Imagine: How Creativity Works

Lehrer Jonah

ISBN 10: 0670064556 / ISBN 13: 9780670064557

Published by Allen Lane, 2012

About this Item

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 best-selling 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, daydreaming productively, and adopting an outsider's perspective (travel helps). He unveils the optimal mix of old and new partners in any creative collaboration and explains why criticism is essential to the process. Then he zooms out to show how we can make our neighborhoods more vibrant, our companies more productive, and our schools more effective. You'll learn about Bob Dylan's writing habits and the drug addictions of poets. You'll meet a Manhattan bartender who thinks like a chemist, and an autistic surfer who invented an entirely new surfing move. You'll see why Elizabethan England experienced a creative explosion, and how Pixar's office space is designed to spark the next big leap in animation. 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.

Seller Inventory # CIN0670064556VG

Bibliographic Details

• Title: Imagine: How Creativity Works
• Publisher: Allen Lane
• Publication Date: 2012
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0670064556
• ISBN 13: 9780670064557
• Binding: Hardback
• Condition: Very Good

About this title

Synopsis

How does one measure the imagination? Why are some cities such centres of innovation? Is the internet making us more or less imaginative? What kinds of classroom techniques increase the creativity of children? Does brainstorming work? Even the color of paint on the wall, or the location of a restroom, can have a dramatic impact on creativity.

For too long, we’ve pretended that creativity is an impenetrable biological gift. As a result, we’ve clung to a series of myths about what creativity is and where it comes from. These myths aren’t just misleading—they also interfere with the imagination. That’s why, in addition to elegant experiments and important scientific studies, Imagine is filled with real life examples: Bob Dylan’s writing method and the drug habits of poets, an autistic surfer who invented a new surfing move, a website that solves seemingly impossible problems, and the offices of Pixar. Creativity shouldn’t seem like a process reserved for artists or inventors or other “creative types.” The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse hard-wired into its most essential programming code. This book is about how that happens. It is the story of how we imagine.

About the Author

Jonah Lehrer is the author of How We Decide and Proust was a Neuroscientist . He is also a contributing editor at Wired , where he writes a blog called The Frontal Cortex, at Scientific American Mind and National Public Radio’s RadioLab. He has written for The New Yorker , Nature , Seed, The Washington Post and The Boston Globe . He lives in New York City .