Einstellung Effect

Story from sixty-some years ago: a stretch of road in Strafford (Pa.), including a portion running beneath the train tracks, was re-paved. The added street height meant a slightly reduced clearance at the underpass. Along came a large truck that, having previously negotiated the underpass without incident, was not so fortunate this time -- the top of the attached trailer struck the iron beams supporting the overhead tracks. The truck was wedged in place. A large tow-truck was called in to pull it out. It wouldn't budge. A second one was summoned to simultaneously push. Still no luck. A structural engineer came on the scene. But that's not the story.

Amongst the crowd that now gathered to watch the spectacle was a little kid (younger than me). He watched in silence as the adults rendered various opinions. During a temporary lull, it was later reported, the kid finally piped up, "Why don't you just let the air out of the tires?" The truck was thereby extricated.

Einstellung (Ger: attitude, mindset) Effect refers to the development of a mechanized state of mind in which previous experience may tend to blind one from addressing a problem in a new or better way. Or, in the phrase sometimes attributed to Maslow: if you're a hammer everything looks like a nail.

A close cousin of the Einstellung Effect is the phenomenon of functional fixedness, the impaired ability to discover a new use for an object owing to one's previous experience of such object in a dissimilar context. Huge benefits may sometimes be derived from overcoming such locked-in thinking. (One example is (was) Boulder-based Exabyte Corporation, founded on such a breakout -- one which can be described in less than a sentence i.e. the adaptation of a standard consumer video deck to record data rather than images. The result was a data storage device featuring a literal order of magnitude cost improvement over anything else at the time. "All" it took was the imagination to bridge the worlds of photography and electronics.)

We may share a personal or observed epiphany that took us on a path less traveled which then "made all the difference." What we're exploring is the notion of "synaptic plasticity" i.e. neurons firing together/wiring together -- necessary for learned behaviour and memory yet limiting, perhaps, the establishment of new connections.

Maybe it takes a fresh start. Enter Artificial Intelligence. Lee Sedol, the then first-ranked player of the board game "Go" (simple rules, unfathomably complex, more potential moves than there are atoms in the universe) was bamboozled in his first game against the artificial intelligence behind DeepMind's AlphaGo. AlphaGo (along with its derivatives, Master and Zero) learned by playing against itself. Forty days of self-training and 30 million games enabled it to conjure up solutions outside the limitations of patterned thinking by even the most advanced human competitor. Quite another approach is what the Zen Buddhists refer to as the "beginner's mind" -- somewhat on display with that kid and the stuck truck. Then there is room for the AI/human hybrid e.g. Sixty Minutes recently covered the story of AI assisting physicians to point out issues on mammograms otherwise overlooked by highly trained doctors due to the Einstellung Effect.

The real conversation, however, is at the macro level where entire cultures are perhaps so afflicted. The war on drugs, which was rooted in factors that went well beyond genuine public health concerns (see, War On Drugs, MM 9/26/16), has resulted in immense collateral damage over the ensuing decades. Yet, meaningful debate is largely supplanted by certain entrenched patterned "thinking." And so it goes with some of the biggest issues of our day e.g. a consumer culture continuing on autopilot even in the face of the planet's existential challenges. Deliver us from the monkey trap ("Don't Get caught In the Monkey Trap": CLICK).