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
Even when alternative views are clearly wrong, being exposed to them still expands our creative potential. In a way, the power of dissent is the power of surprise. After hearing someone shout out an errant answer, we work to understand it, which causes us to reassess our initial assumptions and try out new perspectives. “Authentic dissent can be difficult, but it's always invigorating,” [Charlan] Nemeth [a professor of psychology at the University of California at Berkeley] says. “It wakes us right up.
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.
Every creative story is different. And yet every creative story is the same: There was nothing, now there is something. It's almost like magic.
If you're trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed.
You know more than you know.
The imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.
The one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know.
Creativity shouldn't be seen as something otherworldly. It shouldn't be thought of as a process reserved for artists and inventors and other 'creative types.' The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code. At any given moment, the brain is automatically forming new associations, continually connecting an everyday x to an unexpected y.
By the age of 3, children from wealthier households hear, on average, about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. The ratio is reversed in households on welfare.
So let's not pretend that travel is always fun. We don't spend 10 hours lost in the Louvre because we like it, and the view from the top of Machu Picchu probably doesn't make up for the hassle of lost luggage. (More often than not, I need a holiday after my holiday.) 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.
The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted.
Design is the conscious imposition of meaningful order.
Every creative story is different. And every creative story is the same. There was nothing. Now there is something. It's almost like magic.
Creativity is a catchall term for a variety of distinct thought processes.