Focused exploration may seem to be oxymoronic. A ruthless emphasis on focus tends to play into the exploitation paradigm. Laser focus becomes intensity and we filter out competing ideas. There are times when that’s the right strategy. Many discussions of focus, therefore, deal with how we can cause the brain to be more disciplined by eliminating distractions, etc.

Focused exploration is using exploration to encounter additional ideas when you are trying to answer a question. The question proscribes the search. To be sure, pure exploration without a goal may become focused when something grabs your attention leading to perception. I do believe the best thinkers regularly allow some opportunity for exploration as enrichment. You never know for sure in what domain you’ll encounter an idea that leads to insight.

The paragraphs below are an approximate transcript of the podcast episode Developing Learner’s Mind: Focused Exploration.

“We’re talking today about the third element in cultivating Learner’s Mind. That element is focus. Focus is an ambiguous word. It applies in the efficiency/exploitation realm where it shows up as intensity that looks for powerful and productive ideas and discards those that don’t make the cut. That disposition can be extremely valuable, and we’ll explore that type of focus later this season.

Focus is also needed in the exploration realm and that’s where we’ll settle in today. To recap where we’ve been in the previous two episodes: Curiosity drives you to explore and not just to mine your current catalog of ideas. As you explore, various items and ideas vie for your attention. Attention selects something and that leads to perception which is a basic awareness of particulars. To move farther mentally requires you to focus. In this sense focus requires you to limit the field of your exploration (at least temporarily). You want to find out more about the thing or the idea. You want to give it due regard to assess its nature and what it might contribute to your thinking.

If you’ve listened to previous seasons of this podcast, you may recall that I am a microbiologist. Microscopes of all sorts have been my stock in trade for 50 years. Observing something with a microscope requires moving intentionally from a relatively big picture to an increasingly small part of that picture at progressively higher magnifications. Without this sequence you have no context for what you are viewing and are liable to misinterpretation. We capture this colloquially as “You can’t see the forest for the trees.” The same goes for the concept of focus in your attempts to know and understand using exploration.

You must clarify what you are looking for. This requires you to formulate a question that you are trying to answer through your exploration. A focus question helps to direct your exploration/your search.

Sometimes focus involves purposefully taking on a different point of view. The thing that has caught your attention is intentionally viewed from a different perspective. This is like deciding to use a particular kind of microscope or staining technique to image a specimen. It is remarkable how different the same thing can appear when viewed differently.

Epistemologist Esther Meek uses the word reflection to capture the idea of focus. She says,

 “I think it is helpful here especially to consider the concept of reflection, because it has about it some sort of quality of secondariness: it is a pulling back from something in order to consider. . . . There has to be something that is being pulled back from in order to count as reflection. This explains, he [philosopher John Macmurray] says, how we may say that all cognition is recognition.” p. 232

Recognition combines attention and perception (podcasts 1 and 2 this season). Reflection is an act of focusing on what recognition has captured in our mind’s eye. Reflection calls a halt to our exploratory search while we ponder whether we have encountered an item or idea that makes a cognitive contribution. Rapid skimming searches of the Google variety are usually too pragmatically driven to result in true reflection. Many people lack the patience to explore the sources in detail to unearth their arguments, their rationale. Instead of reflection, we expect our search terms to provide ready answers to our question.

The default cognitive paradigm for most adults is an unremitting commitment to mining the knowledge that they already possess. Cognitive neuroscience calls this Exploitation. Exploitation is viewed as time efficient. It is especially a temptation to those who have true expert knowledge (most professionals operating in their area of expertise). Exploration seldom adds anything of enduring value they reason. But what if the answer to a question or the solution to a problem involves concepts that are not yet in their sights? Ah, then the emphasis on mining their existing expertise paints them into a corner. Perhaps they have professional myopia. Perhaps they are not really asking the right question. Perhaps they need to explore!

Consider the classic story of the uncovering of the structure of DNA as a cautionary tale. Maddeningly to experts of the time, they were outdone by two neophytes. Watson and Crick stepped outside the plodding science of the time and found the express lane to answer one of the biggest questions of the day, “what is the nature of the gene?” The answer to this question established the foundation of molecular biology which was so revolutionary it was termed the New Biology. Its implications continue to ripple out today in innovations such as mRNA vaccines and gene therapy.

The differences between the exploitation and exploration paradigms are stark.

Composer Leonard Bernstein is operating from the exploitation paradigm when he says,

"To achieve great things, two things are needed: a plan and not quite enough time."

https://www.classicfm.com/composers/bernstein-l/guides/leonard-bernstein-quotes/great-things/

Notice that Bernstein already has a plan and that he is watching the clock; he doesn’t have quite enough time to execute the plan.

James D. Watson reflects on his state of mind during the two years he and Francis Crick were on the hunt for the nature of the gene, “Much of our success was due to the long uneventful periods when we walked among the colleges or unobtrusively read the new books that came into Heffler’s Bookstore.” p. 128 The Double Helix

In direct disagreement with Bernstein, Watson says,

“It's necessary to be slightly underemployed if you are to do something significant. . . . I was very underemployed when we solved the structure of DNA.”

The Eighth Day of Creation by Horace Freeland Judson, Touchstone Books, 1979. p. 20

Watson says he lacked time pressure and was free to explore. The roots of his success he attributes to exploration, not laser-focused, time-pressured exploitation. Watson candidly (some would say too candidly) laid out his state of mind in his memoir, The Double Helix. As a 23–25-year-old Watson and Francis Crick were establishing the structure of DNA, which they published in 1953.

Here's a bit of context. Biologists and biochemists in 1951 were biased in favor of genes being composed of protein and not DNA. A significant experiment argued compellingly in 1944 for DNA and not protein, but most scientists remained skeptical. Science is often extraordinarily incremental, methodical, tentative, and thorough and, as a result, tends toward exploitation rather than exploration. When science is committed to the wrong model, exploitation is deadly inertia. This is what Watson and Crick were prepared to exploit.

Watson said about the early 1950’s “You would have thought that with all … [university geneticists] talk about genes they should worry about what they were. Yet almost none of them seemed to take seriously the evidence that genes were made of DNA.” Double Helix, p. 53

Very few scientists were even working on DNA. Two of the few were Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin, both of whom were known to Watson and Crick. Both Wilkins and Franklin were careful, cautious, thorough scientists. Watson in The Double Helix says “Maurice [Wilkins] continually frustrated Francis by never seeming enthusiastic enough about DNA. . . . Francis [Crick] felt he could never get the message over to Maurice [Wilkins] that you did not move cautiously when you were holding dynamite like DNA.” pp. 19-20

Watson and Crick were not patient experimentalists. They were much more given to proposing theoretical models and then testing them with other scientist’s data.

Francis Crick says of himself “I learned how to see problems, how not to be confused by the details, and that is a sort of boldness; and how to make oversimple hypotheses—you have to, you see, it’s the only way you can proceed—and how to test them, and how to discard them without getting too enamored of them. All that is a sort of boldness. Just as important as having ideas is getting rid of them.” The Eighth Day, p. 41

Watson was 23 years-old at the beginning of the story and 25 at the end with the crowning achievement of his life, the structure of DNA in his portfolio. Crick had started in physics and moved over to biology in pursuit of a PhD. In his mid 30’s, an older graduate student when he worked with Watson, Crick had little patience for the tedium of experimental science.

Both Watson and Crick were inquisitive and extensively networked with other scientists in the U.S. and, especially, in the UK. They took DNA seriously and they felt it was just a matter of time before others took it seriously. They wanted to understand DNA before anyone else got there. Because theoretical models are intellectual constructs that are attempts to account for experimental data, they focused on model building. They also relentlessly collected experimental data both published and unpublished.

Here's a 1979 summary of Watson and Crick’s work: “It was a quarter-century ago that Watson and Crick, playing with cardboard cutouts and wire and sheet metal models and sorting out the few controlling facts from a hopscotch of data, elucidated the molecular architecture of the genetic material itself, the double-railed circular staircase of deoxyribonucleic acid.” [We’re now a year away from the 70th anniversary.] Eighth Day, p. 21

“It was downright obvious to her [Rosalind Franklin] that the only way to establish the DNA structure was by pure crystallographic approaches. As model building did not appeal to her . . .The idea of using tinker-toy-like models to solve biological structures was clearly a last resort. . . .only a genius of his [Pauling’s] stature could play like a ten-year-old boy and still get the right answer.” p. 51

“I [Watson] soon was taught that [Linus] Pauling’s accomplishment was a product of common sense, not the result of complicated mathematical reasoning. …The alpha helix [in proteins] had not been found by only staring at X-ray pictures; the essential trick, instead, was to ask which atoms like to sit next to each other [patterns]. In place of pencil and paper, the main working tools were a set of molecular models superficially resembling the toys of preschool children.” p. 38

Model building is an exploratory quest. It involves an openness to experimental data and a willingness to discard models that don’t measure up. At its best it is a bold refusal to be side-tracked by data and to focus instead on looking for patterns.

You can find on my website, deepanddurable.com, a great deal more detail on how Watson and Crick put things together and how their models were revised in the face of new data. I could get geeky or wonky here, but I won’t.

The essence of their effort was a process of continual refinement and sometimes elimination of competing models.

Here were the constraining facts for Watson and Crick:

DNA is composed of sugar (deoxyribose), phosphate (which makes it acidic), and four nitrogen-containing bases (nucleotides). This had been known for many decades.

DNA can be crystallized. Crystals can be analyzed by X-ray to determine the arrangement of atoms in the crystals. This was the contribution of Maurice Wilkins and Rosalind Franklin.

X-ray data indicated DNA is long and skinny. The data also show it has a regular pattern repeat characteristic of a helix. The distance of the pattern repeat, and the width of the molecule are parameters that any structural model must obey.

The dimensions of the DNA molecule are specified in the smallest commonly used metric units, called Å. Atoms and chemical bonds joining atoms are measured in Å. DNA is about 20 Å wide and one turn of the helix is 34 Å.

The 20Å width can only accommodate a small number of chemically bonded atoms. Within this width space must be given for the sugar-phosphate backbone and the four bases (A, T, G, C) which each consist of a group of atoms.

The regularity of the DNA molecule must allow for irregularity in nucleotide composition since information is conveyed by the sequence of A, T, G, C and different genes have different sequences.

The structure of DNA should provide the basis for Chargaff’s rules (1952) which stated that in all DNA molecules from any creature, A = T and G = C.

The bases A and G consist of two rings of atoms, but C and T consist of only a single ring. How can DNA have a consistent width?

Ideally the structure of DNA should provide a mechanism whereby DNA makes a copy of itself.

These were features of a puzzle. Watson and Crick went directly to the big picture rather than getting bogged down in details like the rest of the scientific community. They took these attributes of DNA as givens and built scale models of DNA to try to find a layout that would harmonize all the givens. They were explorers. They let others do the focused bench research. Bench research generates data through a process that relies heavily on exploitation. Both exploitation and exploration are needed, but Watson and Crick made the bold decision that enough was already known about DNA to make posing a structure plausible.

If you are good at visualization picture DNA as a spiral staircase with two sides. The sides are two strong sugar-phosphate backbones. The width from one side to the other is 20Å. The backbones attach to steps which are made of two rings paired with one ring (either A with T or G with C). Each step is offset by 36° from the previous step. This means that going up 10 steps constitutes one revolution of the spiral (helix). 10 steps take us up 34 Å. There is no limit on how long the DNA molecule can be, but it will always be the same 20 Å width.

Listeners who want to see the structure of DNA that was proposed (with a few tweaks since 1953) will need to go to my website at deepanddurable.com

“At the time, the discovery of the structure of DNA was hard—not intrinsically, but because its importance and uniqueness were not well recognized. The discovery was hard also because the data were scattered, confusing, in some respects meagre, in others overabundant. To begin with, it was not clear what was most relevant in all that was known of the chemical composition of nucleic acids. Neither Watson nor Crick was a biochemist. They were ignorant of a long and erudite scientific tradition, but at least they were not blinded by it.” Eighth Day, p. 27

Outro:

This example shows us the potential power of exploration. There comes a time when exploitation won’t cut it. Exploitation gets stuck because:

·      it doesn’t include all the concepts needed

·      it isn’t focused on answering the right question

·      one or more of the concepts in use are misconceptions

Healthy problem-solving involves a purposeful toggling between disciplined exploitation of what is currently known, and exploration employed in a purposeful search for new ideas and perspectives. Join me in two weeks as we examine patterns and puzzles.”