This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. A few years ago, social scientist

Francesca Gina was browsing the shelves at her local bookstore when she came

across an unusual looking book in the cooking section. This recipe book, they

look a little bit different and the title said, never trust a skinny Italian

chef. And being Italian, it was very intrigued and as I flipped through the

page, it became clear that this was not your typical recipe book. The dishes

were playful, quirky and improbable. Snails were paired with coffee sauce,

Vilthang with charcoal powder. The recipes had titles like how to burn a sardine.

And oops, I dropped the lemon tart. The were pictures of beautiful dishes who

resist the a dish called the crunchy part of the lasagna. Now if you know

anything about Italians, first of all we have lots of rules when it comes to cooking.

And second, we really cherish our traditional dishes, especially because

they've been passed on for generations. But this chef, one of the most successful

in the world, couldn't resist circling back to one big existential question.

Why is it that we cook the dish in this way? Why is it that we cook the dish in

this way? It's the kind of question Francesca loved. As a professor at Harvard

Business School, she studies non-conformance, specifically people who break the

rules and end up in trouble. But now, standing at the bookstore, she wondered,

can define norms lead to innovation, can letting go of tradition lead to the most

sublime examples of creative thinking. To find out, she got in touch with a man

behind the cookbook, the so-called Jimmy Hendrix of Italian cooking, Massimo Batura.

After a few conversations, you said, luck. If you really want to understand the

...