How to Think Big / UCLA Impact

How to Think Big

UCLA School of Dentistry’s Wenyuan Shi’s inventions may revolutionize cavity prevention, but the tool he chose was a little more playful.

Video excerpts from “Hot Type”, hosted by Evan Solomon, Canadian Broadcasting Company. Guns, Germs and Steel (Quicktime / 2:31 min)
Meet UCLA professor Jared Diamond and learn about the inspiration for his best-seller. Download QuickTime here.

Lesson: Be voraciously curious.

UCLA’s Jared Diamond brings together such seemingly unconnected topics as (to name but a few) the domestication of animals; the development of the Indo-European family of languages; the tribes of New Guinea; the reason for menopause; the latitude-related features of climate; the history of China and the origins of horsemanship. How he weaves such threads together has led to breakthrough discoveries in evolutionary biology, physiology, ecology, conservation biology and human history. Of course, thinking big comes easier when you are an actual genius (Diamond won a MacArthur “genius grant” in 1985).

Lesson: Look at the bigger picture.

Today’s emphasis on community policing began with UCLA’s James Q. Wilson. His “broken windows” theory of crime looked beyond criminal and victim to examine the environment of crime – that if police ignore public disorder, symbolized by broken windows, criminals will get the message that anything goes. <more>

Lesson: Take a closer look at the little things.

Dinner conversation is so much more than small talk when Elinor Ochs is listening. Considered a founder of the field of language socialization – the study of the way people acquire language and are shaped by the culture around them – Ochs studies how regular Los Angeles families interact at home everyday. As Ochs says, “We can tell a lot about beavers by looking at the dams they build.” <more>

UCLA scholars have contributed important breakthroughs in thought – “game changing” ideas that have significantly expanded humankind’s body of knowledge. In the genius of each of these faculty members, there are lessons to be found on how to think big every day.

Lesson: Apply models from other disciplines to a new field.

UCLA’s Susan McClary earned a reputation for originality in the field of musicology by interpreting symphonies and popular songs as cultural artifacts, much as art historians and English professors do with paintings, sculpture, novels and poetry. Her work examines musical repertories ranging from early 17th-century opera to the songs of Madonna. <more>

Lesson: Challenge conventional wisdom with cold, hard data.

Edward Telles, Ph.D., got excited by puzzles contained in demographic data and realized that the solutions could have social and political significance. Poring over reams of government data, he challenged the prevailing theory that racial mixing cures many ills. Many credit his research with successfully debunking the myth of Brazil as a “racial democracy” – and inspiring efforts to improve opportunities for all Brazilians. <more>

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Lesson: Don’t give up.

“My first idea was quite wrong, and it took me a while to figure out why,” said biological chemist Elizabeth Neufeld, Ph.D. “I was ultimately able to solve this group of diseases that had been a puzzle, and in a fairly unusual way.” Neufeld went on to win a National Medal of Science for her research into lysosomal storage diseases. <more>