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
And so we keep on thinking, because the next thought might be the answer.
The answer will only arrive after we stop looking for it.
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.
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.
Cities force us to interact with strangers and with the strange. They pry the mind open. And that is why they are the idea that has unleashed so many of our new ideas.
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 vocational approach at NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) helps build grit in students. It teaches them how to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal, to sacrifice for the sake of a passion. The teachers demand hard work from their kids because they know, from personal experience, that creative success requires nothing less.
The best way to solve a problem? Try explaining it to somebody outside your field.
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.