Jonah Lehrer is a contributor to The New Yorker and various magazines which explore science and popular psychology. His third book has just been published in 2012. Entitled “Imagine: how creativity works,” it is written in a style that is very similar to that of Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell: jumping between brain researchers and anecdotes involving Bob Dylan and William Shakespeare in an effort to sum up his chosen topic.
Lehrer attempts here to explain the way creativity works in human lives. This is a challenging topic. Obviously, creativity is vital in many areas: science, literature, the world of business, painting, and music, just to name a few. Lehrer portrays creativity as a mysterious thing. At times, the more we pursue it, the more it seems to run away. He alludes to the fact that great acts of creativity often occur in a relaxed mind that has been previously deeply focused on a problem. In several of the ‘threads’ that he weaves into this book, relaxation and play are vital sources of creativity. Companies such as 3m and Google have attempted to harness this insight, with some success. The ancient Greek scientist Archimedes apparently did reach an understanding of how to measure the volume of an irregular object while taking a bath, for example. Today, the big insight is more likely to happen to someone taking a shower in the morning, at a relaxed time when the world of dreams is yielding to wakefulness.
But there is also some science in Lehrer’s presentation. He maps out the areas of the human brain that are involved in the creative process, and explains how they can be triggered into action. He also explains that what we call “creativity” is not just one process, but several. There is the Big Jump form of creativity, in which the thinker is able to “shift gears” to apply an idea in a new way to reach an important new discovery. But creativity can also be a long slow grind of improving something incrementally. This sort of activity can be carried out simply through focus and hard work- and often collaboration between several individuals can help it along.
Finally, when we are trying to set up the ideal nursery for creativity, Lehrer mentions the statistical data that assert the extraordinary creativity that arose in Elizabethan London and Periclean Athens- far more creativity than would be expected from the small populations of those two towns. Culture and history therefore do have a certain impact on creativity. How do we imitate the impact of the golden age of Shakespeare? Well, we probably can’t, unfortunately.
After giving up much to think about, Lehrer ends up admitting that creativity is not an exact science, not the sort of thing that we can all plug into to become instant Shakespeares or Einsteins. His multitudes of examples sometimes border on being confusing and contradictory; and he might have benefited by citing more brain research at times. At one point, he explains that the poet W.H. Auden used the drug Benzedrine while revising his poems to a level of brilliance. Creativity through drug addiction is a bad idea, and Lehrer could have done more to explain why! But in the end, it is an important topic, and Lehrer adds to our body of knowledge and opinion. At only around 250 pages, it is worth reading as an introduction, and we are left wanting a deeper explanation.
Unfortunately, however, the publication of this book was followed by Lehrer’s dismissal from the New Yorker magazine in July 2012. His employer had apparently reached the conclusion that Lehrer had invented Bob Dylan quotations which he used in “Imagine.” This revelation resulted in the publisher halting any further publication of the book. It also unfortunately calls into question the value of the remaining sections of the book, because the reader would have to ask himself, how can I be sure how much of this book is invented? For these reasons, best advice is to avoid this book unless you are interested in the topic of journalistic ethics.
