3 Un disordine alla volta!

Il libro che ha ispirato l'unica regola di casa mia: "un disordine alla volta, per favore".
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Willpower: Rediscovering Our Greatest Strength

Can you resist everything except temptation? In a hedonistic age full of distractions, it's hard to possess willpower - or in fact even understand why we should need it. Yet it's actually the most important factor in achieving success and a happy life, shown…

AMAZON.IT

L’anticorpo del disordine

Resilience – Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World
Tim Harford

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Punti chiave: Cio’ che fa male fa anche bene (se produce diversità) – Diversificare il rischio produce resilienza – L’impulso burocratico a uniformare – Una triste notizia: noi confondiamo povertà e disordine – Altra triste notizia: confondiamo diversità e disordine – 

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Two centuries after Johann Gottlieb Beckmann had been tidying up messy ancient woodlands into neat rows of Norwegian spruce, the German forests were dying.

Note:LO SPORCO SEGRETO DEI BOTANICI

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merely removing fallen logs and dead trees would result in the loss of almost a third of non-bird wildlife species in a forest…over time they altered the ecology of the forest and exposed the trees to fungi

Note:SOTTOBOSCO

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None of this was anticipated by the foresters of yesteryear.

Note:ESPERTI

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In nature, mess often indicates health – and not only in the forest.

Note:SALUTE E COMPLESSITÀ

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stomach ulcers, which were thought to be caused by stress.

Note:ULCERE E STRESS

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ulcers weren’t caused by stress at all, but by a corkscrew-shaped bacteria, Helicobacter pylori.

Note:L’IDEA DI MARSHALL

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Barry Marshall drank a flask full of H. pylori…Finally Marshall and Warren had the attention of the medical profession….

Note:SPERIMENTAZIONE

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Blaser found that Americans who had H. pylori in their guts were far less likely to suffer from asthma…H. pylori helps prevent obesity by regulating a stomach enzyme called ghrelin…

Note:COLPO DI SCENA: IL BATTERIO FA BENE

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The view used to be that the human body was under assault from bacteria, and that antibiotics were an unalloyed good, albeit one to be used with care lest bacteria evolve resistance.

Note:ORTODOSSIA SUI BATTERI

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Some bacteria are dangerous, some are harmless passengers and some are beneficial. Some, such as H. pylori, can be dangerous or beneficial depending on the situation.

Note:AMICI O NEMICI?

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Martin Blaser has become one of the leading champions of the view that our bacterial guests are starting to become less diverse and that this thinning of the microbiome is doing us harm.

Note:L’ALLARME DI BLASER

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it was easier to stay slim in the 1980s…people today seem to be heavier than their forebears, even when they eat the same and are equally active….

Note:OBESITÀ

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people today have denuded gut bacteria

Note:SPIEGAZIONE

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Lactobacillus sakei – another of those bacteria we have cluttering up our bodies – appears to prevent sinusitis

Note:SINUSITI

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The most disgusting example concerns the treatment of Clostridium difficile gut infections…C. difficile itself is increasingly resistant to antibiotics. But now a near-miraculous cure has been discovered…The treatment in question was faecal microbiota transplantation – which is a polite way to describe blending a healthy person’s excrement with a little salty water, and injecting the mixture into the patient via the obvious orifice….

Note:CLOSTRIDUM

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Why, then, are our microbes going missing? The most obvious culprit is the routine use of antibiotics.

Note:IL DANNO DEGLI ANTIBIOTICI

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A third explanation is the rise of the caesarean section, which is now how almost a third of American babies come into the world. Babies collect a rich broth of microbes from their mothers, but this transfer does not occur in the womb as one might expect. Instead, they are smeared with bacteria as they pass through the birth canal

Note:COLPA DEL CESAREO?

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It is worth acknowledging that these ideas have already become a fad – a great deal of nonsense is now being talked by quacks and purveyors of probiotic yoghurt aiming to promote a ‘healthy microbiome’.

Note:CIARLATANI

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if you try to control a complex system, suppressing or tidying away the parts that seem unimportant, you are likely to discover that those parts turn out to be very important indeed.

Note:CONSEGUENZE NON INTENZIONALI

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Jane Jacobs, urban writer and campaigner, made the case for neighbourhood diversity in The Death and Life of Great American Cities…Diversity at street level was made possible by a mix of offices and homes, stores and workshops. It was also made possible, Jacobs argued, by a mix of old and new buildings….

Note:LA DIVERSITÀ NELLE CITTÀ

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It is preferable, she argued, to have an inefficient hodgepodge of different industries than to specialise in a single industry, however efficient that might seem in the short term. One of her favourite examples was the unromantic mess of Birmingham, the second-largest city in England. Birmingham is famous for making nothing in particular

Note:BIRMINGHAM

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When Jane Jacobs was admiring Birmingham in the early 1960s, her view seemed odd. Detroit, the quintessential one-industry town, was booming…specialised cities were fragile….

Note:DETROIT VS BRMNGHAM

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AnnaLee Saxenian, an economist and political scientist, published a study comparing two famous technology clusters, Silicon Valley and Boston’s Route 128.

Note:SILICON VALLEY

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the technology companies of Route 128 – companies such as Wang, Raytheon and Sun – kept themselves in tidy silos, specialising in narrow fields of excellence. The fledgling companies of Silicon Valley sprawled into each other, engineers constantly gossiping with one another

Note:BOSTON ROUTE: ORDINE E STANDARD

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Hidalgo has discovered that there is a strong correlation between being a diversified economy, a complex economy and a rich economy…highly diversified economies also tend to be rich…

Note:RICCHEZZA E DIVERSITÀ

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Diverse economies, like diverse German forests, are more resilient.

Note:CAPACITÀ DI RISPONDERE ALLE CRISI

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The old proverb ‘jack of all trades, master of none’…Perhaps that is true of an individual; it’s not true of a city or a country….

Note:PROVERBI VALIDI PER LE PERSONE MA NON PERLE COMUNITÀ

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If people prefer to live near similar people – perhaps people of the same race, class, ethnicity or income – then even quite mild preferences can lead to marked social segregation.

Note:MA DIVERSIFICARE È UN PROBLEMA

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a bureaucratic desire for tidy, segregated cities is expressed in zoning and planning

Note:IL DESIDERIO DI SEGREGAZIONE DELLA BUROCRAZIA

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Recall how Jane Jacobs’s ballet of Hudson Street relied on the fact that the street was active at any time of day, because so many different kinds of people used it. In contrast, thoroughly zoned neighbourhoods are unbalanced. They are too busy at certain times, deathly quiet at others

Note:DORMITORI

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I had published a study which showed that messy streets lead to greater intolerance. In a messy environment, people are more likely to resort to stereotypes of others…But within a few months of publication, social psychologists received some unsettling news: Diederik Stapel was a fraud….

Note:CASINO E INTOLLERANZA… L’ORDINE CI RENDE PIÙ BUONI? UNO STUDIO FRADOLENTO

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Stapel, the newspaper reported, ‘had been frustrated by the messiness of experimental data, which rarely led to clear conclusions’. His lifelong obsession with elegance and order, he said, led him to concoct sexy results

Note:L’EDITORE VOLEVA RISULTATI CHIARI

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It was a quest for aesthetics, for beauty – instead of the truth.’

Note:BELLEZZA CONTRO VERITÀ

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The story of the ‘broken windows’ theory of urban decay is another example of how we instinctively overestimate the benefits of tidying up certain kinds of urban mess.

Note:BROKEN WINDOW SOPRAVVALUTATA

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The truth is that social science has not been able to muster much support for the broken windows theory of policing

Note:POCO SUPPORTO

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four factors seemed to explain the timing, extent and geographical pattern of the fall in crime: more police; a larger prison population (this may deter crime, and will also prevent crimes because would-be criminals are locked up); the waning of an epidemic of crack use; and the legalisation of abortion in the 1970s,

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LEVITT... FATTORI PIÙ INFLUENTI

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Thacher is right – certain kinds of mess are worth tidying up for their own sake. But it’s striking how easily we fall for the old-fashioned idea that ‘cleanliness is next to godliness’

Note:BIAS: DISORDINE => MALE

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Sampson and Raudenbush conducted a survey of thousands of Chicago residents, asking them about their own perceptions of disorder…Then they compared the subjective perceptions…with the objective observations…

Note:DISORDINE PERCEPITO

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Neighbourhoods with many poor families, or with a high proportion of African American residents, or both, were perceived as being more disordered…If we want to predict whether a city block’s residents think that it’s a mess, we would learn more from looking at data on race and poverty…

Note:POVERTÀ SCAMBIATA PER DISORDINE

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Academics with Jewish ancestry found their careers in ruins. The best of them left, seeking less intolerant cultures in Britain and the United States. A torment for those that fled, this policy was also a self-inflicted wound. German science was crippled. Despite a formidable industrial base and engineering tradition, Germany was unable to keep pace with the innovations that emerged from Britain and the United States – often from the very people who had been driven out.

Note:LA RICERCA DEPURATA DAGLI EBREI

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he compared it to the impact of bombing raids on university departments during the war. He found the damage from losing Jewish or dissident scientists was far greater and longer lasting than the damage to offices or laboratory facilities.

Note:WALDINGER

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Ottaviano and Peri found that cities which hosted a complex patchwork of nationalities prospered as a result.

Note:MELTING POT

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Recall that Katherine Phillips and her colleagues found that small student groups disliked having a stranger in their midst, even as the stranger was helping them solve the murder-mystery problem they faced.

IL CORPO ESTRANEO

INTRO+1 Creativity - Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World by Tim Harford

Messy: How to Be Creative and Resilient in a Tidy-Minded World by Tim Harford

You have 118 highlighted passages

You have 117 notes

Last annotated on October 8, 2016

On the 27th of January 1975, a seventeen-year-old German named Vera BrandesRead more at location 52

Note: x Edit

Vera Brandes was introducing Keith Jarrett and his producer Manfred Eicher to the piano – and it wasn’t going well.Read more at location 57

Note: x Edit

“If you don’t get another piano, Keith can’t play tonight.”’Read more at location 60

Note: x Edit

‘this tiny little Bösendorfer, that was completely out of tune, the black notes in the middle didn’t work, the pedals stuck. It was unplayable.’Read more at location 64

Note: LE CONDIZIONI DEL PIANO Edit

he could do nothing about the muffled bass notes, the plinky high notes and the simple fact that the piano – ‘a small piano, like half a piano’ – just didn’t make a loud enough sound to reach the balconies of the vast auditorium.Read more at location 68

Note: c Edit

Jarrett didn’t want to perform. He left and went to wait in his car,Read more at location 70

Note: J IN AUTO Edit

Desperate, she caught up with Jarrett and, through the window of his car, begged him to play. The young pianist looked out at the bedraggled German teenager standing in the rain and took pity on her. ‘Never forget,’ Jarrett said. ‘Only for you.’Read more at location 72

Note: L IMPLORAZIONE Edit

That night’s performance began with a simple chiming series of notes, then quickly gained complexity as it moved by turns between dynamism and a languid, soothing tone. It was beautiful and strange, and it is enormously popular: The Köln Concert album has sold 3.5 million copies.Read more at location 77

Note: ESITO Edit

When we see skilled performers succeeding in difficult circumstances, we habitually describe them as having triumphed over adversity or despite the odds. But that’s not always the right perspective. Jarrett didn’t produce a good concert in trying times. He produced the performance of a lifetime, but the shortcomings of the piano actually helped him.Read more at location 80

Note: DIFFICOLTÀ CHE AIUTANO. NN CONTRO LE DIFFICOLTÀ Edit

The substandard instrument forced Jarrett away from the tinny high notes and into the middle register. His left hand produced rumbling, repetitive bass riffs as a way of covering up the piano’s lack of resonance. Both of these elements gave the performance an almost trance-like quality.Read more at location 83

Note: ESEMPIO Edit

the proportion between the instrument and the magnitude of the hall,’Read more at location 87

Note: QUELLO CHE SI DEVE CAPIRE Edit

Standing up, sitting down, moaning, writhing, Keith Jarrett didn’t hold back in any way as he pummelled the unplayable piano to produce something unique. It wasn’t the music that he ever imagined playing. But handed a mess, Keith Jarrett embraced it, and soared.Read more at location 89

Note: ABBRACCIARE LE DIFFICOLTÀ Edit

Keith Jarrett’s instinct was not to play and it’s an instinct that most of us would share.Read more at location 91

Note: ISTINTO SBAGLIATO Edit

But with hindsight, Jarrett’s instinct was wrong.Read more at location 92

Note: c Edit

The argument of this book is that we often succumb to the temptation of a tidy-minded approach when we would be better served by embracing a degree of mess.Read more at location 94

Note: TESI. METTIAMO UN PÒ DI CASINO NELLE NS VITE Edit

We succumb to the tidiness temptation in our daily lives when we spend time archiving our emails, filling in questionnaires on dating websites that promise to find our perfect match, or taking our kids to the local playground instead of letting them run loose in the neighbourhood wasteland.Read more at location 98

Note: LA RESA ALL ORDINE Edit

the careful commander is disoriented by a more impetuous opponent; the writer is serendipitously inspired by a random distraction; the quantified targets create perverse incentives; the workers in the tidy office feel helpless and demotivated; a disruptive outsider aggravates the team but brings a fresh new insight. The worker with the messy inbox ultimately gets more done; we find a soulmate when we ignore the website questionnaires; the kids running loose in the wasteland not only have more fun and learn more skills, but also – counterintuitively – have fewer accidents. And the pianist who says, ‘I’m sorry, Vera, that piano is simply unplayable’, and drives off into the rainy Cologne night leaving a seventeen-year-old girl sobbing on the kerbside, never imagines that he has passed up the opportunity to make what would have been his most-loved piece of work.Read more at location 105

Note: ELOGIO DEL DOISORDINE Edit

1 CreativityRead more at location 119

Note: 1@@@@@@@@@@@@@ Edit

Bowie, Eno and Darwin: How frustration and distraction help us solve problems in art, science and lifeRead more at location 122

Add a note

Keith Jarrett’s predicament was a happy accident. But there are those who take it for granted that such accidents can and should be planned; they feel that messy situations will tend to provide fertile creative soil.Read more at location 124

Note: CASINO PIANIFICATO Edit

In 1976, David Bowie fled to West Berlin.Read more at location 126

Note: CHI Edit

he found himself stuck.Read more at location 127

Note: x Edit

legal troubles,Read more at location 127

Note: x Edit

he was taking too many drugsRead more at location 128

Note: x Edit

It was a dangerous period for me,’ Bowie reflected over twenty years later. ‘I was at the end of my tether physically and emotionally and had serious doubts about my sanity.’Read more at location 130

Note: B. SI DESCRIVE Edit

Hansa Studios,Read more at location 132

Add a note

Tony Visconti,Read more at location 133

Note: x Edit

the place screamed ‘you shouldn’t be making a record here’.Read more at location 133

Note: x Edit

And then, of course, there was Brian Eno.Read more at location 135

Note: x Edit

Visconti himself had been recruited by Bowie with this sales pitch: ‘We don’t have any actual songs yet … this is strictly experimental and nothing might come of it in the end.’Read more at location 137

Note: INSERZIONE Edit

Eno took to showing up at the studio with a selection of cards he called ‘Oblique Strategies’. Each had a different instruction, often a gnomic one. Whenever the studio sessions were running aground, Eno would draw a card at random and relay its strange orders.Read more at location 140

Note: LE CARTE DI ENO E IL NULLA Edit

Be the first not to do what has never not been done before Emphasise the flaws Only a part, not the whole Change instrument roles Look at the order in which you do things Twist the spineRead more at location 142

Note: ES DI CARTA ENO Edit

For example, during the recording of the Lodger album, Carlos Alomar, one of the world’s greatest guitarists, was told to play the drums instead. This was just one of the challenges that Eno’s Oblique Strategies cards imposed, apparently unnecessarily.Read more at location 147

Note: ES DEL CHITARRISTA Edit

During another session, Eno stood beside a blackboard with a list of chords on it, and the musicians had to follow along as he pointed at random to chord after chord.Read more at location 148

Note: ALTRO ES Edit

Carlos did have a problem, simply because he’s very gifted and professional … he can’t bring himself to play stuff that sounds like crap.’Read more at location 154

Note: IL NERVOSISMO DEI PROFESSIONISTI Edit

Yet the strange chaotic working process produced two of the decade’s most critically acclaimed albums, Low and ‘Heroes’, along with Iggy Pop’s most respected work, The Idiot and Lust for Life, which Bowie co-wrote and which benefited from the same messy approach.Read more at location 155

Note: IL PARTO DEL CAOS Edit

It’s hard to argue with such results, and Brian Eno’s Oblique Strategies now have a cult following in creative circles.Read more at location 159

Note: ESTENSIONE STRATEGIA OBLIQUA Edit

Given both Jarrett’s and Bowie’s experience, it seems that arbitrary shocks to a project can have a wonderful, almost magical effect.Read more at location 162

Note: ARBITRARY SHOCK Edit

The advantage of random disturbances can also be seen in a far more technical realm – mathematicsRead more at location 164

Note: ANCHE IM ALTRI RAMI Edit

Take the question of how to lay out a circuit on a silicon chip.Read more at location 165

Note: CIRCUITI DRL CHIP Edit

there are trillions upon trillions of conceivable ways to lay out the wiring and the digital logic gates that make up the circuit – and some are much more efficientRead more at location 167

Note: c Edit

This is an example of what mathematicians call an NP-hard problem. NP-hard problems are a bit like enormous combination locks:Read more at location 168

Note: c Edit

With a lock, only one solution will work. With a chip, manufacturers don’t need to find the ultimate circuit layout;Read more at location 172

Note: c Edit

A good algorithm will get you a decent solutionRead more at location 173

Note: c Edit

But what makes for a good algorithm?Read more at location 174

Note: c Edit

Another is to start with a random layout and look for incremental improvements:Read more at location 176

Note: c Edit

Unfortunately, this method is likely to send you down a dead end.Read more at location 178

Note: c Edit

The better method is to emulate Brian Eno and introduce a judicious dose of randomness.Read more at location 180

Note: c Edit

There’s no guarantee of finding the very best circuit layout, but this kind of approach will usually find a good one.Read more at location 182

Note: c Edit

evaluate a complex new molecule for possible medical use by comparing its structure with that of many other complex molecules with known medical properties.Read more at location 184

Note: ES IN CAMPO SANITARIO Edit

Here’s an analogy: imagine participating in a strange competition to find the highest point on the planet, without being allowed to look at a map. You can name any set of coordinates you like and you’ll be told its altitude: say, ‘50.945980, 6.973465’, and you’re told: ‘That’s 65 metres above sea level.’ Then you can name another point,Read more at location 187

Note: ANALOGIA EVEREST Edit

What strategy will you use?Read more at location 190

Note: c Edit

you could try a methodical search: start with ‘0.000001, 0.000001’ and work your way up.Read more at location 191

Note: c METODICO Edit

Or you could try a strategy of purely random leaps:Read more at location 193

Note: c PURO RANDOM Edit

An alternative extreme strategy is pure hill-climbing, analogous to the step-by-step search for improvements in silicon chip design. Start at a random point and then look at all the nearby coordinates – say, a metre away in each direction. Pick the highest of those and repeat the process over and over.Read more at location 195

Note: c STEP BY STEP Edit

Hill-climbing strategies get stuck if they meet small hills.Read more at location 199

Note: c DIFETTO DELLO STEP Edit

The most likely winning approaches will be a blend of randomness with hill-climbing.Read more at location 200

Note: c BLEND Edit

Improvising at the piano seems a world away from laying out an efficient array of electronic components on a silicon wafer, but the analogy of random leaps and hill-climbing helps to make sense of what happened in Cologne. Keith Jarrett was already a highly accomplished pianist: we might imagine his performances as habitually scaling peaks in the Alps. When faced with the unplayable piano, with its harsh treble and anaemic bass, it was as if a random disruption had plucked him from an Alpine peak and deposited him in an unfamiliar valley.Read more at location 204

Note: JATRETT E I PICCHI Edit

But when he started to climb, it turned out that valley was in the Himalayas,Read more at location 208

Note: c IMPRO COME ESPLORAZ Edit

It’s human nature to want to improve and this means that we tend to be instinctive hill-climbers. Whether we’re trying to master a hobby, learn a language, write an essay or build a business, it’s natural to want every change to be a change for the better. But like the problem-solving algorithms, it’s easy to get stuck if we insist on never going downhill.Read more at location 209

Note: VICOLO CIECO. IL PROB DEGLI APPASSIONATI Edit

In the 1990s, Graeme Obree, a maverick cyclist nicknamed the ‘Flying Scotsman’, made some random leaps – he experimented with radical changes, building his own bike from odd components (including parts of a washing machine) and adopting unusual riding positions; one of these involved tucking his hands into his breastbone with no handlebars to speak of, and in another he held his arms straight out like Superman. Obree’s experimentations enabled him to break the world hour record twice, until cycling’s world governing body, the UCI, simply banned his tucked riding position. He switched to the unconventional Superman position and won the World Championship; the UCI banned that position too. Given the UCI’s attitude, we should not be surprised that the best cyclists and cycling teams now focus largely on marginal gains.Read more at location 218

Note: AUTOROT E STEP BY STEP. IL CASO OBREE Edit

In 2014, some of the workers on London’s Underground system went on strike for two days. The strike closed 171 of the Tube’s 270 stations, leaving commuters scrambling to find alternative routes using buses, overground trains or the stations that remained open. Many London commuters use electronic fare cards that are valid on all forms of public transport, and after the strike, three economists examined data generated by those cards. The researchers were able to see that most people used a different route to get to work on the strike days, no doubt with some annoyance. But what was surprising is that when the strike was over, not everybody returned to their habitual route. One in twenty of the commuters who had switched then stayed with the route that they had used during the strike;Read more at location 227

Note: SCIOPERO DELLA METRO. UN CASO PIÙ FAMIGLIARE Edit

All they needed was an unexpected shock to force them to seek out something better.Read more at location 235

Note: c Edit

As long as you’re exploring the same old approaches, Brian Eno explains, ‘you get more and more competent at dealing with that place, and your clichés become increasingly clichéd’. But when we are forced to start from somewhere new, the clichés can be replaced with moments of magic.Read more at location 239

Note: IL BLOCCO DEI CLUICHÈ Edit

the spaciousness of the place stops it feeling claustrophobic, it is engagingly messy. We are surrounded by a piano and some guitars, speakers and laptops, towering bookshelves packed with curiosities, bits and pieces of half-built instruments, plastic crates full of cables and wires and art supplies, and on a desk in a corner, a perfume collection.Read more at location 251

Note: LO STUDIO DI ENO Edit

Eno himself is a man who once dressed like a wizard, his long locks dyed silver as he played the synthesiser with a giant plastic knife and fork. Now in his mid-sixties, the glam look is long gone. He is dressed expensively but casually. Where his head isn’t bald, it is shaved. He has the veteran cool of a star architect.Read more at location 254

Note: IL LOOK DI ENO Edit

Brian Eno is easily distracted. We’re often told that good work comes from the ability to focus, to shut out distractions. To choose from a plethora of self-help tips along these lines,Read more at location 260

Note: DISTRAZIONE O CONCENTRAZIONE? Edit

Some people turn to methylphenidate (better known as Ritalin) to help them concentrate.Read more at location 265

Note: c Edit

science writer Caroline Williams even visited the Boston Attention and Learning Lab – an affiliate of Harvard and Boston Universities – to have her left prefrontal lobe zapped with magnetic pulses, all in an attempt to resolve what one of the lab’s neuroscientists called her ‘issues with attention and distractibility’.Read more at location 265

Note: c Edit

Yet here is a creative icon, one of the most influential people in modern music, who seems unable to hold a conversation outside a soundproof box.Read more at location 268

Note: c ENO UN GENIO CHE SI DISTRAE X UN NONNULLA Edit

Look around a record shop and Eno is everywhere: as a glam rocker with Roxy Music; composing ambient work such as Music for Airports; creating My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, a collaboration with David Byrne in which two white geeks anticipated hip-hop; and making Another Green World, the record that Prince once named as his biggest inspiration. (It’s the one featuring Phil Collins and the beer cans.) But the albums with Eno’s name on the front are just the start. Look in the small print and he is everywhere, a zephyr of cerebral chaos blowing back and forth across the frontal lobes of pop. Famous for his contributions to David Bowie’s albums, Eno has also worked with Talking Heads, U2, Paul Simon and Coldplay. Along the way he collaborated with punks, performance artists, experimental composers and even the film director David Lynch.* When the music magazine Pitchfork listed its top 100 albums of the 1970s, Brian Eno had a hand in more than a quarter of them.Read more at location 269

Note: CHI È ENO. TANTO X DIRE Edit

Distractible brains can also be seen as brains that have an innate tendency to make those useful random leaps. Perhaps, like Keith Jarrett’s unplayable piano, distractibility is a disadvantage that isn’t a disadvantage at all.Read more at location 278

Note: IL BELL DELLA DISTRAZIONE Edit

A few years ago a team of researchers including Shelley Carson of Harvard tested a group of Harvard students to measure the strength of their ability to filter out unwanted stimulus. (For example, if you’re having a conversation in a busy restaurant and you can easily filter out the other conversations going on around you and focus only on the conversation at hand, you have strong attentional filters.) Some of the students they studied had very weak filters – their thoughts were constantly being interrupted by the sounds and sights of the world around them. You might think this was a disadvantage. Yet these students were actually more creative on all sorts of measures.Read more at location 281

Note: ESPERIMENTO DEI FILTRI Edit

There were 25 of these super-creatives in the study; 22 of them had weak or porous attention filters. Like Brian Eno, they simply couldn’t filter out irrelevant details.Read more at location 288

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Holly WhiteRead more at location 291

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Priti ShahRead more at location 291

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the ADHD sufferers were more creative in the laboratory than non-sufferers and were more likely to have major creative accomplishments outside the lab.Read more at location 293

Note: ADHD PIÙ CREATIVI Edit

sardonic headline in The Onion: ‘Ritalin Cures Next Picasso’.Read more at location 298

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Charlan NemethRead more at location 300

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Julianne KwanRead more at location 300

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showed pairs of people blueish and greenish slides, asking them to shout out whether they were blue or green. The experimenters had a trick to play, however: one member of each pair was actually a confederate of the researchers, who would sometimes call out baffling responses – ‘green’ when the slide was clearly blue. Having been thoroughly confused, the experimental subjects were then asked to free-associate words connected with ‘green’ and ‘blue’ – sky, sea, eyes. Those who had been subjected to a confusing mess of signals produced more original word associations: jazz, flame, pornography, sad, Picasso.Read more at location 301

Note: CONFUSI E FELICI . UN ESPERIMENTO Edit

Ellen Langer,Read more at location 307

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Paul Howard-Jones,Read more at location 313

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Researchers showed their experimental subjects a set of three words and then asked them to tell a brief story involving the three words. Sometimes the words had obvious connections, such as ‘teeth, brush, dentist’ or ‘car, driver, road’. Sometimes the words were unconnected, such as ‘cow, zip, star’ or ‘melon, book, thunder’. The more random, obscure, challenging combinations spurred the subjects into spinning far more creative tales.Read more at location 313

Note: DAMMI TRE PAROLE Edit

Adrian Belew, another fine guitarist, who was drafted into the David Bowie recording session where Carlos Alomar was ordered to play the drums. Belew didn’t really know what was happening and had barely plugged in his Stratocaster when Eno, Visconti and Bowie told him to start playing in response to a previously unheard track. Before he could ask why Carlos was on the drums, Belew was told that Alomar ‘would go one, two, three, then you come in’. ‘What key is it?’ asked Belew. ‘Don’t worry about the key. Just play!’ ‘It was like a freight train coming through my mind,’ said Belew later. ‘I just had to cling on.’Read more at location 327

Note: ADRIAN BELEW A BERLINO Edit

Eno admits that his experiments with Belew, Alomar and the other musicians in Berlin weren’t much fun for them. Used to finding a comfortable groove, they had their routines ‘entirely subverted’Read more at location 336

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The eventual result of the freight train coming through Belew’s mind, sliced and spliced by Eno and producer Tony Visconti, became a guitar solo that is the spine of Bowie’s single ‘Boys Keep Swinging’. The solo is now regarded as a classic.Read more at location 338

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when we listen to a Bowie album, we don’t see the mess and frustration of the recording session; we can just enjoy the beauty that it produced.Read more at location 340

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The enemy of creative work is boredom, actually,’ he says. ‘And the friend is alertness. Now I think what makes you alert is to be faced with a situation that is beyond your control so you have to be watching it very carefully to see how it unfolds, to be able to stay on top of it.Read more at location 357

Note: ENO SULLA CREATIVITÀ Edit

That alertness is Keith Jarrett on stage in Cologne. It’s Adrian Belew desperately trying to make sense of ‘Boys Keep Swinging’.Read more at location 359

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They force us into a random leap to an unfamiliar location, and we need to be alert to figure out where we are and where to go from here. Says Eno, ‘The thrill of them is that they put us in a messier situation.’Read more at location 361

Note: RUOLO DELLE CARTE Edit

Connor Diemand-Yauman, Daniel M. Oppenheimer and Erikka VaughanRead more at location 364

Note: x PSICOLOGI Edit

Half their classes, chosen at random, got the original materials. The other half got the same documents reformatted into one of three challenging fonts: the dense Haettenschweiler, the florid Monotype Corsiva or the zesty Comic Sans Italicised. These are, on the face of it, absurd and distracting fonts. But the fonts didn’t derail the students. They prompted them to pay attention,Read more at location 365

Note: ESP A SCUOLA. LIBRI STAMPATI CON FONT STRAVAGANTI Edit

Students who had been taught using the ugly fonts ended up scoring higher on their end-of-semester exams.Read more at location 369

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Erez Lieberman AidenRead more at location 374

Note: x UN ENO DELLA SCIENZA Edit

He has been a physicist, an engineer, a mathematician, a molecular biologist, historian and a linguist, and he’s won some big scientific prizes for his work. All before he turned forty.Read more at location 376

Note: CV Edit

Ed Yong describes Aiden’s working method as ‘nomadic. He moves about, searching for ideas that will pique his curiosity, extend his horizons, and hopefully make a big impact. “I don’t view myself as a practitioner of a particular skill or method,” he tells me. “I’m constantly looking at what’s the most interesting problem that I could possibly work on.Read more at location 377

Note: STRATEGIE Edit

The nomadic approachRead more at location 382

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Aiden tried to sequence the human immune system. Human antibodies are built from a Lego-kit of different genes, snapping together quickly to meet the challenges of constant invasions from viruses, bacteria and other nasties. Aiden wanted to catalogue all the Lego bricks in the set – all the different genes that could be deployed to fight germs. After months of hard work, the project crashed.Read more at location 383

Note: ESEMPIO DI FALLIMENTO RICONVERTITO Edit

But then Aiden went to an immunology conference, wandered into the wrong talk and ended up solving a ferociously difficult problem – the three-dimensional structure of the human genome – by combining everything he had learned in failing to sequence antibodies with an obscure idea he’d stumbled upon from mathematical physics.Read more at location 387

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This wasn’t a fluke. It was a strategy. Aiden seeks the hardest, most interesting problems he can find, and bounces between them. A failure in one area gives fresh insights and new tools that may work elsewhere.Read more at location 389

Note: STRSTEGIA DEL RIMBALZO Edit

Bernice EidusonRead more at location 395

Note: x PSICOLOGA Edit

A question of particular interest was: what determines whether a scientist keeps publishing important work throughout his or her life? A few highly productive scientists produced breakthrough paper after breakthrough paper. How? A striking pattern emerged. The top scientists switched topics frequently. Over the course of their first hundred published papers, the long-lived high-impact researchers switched topics an average of 43 times.Read more at location 400

Note: I GRANDI CAMBIANO SPESSO Edit

This sort of project-switching seems to work in the arts as well as the sciences. David Bowie himself is a great example. In the few years before he went to Berlin, Bowie had been collaborating with John Lennon, had lived in Geneva, Los Angeles and Philadelphia, and had acted in a feature film, The Man Who Fell to Earth, as well as working abortively on its soundtrack. He had been drafting an autobiography. In Berlin, he produced and co-wrote Iggy Pop’s albums in between working on his own.Read more at location 410

Note: PROJECT SWITCHING BOWIE Edit

Two leading creativity researchers, Howard Gruber and Sara Davis, have argued that the tendency to work on multiple projects is so common among the most creative people that it should be regarded as standard practice. Gruber had a particular interest in Charles Darwin, who throughout his life alternated between research in geology, zoology, psychology and botany, always with some projects in the foreground and others in the background competing for his attention. He undertook his celebrated voyage on the Beagle with ‘an ample and unprofessional vagueness in his goals’.Read more at location 437

Note: MULTIPLE PROJECT Edit

Note: DARWIN Edit

Gruber and Davis call this pattern of different projects at different stages of fruition a ‘network of enterprises’. Such a network of parallel projects has four clear benefits, one of them practical and the others more psychological.Read more at location 446

Note: 4 VANTAGGI Edit

The practical benefit is that the multiple projects cross-fertilise one another.Read more at location 448

Note: CROSS FERTILISATION Edit

fresh context is exciting;Read more at location 454

Note: ECCITAZIONE Edit

while we’re paying close attention to one project, we may be unconsciously processing anotherRead more at location 456

Note: INCONSCIO Edit

A third psychological benefit is that each project in the network of enterprises provides an escape from the others.Read more at location 461

Note: VIA DI FUGA Edit

The philosopher Søren Kierkegaard called this ‘crop rotation’.Read more at location 463

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That’s the theory, but in practice it can be a source of anxiety. Having many projects on the go is a stressful experience that can quickly degenerate into wheelspinning.Read more at location 468

Note: PERICOLO ANSIA Edit

one practical solution, from the great American choreographer Twyla Tharp.Read more at location 471

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Tharp uses the no-nonsense approach of assigning a box to every project. Into the box she tosses notes, videos, theatre programmes, books, magazine cuttings, physical objects and anything else that has been a source of inspiration. If she runs out of space, she gets a second box. And if she gets stuck, the answer is simple: begin an archaeological dig into one of her boxes.Read more at location 474

Note: UNA SOLUZIONE Edit

Eno’s friend, the artist Peter Schmidt, had a flip-book filled with similar provocations. The two men teamed up to produce the Oblique Strategies deck – a guaranteed method of pushing artists out of their comfort zones.Read more at location 502

Note: FLIP BOOK Edit

The poet Simon Armitage, fascinated by the cards, says their effect is ‘as if you’re asking the blood in your brain to flow in another direction’.Read more at location 504

Note: METAFORA POETICA Edit

It’s like when you’re feeling a pain in your foot and someone slaps you in the face, you’re not feeling the pain in your foot any more.Read more at location 509

Note: ALTRA METAGORA Edit

Alomar now teaches music at the Stevens Institute of Technology in New Jersey and he regularly resorts to the Oblique Strategies. His students will sometimes experience creative block and, says Alomar, ‘I need for them to see what I saw, and feel what I felt, and the dilemma that I had when I had to come up with something out of nothing.’Read more at location 520

Note: CONVERSIONE Edit