DESCRIPTION

“New York Times” bestselling author Jonah Lehrer introduces us to musicians, graphic artists, poets, and bartenders to show us how we can use science to be more imaginative and make our cities, our companies, and our culture more creative.

Highlights

• until the Enlightenment, the imagination was entirely synonymous with higher powers: being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the ingenious gods. (Inspiration, after all, literally means “breathed upon.”) (Location 93)
• Ever since the ancient Greeks, people have assumed that the imagination is separate from other kinds of cognition. But the latest science suggests that this assumption is false. (Location 110)
• Every creative journey begins with a problem. It starts with a feeling of frustration, the dull ache of not being able to find the answer. We have worked hard, but we’ve hit the wall. We have no idea what to do next. (Location 188)
• The danger of telling this narrative is that the feeling of frustration—the act of being stumped—is an essential part of the creative process. (Location 193)
• It’s often only at this point, after we’ve stopped searching for the answer, that the answer arrives. (Location 197)
• All of a sudden, the answer to the problem that seemed so daunting becomes incredibly obvious. We curse ourselves for not seeing it sooner. (Location 199)
• Why is a relaxed state of mind so important for creative insights? When our minds are at ease—when those alpha waves are rippling through the brain—we’re more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inward, toward that stream of remote associations emanating from the right hemisphere. In contrast, when we are diligently focused, our attention tends to be directed outward, toward the details of the problems we’re trying to solve. (Location 506)
• The unexpected benefits of not being able to focus reveal something important about creativity. (Location 556)
• Zen Buddhist meditator (Location 560)
• The benefit of such horizontal interactions—people sharing knowledge across fields—is that it encourages conceptual blending, which is an extremely important part of the insight process. (Location 579)
• What does conceptual blending have to do with creativity? Although people take this mental skill for granted, the ability to make separate ideas coexist in the mind is a crucial creative tool. Insights, after all, come from the overlap between seemingly unrelated thoughts. They emerge when concepts are transposed, when the rules of one place are shifted to a new domain. (Location 597)
• Hume was pointing out that the act of invention was really an act of recombination. (Location 604)
• key element is a willingness to consider information and ideas that don’t seem worth considering. (Location 653)
• those undergrads who had a tougher time ignoring unrelated stuff were also seven times more likely to be rated as “eminent creative achievers” based on their previous accomplishments. (The association was particularly strong among distractible students with high IQs.) (Location 661)
• According to the scientists, the inability to focus helps ensure a richer mixture of thoughts in consciousness. (Location 663)
• The lesson is that productive daydreaming requires a delicate mental balancing act. On the one hand, translating boredom into a relaxed form of thinking leads to a thought process characterized by unexpected connections; a moment of monotony can become a rich source of insights. On the other hand, letting the mind wander so far away that it gets lost isn’t useful; even in the midst of an entertaining daydream, you need to maintain a foothold in the real world. (Location 744)
• “A person is a poet if his imagination is stimulated by the difficulties inherent in his art and not if his imagination is dulled by them.” (Location 788)
• The sobering reality is that the grandest revelations often still need work. The new idea—that thirty-millisecond burst of gamma waves—has to be refined, the rough drafts of the right hemisphere transformed into a finished piece of work. (Location 821)
• It’s impossible to overstate the importance of working memory. For one thing, there is a strong correlation between working memory and general intelligence, with variations in the size of working memory accounting for approximately 60 percent of the variation in IQ scores. (Location 885)
• This is the power of attention and working memory; it allows us to relentlessly refine our ideas, to continue thinking about our thoughts. “Design is the conscious imposition of meaningful order,” (Location 1010)
• The German philosopher Martin Heidegger referred to this as the unconcealing process. He argued, like Glaser, that the reality of things is naturally obscured by the clutter of the world, by all those ideas and sensations that distract the mind. The only way to see through this clutter is to rely on the knife of conscious attention, which can cut away the excess and reveal “the things themselves.” (Location 1028)
• As Nietzsche observed in his 1878 book Human, All Too Human:   Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration … shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre, or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects … All great artists and (Location 1055)
• thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering. (Location 1059)
• Aristotle was there first, stating in the fourth century B.C. that “all men who have attained excellence in philosophy, in poetry, in art and in politics, even Socrates and Plato, had a melancholic habitus; indeed some suffered even from melancholic disease.” (Location 1066)
• Forgas has repeatedly demonstrated that a little melancholy sharpens the spotlight of attention, allowing us to become more observant and persistent. (Location 1073)
• (Of course, feeling sad also makes us less likely to have moments of insight.) (Location 1074)
• Numerous studies have demonstrated that when it comes to problems that don’t require insights, the mind is remarkably accurate at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved. (Location 1139)
• The struggle of maturity is to recover the seriousness of a child at play. —Friedrich Nietzsche (Location 1159)
• spontaneously generated ideas are constrained by the particular rules of the form. (Location 1253)
• I guess my only secret is that I didn’t know any better.” (Location 1590)
• The secret was outsider thinking: the problem solvers on InnoCentive were most effective when working at the margins of their fields. (Location 1633)
• We assume that technical problems can be solved only by people with technical expertise; the researcher most likely to find the answer is the one most familiar with the terms of the question. But that assumption is wrong. The people deep inside a domain—the chemists trying to solve a chemistry problem—often suffer from a kind of intellectual handicap. As a result, the impossible problem stays impossible. It’s not until the challenge is shared with motivated outsiders that the solution can be found. (Location 1646)
• The young know less, which is why they often invent more. (Location 1660)
• we can continue to innovate for our entire careers as long as we work to maintain the perspective of the outsider. (Location 1675)
• The moral is that outsider creativity isn’t a phase of life—it’s a state of mind. (Location 1681)
• “Technology inspires art, and art challenges the technology.”) (Location 1947)
• “Creativity is so delicate a flower that praise tends to make it bloom, while discouragement often nips it in the bud,” (Location 2067)
• The only way to maximize group creativity—to make the whole more than the sum of its parts—is to encourage a candid discussion of mistakes. (Location 2086)
• ‘Do not criticize’ is often cited as the [most] important instruction in brainstorming, this appears to be a counterproductive strategy. Our findings show that debate and criticism do not inhibit ideas but, rather, stimulate them relative to every other condition.” (Location 2102)
• Cities exhibit superlinear growth: as they get bigger, every person in the city becomes more productive. (Location 2429)
• connectedness of the country accelerates the pace of innovation: when strangers trade knowledge, new knowledge is created. (Location 2639)
• as the number of employees grew, the amount of profit per employee shrank. (Location 2705)
• What these allegations failed to take into account, however, was that Shakespeare was pioneering a new creative method in which every conceivable source informed his art. For Shakespeare, the act of creation was inseparable from the act of connection. (Location 2835)
• “I’d bet that there isn’t a single highly successful person who hasn’t depended on grit,” says Angela Duckworth, a psychologist at the University of Pennsylvania who helped pioneer the study of the psychological trait. “Nobody is talented enough to not have to work hard, and that’s what grit allows you to do.” (Location 2986)