Transcription
I want you to think about the last time you tried to improve something. Maybe it was a presentation at work. You read through the slides and your instinct was to add a chart or a footnote or a new slide to explain the previous one. This is a tendency so automatic, so deeply embedded in the way we think that we don't notice it. We add, we rarely subtract. And that instinct, the one that feels so smart and so productive, may be one of the biggest blind spots we have. Let me explain.
At the University of Virginia, an engineer named Lidy Clots has spent years studying this tendency. He calls it subtraction neglect. It's our automatic impulse to solve a problem by addition even when the better solution is to take something away. The story of how Lighty came to understand this begins in a college exam room with a professor named Rys Comey and a chalkboard showing two numbers.
When Lighty was an undergraduate engineering student, he was struggling to master mechanics, the branch of physics that deals with objects at rest and in motion. And my approach to mechanics was figure out how to solve the problems that I've been assigned for homework, learn that specific problem, and try to cram as many of those into my brain as possible so that when the exam came about, I'd be more likely to have a an exact replica of the problem that was on the exam already accessible in my brain. >> It wasn't working. He was carrying a C average. For the first time in his life, he was in danger of failing a course. If that happened, he would have to delay his degree, ask his parents to pay extra tuition or change his major entirely.
So before the third exam, he tried something radical. He stopped cramming. He stripped everything away. He realized that much of introductory mechanics boils down to one equation. Newton's second law of motion. Force equals mass time acceleration. He realized that if he understood that one thing deeply enough, he could work through most of what the exam threw at him. >> I stopped memorizing dozens of other equations and tangential ideas. I didn't need to know a bunch of forces and masses and accelerations. I just needed to remember that formula F= ma. >> He walked into the exam that day carrying fewer things in his head than any of his classmates.
Sometime later, Professor Viscomi handed back the exams. He wrote two numbers on the chalkboard, a 98 and a 47. Then he looked at Lighty and smirked. >> Everybody assumed that I had gotten the 47. My classmates were playfully jeering me. And I'm sitting there thinking about like, okay, now that I've failed out of engineering, what will my major be? And when I got my test back, I realized why he had smirked. And it was because I had earned the 98. >> Leidy was ecstatic. But more than that, he was confused. He had done better by reducing the things he was keeping in his head by subtracting. It was the start of a long journey to understand why we systematically overlook the power of subtraction and what this costs us.
Years later, Leidy saw the same principle in a playroom. He was building a bridge out of Duplo blocks with his three-year-old son, Ezra. The support towers were of different heights. The bridge wouldn't span because they weren't level. Leid's instinct was to add a block to the shorter tower. But before he could act, Ezra did. >> Ezra had already removed a block from the taller tower. So whereas my impulse had been to add to the short support, in that moment I realized that it wasn't the only way to create a level bridge. >> Leidy brought the bridge problem to colleagues, to students, to a professor he describes as a genius. He wanted to see who would think to subtract. Everyone added. It was then that he began to understand this isn't a quirk of personality. It's something that happens inside virtually all of us.
So, he designed a series of experiments in research published in Nature in 2021. Leidy and his team showed volunteers a digital grid of colored squares and asked them to make it symmetrical. You could add squares or remove them. Both approaches worked. Most people chose to add. The moment subtraction was pointed out as an option, people took it. The problem was subtraction didn't occur to people as a possibility. This pattern appeared everywhere Leidy looked. He asked people to improve a short essay. Only 17% subtracted words. The other 83% they made it longer. Strunken whites, the elements of style, the most assigned writing textbook in American classrooms for decades, carries a famous directive. Omit needless words. That advice has been on syllabi for generations. And yet, people handed an essay and told to improve it still reached for more words, not fewer. The same pattern held in recipes. When volunteers were asked to improve a five-ingredient dish, only two out of 90 removed an ingredient. When given loops of musical notes and asked to improve them, people were three times more likely to add notes rather than take them away.
Leidy built one more experiment. Inspired by a long-running disagreement with his wife, who likes to stuff family travel schedules with activity, he created a fictional itinerary for a day in Washington DC. 14 hours, the White House, the National Cathedral, the Old Post Office, the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, a museum, shopping, lunch at a five-star beastro. Just the travel time between all those stops, assuming optimal DC traffic, would exceed 2 hours. Volunteers could rearrange activities, add new ones, or remove items. >> Even with this jam-packed itinerary, only one in four participants removed activities from the packed original. >> And the rest? >> Well, some rearranged, but most added. >> They added to a schedule that was already physically impossible to complete.
So, all this raises a critical question. Why? Part of the answer might be biological. At the University of Michigan, psychologist Stephanie Preston has spent her career studying what she calls inquisitiveness, our drive to get and keep things. In one study, volunteers were shown over 100 objects on a screen. Bananas, coffee mugs, extension cords, but also empty 2L bottles, used sticky notes, outdated newspapers. They were asked whether they wanted to acquire each item virtually. People wanted to accumulate dozens of objects, things they had no use for. Then came the real test. They had to whittle everything down to fit into a digital grocery bag on the screen. >> A lot of participants failed to get it down to a single bag. >> Neuroscience also has something to say about our tendency to be acquisitive. When we acquire things, even used sticky notes, it activates the brain's reward pathway. This is the same system stimulated by cocaine. Adding feels like a win, like progress, like abundance. Subtraction feels like a loss. And humans, as any behavioral economist will confirm, are deeply averse to losses.
If our biology is already pushing us toward addition, our culture applies even more pressure. Consider what we celebrate. We build plaques for people who construct skyscrapers. We name buildings after donors. We hold ribbon cuttings for new hospitals and new highways. >> It's so much easier to get a donation for somebody to create a building that has their family's name on it than to donation for removing something or for even for something that doesn't come with this big physical reminder of the person's generosity. >> Politicians want to tout a new amenity, something tangible, something they can point to. You cannot cut a ribbon on a decrepit building that has been removed. This pattern stretches back to the earliest days of human civilization. Monumental architecture, the pyramids of Egypt, the ziggurats of Mesopotamia, they are literally defined by the fact that their scale exceeded any practical function. These were structures that added well beyond what was necessary. The leaders who commissioned them gained status. Addition in the deep grammar of civilization has been the language of power.
>> Subtracting is more work. It's more mental work. It's more kind of steps as we're talking about it and there's less to show for it. And so after you do all this extra work, you have less evidence because the thing that you've done is by definition disappeared. Leidy saw this at his own university. The University of Virginia asked for suggestions on how to improve. Out of 750 ideas, fewer than 10% suggested taking something away. People wanted more study abroad grants, more mental health services, more housing. Someone requested a new ice arena. >> Surely there was untapped potential because out of 750 ideas for changing the university, fewer than 10% suggested taking something away. >> And there's a logic to this. If you walk into an organization and propose cutting things, you're challenging someone's pet project, someone's baby, you'll make enemies. But if you propose adding something, there's almost no social risk. And you'll get to say, "This will make things better."
Removing something also requires you to deeply understand how a system works to figure out what it is that is redundant or unnecessary. The result in organizations everywhere is accumulation. A pileup of programs, initiatives, even meetings that nobody questions. Subtraction sometimes requires an external push. Call it an external executioner. Consider the Embaradero Freeway in San Francisco. Built after World War II, it was a massive double-decker concrete structure stretching more than a mile along the eastern waterfront, blocking access to the bay. In the mid-1980s, planners proposed tearing it down. Voters rejected it. For every person who wanted the freeway removed, two wanted to keep it. It could prizewinning San Francisco Chronicle columnist named Herb Kaine wrote that tearing down the freeway was quote an even worse idea than building it. The planning commission moved on.
Then on October 17th, 1989, the LMA Pria earthquake struck. The earthquake killed more than 60 people and injured thousands. And then it also gave people a view of what life would be like if you didn't have the Embaradero because the Embaradero didn't collapse during the earthquake, but it was rendered unusable for a while. And so people saw that they found other ways to get around the city. Um, and that it didn't kind of totally ruin life in San Francisco to not have the Embaradero. >> The earthquake provided the push. The freeway came down. The waterfront came back, housing increased, jobs increased, traffic rerouted without catastrophe. >> By 2000, it was hard to find anyone who thinks ripping down the freeway was a bad idea. >> It took a disaster to make the possibility of subtraction visible to prove that what had been removed was not in fact necessary.
Science suggests we don't have to wait for a crisis. We can build structures that force subtraction into our decision-making. One of Leidy's most practical tools is what he calls the stop-doing list. We all keep to-do lists. A stop-doing list operates on the same logic, except instead of adding tasks, you catalog the things you're going to quit. >> If you're going to add new stuff to your day, and assuming you're already at capacity, you need to also figure out what you're going to take away. For Leidy, one useful application is what he calls stop editing. He reads a great deal of student writing. When he picks up a rough draft, the temptation is to mark every change he would want to make. >> I'll set a limit. I'll say, "Okay, give this student the 10 most important comments for this piece of writing." And it it works really well. I mean, it saves me time one, but it also kind of rewards students who do more, right? So if the student gives you a really polished piece of writing, I still force myself to come up with 10 ways to make it better. Whereas if somebody doesn't put as much time in and gives you this really rough first draft, I don't spend all my time getting that to the same place that the the other piece of writing is.
The same principle applies to laws that govern us. By some measures, the number of laws on the books grow faster than the economy. Some places now require legislators when proposing a new law to identify an existing law that they want to remove. By making it a rule, you make it easier to subtract. You make it socially acceptable to propose subtraction.
In medicine, subtractions save lives. At John's Hopkins University, researcher Peter Pronovost was studying catheter-related infections. Catheterss, thin plastic tubes used to draw blood or deliver medication, are ubiquitous in hospitals and one of the most common sources of infection. These infections were causing roughly 30,000 deaths in the United States every year, about as many as car crashes. The insertion process was complicated, dozens of steps, each requiring judgment. Pronovost's insight was to simplify. Pronovost and his team considered all of this complexity, but then they proposed a very simple recipe. They they gave a checklist. Wash their hands with soap. Clean the patient's skin with antiseptic. Put sterile drapes over the entire patient. Wear a sterile mask, hat, gown, and gloves. And put a sterile dressing over the catheter site. >> Five steps. Pronovost had made what was essential stand out. And people stopped dying.
Some of the most powerful examples of subtraction come from design. In 1927, Anna Kitline had an insight about building materials that would change construction forever. She was the first female licensed architect in Pennsylvania, a serial inventor. She changed construction by noticing something everyone else had overlooked. Before Kiteline, building blocks were solid, dense, heavy. She asked, "Do they need to be?" By creating the the hollow block, you remove half the material, which of course makes it less expensive and easier to build with and less fuel to transport. And then these hollow blocks also provide more insulation because of the air voids that are in the blocks. Her Kreak was cheaper, lighter, insulated better, and was less prone to fire. The hollow concrete masonry unit, the direct descendant of her invention, is one of the most commonly used building materials on planet Earth.
Then there's the Strider bike. For nearly a century, children's bicycles were loaded with additions. Training wheels, fake tires, contraptions attaching a child's bike to a parent's bike like a caboose. Then someone asked, "What if we subtract the pedals and the drivetrain entirely?" the way they work. They're small bikes, but they're not propelled by chains and pedals, but by toddlers striding with their legs. Once my my son has since aged out of the strider bike, and once he decided it was time for his big kid bike, we didn't have to bother with training wheels. He already knew how to balance. By removing what everyone assumed was essential, designers made the bike ridable by children as young as a year and a half. They found a whole new market, and they eliminated the need for training wheels.
But even when we do subtract, there is a final problem. Noticeability. When you add something, everyone can see it. When you subtract something, the evidence by definition disappears. Back in the 1970s, an aerospace engineer named Marian Rudy had an idea. Use air to provide cushioning in running shoes. Less material inside the shoe, more performance on the road. Shoe companies kept turning him down. They couldn't see what he was offering. He finally reached Nike. Phil Knight took him out for a run, felt the difference, and agreed, but still nobody could see it. >> They had this kind seinal shoe, the the Air Max one. And those shoes were one of the the first models that actually displayed the air. So they have the little window on the side, so you could see, hey, in fact, there's air in here. Nike didn't just sell air cushioning. They made the absence of material visible. They cut a window into the sole of the shoe so you could see what was no longer there.
Marie Condo built an empire on a version of the same reframe. For years, the default advice for tidying a home was to identify what you no longer wanted. Sort through the clutter. Discard what doesn't fit. Condo flipped the question entirely. Forget what you want to get rid of. focus only on what you want to keep. >> Her core message is sparking joy. She said, "Keep what sparks joy and get rid of everything else." And so, she's kind of steering us around loss aversion there. Um, because she's focusing us on this, you know, this future vision of the the tidy space. >> The outcome is identical. What changes is where your attention goes. And that psychologists will tell you changes everything.
When Bruce Springsteen recorded Darkness on the Edge of Town in 1978, he wrote more than 50 songs. Only 10 made the record. The songs he removed were not bad. Some became massive hits the moment they left his hands. Patty Smith's Because the Night reached number 13. The Pointer Sisters Fire hit number two. Springsteen gave away top 20 singles. He had yet to place one there himself. He talks about this album as his samurai record, all stripped down for fighting, and those are his exact words. So, he's going for this really stripped down aesthetic he thought would kind of revolutionize the way music was heard. >> Leid's favorite song on that record is Racing in the Street. It was the la he sang to Ezra. Its opening line, I got a 69 Chevy with a 396. Compare that with the opening line of Greetings from Aspbury Park, New Jersey. Springsteen's debut. Madman, drummers, bummers, and Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat. A cascade of words tumbling forward like a river breaking its banks. Same songwriter, a few years apart. What made the later album better was a radical act of subtraction. The stripping away concentrated the music.
Picasso once defined art as the elimination of the unnecessary. Antoine de Sanupery put it this way. Perfection is achieved not when there is nothing more to add but when there is nothing left to take away. A quote attributed to Laer goes even further. To attain knowledge add things every day. To attain wisdom subtract things every day. That is 2 and a half thousand years ago. La said it. Picasso said it. San Zuperi said it. Lighty's son Ezra lived it. He hadn't been taught yet that when something is broken, you're supposed to add.
If this video sparked something for you, check out the Hidden Brain podcast. You can find it on any audio podcast player. Each week I bring you new updates about the science of the mind and how the hidden patterns in your behavior shape your life. Please check us out. I'm Shankar Vantam. See you soon.