Expand Your Imagination Exponentially: Jeff Bollow (Transcript)

Here is the full transcript of Jeff Bollow’s talk titled “Expand Your Imagination Exponentially” at TEDxDocklands conference.

Listen to the audio version here:

TRANSCRIPT:

The Exponential Expansion of Human Imagination

So, I want to expand your mind literally. And I teach writing, so I mean literally, literally. We are about to enter the most extraordinary era in human history. Over the next 20, 30, 50 years, our world is going to experience a transformation on a scale beyond anything we can currently imagine.

And I don’t mean that to be trite or cliche. We actually can’t imagine it, because our brains have difficulty with a concept called exponential change. If you take a computer and you use that computer to build a better, faster computer, well that then becomes the baseline upon which you build the next iteration of better, faster, better, faster. So power and capacity double, and then double again, and then double again, and then double again.

And it multiplies exponentially until we reach some breakthrough technology that disrupts our current way of life, meaning there’s life before that technology and life after that technology, and we can never go back. We can’t imagine that breakthrough technology because we’re missing those interim steps. Our ability to imagine the future is limited by our current frame of reference.

When I was a kid in the 80s, the idea that I could have a device in my pocket that could answer any question I could think to ask in seconds was pure science fiction. It would have been crazy. It would have been unrealistic, because our frame of reference didn’t include the Internet. We tend to think of the future as today with faster gadgets, but that exponentially advancing technology means we’re seeing world-changing advances in a huge array of these disruptive technologies. 3D printing, artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, robotics, synthetic biology, quantum computing, and on and on and on.

We can imagine change in each of those areas, but we have a hard time imagining the exponential change that comes from all of those technologies combined. I’ll give you an example. Earlier this year, a company in China 3D printed a five-story apartment building. Now from that, we can imagine how 3D printing might transform the manufacturing industry or the building industry.

But what about when artificial intelligence itself, advancing exponentially, is integrated into 3D printing technology? Or take it a step further. What about when quantum computers enable nanoscale, artificially intelligent robots to 3D print never-before-seen molecules? Are our imaginations ready for that future?

The Need to Expand Our Collective Imagination

Most of us occupy our thoughts with the mundane problems of today, or worse, the lingering conflicts of the past, and remain oblivious to the seismic changes these new technologies can’t help but introduce. And that’s why I believe that as individuals, as a society, as a species, we need to expand our imagination exponentially too. So how do we do that?

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Well, I grew up in Hollywood and have been around the film industry all my life, so I’ve always thought the best way would be through movies and television, through experiential entertainment.

To create stories that would immerse global audiences into worlds beyond our current imagination, thereby expanding our collective notion of what’s possible. A perfect example is Star Trek, right? They imagined this mostly peaceful future with these crazy, wildly imaginative technologies for its era, that then triggered the imagination of countless future scientists and engineers. Well, I’ve been involved in various aspects of the film industry since I was a kid.

I’ve been an actor, a director, a producer. So when I moved to Australia, I started a production company with the intention of making films that would ignite our imagination in bold new ways. But when I couldn’t find the kinds of screenplays I was looking for, I decided to build a screenplay development system by reverse engineering the complete creative process. And I ended up spending so much time thinking about thinking, about the how-to of creativity, that I started to see imagination itself in a whole new way.

Understanding the Power of Imagination

Imagination is the fuel of creativity. Imagination is our brain’s ability to form concepts and ideas and images and sensations internally, regardless of what’s happening externally. Imagination is like a canvas for testing out ideas, and its power is largely attributable to our complex language system. See, our language has something called analogies and metaphors.

I can take my two fists and say, this is the earth and this is the sun. And when I move in this circle, you immediately grasp the concept of an orbit, even though you will never witness this phenomenon through your senses. Analogies and metaphors enable us to perceive beyond our immediate physical space. And this gives our brain an extremely unique characteristic.

It makes our imagination potentially infinite. We can imagine scenarios that have no counterpart in reality. We can create stories of past events or events that have never happened, and our brain immerses into the area. We see images and sensations as if it were real.

And we can use this unique feature of the brain to expand the canvas itself. One of the most amazing discoveries I ever made teaching writers is so simple, and yet so deeply profound. And that is that ideas spark ideas. Ideas are not intended to sit in our brains.

Ideas Spark Ideas

Ideas are designed to trigger a response, whether it’s an action, like go get food or run from danger, or another idea. Here’s an exercise I give my writing students. When I say start, they’re to start writing. When I say stop, they’re to stop writing.

And in between, they’re to write as fast as they can without thinking, without rereading, or without slowing down. Try this for yourself. Every single time, you will go off in directions you could never have imagined consciously. You will feel page after page after page.

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You will never run out of ideas, because every idea is designed to trigger a response.

Ideas spark ideas. And you can do this exercise indefinitely if you add one simple rule. And that is, there is no such thing as good or bad.

There is only effective or ineffective. If we say that an idea is bad or wrong, we’re judging that idea, we’re stopping the flow of thought, and we’re discarding the idea. If instead we say that same idea is ineffective, well, it begs the question, ineffective how? Ineffective at what?

Which encourages that idea stream to continue as we search for a more effective way to express ourselves or solve the problem, as ideas spark ideas. What this means is that our brains are effectively creativity engines with unlimited potential output. That’s pretty cool, right? The only problem is that our imagination is limited by our current frame of reference.

The Importance of Sharing Our Unique Perspectives

It needs a trigger. We have, we form new ideas through new sensory information or new ways of pondering old memories or new combinations of concepts. This is one of the reasons we love TED Talks so much, because ideas worth spreading spark better quality new ideas in our own minds. It’s also one of the reasons I believe everyone should write.

Now, you don’t have to write movies or novels, much as it pains me to say that, but the act of writing immerses us into the scenario of the idea. It physicalizes the idea and invokes more parts of your brain as you immerse into that world. It actually strengthens the idea itself. Writing captures an idea before it triggers that response.

Writing actively expands our imagination by encouraging us to go further down that idea stream. Now, at this point you might be thinking, but I don’t want to be a writer, or that’s all interesting, but I don’t really have anything earth-shaking to contribute. But consider this. Each of us has unique DNA that gives us each a different height, weight, gender, ethnicity, shape of face, which causes each of us to react and respond to our world in dramatic different ways.

Now add to that the fact that we each experience life on a completely different set of space-time coordinates. We each move from birth to death through our world, witnessing completely different events and interpreting them in completely different ways. And this gives each of us a brain chemistry that is intrinsically unique. No one else in the history of time, or the entirety of the future, will ever see what you’ve seen or interpret it the way you interpret it.

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Interconnectedness and the Collective Imagination

Which means no one else can imagine what you can imagine. You have a window on our world no one else will ever have. Imagine the earth is a giant brain, and you and me and the billions of other people on this planet are the neurons. When you capture and share your unique window on the world, it becomes my input, just as my unique perspective is now your input.

We’re not going to imagine the future by thinking bigger. We need to think more interconnectedly. We need to let our ideas spark each other’s ideas, and vice versa, because it’s the variety of imagination that widens our frame of reference and truly expands our thinking. And in a world of exponentially advancing technology, a world where technology solves the basic fundamental human needs, food, shelter, clothing, and make no mistake, that’s what’s coming, creativity becomes the new currency.

My imagination shows me a world where the computers that can now fit into our pockets will fit into our cells to fix the damage and keep us healthy. A world where nanoscale 3D printers can disassemble the molecules in a pile of dirt and reassemble them into fresh, healthy food that can feed a global population. A world where bio-integrated quantum computers give our brains the processing power of a million minds, and I think the future can’t help but look nothing like the past. Where does your imagination lead?

The Opportunity to Shape the Future

Anyone today can start a blog, make a movie, crowdfund an invention, start a business, reach a global audience. We’ve already entered the most extraordinary era in human history, and the seismic changes that are coming will affect every individual, every business, every community, and every government on this planet. All you need to do is imagine where we’ll be 10, 20, 30 years, 50 years from now. Capture your unique window on the world, write it down, and then share it in whatever productive way is right for you.

I’ll leave you with this thought: The future is our collective imagination made real. It doesn’t matter if my imagination is an accurate prediction of the future. One giant analogy, or pure science fiction, ideas spark ideas, and by expanding our collective imagination exponentially, we will be prepared for whatever the future brings.

Thank you.