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Theoretical physicist Leonard Mlodinow knows that good ideas don't come easily. Creative, original thinking is actually a lot harder to achieve than just tuning out, as the brain puts a lot of filters and biases on ideas before they come out. Some of these filters are applied through learned experience: for example, you're not going to be able to truly tap into creativity if you're focused on whether your potential idea will fail or not, nor are you going to be able to think creatively if you're distracted. The human brain is constantly coming up with ideas in the subconscious mind but few make it past these filters. But if you focus, and allow your brain to relax, those ideas can bubble up into the conscious mind more and more often. Leonard Mlodinow's latest book is Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change.

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LEONARD MLODINOW:

Leonard Mlodinow is a theoretical physicist and author recognized for groundbreaking discoveries in physics, and a passion for making science accessible and interesting to the general public. He was on the faculty of Caltech, and is the author of five best-sellers. Among them, The Grand Design, co-authored with Stephen Hawking, took the reader on a tour of the latest ideas in physics and cosmology, and reached #1 on the New York Times best-seller list. His book Subliminal: How Your Unconscious Mind Rules Your Behavior, described how a person's thoughts, decisions, and feelings are profoundly influenced by the behind-the-scenes operation of the unconscious mind, and won the PEN/E.O. Wilson award for literary science writing. And his book The Drunkard's Walk: How Randomness Rules Our Lives showed how the hidden forces of randomness have a huge and generally unrecognized effect on all aspects of life, as well as the course of companies and societies. It was chosen as a New York Times notable book, and short-listed for the Royal Society book award.

Dr. Mlodinow is also known through his many contributions to journals such as The New York Times

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TRANSCRIPT:

Leonard Mlodinow: Sometimes the solution to a challenge in life isn't cleverer thinking, it's to step back and look at the problem, not the solution and then you'll realize that you had some hidden assumption or some assumption that you could relax that you didn't realize and that will change everything. For example, here's a riddle: Marjorie and Margie were born of the same mother and father on the same day of the same month at the same hour and yet they are not twins. How is that possible? So these two girls were born at the same time of the same parents but they're not twins? Well, the answer is they're triplets. Now you could start reasoning you're not going to get there because you have an assumption, an implicit assumption that you're making you have a picture in your mind - that's why the riddle is tough. I say Marjorie and Margie you're picturing two girls or two women, once you have that picture in your mind you're excluding the answer, which is triplets or quadruplets or something else like that. And that happens in life too that sometimes the answer is easy once you question your assumptions. And that's a key to elastic thinking.

The human brain is an idea machine. On the unconscious level, a level that you're not even aware of, your brain is constantly making associations and coming up with ideas. Now if all these ideas just popped into your consciousness you would be overwhelmed you would drown in them you wouldn't be able to function as some people with certain mental disorders experience. If you're schizophrenic, for instance, you might be swamped with so many sensations and ideas that you can't even connect with reality. Most of us do better than that because we have these things called cognitive filters in our brain that kill the ideas that are less conventional or less likely to be true less connected to reality and they allow the more ordinary ideas to come through on the theory in your brain that those are the ones most likely to work and in most circumstances they are the ones that work. But sometimes they're not and you need a different idea. When you're looking to think differently you have to learn how to relax those cognitive filters.

When you relax your mind it's only when you relax your mind and you open your mind and you open yourself that a new idea can pop into your mind that hey maybe I never thought of this...

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