Martin Seligman || From Learned Helplessness to Learned Hopefulness

Doctor Seligman is director of the PEN Positive Psychology Center, the Zellerbach Family Professor of Psychology, and the PEN Department of Psychology, and director of the PEN Master of Applied Positive Psychology Program. Commonly known as the Founder of positive Psychology, Doctor Seligman is a leading authority in the fields of positive psychology, resilience, learned how, helplessness, depression, optimism, and pessimism.

He's also a recognized authority on interventions that prevent depression and that build strengths and well being. He has written more than two hundred and fifty scholarly publications and twenty books, including Flourish, Authentic Happiness, Learned Optimism, Character, Strengths and Virtues, which was co authored with Chris Peterson and his autobiography The Hope Circuit, a Psychologist's Journey from Helplessness to Optimism.

Doctor Suliman, what an honor it is to chat with you today, Hey, Scott, it's good to see you again. I think it's been about two years since I saw you left, and it's a pleasure to be your guest here. Yeah, it's been a moment. As they say, well, let me ask you, what are some of the things you are most excited about that you've worked on in the past few years. Well, I've been struggling to write a book

on agency across all of human history. So when I looked over my work, it was basically about the fact that human beings, by exerting voluntary action, could have on the world. And it occurred to me that this might vary across time and culture, and particularly there are lots of times in human history which are stagnant, which really

nothing happens. Medieval apologists notwithstanding four hundred AD to about fourteen hundred AD is a time in the West of great stagnation, and then starting around fifteen hundred AD, we have enormous human progress, which accelerates through the Industrial Revolution and is still accelerating. So I started to wonder if what could be driving this was different beliefs about human agency.

And so I've tried to look at words, concepts, philosophical beliefs, and I'm trying to write on the notion going back to hunter gatherers, through the Bronze Age, through the Hellenic concepts, through Christianity and Judaism about agency, and it's waxing and waning. But the basic hypothesis is when human beings don't believe in free will and agency, there's no human progress. When human beings do believe in free will and an agency,

that's when human progress occurs. So I've been struggling with this book. My oldest daughter is a historian, and I sent her a sixty page outline of it, and she said it was hopeless that knew I knew, I knew no history, and it was time I learned some. And so you assign me to read the nine volume, ten thousand page Cambridge History of the World, which basically talks about agency at least subtly across time and space. So

I'm on volume three now, that's so interesting. Well, agency, so whether or not we actually have free will, it's the belief in free will. Is that right? Do you think we actually have free will? So this is not about whether or not we actually have free will, although I happen to believe we do. This is about the belief in free will. So the belief itself is a driver.

And so when Augustine comes along in the fourth century and says that Pelagious is a heretic and that human beings cannot choose good or evil, it's all of God's grace, a gift from God that becomes a Christian doctors for almost a thousand years, and it coincides with almost no material progress, and then starting around fifteen hundred, Catholicism begins to change its view Erasmus Pico argue that human beings can participate in their own grace, that we're like toddlers,

but when we fall down, God lifts us up. But we have to have motive power of our own. And that's when we see a human progress beginning again in

the West, but it's stymied by the Reformation. The Reformation, contrary to what Protestants are talking about today, is Calvin and Luther's revolt from Erasmus claiming that we have no free will at all, and a lot of the burning of the stake in the battle from fifteen twenty five to about seventeen hundred is over this issue of free will, and it's the Dutch and the liberal Catholics who believe in it, the Calvinists, the Lutherans deny it. People are

burnt at the stake over it. But basically the Dutch Protestants win and we get Methodism and modern Protestantism, which is very strongly believes in human efficacy and will. So that's more. That's more than you want to know about what I'm working on now. No, it's very interesting, and it's a lot I didn't know about it, you know.

I try to look at through threads of your own research, and I think about your original work in grad school and learned Helplessness, and how far you've come from that research, so far that you argue recently that you got it backwards.

Is that right? Yeah? But importantly learned helplessness was about human efficacy and not have human efficacy, and indeed its agency is the red thread that's run through my work Importantly, Steve Mayer has convinced me that we were wrong in our characterization of animals and humans in the original helplessness experiments. So what we believed was that rats, dogs, and people when they had inescapable events, learned that nothing they did

mattered and that's why they did so badly. Mayor has convincing data that the dorsal rofe nucleus little fifty thousand cell structure in rats one hundred and fifty thousand cell structure in human beings is the default activity when we face averse of events, and that the default is helplessness. Helplessness is unlearned. But what we learned is that we

can do something. And what makes human beings very special is we have a frontal cortex, which is all about learning, hope, learning that what we do matters, learning that the future can be better than the past. So we had it backwards. The action is in learning that you can do something. And if Steve is right, the default condition of mammals when bad things happen is to curl up and be helpless. Were they dogs that you originally did your research on?

Were they dogs or rats? The very first experiments were dogs, but very soon it became rats, mice, cats, and most importantly, the human helplessness work started about three years after the first work in animals. I was worried in the animal research that it was some artifact about rats or dogs, but it turns out to be highly replicable across every mammalian species has been tried, and if they had a more developed pree from the cortex, some of your original

conclusions might have been different. All mammals, as far as I understand, have some prefrontal cortex, but what humans have is massive of prefrontal cortex and a prefrontal cortex that's affected by words, and so that makes a big difference. We can learn hope, not just by doing things that succeed. We can be taught about hope. We can culturally accrue hope. So you know, since you went from warned helplessness to learned hopefulness. That's the way I would characterize first my

own life, and that's what the hope circuit is about. Secondly, psychology as a whole. So when I started in psychology, it was all about fear, conflict, struggle, competition, and I was part of a movement that changed it to be also about meaning, control, love, engagement, accomplishment, success, and hope. And the third thing that happened in my lifetime was the world got better, So my life changed for the better. Psychology changed to include positive topics, and this was legitimized

by massive changes in human progress. Hey everyone, if you find the themes we cover on the Psychology Podcast interesting and enlightening, you might be interested in my new book, Transcend, The New Science of Self Actualization. The book is the culmination of my journey to scientifically discover the factors that can lead us to optimal health, growth, creativity, peak experiences,

and deep fulfillment. I believe we can still manage to have peak experiences, the most wondrous moments that make life worth living, regardless of our current life circumstances. We can choose growth for more. You can visit Transcend hyphenbook dot com. A's Transcend hyphenbook dot com with a hyphen between the word transcend and the word book. If you get a chance to read the book, it'd be great if you could leave a review on Amazon, tweet about it, or

share the book with friends. I truly hope this book can help people get through these tough times. And realize that we all have greater resiliency, creativity, and potential within us than we ever realized. Okay, now back to the show. Well, so I want to go back a second here. So your age thirty, and you have this dream that changes the trajectory of your career and what you decide you want to do. Can you talk a little about that dream and how that impacted you. I'll give you one

quote from that dream. Why is everyone playing with cards? Yeah? So, I've always paid attention to dreams. In fact, I think the best paper I ever wrote is a theory of dreaming that almost no one has ever read. In the early nineteen seventies, I had become a professor young professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the work on learned

helplessness in animals and humans was becoming well known. And my mentor was a a middle aged psychiatrist named Aaron Beck, and he and I would have lunch about once a month. We still do. Beck is now ninety eight years old. I'm seventy seven. We still have great lunches. We're doing them now on Google Meet and Zoom. And so we met for lunch at Kelly and Cohns, and Tim, who's ordinarily a very gentle person, said to me, Marty, if you continue doing what you're doing, you're going to waste

your life. And I choked on my grilled Reuben and thought that Tim must be wrong. But a few months later I had a dream that one would call a newmanous dream, a very salient dream, in which I was walking up the ramp at the Guggenheim Museum, and on my right there were rooms, and in the rooms people were playing with cards, and I asked the question, why is everyone playing with cards? Where Upon the roof of

the Guggenheim opened and the guy had appeared. And you'll be interested to know, Scott, that God is a elderly male with a white beard and a booming voice. And what God said very loudly to me in this dream was, well, Seligman,

at least you're starting to ask the right questions. And that coincided with what Beck had said, and it told me the time had come to change my research from animal models of psychopathology to what I now do, human research, longitudinal research, research not only on the bad stuff that cripples life, but research on what builds life as well. What makes life worth living? When I look back, the dream and the choking on my grilled Reuben with Tim Beck were turning points in my research. I was about

thirty years old at the time. Wow, that's historic. Well you started working on optimism before you founded positive psychology. Now what was this, What was the research? Why did you get interest in optimism? How'd that happened? Well, I thought I was working on pessimism, So I'll tell you

the story of how it happened. In our helplessness experiments, both in animals and people, we found that only about two thirds who got inescapable events, unsolvable problems, inescapable shock, inescapable noise, only about two thirds became helpless, and the other one third of people in animals didn't become helpless. So I began to wonder, what was it about some people that made them so resilient and so resistant to

depression and to becoming helpless. So we did about ten years of research on this question, and we basically found that it was optimism that people who believed that when bad events occurred to them, the bad events were trangent, they're temporary, the bad events were local. Just as one situation the bad events were controllable. These were the optimists, and these were the people who we could not make

helpless easily in the laboratory. Conversely, people who came to the laboratory with the belief that when bad events occur, they're permanent, they're pervasive, and there's nothing they can do about them. Where the people who became helpless at the drop of the hat. So the story was that pessimists become helpless easily. They get depressed at about twice the rate of optimistic people, and optimists are resilient when bad events occur, they recover and they don't become helpless in

the laboratory easily at all. Oh, that must have been quite a stark contrast from the learned helplessness research. Just as a human being, to hear these dogs yelling in pain, that must have been hard for you, right as an experimenter, and hearing all that the suffering of those animals. Oh yeah, I'm a dog lover and very difficult experiments to do. I found myself in a laboratory at age twenty one that was doing shock experiments with dogs, and as soon as I could get out of it, I stopped doing

experiments with dogs. Did experiments with rats for a while, also difficult to do much easier to do experiments with people. So the nineties, we're in the nineties now, and you decide I'm going to run for president of APA, the American Psychological Association, and people told you forget about it, kind of to aly lined up in vance. The order of succession is already designated. Why did you decide to

run for AP president? Why persevere when people told you that. Well, in about nineteen ninety three, Consumer Reports contacted me and said they were going to do They usually do studies of washing machines and automobiles and get consumer ratings of them, and they said they wanted to do psychotherapy, and they asked me if I would become their main consultant for a Consumer reports study of whether or not people thought

of psychotherapy was effective. Now, I had been a psychotherapy researcher, both drugs and psychotherapy, but I was involved in doing small, essentially laboratory and clinical studies of cognitive therapy and the like. But this was an opportunity to send a questionnaire out to one hundred thousand people, many of whom it had psychotherapy and asked them to rate it, and so we got back tens of thousands of responses and analyzed them,

and I was shocked by the results. They're completely different from the results we found in essentially outcome studies of psychotherapy. The first big difference was that eighty to ninety percent of people in the Consumer Reports study thought that psychotherapy was very effective for them, whereas in the laboratory research on psychotherapy only about sixty percent of people are affected,

markedly against the forty percent placebo rate generally. First thing, we found that people like psychotherapy much more than the laboratory told us they did. The second big difference was that with clinical outcome studies there's high specificity. So flooding works well on obsessive obsessive compulsive disorders, exposure works well on therapy, cognitive behavior therapy works well on depression. But in the Consumer Reports study everything worked about equally well.

So once we had those results and published them, it occurred to me that these are results that would be very important to the main constituency of the American Psychological Association, and indeed I decided to run for president based on the Consumer Reports results, and in spite of the fact that everyone told me I couldn't possibly win, that the next three presidents had designated by the people who ran APA.

I won by the largest margin in modern history. And it's not like you went into that saying I'm going to create a new field that revolutionizes the psychology and creates all these things. At what point did you think, well, I'm going to make this my platform. Positive psychology didn't have something to do with your daughter, Nikki, Well, it

wasn't my platform going in, but it was going out. Basically, I found myself asking the question, what did what was missing in psychology and what was present and something psychology could be proud of. Was it psychotherapy actually worked, that had helped a good number of people, and it was well liked. But what psychology was missing was what makes life worth living. Psychology was all about what cripples life and trying to get rid of the things that crippled life.

But I think the belief that the best we can ever do in life, which is what Freud told us in Schopenhauer, is not to be miserable that that belief is empirically false, morally insidious, and a personal and political dead end. And so I began to think about the question of could there be an effective psychology of the good life, of what makes life worth living, not just getting rid of what cripples life, And so that became the driving force for my next twenty years of work.

I see. And then when was this gardening incident that you talk about with Nikki. Oh, that was a emblematic turning point that occurred in I think about nineteen ninety six. I had just become president elect elect and was wondering what my theme might be. And Nicki had turned five years old. Nicki, by the way, is just getting her PhD from Fordham now in clinical psychology, so she's going

into the family business in some ways. Nicky had just turned five and we were gardening together, and Nicky was throwing weeds in the air and dancing and singing and having a great time, and I'm a worker being I shouted at her and I said, get to work, Nicki, And she looked at me, and she walked away, and she came back and she said, Daddy, can I talk

to you? And I said sure, he said, Daddy, Do you remember that was my fifth birthday was about two weeks ago, so this must have been in early September of nineteen ninety six. I would have to guess then from that counting backwards, do you remember before my fifth birthday that I was a whiner, that I whined all the time? And I said yeah, I said, well, have you noticed in the last two weeks I haven't whined once? And I said, yeah, yeah, You've really been a pleasure.

And he said, well, Daddy, I decided on my fifth birthday that I wasn't going to whine anymore. And that was the hardest thing I've ever done, and it succeeded. And if I can stop whining, you can stop being such a grouch. And indeed that was the emblematic inspiration for me of founding a movement which was not about what was wrong, but a movement about what was right in life. To take the spirit of positive psychology and ask you, what are your top character strengths? What are

your top three character strengths? Last time I looked, they were leadership, critical intelligence, and love of love of beauty. Bravery might have been up there, but I'm not sure. But importantly it was leadership, creativity, critical intelligence, and love of beauty. Yeah, I would after spending four years with you, I'd say that makes a lot of sense. You often got touched by beautiful things. Even just listening to classical music I know, really drabs you bad. Day to day.

I haven't listened to any music. I think when this is done, I'll go for a walk and listen to music. You should. You should, I highly recommend it. Well, it's a positive psychology right now, a lot of people in the age of this coronavirus certainty. What can positive psychology offer people? This is partly why I reached out to you to have you on my podcast, because I heard you do this thing for the Mapsters with Aaron Beck

and what you said inspired me. So I want you to be able to inspire the thousand thousands of people listening to you right now as well. Well. I have some pretty firm hypothesis about what positive psychology says, both about what you should do during the pandemic and then the way out what you should do after. So the background for this is to split different aspects of positive psychology.

So I'm going to split here between positive emotion, which is being cheerful, merry, having fun and smiling a lot, having a good time, and optimism, which is not a feeling state. Optimism is a belief about the future, a belief that the future will be better. Now, let's take a look at what we know about the effects of those two different aspects of positive psychology. Well, on the first positive emotion and the jargon here is positive affectivity.

That is, there are some people who are highly positively effective. Scott and I are not among them. These are people who smile a lot, who are merry, who laugh a lot, and have a good time. Sheldon Cohne decided about fifteen years ago to ask the question about the relationship of positive effectivity and of optimism to viral infection, and he did.

He used three different kinds of rhinoviruses. I think two of them are coronaviruses, if I'm not mistaken, and he took I think a couple hundred volunteers, paid them three hundred dollars apiece and squirted viruses into their nose and asked who got a bad cold and who didn't, and how long did the cold last? And interestingly, the main variable that worked was positive affectivity. People who were high positive affect who smiled a lot, laughed or merry people

got shorter colds and less severe colds. And he measured this, by the way, by the weight of the mucus, so this is not self report. Interestingly, optimism had no effect, So optimistic people got colds at the same rate as pessimistic people. So the first lesson from Sheldon Cone is that if you want to avoid the infection during the pandemic, the hypothesis is, as hard as it sounds, you should

have a lot of fun. We bought a puppy, for example, listening to music, having sex, having good food, finding all the things that give you joy and make you smile. So that's part one. If I had to make a guess, the formulation from positive psychology, have as much fun as you possibly can during this difficult time. Then the question is this pandemic will wane. It's probably the first wave of it is probably waning now in the United States. And then the question is who will recover, who will

lead us? What kind of personality is needed for resilience, And the answer there is not merry, smiling, laughing people. It's people with hope and optimism. So the massive literature on optimism says these are the people who rebuild. So Scott The underlying lesson here is during the pandemic, have as much fun as you possibly can. As difficult as it sounds, but as the pandemic wanes, it's optimism and hope that's going to matter. You've criticized this happyology of

positive psychology, but you're saying, let's allow ourselves. Let's give ourselves permission to have some happyology. Right now. This is the very first time I've ever endorsed the smiley face. So, as you know, whenever I speak to journalists about positive psychology, the first thing I say is, don't put the smiley face on the cover. Well, I think the smiley face matters right now. I agreed. So you made a comment, and maybe I misunderstood. You said me and you are

not the smiley have fun kind of got people. Is that right? I'm low positive effective, and I have to go out of my way. Listen listening to meatloaf, having a puppy, cooking good food, gardening during the pandemic. So I'm massively trying, as hard as it is to have fun during the pandemic. Some people have fun more easily than I do. But that's what I'm working on. I've even been dancing a little. That's awesome. Yeah, and so is your perception your perception of me as well positive

affective as well. Yeah. So I've always seen you as a sort of like me, basically glum, and that we had to work at positive affectivity. Am I wrong about you? I think so, I think you are wrong about me. Maybe we've never partied together. No, No, I've partied with almost none of my students and postdocs and coworkers. Ever, So you're you're you must have taken some of the positive affectivity tests. How do you come out? I'm pretty high.

I'm pretty high in positive affect But I want to just comment on something I noted about you, because I think that you know your your personality has changed. I mean, you know throughout your whole course of your whole life. But I can only speak the past four years or so. I mean, I would almost characterize you these days as naturally positive affect you. You don't you know, I don't know if you if you think that you've had quite

a transformation over the years. But my own perception of you is your default state now is quite seems quite friendly and positive affect I've measured it over the years both optimism and positive affect. And you're right, So I've gone from being pessimistic and negatively effective to being quite optimistic and not particularly negatively affective anymore. So I am

better at having fun than I used to be. So I think that it'd be helpful in this kind of restless conversation talk a little bit about what are some critiques of positive psychology that you've addressed. You know, you've talked about strong criticisms and weak criticisms. What's a strong

criticism of the field that people have leveled against positive psychology. Well, I think the best criticism is that it positive psychology says that it's in the head, And the best criticism is that a good world is not in people's head. A good world is in the world, and that if we want to allocate money to make people happier, it's not doing positive psychology things. It's rather more income and

the like. And so that's a good criticism and the answer to it is, interestingly that more and more income, both for individuals and fors asymptotes quickly, and that in the United States that between eighty and one hundred thousand dollars a year increases in income don't produce increases in

life satisfaction. So that's a good criticism, and I think the answer to it is that below the safety net, what we really want to care about is increasing people's income, and the world above the safety net, more and more we want to ask the question of perma engagement, good relationships, meaning, and accomplishment rather than more money. So that's the best critique I know. The second good critique, which I think really is insidious and false, but it's catchy, is that

happy people don't care about the world. That happy people are blithe and they care about themselves. And Barbara this is basically Barbara Ehrenreich's main critique of positive psychology, that happy We don't want to make people happy, we want to make them realistic rather than happy. And the answer to that is there are quite a few studies now of altruism, who volunteers, who contributes money, who works hard for other people, and the strong weight of that evidence

is that it's happy people. Depressed people turn inward. They tend to be less altruistic, they tend not to volunteer. And you know, almost all of your listeners who have been depressed at one time or another another. When you're depressed, you turn to yourself and you become number one. And so the second criticism that making people happy will make them bad citizens is one hundred and eighty degrees wrong. So those are those are my two favorite criticisms. What's

your favorite criticism? My favorite is that the field ignores suffering. So maybe it went in the opposite direction and trying to correct the record that the focused too much in suffering, but it ignores those that the most vulnerable in our society, those in the lower rungs that really just what their most basic needs met. How do you respond to that? Yeah, well, I agree with that, And by definition, the field came out of clinical psychology, and thirty years of my life

had to do with the relief of suffering. So I take relief of suffering very seriously. But the field, by definition, is not about the relief of suffering. It's not about removing what cripples life, and I definitely think we should be doing that. Positive psychology is not a replacement for clinical psychology or for negative psychology, but rather positive psychology says, in addition to caring about relief of suffering, let's ask

the question what builds the good life? And part of that is certainly removing suffering, and that's what psychology has traditionally done. Positive psychology says, in addition, we need to ask about more than just the relief of suffering. Right, what do you think of humanistic psychology? You knew I was going to ask you that question. It hasn't played

much of a role in my life. So when I was an undergraduate, I read Frome, and I remember meeting al Ellis, and then I went through laboratory psychology and clinical psychology, and in the of positive psychology, I was reminded of humanistic psychology, but hadn't read much of it. So most of the humanistic psychology I read was kind of in response to the critique of humanists humanistic psychology is of positive psychology, which basically just said it was

old wine in new bottles. I went back and read more and more Maslow and Rogers and the like, and I liked them a lot. I think the difference between positive psychology and humanistic psychology is that it's more rigorous, and so positive psychology for me, arose out of laboratory and longitudinal, experimental and social psychology and it would have been dishonest of me to cite humanistic psychology, since that played almost no role when I was pretty much ignorant

of it in the founding of positive psychology. But in retrospect, Maslow and Rogers were deeply onto very much the same thing long before I was. But they weren't scientists essentially. And I guess we added seven point scales and laboratory experiments and rigor to many of the premises that Maslow began with. That's a very fair answer. And I assume you didn't. You didn't read a lot of Maslow then

in the fifties and sixties. Yeah. By the way, you did a great job in your book of characterizing Maslow's life, and I found I just learned a lot more about Maslow from your book. Thank you. I appreciate that. I'm trying to I'm trying to put some of those ideas on a firm scientific foundation. So I really appreciate that. And there's no reason for human modern dy humanistic psychologist and positive psychologists not work together on a scientific foundation.

There's no reason why we can't work together. I love it. I agree completely. I think it's a historic accident partly due to my own ignorance, but also partly due to the insolarity and the strained scientific methods that some of the humanistic psychologies advocated that the two disciplines were so far apart. Yeah, I agree, I agree. There was a lot of just words, you know, put forth that were beautiful words. Beautiful words, you know, like in the Art

of Loving Eric Fromner. Loving is a beautiful book, but there's no not a lot of scientific rigor in it. So I'm trying to resurrect it and put some of that on a scientific foundation. So would you say that you are a natural in psychology in the sense because you play bridge as well? Is that right? Can you compare and contrast your bridge talent to your psychology talent. I can answer that pretty definitively, since I spend about half my time playing bridge and about half my time

doing psychology. Doing psychology is easy for me. The cards just fly off my hands. You know. When I hear you talking about creativity, I really understand what you're saying, and I can often see to the bottom of it. Psychological questions become our naturals for me. Playing bridge, however, is labor I have to sit there and sweat and reason it out and calculate probabilities, whereas some of the great partners I play with in Bridge, the cards just

fly off their hands. They just know what the right move is without being able to explain it. So in Bridge there are clearly naturals, and I've been privileged to partner quite a few of them. And then there are students like me for whom it's sweat. In psychology, I'm a natural. I love it. It's easy, but many of my students are students. It's hard for them. So that's the distinction that I think is a real one. By

the way, it's not about not about success. So in Bridge, some of the students who sweat it out are just as successful as the naturals, And in psychology some of the students are just as successful as the naturals, and naturals are often failures. Grit matters a bit as well. In addition, time on task matters. For me, the operative part of grit is how much time you spend at it.

And indeed there's a lot to be said for time on task, particularly if you're a student, as in Bridge, so I play about four hours of Bridge to day and over sixty years it's become easier for me, but it's still hard. Psychology, which I spend about the same amount of time on, has always been easy for me. So talent and natural being and achurl that's different than creativity. What is creativity? I'm asking this to you because I

know you have a new theory, a new paper. I'd much rather know what you think about it, since you know and have written more deeply than I have about creativity. I like your new paper. I want to say, I don't know if you've published yet, but no, it's still you know, it's dormant, and it's dormant because I want to create, essentially courses to see if it works. So it's just an idea. It basically says that in science and maybe in art, but only in science I'm hypothesizing about.

There are five different kinds of creative ideas, not just one. The first is integration. That's seeing that two things look like they're different are really the same. Basically, Newton in the Apples story is Newton. The real part of the story is that when he was back at the farm during the plague, this moon was rising behind the family apple tree, and one of the apples secluded the moon perfectly, and Newton thought that could it be that what draws the apple to the Earth is the same thing that

keeps the moon in orbit. What Newton was really great at was integration, seeing that two things that looked different were the same. He did the same thing with the fundamental colors. The second kind of creativity is differentiation, That is seeing that two things that look like they're the same are really different. And so dividing smallpox into Variola major, which was deadly and Variola minor, which had the same symptoms but was not deadly, was an example of that.

The periodic table of the elements is an example of differentiation. The third kind is figure ground reversal, and that is taking the basic premise of the science and reversing it and asking what's the case. And the Compernician revolution putting the Sun at the center of the Solar system not the Earth, was an example of that. Positive psychology is an example of that, which says, hey, the answer is

not in the clinic, but it's in normality. The fourth kind is distality, and that's being able to imagine things that are very different from the here and now. So Einstein and Tesla were wonderful imaginers of space and time and machines. And the fifth kind for me is creative accidents itself, like the discovery of antibacterials, in which you just come upon something. Discovery of radiation was similar. So Scott, that's kind of where I am about it. But for me,

this is just idle thought. And so I'm beginning to ask the question with a company called Better Up, giving courses on each of these five different kinds of creativity within the business setting, depending on what the company needs integration, differentiation, figured ground reversal, and seeing if that helps creativity. So I'm probably not going to really do much with this theory until I can find that you can actually change

these things for the better, fair enough. But what I like about it, and what I think that we both criticize about some of the field, is that there's a lot more to creativity than what's measured by the existing creativity tests that exists, Like tests of divergent thinking. Divergent thinking tests don't get at the quality of the thought, right, so it might measure the quantity, but not the extent to which you have I've looked at. So it's cool stuff.

And you've also talked about the importance. This is something you stressed all four years I worked with you, the importance of the sense of the audience that's not picked up by existing tests of creativity. Are they right? Yeah, although the third criteria of creativity, that is usefulness, seems to me really quite important. That there really is a market and an audience, and it's a part of creativity, is not just originality, but that there's an audience for

the originality. I think surprisingness. What do you think of I think surprisingness, counterintuitive counterintuitivity is really another important thing that Simonson points to. What's your view on surprisingness? How do you separate that from the ability to connect dots that other people don't connect? Is that similar to it? Well, that's one kind of surprisingness. Another kind is figure ground reversal,

which says people, hey, your basic premise is wrong. So it's not the connecting of dots, it's rather the shock value. We were working together on prospection, saying to people that it's not enough just to know about the past and the present, that we should start with thinking about the future. Has shock value, and I don't think that's really the connection of dots. I don't think so either. It doesn't seem like quite the same thing. Yeah, you know, there's

a term of disruptors. A lot of creativity creative people are disruptors, and they disrupt this sort of status quote ideas. It's not a formula for being popular, but it is a formula for getting work done. That asks about the basic premises. You know, you've said in your career that you're one of your ambitions is to not be boring, right quote, not be boring? Do you think creative that's also a prerequisite for being a creative human being. Well,

that's a good question. So creativity is almost by definition not boring. So surprisingness is part of not being boring. It's a good question. So not being boring may be very similar to being surprising. Yeah, I think so. I think so. So to be a disruptor for a second. And the future of psychotherapy, you see perspection as being perhaps a future of psychotherapy and not focusing so much in the past, but helping people focus more in the future.

One of the privileges of having lunch with Beck once a month at age ninety eight is that he's come around I think to the view of the importance of perspection and positivity in psychotherapy. So I think anxiety and depression are right on their surface, not about the past or the present, about the future. You're anxious about what might happen, and you're depressed about that the future is bleak.

So it's so bizarre that the psychotherapy is for anxiety and depression of neglected the future orientation of them and concentrated on the past and the present. Beautiful, Okay, So last to end here, is there anything you want to bring up, anything you want to tell people to set records straight. I know there was some controversy with APA and applications of your work, and is there anything at all you want to address or to talk about here at the end? Well, to the extent this conversation has

intrigued people. I have the satisfaction of having written an autobiography, The Hope Circuit, which words and all tells the story of the trajectory in my life, and Scott was a reviewer of it, and I recommend it to you. Thank you. I also, by the way, recommend Scott's excellent book to you,

particularly the Sailboat in this book, Thanks Marty. I just want to personally thank you for giving me the chance that you gave me to work at the Positive Psychology Center to teach positive psychology at Penn and those are four of the most meaningful years of my entire existence so far in life. So I just want to really thank you and thank you to all the work you've done for everyone else. You're welcome, Scott. Thanks for listening

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