Jonah Lehrer
Jonah Lehrer
Jonah Lehrer, is an American writer and speaker, once widely sought-after, who had major published works recalled for irregularities in their intellectual content. Lehrer received Columbia University neuroscience training and did graduate humanities coursework, and thereafter built a rapidly successful book, magazine, and new media career that integrated science and humanities content to address broad aspects of human behaviour. Having been contracted to write for the The New Yorker and Wired.com, Lehrer was discovered to have routinely recycled his earlier...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionAuthor
Date of Birth25 June 1981
CountryUnited States of America
Jonah Lehrer quotes about
How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition. We know when we are angry; every emotional state comes with self-awareness attached, so that an individual can try to figure out why he's feeling what he's feeling. If the particular feeling makes no sense—if the amygdala is simply responding to a loss frame, for example—then it can be discounted. The prefrontal cortex can deliberately choose to ignore the emotional brain.
People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.
We travel because we need to, because distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything. Several new science papers suggest that getting away is an essential habit of effective thinking. When we escape from the place we spend most of our time, the mind is suddenly made aware of all those errant ideas we'd previously suppressed. We start thinking about obscure possibilitiebsthat never would have occurred to us if we'd stayed home.
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.
What you discover when you look at creativity from the perspective of the brain is that it is universal. We're all creative all of the time, we can't help but be creative.
To have a style is to be stuck.
Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we're rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world.
Grit is the stubborn refusal to quit.
It's a hard thing to describe. It's just this sense that you got something to say.
I want to give people theories, I want to expose them to scientific stories that force them to re-evaluate the way they use these three pounds of meat inside their head.
I always wanted to be a scientist, I always thought I'd be a scientist, that was the narrative I was carrying around. I worked in a neuroscience lab as an undergraduate and then after, almost five years in total, but I realized I just wasn't good at science. I didn't have the discipline for it.
Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It's a skill.
Children can't help but create: they need to put their mind on the page, they want to paint, to sculpt, to write short stories.
The inconsistency of genius is a consistent theme of creativity.