The Filter Bubble - Eli Pariser [37]
Like many psychoactive drugs, we still know little about why Adderall has the effects it has—or even entirely what the effects are. But the drug works in part by increasing levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, and norepinephrine has some very particular effects: For one thing, it reduces our sensitivity to new stimuli. ADHD patients call the problem hyperfocus—a trancelike, “zoned out” ability to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else.
On the Internet, personalized filters could promote the same kind of intense, narrow focus you get from a drug like Adderall. If you like yoga, you get more information and news about yoga—and less about, say, bird-watching or baseball.
In fact, the search for perfect relevance and the kind of serendipity that promotes creativity push in opposite directions. “If you like this, you’ll like that” can be a useful tool, but it’s not a source for creative ingenuity. By definition, ingenuity comes from the juxtaposition of ideas that are far apart, and relevance comes from finding ideas that are similar. Personalization, in other words, may be driving us toward an Adderall society, in which hyperfocus displaces general knowledge and synthesis.
Personalization can get in the way of creativity and innovation in three ways. First, the filter bubble artificially limits the size of our “solution horizon”—the mental space in which we search for solutions to problems. Second, the information environment inside the filter bubble will tend to lack some of the key traits that spur creativity. Creativity is a context-dependent trait: We’re more likely to come up with new ideas in some environments than in others; the contexts that filtering creates aren’t the ones best suited to creative thinking. Finally, the filter bubble encourages a more passive approach to acquiring information, which is at odds with the kind of exploration that leads to discovery. When your doorstep is crowded with salient content, there’s little reason to travel any farther.
In his seminal book The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler describes creativity as “bisociation”—the intersection of two “matrices” of thought: “Discovery is an analogy no one has ever seen before.” Friedrich Kekule’s epiphany about the structure of a benzene molecule after a daydream about a snake eating its tail is an example. So is Larry Page’s insight to apply the technique of academic citation to search. “Discovery often means simply the uncovering of something which has always been there but was hidden from the eye by the blinkers of habit,” Koestler wrote. Creativity “uncovers, selects, re-shuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, (and) skills.”
While we still have little insight into exactly where different words, ideas, and associations are located physically in the brain, researchers are beginning to be able to map the terrain abstractly. They know that when you feel as though a word is on the tip of your tongue, it usually is. And they can tell that some concepts are much further apart than others, in neural connections if not in actual physical brain space. Researcher Hans Eysenck has found evidence that the individual differences in how people do this mapping—how they connect concepts together—are the key to creative thought.
In Eysenck’s model, creativity is a search for the right set of ideas to combine. At the center of the mental search space are the concepts most directly related to the problem at hand, and as you move outward, you reach ideas that are more tangentially connected. The solution horizon delimits where we stop searching. When we’re instructed to “think outside the box,” the box represents the solution horizon, the limit of the conceptual area that we’re operating in. (Of course, solution horizons that are too wide are a problem, too, because more ideas means exponentially more combinations.)
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