The creative mandate for knowledge
For the latest episode of Creative Intelligence, I sat down in New York with Pranav Yadav. He came into the world of work with a triple major in math, physics and economics, and unsurprisingly got snapped up by Wall Street where he worked at Goldman Sachs. What’s really impressive though, is he then took the jump into digital marketing consulting knowing that it was not an area in which he had expertise — but, crucially, it was one in which he was most fascinated. At the age of 25, he was appointed CEO of Neuro-Insight, a company that uses brain imaging to gauge the impact of marketing on the human subconscious. Clients include The New York Times, Amazon, Ford and Facebook.
“Every discipline, whether it be the sciences, physics or mathematics, or economics, essentially gives you multiple frameworks to work with,” says Pranav. But in order to innovate, he argued, we need to create new ways of understanding. He uses the example of Einstein’s work on relativity: “He really admired Newton’s work, which was fantastic at identifying the force of gravity and applying it to classical mechanics. Yet, there was something within him that told him that this doesn’t apply to extremely large objects or extremely small objects. He had to use his creativity to invent a new way of being.”
I believe this point has an abstract application because we need to be creative when it comes to the big problems. I read an interview recently with Chess Grandmaster and writer Jonathan Rowson, who questioned the lack of philosophical curiosity and creativity in public life: “I think the left-right political spectrum is a conceptual zombie in a world where ecology, technology and finance are the main influences, but we don’t seem to know how to kill it.”
So, if the matrix in which we frame politics is broken, how should we look for meaning? In the 20th century, we relied on dichotomies such as the Cold War, post-colonialism and orientalism to define history and our place within it. These are now outdated because the world has moved past them. We need to comprehend a multi-polar, multi-dimensional world in which the individual is looking to find reflections and representations of their own complexities.
Speaking with Pranav, it’s clear that he feels we seriously lack a sense of philosophical connection with the human experience. For him, that extends to what some would call “spirituality,” others might say “faith” or the kind of belief that was traditionally yoked by religion.
These are typically internalized concepts, deeply individual. In the past, we have only come to recognize these on platforms where the dialogue has been owned and codified by a “priest class.” The result was a religious prescription. When the machine age came along, societies started moving and discussing things differently; as a result, the world’s major religions are historically seen as being at the crux of the friction between traditionalism and modernism.
Today, contemporary faith looks a lot different to what it did 200, 100 or even 50 years ago. Regardless of your own creed — believer, agnostic, atheist — I think we could soon be living in the next incantation of spiritualism. I don’t mean we’ll all be worshiping some kind of “digi-god” through an app which measures your “faith-score.” Literally, god forbid. What I mean is that the potential of digital technology to change society will reveal new and interesting ways to express, celebrate and discuss our beliefs.
This transcends the old-fashioned social triumvirate of religion, politics, and economics. It comes back to Rowson’s comments above, but perhaps the real question is not how best to understand or frame these things, but how best to free them by not framing them. We need to kill the old models, only then can we know and utilize the real potential in the digital universe.
This is what digital anthropology is all about: not limiting our understanding of digital knowledge by applying boxes to the space, rather allowing it to free itself by not confining our perspective to one viewpoint. We need to examine and test all the applications of digital to really see its dimensions. Like all meaningful endeavors of understanding, that is work that will never be finished — and therefore, as with the pursuit of all knowledge, inherently worth doing.
Pranav’s work is apt here because Neuro-Insight operates by translating our own internal ‘operating systems’: our culture and how that defines our outlook on the world. “The culture, which is the myths, songs, stories and rituals which you grew up with, are what define how you are going to respond to a particular thing at a particular time,” he says.
“Cultures are like different operating systems — they were contained geographically and racially at a certain moment in time, when the world was a certain way. Today, with the digital world coming in and the sharing of ideas, music and culture, being so widespread — the whole world is a village with these microcosms and segmentations which do not follow any traditional rules around demographics, race, gender — anything.”
My talk with Pranav was a compelling one, and he’s someone who I feel will bring a lot to the creative intelligence space. I hope you’re able to take a listen for yourself here.
