This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam.

A few years ago, social scientist Francesca Gino was browsing the shelves at her local bookstore.

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 pages, it became clear that this was not your typical recipe book.

The dishes were playful, quirky, improbable.

Snails were paired with coffee sauce, wheel tongue with charcoal powder.

The recipes I titles like, how to burn a sardine.

And whoops, I dropped the lemon tart.

There were pictures of beautiful dishes who could resist the 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 world.

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 has spent most of her career studying non-conformist,

specifically people who break the rules and end up in trouble.

But now, standing at the bookstore, she wondered, when can defying 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 the man behind the cookbook, the so-called Jimmy Hendrix of Italian Cooking, Massimo Batura.

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