The mind is like a parachute. It doesn’t work if it is not open.
Frank Zappa
The meaning of the quote
In 1984, an Australian doctor named Barry Marshall swallowed a broth full of the bacteria he’d been studying.
Marshall and his colleague Robin Warren believed a bacterium called Helicobacter pylori caused most stomach ulcers. Other doctors blamed stress and spicy food, and journals kept rejecting the pair’s work. So Marshall made himself the experiment and within days he was vomiting with the stomach inflammation that comes before an ulcer. Scientific American later told the story of how that self-experiment gave him his proof.
Marshall and Warren won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine in 2005. It still took the medical world years to accept what a single glass of broth had shown.
That slow acceptance is what the quote is about. A parachute that stays folded in its pack is dead weight strapped to your back, and it only saves you once it opens. A mind works the same way. You can fill it with facts, degrees and strong opinions, but if it won’t open to a new idea, none of that knowledge helps when you need it.
Marshall stayed a skeptic the whole time. He tested his own idea as hard as he could and let the result decide. That’s what an open mind looks like. It lets evidence move you, even when the evidence points away from the idea you like best.
Most of us are closer to the doctors who ignored Marshall than we’d like to admit. Psychologists call this habit confirmation bias. We notice facts that agree with us and wave off the ones that don’t. Decide a new classmate is rude after one awkward hello, and every quiet moment afterward looks like proof.
Marshall had one advantage most of us don’t get when we’re wrong. He could test his idea and get a straight answer back. Most beliefs don’t come with a lab result, so you have to build the test yourself.
Marshall was right about the bacteria, but being right wasn’t enough. He needed other doctors willing to look at the evidence and change their minds.
Be the one who looks.
About the author
In March 1965, police raided a tiny recording studio in Cucamonga, California, and arrested its 24-year-old owner. An undercover vice officer had posed as a customer and asked him to make a suggestive “party tape.” The young musician spent 10 days in jail and lost his studio.
His name was Frank Zappa.
A year later, Zappa and his band the Mothers of Invention released Freak Out!, one of the first double albums in rock history. He went on to release more than 60 albums, mixing rock, jazz, classical music and comedy, and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1995.
Zappa was born in Baltimore in 1940 and spent a sickly childhood fighting asthma and constant sinus trouble. His family moved several times, partly for his health, and ended up in Lancaster, California.
As a teenager, he found a record by the composer Edgard Varèse, whose music sounded like nothing he’d heard before. For his 15th birthday, he asked his mother for one present, a long-distance phone call to Varèse in New York. Varèse was away in Europe, so Zappa talked to his wife instead, and Varèse later wrote him a letter.
In 1963, before anyone knew his name, Zappa went on the TV talk show hosted by Steve Allen and played a bicycle as a musical instrument, plucking the spokes and blowing through the handlebars.
He was also one of the few rock stars of his era who didn’t use drugs, and he named his children Moon, Dweezil, Ahmet and Diva.
In 1985, Zappa testified before the US Senate against a plan to put warning labels on albums with “offensive” lyrics. He told the senators:
“The PMRC proposal is an ill-conceived piece of nonsense which fails to deliver any real benefits to children.”
After communism fell in Czechoslovakia, President Václav Havel, a longtime fan, asked Zappa to represent the country on trade and culture.
Zappa died of prostate cancer on December 4, 1993, at 52. His autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book, is as blunt and funny as the man who wrote it.
Resources
- Think Again by Adam Grant (Book)
- Why you think you’re right even if you’re wrong by Julia Galef (YouTube)
- When Scientists Experiment on Themselves: H. pylori and Ulcers (Article)
- Frank Zappa at the PMRC Senate hearing (YouTube)
- The Real Frank Zappa Book (Book)
- Confirmation bias (Wikipedia)
Leave feedback about this