“Entities should not be multiplied beyond necessity.” – William of Occam

“Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.” – Albert Einstein

Barry Schwartz wrote entertainingly about the beauty of making choices as simple as possible.  In his book The Paradox of Choice, he describes several theoretical experiments where consumers are presented with choices which have smaller or larger numbers of choices.  The conclusion is that in many cases, presenting more choices not only complicates consumer choice, making business less efficient, but in many cases actually leads to significantly lower sales – making choice too difficult, means that consumers choose to do nothing!

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“Only connect!”  - E.M. Forster

Matt Ridley has written a great piece in the Wall Street Journal (thanks to @allinthemind for pointing me to the article), which discusses the link between creativity and the evolution of humans.  Why did human culture, society minds and language suddenly evolve so rapidly and at the same time (starting around half a million years ago)?  Matt Ridley claims (rightly I believe) that the key factor was interaction between individuals (especially when from different cultures and locations) – what he calls “collective intelligence” – which accelerated developments beyond anything that would have happened naturally (creating a revolution rather than an evolution).

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“The fixity of a habit is generally in direct proportion to its absurdity.”  -  Marcel Proust

Emotions are at the heart of decision making, and there is more recent evidence that often we are not conscious of the reasons for our choices, but those choices are based on our unconscious beliefs about the positive or negative emotions that are associated with specific choices.  In a recent article in the Journal of Consumer Research, which I picked up in a neuroscience blog (details below), researchers demonstrated that respondents focused on positive and negative emotions in making decisions about fictitious brands, and ignored more conscious (rational) information on product features (and could not recall the reasons for their decisions).  This meant that a product with inferior features, was chosen ahead of a product with superior features (ie strong rational reasons for choice), when associated with emotions which were more positive than those associated with the superior product.  Respondents were not conscious of the reasons for such decisions, and were not able to identify the reasons for their choices.

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“The imagination is a necessary ingredient of perception itself.”  – Immanuel Kant

“A man hears what he wants to hear, and disregards the rest.”  – Paul Simon

Proust understood the fallibility of our memory (and also the extraordinary power of remembered events) long before the latest advances in neuroscience.  In Proust was a Neuroscientist, Jonah Lehrer engagingly uncovers the insights of a number of creative artists into the working of the human mind, and how their creative works often tell us more about the human experience than any number of scientific treatises.  The chapter on Proust is particularly revealing about the fallibility of memory, describing how events are recreated in our mind each time we remember, and subtly changed and altered by the very act of remembering. Each time we remember something, we reshape our memories to fit our current realities, and therefore make continuous subtle changes to past events (demonstrated in many legal cases as well as experiments in behavioural economics).

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“The eye is not enough.  One needs to think as well.”  – Paul Cezanne

“As the brain-changes are continuous, so do all these consciousnesses melt into each other like dissolving views.  Properly they are but one protracted consciousness, one unbroken stream  …….  The last peculiarity of consciousness to which attention is to be drawn in this first rough description of its stream is that it is always interested more in one part of its object than in another, and welcomes and rejects, or chooses, all the while it thinks.”  – William James

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“Creativity is the power to connect the seemingly unconnected.”  – William Plomer

“Creativity generally involves crossing the boundaries of domains.”  – Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi

It is well understood that creativity is strongly associated with making connections between previously unconnected ideas, and most powerfully (most disruptively) when those ideas represent opposing or contradictory concepts or when they come from very different domains.

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