Re: What inspires you?

Description: Gilbert has no shortage of inspiration, though most of his work comes out of banging heads with his collaborator.

Transcript: You know I . . . I think if people could answer that question properly, they would be more inspired. If we knew where our ideas came from – which ideas were good ideas – we’d all have great ones all the times. I think these are things we don’t really know about ourselves, and that’s what makes psychology interesting.

For me when I was a kid – I don’t know if you had this experience – I used to, when I was a real little kid, I used to look in the mirror and kind of look away. Keep doing this and see if I could catch myself – turn my head around really fast and catch myself looking away. And what that experience taught me was I always had the suspicion that there was something hidden that I wasn’t seeing about myself in that mirror – something true about our psychology lives that I couldn’t quite glimpse, and I wondered if there was some method for doing so. In a sense, science is that method. The science of psychology is the attempt to see things within ourselves that are hidden from our everyday inspection. I have no idea what question you asked me, but I’m sure enjoying the answer.

I’m not quite sure about the word “inspiration”. Inspiration sounds to me like we wake up every day feeling like lying still until something rigors a jolt of electricity. I leap out of bed every day, and I just wonder why there’s not enough hours to get done all the things I’m excited about doing. Maybe I swallowed inspiration really, really early and I don’t need any more. Mainly I need to find ways to slow down and take a break.

Question: Do you have a creative process?

Transcript: I think not. I think my creative process is probably as mundane as most of them are. You know, we . . . we . . . I think we glamorize creativity. We imagine that somebody is sleeping and wakes up and says, “Eureka!” Most of the time, creative solutions are a product of time untasked. It’s a lot of people spending a lot of time puzzling and puzzling and puzzling together. I think the best ideas I’ve ever had are a result of banging my head together with my collaborator, Tim Wilson, or my graduate students for months on end, and finally arriving at a . . . what looks like a creative solution from the outside, but for us seems like a pretty hard one and natural progression from ignorance and knowledge.

Question: What is the balance you have struck between creativity and scientific rigor?

Transcript: I don’t understand creativity and scientific rigor as antonyms. And I’m not even sure they have a relationship. They seem to me to be two attributes of good science. Good science is creative. It tells about things we don’t already know. It surprises us with solutions we wouldn’t have thought of; but the moment we hear them we go, “But I can see it’s right” . . . that’s the creative part. And science is, of course, about rigor. Anybody can be creative in any way, but science has a lot of rules within which we have to be creative. And in that sense, science is like haiku. You know, it’s a highly constrained form. And the question is, can you be creative within the rules? That’s what science asks us to do.

Question: Is there a book you find particularly inspiring?

Transcript: I wish I had more time to read fiction. I don’t have as much time to read it as I might, so I’m the wrong person to ask about the most exciting novel ever written. But I certainly know that the work that Phillip K. Dick inspired me 25, 30 years ago in ways that I still find myself reflecting on. Phillip K. Dick at that time was, of course, a genre science fiction writer now recognized as a great American writer. But in his novels, reality was constantly working and bending. And what we were constantly learning was the nature of reality is how your brain constructs it. And the slightest change in the way your brain works can make a great change in the reality around you. That was a lesson never lost on me, and one that I think is probably the underlying lesson of scientific psychology.

Recorded on: 6/12/2007