The Filter Bubble

The Adderall Society

The drug Adderall is a mixture of amphetamines. Prescribed for attention deficit disorder, it’s become a staple for thousands of overscheduled, sleep-deprived students, allowing them to focus for long stretches on a single arcane research paper or complex lab assignment.

For people without ADD, Adderall also has a remarkable effect. On Erowid, an online forum for recreational drug users and “mind hackers,” there’s post after post of testimonials to the drug’s power to extend focus. “The part of my brain that makes me curious about whether I have new e-mails in my inbox apparently shut down,” author Josh Foer wrote in an article on Slate. “Normally, I can only stare at my computer screen for about 20 minutes at a time. On Adderall, I was able to work in hourlong chunks.”

In a world of constant interruptions, as work demands only increase, Adderall is a compelling value proposition. Who couldn’t use a little cognitive boost? Among the vocal class of neuroenhancement proponents, Adderall and drugs like it may even be the key to our economic future. “If you’re a fifty-five-year-old in Boston, you have to compete with a twenty-six-year-old from Mumbai now, and those kinds of pressures [to use enhancing drugs] are only going to grow,” Zack Lynch of the neurotech consulting firm NeuroInsights told a New Yorker correspondent.

But Adderall also has some serious side effects. It’s addictive. It dramatically boosts blood pressure. And perhaps most important, it seems to decrease associative creativity. After trying Adderall for a week, Foer was impressed with its powers, cranking out pages and pages of text and reading through dense scholarly articles. But, he wrote, “it was like I was thinking with blinders on.” “With this drug,” an Erowid experimenter wrote, “I become calculating and conservative. In the words of one friend, I think ‘inside the box.’” Martha Farah, the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, has bigger worries: “I’m a little concerned that we could be raising a generation of very focused accountants.”

Like many psychoactive drugs, we still know little about why Adderall has the effects it has—or even entirely what the effects are. But the drug works in part by increasing levels of the neurotransmitter norepinephrine, and norepinephrine has some very particular effects: For one thing, it reduces our sensitivity to new stimuli. ADHD patients call the problem hyperfocus—a trancelike, “zoned out” ability to focus on one thing to the exclusion of everything else.

On the Internet, personalized filters could promote the same kind of intense, narrow focus you get from a drug like Adderall. If you like yoga, you get more information and news about yoga—and less about, say, bird- watching or baseball.

In fact, the search for perfect relevance and the kind of serendipity that promotes creativity push in opposite directions. “If you like this, you’ll like that” can be a useful tool, but it’s not a source for creative ingenuity. By definition, ingenuity comes from the juxtaposition of ideas that are far apart, and relevance comes from finding ideas that are similar. Personalization, in other words, may be driving us toward an Adderall society, in which hyperfocus displaces general knowledge and synthesis.

Personalization can get in the way of creativity and innovation in three ways. First, the filter bubble artificially limits the size of our “solution horizon”—the mental space in which we search for solutions to problems. Second, the information environment inside the filter bubble will tend to lack some of the key traits that spur creativity. Creativity is a context-dependent trait: We’re more likely to come up with new ideas in some environments than in others; the contexts that filtering creates aren’t the ones best suited to creative thinking. Finally, the filter bubble encourages a more passive approach to acquiring information, which is at odds with the kind of exploration that leads to discovery. When your doorstep is crowded with salient content, there’s little reason to travel any farther.

In his seminal book The Act of Creation, Arthur Koestler describes creativity as “bisociation”—the intersection of two “matrices” of thought: “Discovery is an analogy no one has ever seen before.” Friedrich Kekule’s epiphany about the structure of a benzene molecule after a daydream about a snake eating its tail is an example. So is Larry Page’s insight to apply the technique of academic citation to search. “Discovery often means simply the uncovering of something which has always been there but was hidden from the eye by the blinkers of habit,” Koestler wrote. Creativity “uncovers, selects, re-shuffles, combines, synthesizes already existing facts, ideas, faculties, (and) skills.”

While we still have little insight into exactly where different words, ideas, and associations are located physically in the brain, researchers are beginning to be able to map the terrain abstractly. They know that when you feel as though a word is on the tip of your tongue, it usually is. And they can tell that some concepts are much further apart than others, in neural connections if not in actual physical brain space. Researcher Hans Eysenck has found evidence that the individual differences in how people do this mapping—how they connect concepts together—are the key to creative thought.

In Eysenck’s model, creativity is a search for the right set of ideas to combine. At the center of the mental search space are the concepts most directly related to the problem at hand, and as you move outward, you reach ideas that are more tangentially connected. The solution horizon delimits where we stop searching. When we’re instructed to “think outside the box,” the box represents the solution horizon, the limit of the conceptual area that we’re operating in. (Of course, solution horizons that are too wide are a problem, too, because more ideas means exponentially more combinations.)

Programmers building artificially intelligent chess masters learned the importance of the solution horizon the hard way. The early ones trained the computer to look at every possible combination of moves. This resulted in an explosion of possibilities, which in turn meant that even very powerful computers could only look a limited number of moves ahead. Only when programmers discovered heuristics that allowed the computers to discard some of the moves did they become powerful enough to win against the grand masters of chess. Narrowing the solution horizon, in other words, was key.

In a way, the filter bubble is a prosthetic solution horizon: It provides you with an information environment that’s highly relevant to whatever problem you’re working on. Often, this’ll be highly useful: When you search for “restaurant,” it’s likely that you’re also interested in near synonyms like “bistro” or “cafe.” But when the problem you’re solving requires the bisociation of ideas that are indirectly related—as when Page applied the logic of academic citation to the problem of Web search—the filter bubble may narrow your vision too much.

What’s more, some of the most important creative breakthroughs are spurred by the introduction of the entirely random ideas that filters are designed to rule out.

The word serendipity originates with the fairy tale “The Three Princes of Serendip,” who are continually setting out in search of one thing and finding another. In what researchers call the evolutionary view of innovation, this element of random chance isn’t just fortuitous, it’s necessary. Innovation requires serendipity.

Since the 1960s, a group of researchers, including Donald Campbell and Dean Simonton, has been pursuing the idea that at a cultural level the process of developing new ideas looks a lot like the process of developing new species. The evolutionary process can be summed up in four words: “Blind variation, selective retention.” Blind variation is the process by which mutations and accidents change genetic code, and it’s blind because it’s chaotic —it’s variation that doesn’t know where it’s going. There’s no intent behind it, nowhere in particular that it’s headed—it’s just the random recombination of genes. Selective retention is the process by which some of the results of blind variation—the offspring—are “retained” while others perish. When problems become acute enough for enough people, the argument goes, the random recombination of ideas in millions of heads will tend to produce a solution. In fact, it’ll tend to produce the same solution in multiple different heads around the same time.

The way we selectively combine ideas isn’t always blind: As Eysenck’s “solution horizon” suggests, we don’t try to solve our problems by combining every single idea with every other idea in our heads. But when it comes to really new ideas, innovation is in fact often blind. Aharon Kantorovich and Yuval Ne’eman are two historians of science whose work focuses on paradigm shifts, like the move from Newtonian to Einsteinian physics. They argue that “normal science”—the day-to-day process of experimentation and prediction—doesn’t benefit much from blind variation, because scientists tend to discard random combinations and strange data.

But in moments of major change, when our whole way of looking at the world shifts and recalibrates,