Itai Yanai 00:08
When I hear a big idea, when I discover a big idea, it just gives me goosebumps and inspires this, this feeling of awe. And in a sense, I’ve become like an awe junkie.
David Payne 00:19
This is Creativity in Science, a series brought to you by Nature Careers.
Itai Yanai 00:25
…but it was more like a different kind of mindset, like, okay, we need to snap out of this. We need to zoom out. We need to pop out.
David Payne 00:34
…a podcast about how science and creativity go hand in hand, and about how one can nurture the other.
Itai Yanai 00:44
….where we’re going to have to use abstract thinking. We’re going to use every trick we got, and that’s going to give us the way forward.
David Payne 00:54
First up, we meet two researchers who urge scientists to combine what they call the grind of day science with a more Promethean night science.
Itai Yanai 01:14
So I’m Israeli. I’m a professor at the New York University Grossman School of Medicine, where I study gene regulation and cellular plasticity.
And together with my good friend and science buddy, Martin Lercher, we study the creative side of the scientific process.
Martin Lercher 01:32
I’m Martin Lercher. I’m a professor of computational cell biology at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Itai Yanai 01:40
In my lab we were using this terminology that François Jacob came up with, called day science and night science.
And whenever we were stuck, whenever somebody was stuck in the lab, my advice was, “well, I guess we’re gonna have to do some night science.”
And it didn’t mean that, literally, it would have to be at night.
Although it did involve that many times as well. But it was more like a different kind of mindset, like, “okay, we need to snap out of this. We need to zoom out. We need to pop out into the world of night science, into the world of ideas, where we’re going to have to use abstract thinking. We’re going to use every trick we got, And that’s going to give us the way forward.”
And so I told this to Martin, and he was interested, and he said okay, let’s give it a shot. And we started working on what we call the Night Science Project.
So then we did the podcast, and then from the podcast, we got invited to do workshops.
And then from the workshops, it became a nonprofit organization, and really led to the magic of this thing unfolding.
Martin Lercher 02:57
So what we think, what is really crucial to understand the scientific process, is to recognize that there is a dichotomy between the executive part and the creative part, which we call day science and night science respectively.
Now of course, science is not the only human endeavour where you need creativity.
For example, in the arts, you also have those two parts. Even if also artists don’t seem to distinguish this as two different frames of minds, right?
Of course, artists know that you have to be creative.
But usually they also don’t talk about these two different phases where you come up with the idea. For example, like Frida Kahlo, she might want to express something in a painting, and she has to think about, now, what could be the composition of the painting?
Like, what kind of colours do I want to use?
And so there’s a lot of creativity that goes into it before she even starts putting paint to the canvas. And then that second part is more executive.
And just like in science, you frequently flip between the two modes, right?
You’re not, like, two hours in creative mode, and then two hours you’re in executive mode. It can happen within seconds or minutes.
But there are two different frames of mind.
Or in music, somebody like Taylor Swift. You know, she stands on a stage and she executes the music.
Like everybody in the band knows what to play at which moment in time. But before that happens, before that day music on the stage can happen, she needs to have an idea of what about her personal life she wants to express in the next song.
And what images does she want to use? And what could be? What kind of melody should it be? And that creative part you could call night music.
Itai Yanai 04:58
Over the past couple of years I’ve started to write a screenplay. And this has been very challenging for me.
I have no training in creative writing. But I do recognize, I think, that in science, when we publish papers, there is a bit of storytelling that’s involved there.
You could take the same result and tell it in such a way that it would be compelling and memorable and impactful for a person.
Or you could tell it in such a way where it’s just boring data and no one would see the relevance of it to anything at all.
So the storytelling can really have an effect.
And so I recognize that I think I have learned a little bit of storytelling by doing science, even though it wasn’t formally taught.
So I think that the screenplay as a kind of hobby is not an independent part of my life, but really sort of integrates also with my being a scientist.
Martin Lercher 06:07
I love writing, You know, it’s something I really enjoy. I enjoy writing songs. I also enjoy writing scientific papers.
And when I write a scientific piece together with my science buddy Itai, the highest praise that he can make is to say “that’s poetry,” right?
And it makes me very happy when he says that, right?
So when I write music, I try to write poetry that’s appropriate for that. And when I write science, in a way, I also try to write poetry.
But of course, it’s a very different kind of poetry.
And maybe something else I learned is patience. You know, if you’re, if you’re writing a song, you know, you’re very conscious that this whole writing is a creative process.
In science, there’s more of a back-and-forth between the creative part and the executive part.
But if you’re writing a song, it’s pure creativity, at least up to a certain point, and it just takes time, right?
And recognizing that coming up with ideas takes time is something that was also important.
Or that is also important in science.
Itai Yanai 07:30
I was born in Israel, but when I was nine my nuclear family and I immigrated to the US.
And I think this move influenced me to make many more additional moves in life, to different cities.
But also moves conceptually to different fields.
I think once you make one or two moves, you realize it’s not that big of a deal to make a move, and we don’t have to stay put.
And so when I was trained in computer engineering, (that’s what I did my undergraduate degree in), I really liked computer engineering. I was very good at it. My dad is also a computer engineer. But towards the end of my degree, I came upon this book, really by accident, called The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins.
And I opened this book just on a whim. And by the time I finished reading it, it never occurred to me ever again to be a computer engineer.
I just dropped it easily, and I just found thinking about genes and cells biology in general evolution, so interesting that I immediately said to myself, “okay, I need to become a biologist.”
And then also within biology, I wasn’t afraid to make moves. I moved from genomics to developmental biology to cancer. Now I’m thinking about a move to cell biology.
A lot of the moves that I make, people say to me, “Oh, so brave to move to this field.”
But it didn’t seem like I even had a choice in the matter. It’s just that’s where the data was going.
That’s what the next question was, according to the result. And I think a lot of times we just hold ourselves back.
We just say, “Oh, who are we kidding? I can’t go to this new field.”
But I’d like to think that perhaps because I moved early on in life as a kid, I was sort of primed to not fret too much about making more moves.
Martin Lercher 09:48
I think it’s very helpful for scientists to maybe not escape their discipline, but to move between disciplines.
There’s actually an analogy in music.
For example, Bob Dylan, in the 1960s. He was already well known as a folk singer and a singer of protest songs, and he had a big fan base.
And then he decided to become a rock musician. And he got an electric guitar. And, you know, he played rock music. And a lot of his fans didn’t like that, right?
They came to see the folk singer Bob Dylan, and instead, they got the rock musician Bob Dylan. And that’s not what they paid for.
And something similar happened recently with Beyoncé. She was known for her R&B and hip hop. And then she published a country album. And in this case, it was not so much her fans that disagreed, but the country fans that disagreed.
And they were saying, well, “What are you doing here, right? Go back to your genre, right? Like this is our music.”
But it was the best country album of the year.
And what both of these musicians realized is that if you take your background in one genre of music and bring it to another genre, then you have something that you can express there, that you could neither express where you came from, nor could the people who’ve always been in rock and roll and always been in country music, nor could they express that because they don’t have the same background as you right? So you bring something totally new to the field.
And the same thing we have in science.
A lot of discoveries come from people who were not originally trained in the field in which they make the discovery.
And two famous examples are Francis Crick, who studied physics and then discovered DNA. And went on to do a lot of other interesting things in biology.
Or Mary-Claire King, who started out as a mathematician and then made important contributions to human genetics.
Itai Yanai 12:14
When you come to a new field, you have a tremendously valuable thing, which is beginner’s mind.
And you are not, you are not encumbered by many constraints.
I think once you become an expert in the field, you have a very mature, fixed view.
And there must be some psychological basis to this, where, once we’ve adopted this view, we tend to resist any kind of change in it.
So we don’t want it to change. We don’t want anybody to move our cheese.
We’ve, we see the world this way. And we don’t want that to change.
And so there seems to be this dichotomy, I think, also, between being an expert and being a discoverer.
An expert knows many things. But an expert is disincentivized for making a discovery, because that discovery could shake up their world.
And so I think that when you move to a new field, you can actually take advantage of the fact that you’re not an expert.
You hold no allegiance, no loyalty to any particular idea. Everything is on the table.
And you’re very open. In a sense, you’re, with your beginner’s mind, you’re seeing things as they appear to you without filtering through any particular prism, through any particular hypotheses.
And so you have new ideas. So it’s okay to be ignorant. It’s okay.
Have your ideas. Talk about them. Write them down.
Now you know how you see things. Then you can learn about the field. Talk with the experts, see what they say. Maybe some of your ideas of yeah, other people thought they were good ideas, but they’ve been rejected. They’ve been tested and they didn’t hold up.
Okay, good. But there could be some other ideas there that the field just didn’t see because they’re so busy being experts.
And those are ideas that could now be pursued.
And that’s your way to make a contribution.
So I think that’s the advantage of moving fields is that you can see things that the experts just don’t see. You can actually be original.
It may look like a liability that you don’t know everything. But in this particular sense of discovery, it’s a strength.
Martin Lercher 15:05
The first step, if you want to be a creative scientist, a scientist who is more able to make discoveries and to go into new directions.
If you want that, then the first thing is to be conscious about this dichotomy between the day science part and the night science part, and to allow yourself to give yourself the time that is required for this creative process.
The most important trick is also the simplest one. It’s, you need to talk to someone.
Ideally, you have one or maybe even several science buddies, people where you know that you can speak easily to them in a creative mode.
And for that, it’s really important to not block the other person’s ideas, but to help the other person to develop those ideas.
And it’s something that in improvisational theatre is called the “yes and….” rule.
You don’t have to agree with everything, but you shouldn’t block it. You should say “That’s an interesting idea. How does it fit with this piece of data that I happen to know about, gor example, right?”
You can challenge it, but don’t block it. And that’s crucial if you want to come up with new ideas, if you want to develop ideas,
Embrace the outlier. Usually, the outlier we see is something you know that doesn’t agree with the other data points. And if we dig down and try to figure out what’s wrong with that data point, 95 or maybe 99% of the time, it’s some kind of stupid mistake, right?
Maybe the temperature was different when you did that measurement, or you did, you made a mistake when you converted the units.
Or something really boring and stupid, and in the end, you just throw it away.
But the remaining one or two or 3% of cases, that’s where there isn’t a mistake. That’s where there’s actually something interesting about that data point.
And you can learn about something that you had no idea existed. So always follow your curiosity and follow contradictions. Follow things that don’t fit your expectations.
Another trick is related to this idea that anything goes in night science mode.
So you’re very free to use metaphors and analogies, and especially one important metaphor is anthropomorphisms.
It’s talking about things as if they’re humans, right?
Like, one of my favourite questions when we study bacteria is, “Why would the bacterium do something so stupid, right?”
Like, I don’t think E-coli is stupid, but it often makes a lot of proteins that are totally useless in this situation.
So what’s it thinking? Why is it making those proteins? Maybe it’s expecting something for the future, and it thinks they’re going to come in handy later?
So that’s how I think about that. And of course, everything I said there makes no sense in day science, right?
Like nothing of that is something you can test with a rigorous experiment, right? And of course, the cell is not thinking anything. It’s not expecting anything. But it gives you an intuition.
And the reason for that is that our brain has an enormous capacity to think intuitively about other people’s intentions.
It’s probably something that evolved because we are a social animal. And you can use that capacity of your brain to look at scientific problems in the creative process, to get an intuition.
Itai Yanai 19:28
I’ve learned over the years that what really gives me awe is big ideas. And awe has become a science. There are scientists studying what produces awe at us humans, and they’ve listed eight things.
It’s music (can be transcendental), mystical encounters, interactions with life and death. Art, visual design, collective movement, nature.
And one of them is also big ideas.
And I’ve recognized in me that that when I hear a big idea, when I discover a big idea, it just gives me goosebumps. It inspires this, this feeling of awe.
And in a sense, I’ve become like an awe junkie. I’m just like, why do I do science? I just really love this process of encountering the unknown and making sense of it.
And that’s, that’s my high point, is to get to a moment of awe.
And I think it’s, it’s not something that’s often discussed in science. Like, what is it that motivates scientists to make a discovery?
And I think what I realized is, you know, let’s say your motivation is, is not that.
Let’s say you see it as just a regular job.
Well, then I don’t know how, how that happens.
I think that for me, that the search for awe is really motivating. Like I really need to find the answer, because I want to get to this moment of awe.
And so in that respect, I feel like scientists are really like artists. There’s this real artistic component of trying to get inspiration.
There is a day science component, which is logical. But then there’s also this almost irrational, like process of
And then together, they inspire awe, once you find a discovery.
And I think that view is so beautiful that it should also be a way for us to communicate what is science?
It’s a very, like, human experience, not very different, I would say, from other human experiences, like composing a beautiful sonata or drawing a beautiful sketch. It’s a deeply human resonating process.
