I recently played a popular word game where you connect randomly arranged letters in the shape of a circle to create words that fill a crossword puzzle. There are two ways to figure out puzzles like this. Some stare at the letters and wait for words to pop into their consciousness. If no words surface, there’s a shuffle button to randomly reorder the letters. I take a different approach. Having sorted out where the vowels are most likely to fall, I sort through all the permutations of the various letters in my mind until a legitimate word appears. A brute force attack! For me, the shuffle button is an enemy that confuses my logical approach.

In Elastic, Leonard Mlodinow describes two types of thinking: analytical thought and elastic thinking. In my word puzzle example, analytical corresponds to my logical approach, while the intuitive approach is elastic. Mlodinow’s thesis is this: in our quickly changing environment, our ability to use elastic thinking will enable us to thrive.

Having previously read Subliminal, The Drunkard’s Walk, and The Grand Design, I was eager to pick up Mlodinow’s latest work. He is simply the best popular science writer I know. On the one hand he is a bonafide physicist who worked with Stephen Hawking. On the other hand, he wrote for Star Trek: The Next Generation and MacGyver (the original series). He respects the science while making it broadly understandable.

What makes Elastic different from Mlodinow’s previous books is the tools he incorporates. You can take a psychological test to discover where you fall on the skizotypy spectrum (“a constellation of personality traits such as those the children of schizophrenics seem to have inherited” (190)), or discover your level of mindfulness and explore a few ways to improve.

Elastic is an engaging and enlightening book that challenged the presuppositions of this analytic thinker. I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Mlodinow, Leonard. Elastic: Flexible Thinking in a Time of Change. New York: Pantheon, 2018.