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Imagine: How Creativity Works |
How do you measure the imagination? In his ambitious and enthralling new book, Jonah Lehrer shatters the myth of creative ‘types’, showing how new research is deepening our understanding of the human imagination. Creativity is not a ‘gift’ that only some possess. It’s a term for a variety of distinct thought processes that we can all learn to use more effectively. Lehrer helps us fit our creative strategies to the task and considers how this new science can also make neighbourhoods more vibrant, companies more productive and schools more effective. We’ll learn about Bob Dylan’s writing habits and the drug addiction of poets. We’ll see why Elizabethan England experienced a creative explosion, and how Pixar designed its office space to maximise its talent. From the neuron to the finished symphony, Imagine reveals the mind’s deep inventiveness and its essential role in our complex world.
Jonah Lehrer is a Contributing Editor at Wired and the author of How We Decide, Proust Was a Neuroscientist and Imagine. He is also a frequent contributor to The New Yorker and Radiolab and writes the ‘Head Case’ column for The Wall Street Journal. Visit his website at www.jonahlehrer.com.
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April 11th, 2012 at 9:41 pm
I’ll be there. I am an extremely creative individual and have been since birth – I’ve just finished a 130,000 word novel, my first, at the age of 64, having had a professional life in several creative areas. This is an extremely challenging notion for me. I must read the book. I’ll be there.
April 22nd, 2012 at 11:38 am
This event is wonderfully timed for us – Acts of Beauty – aiming to develop a retreat in a historic estate near Bristol, with a focus on the shared creative process in the arts and other disciplines.
It’s our first step towards a vision of how we might put creativity central to an agenda for social and economic inclusion, for Bristol and linked international communities – so fascinated to hear Jonah’s perspective.
“Imagination is not a talent of some people. It is the health of all the people.”
Acts of Beauty – resourcing creativity
April 25th, 2012 at 2:46 pm
Beginning with an entertaining tale about Bob Dylan “vomiting” up the lyrics of “Like a Rolling Stone” at a time when he seemed to be on the verge of quitting the music business altogether, Jonah Lehrer took us on a colourful tour of the creative process.
For example, Lehrer explained how neuroscience can not only identify our out-of-the-blue moments of insight, but can also predict them up to eight seconds in advance. He also told us that daydreaming can be a good thing -sometimes the way to find an answer is to stop looking.
However, Lehrer was at pains to point out that we rarely get something for nothing. If the “eureka” moment is to bear fruit, it has to be followed up with endless editing and refining – a process even Beethoven found necessary. Just in case we hadn’t got the message, Lehrer also stressed that the biggest single predictor of success is what has been called “grit” – stubborn persistence allied to a determination not to give up when things don’t work out. Failure, it appears, is part of the process.
Much of this talk was both informative and thought-provoking – no more so than when Lehrer considered the success of “horizontal integration” at Pixar. And, after hearing of how the percentage of children defining themselves as creative plummets as they progress through school, I could only agree that strategies to improve this depressing state of affairs are urgently needed.
However, I have my caveats. In particular, Lehrer seemed to be implying that we can all learn how to be creative, which I feel may be a message freighted with no small amount of false hope. Sure, we could all probably do with learning how to knuckle down a bit more, and to shrug off the disappointment of failure. But spotting a creative “spike” on a brain scan seems a very long way from explaining either the processes behind such activity, or why some people are more prone to them than others. Furthermore, advice about the advantages of thinking with the right hemisphere of the brain seems to have little practical application here in the real world.
At the end of the day, I felt none the wiser as to why Bob Dylan is Bob Dylan and I am very much not. I would argue that science has a long way to go before we truly know where creativity comes from – or how it works. However, it was probably inevitable that Lehrer’s message would be so relentlessly upbeat. After all, far fewer people would buy a book entitled “Handy hints on how to maximise any creative potential you might have, but don’t expect to be Bob Dylan because essentially we still don’t know how he does it”.