Page 202 - A Mind For Numbers: How to Excel at Math and Science

As Bohr knew, brainstorming and working with others—as long as they
know the area—can be helpful. It’s sometimes just not enough to use more of
your own neural horsepower—both modes and hemispheres—to analyze your
work. After all, everyone has blind spots. Your naively upbeat focused mode can
still skip right over errors, especially if you’re the one who committed the
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original errors. Worse yet, sometimes you can blindly believe you’ve got
everything nailed down intellectually, but you haven’t. (This is the kind of thing

that can leave you in shock when you discover you’ve flunked a test you’d
thought you aced.)
By making it a point to do some of your studying with friends, you can more
easily catch where your thinking has gone astray. Friends and teammates can
serve as a sort of ever-questioning, larger-scale diffuse mode, outside your own
brain, that can catch what you missed, or what you just can’t see. And of course,

as mentioned earlier, explaining to friends helps build your own understanding.
The importance of working with others doesn’t just relate to problem
solving—it’s also important in career building. A single small tip from a
teammate to take a course from the outstanding Professor Passionate, or to check
out a new job opening, can make an extraordinary difference in how your life
unfolds. One of the most-cited papers in sociology, “The Strength of Weak Ties,”
by sociologist Mark Granovetter, describes how the number of acquaintances

you have—not the number of good friends—predicts your access to the latest
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ideas as well as your success on the job market. Your good friends, after all,
tend to run in the same social circles that you do. But acquaintances such as class
teammates tend to run in different circles—meaning that your access to the
“outside your brain” interpersonal diffuse mode is exponentially larger.

Those you study with should have, at least on occasion, an aggressively
critical edge to them. Research on creativity in teams has shown that
nonjudgmental, agreeable interactions are less productive than sessions where
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criticism is accepted and even solicited as part of the game. If you or one of
your study buddies thinks something is wrong in your understanding, it’s
important to be able to plainly say so, and to hash out why it’s wrong without
worrying about hurt feelings. Of course, you don’t want to go about gratuitously

bashing other people, but too much concern for creating a “safe environment”
for criticism actually kills the ability to think constructively and creatively,
because you’re focusing on the other people rather than the material at hand.
Like Feynman, you want to remember that criticism, whether you are giving or
receiving it, isn’t really about you. It’s about what you are trying to understand.