Quotes from Imagine
Thursday, February 6, 2014 at 05:27AM
From: Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer.
I thought rather than writing a review, I'd just post a few quotes from Mr. Lehrer's very interesting book on creativity. (See note below, added to this post thanks to Jim Randolph's comment.)
“... until the Enlightenment, the imagination was entirely synonymous with higher powers: being creative meant channeling the muses… Inspiration.. literally means “breathed upon.”
...a recent survey of psychology papers published between 1950 and 200 revealed less than 1 percent of them investigated the creative process.
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.
Unless poets are stumped by the form, unless they are forced to look beyond the obvious associations, they’ll never invent an original line. … And this is why poetic forms are so important. When a poet needs a rhyming word with exactly three syllables or an an adjective that fits the iambic scheme, he ends up uncovering all sorts of unexpected connections; the difficulty of the task accelerates the insight process.
You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.
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.
Surprisingly, those students diagnosed with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) got significant higher scores [on creative tests]. … In every single domain, from drama to engineering, the students with ADHD had achieved more. Their attention deficit turn out to be a creative blessing.
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.
...people who consistently engage in more daydreaming score significantly higher on measures of creativity.
… when logic won’t help, when working memory has hit the wall. In such instances the right hemisphere helps expand the internal search.
The lesson of letting go is that we constrain our own creativity. We are so worried about playing the wrong note or saying the wrong thing that we end up with nothing at all, the silence of the scared imagination.
Picasso once summarized the paradox this way: “Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”
It turns out that we can recover the creativity we’ve lost with time. We just have to pretend we’re little kids.
On creating a new drink: “I guess my only secret is that I didn’t know any better.”
The young know less, which is why they often invent more.
… we can continue to innovate for our entire careers as long as we work to maintain the perspective of the outsider.
We need to be willing to risk embarrassment, ask silly questions, surround ourselves with people who don’t know what we’re talking about. We need to leave behind the safety of our expertise.
The most creative ideas, it turns out, don’t occur when we are alone. Rather, they emerge from our social circles, from collections of acquaintances who inspire novel thoughts. Sometimes the most important people in life are the people we barely know.
“When we obsess over tests, when we teach the way we’re teaching now, we send the wrong message to our students. … “We’re basically telling them that creativity is a bad idea. That it’s a waste of time. That it’s less important than filling in the right bubble.” Kyle Wedberg, CEO of New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts
In recent years, psychologists have studied the relationship between persistence and creative achievement. They have discovered that the ability to stick with it - the technical name for this trait is grit - is one of the most important predictors of success.
“Nobody is talented enough not to have to work hard, and that is what grit allows you to do.” Angela Duckworth, psychologist.
Instead of learning how to pass a standardized test, [students in schools that place importance on imagination] learn how to cope with complexity and connect ideas, how to bridge disciplines and improve their first drafts. These mental talents can’t be taught in an afternoon - there is no textbook for ingenuity, no lesson plan for divergent thinking. Rather, they must be discovered: the child has to learn by doing.
When students are given explicit instructions, when they are told what they need to know, they become less likely to explore on their own. Curiosity is a fragile thing.
The question now is whether our society can produce creative talent with the same efficiency that it has produced athletic talent. Our future depends on it.
From Wikipedia:
Jonah Richard Lehrer[1][2] (born June 25, 1981) is an American author, journalist, blogger, and speaker who writes on the topics of psychology, neuroscience, and the relationship between science and the humanities. He has published three books, two of which, Imagine and How We Decide, were withdrawn from the market by publishers after it became known that Lehrer had fabricated quotations. This led to his resignation from his staff position at The New Yorker following disclosures that he had recycled earlier work of his own for the magazine. A later investigation at Wired.com, where he had previously worked, found instances of recycled content and plagiarism. He was fired from that position as a result of the investigation.
Hmmm, I suspect it's not a good idea to use a known plagiarist as a source. But I still like some of the ideas - regardless of the source. Thank, Jim for the alert.
Reader Comments (4)
I wonder how creative he got with his quotes and his citations this time.
Hi Ninja,
Is there a history here I don't know about? Not sure what your comment means. These quotes all come from the book - they are not mine.
Doug
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jonah_Lehrer
Thanks, Greg. I only try to steal from the plagiarists who don't get caught, but it looks like I goofed this time.
Doug