Hmm. Here's the blurb for Jonah Lehrer's Imagine: How Creativity Works:
Did you know that the most creative companies have centralized bathrooms? That brainstorming meetings are a terrible idea? That the color blue can help you double your creative output?
From the bestselling author of How We Decide comes a sparkling and revelatory look at the new science of creativity. Shattering the myth of muses, higher powers, even creative “types,” Jonah Lehrer demonstrates that creativity is not a single “gift” possessed by the lucky few. It’s a variety of distinct thought processes that we can all learn to use more effectively. Lehrer reveals the importance of embracing the rut, thinking like a child, and daydreaming productively, then he takes us out of our own heads to show how we can make our neighborhoods more vibrant, our companies more productive, and our schools more effective. We’ll learn about Bob Dylan’s writing habits and the drug addiction of poets. We’ll meet a bartender who thinks like a chemist, and an autistic surfer who invented an entirely new surfing move. We’ll see why Elizabethan England experienced a creative explosion, and how Pixar designed its office space to get the most out of its talent. Collapsing the layers separating the neuron from the finished symphony, Imagine reveals the deep inventiveness of the human mind, and its essential role in our increasingly complex world.
Hmm. Sounds sorta like one of those pop-sci-for-the-ambitious-middle-manager books so far. There are lots lots of reviews out there, many glowing. Library Journal (one of several reviews at B&N) has this:
In his new book on creativity, Lehrer (How We Decide) presents captivating case studies of innovative minds, companies, and cities while tying in the latest in scientific research. He recounts the sometimes surprising origins of hugely successful inventions, brands, and ideas (e.g., the Swiffer mop, Barbie doll, Pixar animation) and reveals unexpected commonalities in the creative experiences (e.g., the color blue, distractedness, living abroad). The book combines individual case studies with broader psychology to provide new insights into creativity, much like Sheena Iyengar's The Art of Choosing. Many of Lehrer's insights are based on emerging scientific practices and are thus fresh and especially applicable to modern life. He emphasizes innovative companies and experimental approaches to education and includes historical factoids that reveal the backstories of everyday items.
VERDICT Lehrer's findings can be used to inform the design of innovative programs or to structure a productive work environment at home or at the office. This book will appeal to educators, business administrators, and readers interested in applied psychology...—Ryan Nayler, Univ. of Toronto Lib., Ont.
Elsewhere, LJ calls him "The enfant terrible of neuroscience" and describes the book as "Bracing reading (and maybe really, really advanced self-help)". Self-help! That's what I forgot. Try again: the book sounds like one of those pop-sci-self-help-for-the-ambitious-middle-manager books. Although his stuff at Wired is generally worth reading.
Kirkus has this:
Think you’re not creative? Think again. The take-home message from this multifaceted inquiry is that creativity is hard-wired in the human brain and that we can enhance that quality in ourselves and in our society.
Wired and Wall Street Journal contributor Lehrer (How We Decide, 2009, etc.) explores creativity from the inside out, looking at the mechanics of the brain and the effects of mental states from sadness to depression to dementia. He takes readers to laboratories where neuroscientists and psychologists are conducting controlled experiments on creativity, and he gets inside the talented minds of songwriter Bob Dylan, graphic artist Milton Glaser, cellist Yo-Yo Ma and engineer/inventor Arthur Fry. Lehrer examines how social interaction and collaboration promote creativity within a company, using Pixar studios as an example, and how these factors operate in communities, citing Silicon Valley and Tel Aviv as places that foster innovation by enabling people to interact, converse with strangers as well as colleagues and encounter new ideas. Shakespeare's London was just such a place, and the author presents factors that made it so, such as a critical density of population and an explosion of literacy. Lehrer also explores what he calls the outsider factor, showing how newcomers to a field or people working in tangential areas generate new approaches to old problems. America, he writes, can increase its collective creativity if it so chooses. The author points out that our schools already do so with athletes, encouraging and rewarding them from a young age, and the same steps can be taken to nourish our brightest, most imaginative children, as demonstrated by the success of schools like the New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts and San Diego's High Tech High. Further, Lehrer argues for policy changes to enhance our nation's creativity: immigration reform because immigrants account for a disproportionate number of patent applications in the United States, and patent reform, in order to reward and thereby promote innovation.
Lehrer writes with verve, creating an informative, readable book that sparkles with ideas.
Sparkly ideas! Wonder if they're anything like sparkly vampires?
Here's a bit from the Guardian:
As it happens, Lehrer makes a very impressive fist of nailing even this most nebulous of concepts. A remarkably prolific and inventive 30-year-old journalist, his writing for American newspapers and magazines includes a column for the Wall Street Journal in which he is sceptical of the overblown claims of neuroscience to explain complex psychological or cultural phenomena. Yet he is himself capable of speculating convincingly from the available science, picking up from where Malcolm Gladwell leaves off in bridging the two-cultures divide. More than psychology and the social sciences, Lehrer seeks to illuminate the exterior world of culture from within the dark interiors of the brain.
An enthusiast, equally, for what cultural thought can teach the sciences as vice versa, his first book, Proust Was a Neuroscientist, was an essay in the way artistic ideas anticipated strictly scientific ones. He begins this new one by going in search of the neurological source codes of the imagination.
Lehrer does not fall into the trap of lesser pop-neuroscience: grandiose cultural claims extrapolated from shards of brain function. Rather, the trick of Imagine is to start with details and stories and to compose a broad definition through the compounding of examples.He writes case histories...
Not sure I'd call that a trick -- I'd go with 'standard approach', personally.
The NYTimes brought up Gladwell (of whom I am not a fan)as well:
Like Malcolm Gladwell (“The Tipping Point,” “Blink”) and Joshua Foer (“Moonwalking With Einstein”), Mr. Lehrer takes scientific concepts and makes them accessible to the lay reader while dispensing practical insights that verge on self-improvement tips along the way. With these suggestions, his book implies, you too might be able to maximize your creative output.
The book’s breezy methodology makes for some problems — it’s often difficult to tell just how representative a study or survey, cited by the author, might be — but Mr. Lehrer largely avoids the sort of gauzy hypotheses and gross generalizations that undermined Mr. Gladwell’s 2008 book, “Outliers.”
Much as he did in his earlier books “How We Decide” and “Proust Was a Neuroscientist,” Mr. Lehrer shows how adept he is at teasing out the social and economic implications of scientific theories while commuting easily among the realms of science, business and art...
This guy at Amazon saw that same problem:
I'm intrigued by the subject matter, so having read several positive reviews and finding myself stuck in an airport, I paid list price for Jonah Lehrer's Imagine: How Creativity Works. I'd read Lehrer's How We Decide a couple of years ago, and enjoyed it. My anticipation, boosted by a recent NPR interview and one in The Economist, steadily disassembled as I read the book itself.
Lehrer does not cite the scientific literature well - there is no list of sources in the back and many claims have no clear references at all. He seems a little gullible (or sensational) in regard to some other studies...
But my main criticism is that the book relies almost exclusively on anecdote. He trots out case after case of well-known successes (masking tape, Bob Dylan, 3M, Pixar, etc.), and some unknown ones (a surfer, a bartender) --always in retrospect -- and draws out what he presents as yet another insight into creativity. But many of these are contradictory...
Possibly the most on-point review --despite its, um, introductory weirdness -- is this, from sfgate:
...Bouncing from case to case, and from analysis to how-to policy points (none of which advocate drug use), Lehrer suggests that some of us can be like these geniuses. He is bold or innocent enough to tell you how the right circumstances might make that happen.
Does it sound utopian? Lehrer takes us to a school in New Orleans where the poorest of kids make music and later go to college. We learn how a soft-spoken surfer who has Asperger's syndrome can direct the tightly focused mind to produce excellence - even beauty...
"Imagine" conjures up a mix of Oliver Sacks, Malcolm Gladwell and Richard ("creative class") Florida. Lehrer, a wunderkind, attended Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. True to his generation, he multitasks everywhere, from the New Yorker and Wired to NPR. He seems to read omnivorously; he certainly quotes omnivorously, from an army of accomplished people. This is his third book, after "Proust Was a Neuroscientist" and "How We Decide."
Lehrer writes deftly and, like the human brain when it's properly tuned, he can juggle multiple subjects. For those of us who lack that ability, he explains that the right hemisphere, where creative and imaginative thoughts originate, can be activated gently by taking walks, meeting the right person by chance, or simply daydreaming. 3M even allots time every day for employees to wander around. Try telling that to most bosses...
He calls for better education, more immigration, risk-taking, travel and constant borrowing. "We have to make it easy to become a genius," Lehrer writes. It's hard to argue against Lehrer's recommendations, unless you're running for president and some branch of government might be asked to pay for it.
"Imagine's" encouraging message echoes a boosterist Dale Carnegie more than it does the fragments of New Media. He isn't just promising enlightenment, but growth. Yet implicit in "Imagine" is the troubling truth that human capital is woefully underused, and that most economic activity is structured to make it irrelevant. Add to that the sad fact that, even in a wealthy country like the United States, most people can't afford to take risks, or don't believe they can.
A crucial problem in deploying the brain waves that fuel creativity is not nature but nurture - not the mechanics of the brain but those of the world in which the brain lives. Most people fortunate enough to have jobs these days have little control over their working conditions. All the more reason for creative solutions. Lehrer should be commended for showing us how we might inch toward them.
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