Iconoclast
A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently
Gregory Berns

Book Review

Reviewed by Marty Vanags, EDC CEO

I had a conversation with a friend and colleague the other day. This gentleman works in local government and since I have a history of working in local government, we often have a lot to talk about. My friend is one of the smartest, hardest-working individuals I know. He is fair-minded and concerned about the community he lives in and works for. I often go to him for advice and counsel. He is well-respected by people in both the private and public sectors. He takes his job seriously, and by all accounts, he is doing a great job.

One of the things we agree on is the false perception that all public sector employees are lazy, incompetent or simply non-functional. I am here to tell you that is just not true. The examples we often see written about or portrayed in the media are extreme cases. They are worthy examples of waste and stupidity, but one cannot generalize from these examples - but enough being an apologist for local government employees.

The other thing we agreed on was that too often local government employees have been trained to respond to requests by the general public by looking into the rule book or ordinance book as the case may be and say, "Sorry, pal, but the law says you can't do it." I was trained, as was my friend, that if the law says you can't do it, there has to be a reason why, and as a public official my job is to figure out how we can achieve success. Now, you may not get everything you want whether it is a zoning change, a variance or even a speeding ticket changed, but certainly there must be a way to bend or view the rules from a different perspective. Is it possible to change the way we view a law, ordinance, procedure, way-of-doing-things that could be to the benefit of the citizen? This is the essence of public service. It also describes innovative thinking, creativity and imagination. It says, "Yes, there are rules, but there are multiple ways to look at them."

Call me a relativist, but I can't help but think that many new and innovative things we enjoy today were created by people who didn't look at objects or ideas in one single perspective. We wouldn't enjoy many of the fruits of easy living we have today if we didn't have people thinking about them in a different way. Gregory Berns, distinguished chair of Nueroeconomics at Emory University, describes these types of people in his new book, Iconoclast-A Neuroscientist Reveals how to Think Differently. While I am not sure I would classify myself as an iconoclast, I can tell you the cover captured my attention with the definition under the title being, "a person who does something that others say can't be done," as I always tell people the best way to motivate me is to use that exact phrasing. Telling me that something can't be done and that I, in particular, can't do it will get me headed on a mission to prove you wrong.

So what does Berns cover in this book? First, it doesn't hurt to have some interest in the neurosciences or to have at least paid attention in high school anatomy and physiology class, because a good part of the book is a description of what happens in the brain of people who fit the description of the book. The brain has always been of great interest to me, and it is the one part of our body that researchers and scientists probably have still not fully comprehended. I found this part of the book tough reading, but Berns liberally includes descriptions of people as examples, with my favorite being the great glass artist, Dale Chihuly. Others described in the book as iconoclasts include many we would readily know such as Steve Jobs, Warren Buffett, Nolan Bushnell, Ray Croc, Walt Disney, David Dreman, Richard Feynman and Henry Ford. What made these people unique, and how did they succeed where others didn't? According to Berns, they were people whose brain differed in the way it operated.

The more tragic example of an iconoclast covered in the opening part of the book is someone named Howard Armstrong. Most people would not recognize his name, but we are the recipients of his invention on an almost daily basis. Without Armstrong's invention of a technology called frequency modulation or the FM band on the radio, we could not enjoy high quality music and clear radio signals. Armstrong's thinking and, ultimately, his fight with David Sarnoff of RCA (once a good friend) ended when the iconoclast Armstrong took his own life by jumping out of his apartment window. What are we to make of this? Is Berner telling us that iconoclasts are mentally ill or crazy? Is the book going to describe why iconoclasts have a screw loose?

Quite the contrary. Berns describes with great detail the way the brain functions and how we perceive ideas and thoughts. The brain is the greatest supercomputer we know. The amount of data it processes constantly is truly amazing and almost impossible to comprehend. That we can't comprehend what we comprehend is amazing in itself, isn't it? Am I beginning to be hard to comprehend?

Berns describes how Dale Chihuly, the famous glass artist, started to look at glass in a different way after losing the sight of one eye after a car accident. Losing your sight in one eye can be devastating for an artist, but for Chihuly, it was an opportunity to look at his glass blowing in a different way, figuratively and literally. Some of our greatest and most accomplished artists and performers often suffer from malady or disability that forces them to look at their talent in a new way. I think of Stevie Wonder or Ray Charles and their great and unique abilities. Berns says "The iconoclast doesn't literally see things differently than other people. More precisely, he perceives things differently. There are several different routes to forcing the brain out of its lazy mode of perception, but the theme linking these methods depends on the element of surprise. The brain must be provided with something that it has never processed before to force it out of predictable perceptions. When Chihuly lost an eye, his brain was forced to reinterpret visual stimuli in a new way." So, perception is the key to iconoclasm.

In a class I took my last year of undergraduate school, a professor of public administration had us read The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn. I thought my professor was impacted by the mushrooms he had ingested years earlier (his own confession) for making us read the book, for it described how "paradigm shifts" occur and how people change the way they perceive things. Being the young student I was, unwilling in some sense to view the world differently than what was being presented to me, I thought his "paradigm" had shifted along the way. This book was written in 1962 and to this day, I still think about its message. Everything we see-everything we perceive-is developed and informed by our experiences and environment. The only way out of that conundrum, if indeed you want to go there, is to go beyond that level of informed perception and view the world from a different vantage point. Some people can do it; others can't.

I love the idea of the iconoclast. I love the idea that one can view the world from a different viewpoint and come up with solutions and ideas that can improve our living conditions, our quality of life and how we conduct business. The message for business people in this book is clear. If you have been viewing something for a long time from one direction, you may want to change. Sometimes shifting to a different view might be uncomfortable for a while, but it may produce positive results that you didn't expect. It may result in new ideas you have yet to perceive, and it may help you build new relationships you have not yet imagined.