Articles

In the July 28, 2008 edition of the New Yorker magazine, science writer Jonah Lehrer describes how we break the cognitive threshold in his article "The Eureka Hunt: Why do good ideas come to us when they do?" Lehrer tells the story of Wag Dodge, a legendary some jumper from Montana. The story goes something like this:

On August 5, 1949, one of the hottest days recorded in Montana history, thunderstorms ignited a small fire just outside of Missoula in Mann Gulch. That day, sixteen smoke jumpers led by captain Wag Dodge left Missoula in a C-47 to extinguish a few burning acres. It was a routine mission, similar to brushfires the crew had faced hundreds of times. When the smoke jumpers hit the ground, the fire was burning trees on one side of the gulch. But in an instant, the wind reversed itself and began blowing towards the firefighters. A violent updraft took hold. The fire quickly cut off the only access route to the river and began moving at "seven-hundred-feet-a-minute" toward the men.

Dodge ordered his crew to drop their gear and run.

The men scattered and raced toward the steep canyon walls. But when Dodge saw that the flames were less than fifty yards away, he realized the fire could not be outrun. In a moment that can only be described as "insight," Dodge made a decision to turn toward the fire, quickly lighting matches as he ran. Remember, this was 1949. Facing a wildfire waving lit matches was the act of a suicidal maniac.

Or so it appeared.

Dodge quickly lit the grass around him, shouting frantically to the crew to follow his lead. He then crouched down in the middle of the burned perimeter. Breathing through a wet handkerchief, Dodge pulled his jacket over his neck and waited for the wind-whipped inferno to pass over him. On that day, thirteen smoke jumpers perished at Mann Gulch. Only Dodge and two others who found shelter in the crevices of a canyon wall lived to tell the story of one of the worst tragedies in U.S. forest fire history.

Later, when Dodge, the oldest of the smoke jumpers, was interviewed by investigators, he was unable to explain why he spontaneously lit a backfire and laid down in the middle of it. He admitted that he had never entertained the idea before that fateful day at Mann Gulch. What puzzled Dodge and the experts was that the idea of destroying the fuel around him occurred so suddenly, even as the flames rushed to claim his life. Yet as soon as the idea appeared, Dodge was filled with overwhelming certainty that it would work. He never hesitated and never stopped to consider the risks. In fact, he had been seen so confident that he had discovered a way out, he had ordered his men to follow his example.

But what really made Dodge's insight remarkable is that no one had though of burning a personal safety zone prior to his revelation in 1949. As the smoke from Mann Gulch began to clear, word of Dodge's story quickly spread, and in no time burning safety zones, now known as "fire shelters," were adopted as standard training for firefighters around the world. In 1985, forty years after the Mann Gulch tragedy, seventy-three firefighters near Salmon, Indiana, found themselves cut off from all escape routes in a wildfire that later became known as the infamous Butte Fire.

But this time the men were prepared.

They lit and took refuge in individual safety zones for more than two hours as a severe crown fire engulfed them in flames, ash, smoke, and unbearable heat. Despite being a much more intense fire than Mann Gulch, every one of the firefighters at Butte survived. Only five were hospitalized for heat exhaustion, an outcome substantially different than the sixty lives experts predicted would have been lost without Dodge's early insight.

Dodge's epiphany is as vital to firefighters who regularly risk their lives as Einstein's theory of relativity is to physicists and Darwin's break through is to biologists. In each instance, the solution to a highly complex problem suddenly became simple, elegant, and discernable. And in each case their epiphanies had far-reaching ramifications.

But those were not the only common denominators.

In each case, the revelation arrived out of thin air. In each case, there was no question of whether or not the solution was correct. In each case, the IQ cultural background, and education of the individuals widely varied. In each case, previous rules, experience, and knowledge appear to have been temporarily set aside in search of uncharted territory.  And finally, in each case, the innovator was unable to explain how he arrived at his discovery; the steps leading to the breakthrough could not be retraced.

What caused Wag Dodge, a smoke jumper who lived a modest life in a small town in Montana, to have an insight that would forever change firefighter history? And what about spontaneous discoveries made by [Isaac] Newton, Benjamin Franklin, and Nobel Laureates James Watson, Francis Crick, Muhammad Yunus, and Charles Townes? What mechanism catapulted these individuals over seemingly insurmountable complexity, allowing them to cross an intractable cognitive threshold?

Six decades after the Mann Gulch fire, neuroscientists finally have the answer.

They've discovered that our brains work in three ways to solve problems. We use the left side of our brain to perform organized, deconstructive analysis and the right side to creatively attack problems using synthesis. And today we have evidence of a third, heretofore-unknown cognitive process called insight, a faculty uniquely designed for highly demanding, complex problems.

This excerpt is from Rebecca's book The Watchman's Rattle - for more information, click here