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
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.
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.
It is ironic but true: the one reality science cannot reduce is the only reality we will ever know. This is why we need art. By expressing our actual experience, the artist reminds us that our science is incomplete, that no map of matter will ever explain the immateriality of our consciousness.
Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that not everything is a mystery. Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural
When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art.
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.