):
wrap their brains around it. So there should be that
space for students. But instead, if a student knows that
they are being discriminated against, they might avoid creative thoughts
to better fit in and not feel socially ostracized. And
I was thinking about, uh, this this idea of students
in classrooms who are sometimes given empty praise. It's called

(25:15):
the praise paradox. And there's this idea that if you
give a kid empty praise, they perceive it is that
they're not doing well. And so even that just these
like little nuanced things that teach, these interactions to the
teachers and students really make or break how that that
student is going to respond intellectually. Yeah, I mean, looking

(25:36):
back on elementary school for myself, I mean that the
classes that I was most into were the ones where
we discussed stuff where there was like an open forum
at least at the end of class, where you could
just ask questions in order or discuss the the history
you were you were talking about, the story you were reading.
It certainly wasn't math class, but but yeah, science classes,

(25:58):
social studies, uh, literature. I can remember specific classes where
there was that situation where you felt like those who
were hungry for knowledge. We're going to be fit right
and you know, obviously I'm not in it right now.
You you're not in it right now. So we don't
know the absolute environment. We can only talk in generalities
that are painted in some of these studies. But here's

(26:18):
the bright side of being an oddball and in asking
those questions and creating at least. I guess you could
call it an intellectual problem. Um, if you fly your
freak flag, it could be a good thing. There's a
two thousand and twelfth study by JOHNS Hopkins University business
professor Sharon Kim, and she found that social rejection can
inspire imaginative thinking, particularly in individuals with a strong sense

(26:42):
of their own independence. I can I can definitely relate
to that, and having had virtually no friends throughout junior
high like that was the time of a lot of
creative development for me, I think, well, yeah, I mean,
the paper is basically saying that this rejection effect can
liberate creative people from the need to fit in, and
then then they can go and pursue their interests. Like

(27:03):
I remember specifically thinking it's like, all right, it kind
of sucks when I'm at school, and my whole social environment,
you know, like you know, my family is great, I
don't have any friends at school, so I'm just gonna
read as many like Stephen King and J. R. Tolkien
books as possible, and and I just retreated into those.
So are just retreated into uh, into fiction and into

(27:23):
you know, creative thought. Yeah, I know, there's a there's
a sort of aha moment where it's like, I'm never
gonna be able to please these people. Therefore, I'm going
to go be my freaky self and it's gonna be
fun because this weekend I'm going to self hypnotize folks. Well,
I mean, I guess one of the tragedies too, though,
is that we were talking, we talked about the teenage brain,
and I feel like we're I often will think back

(27:46):
on my my my Maize in high school and junior
high and I think, if I had to relive that
all again, it's some sort of weird sci fi scenario happened,
and I found myself with my current mind in my
junior high uh, existence, like what would I do differently?
And it's really a false situation to try to imagine.
Because our hormones are coming out a totally different cocktail

(28:06):
at that point, and our brains are hardwired to want
these people to like us. Uh. So there's there's a
big hurdle there in being the you know, the the
just forget all you people, uh, freak flag flying creative individual. Yeah,
and you have the other problem that underscores at all
is that that social rejection, the pain of it. And

(28:29):
we talked about this in the teenage brain that feels
like actual pain. It is so ramped up in the
amygdala at that age that you can't ignore. It's like
a siren going off. So it takes a very strong
constitution to get past that point to say it's okay
that I'm working outside of the norm and you know this,
it's liberating and I can now go and do the

(28:49):
thing that makes me happiest and that I'm really passionate about.
All Right, Well, there you have it. Uh, just a
little more insight into creativity itself, and especially into the
war and creativity, if you will, the stone cold fact
that as awesome as creativity is, as important as creativity
is in all these various sub fields from the arts

(29:10):
of the sciences, we have a built in aversion to
it and uh, and it makes a lot of sense
from just an evolutionary standpoint. Yeah, and some of you
may be relieved to find this information out. If you've
ever been throwing out some ideas and you feel like
people aren't listening to them, just know that, you know,
it may be that their their thought forces are so
clouded by the cognitive load of it that they truly

(29:32):
cannot understand what you're talking about or see it. Because
it does there's this element of uncertainty. So there's there's
a worth in understanding that perspective and maybe being able
to repackage it. Yeah, all right, If you want to
check out all the creative stuff that we're up to,
various episodes, to all the podcast episodes, all the blog post,
all the videos, you can find them a stuff to

(29:54):
blow your mind dot com that's our mothership, our homepage
that's constantly update who all sorts of cool content. And
you also find links there to our various social media
as such as Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, Google Plus, SoundCloud, you
name it, find us on the one that you use,
and then you can follow us. Indeed, and if you
would like to send us an email, you can do
so at below the mind at Discovery dot com. For

(30:20):
more on this and thousands of other topics, visit how
stuff Works dot com.