by Jonah Lehrer
These are the meta-ideas that have worked before, unleashing the talent of past playwrights and inventors. They are the top-down policies that have set free our bottom-up creativity. But this list is not complete, not even close. As Romer notes, “We do not know what the next major idea about how to support ideas will be.” And this is why it’s so important to keep searching for the effective meta-ideas of the future, for the next institution or attitude or law that will help us become more creative. We need to innovate innovation.
Because here is the disquieting truth: Our creative problems keep on getting more difficult. Unless we choose the right policies and reforms, unless we create more NOCCAs and fix the patent system, unless we invest in urban density, unless we encourage young inventors with the same fervor that we encourage young football stars, we’ll never be able to find the solutions that we so desperately need. It’s time to create the kind of culture that won’t hold us back.
The virtue of studying ages of excess genius is that they give us a way to measure ourselves. We can learn from the creative secrets of the past, from those outlier societies that produced Shakespeare and Plato and Michelangelo. And then we should look in the mirror. What kind of culture have we created? Is it a world full of ideas that can be connected? Are we willing to invest in risk takers? Do our schools produce students ready to create? Can the son of a glover grow up to write plays for the queen? We have to make it easy to become a genius.
CODA
In the summer of 1981, Penn and Teller were struggling magicians plying their trade on the Renaissance Faire circuit, performing a set of middling tricks for little kids. Their costumes were embarrassing, getups of black tights, purple velour capes, fake leather vests, and belts made of rope. They were frustrated and fed up, tired of life on the road. “I was definitely on the verge of giving up the dream of becoming a magician,” Teller says. “I was ready to go back home and become a high-school Latin teacher.” But then, just as despair began to overtake the magicians, a breakthrough arrived in a highway diner. While waiting for his food to arrive, Teller wanted to practice his version of cups and balls, a classic sleight-of-hand trick first performed by conjurers in ancient Rome. The magician begins by placing three small balls underneath three cups. Then the magician engages in a series of vanishes and transpositions, making the balls repeatedly appear and disappear. Just when the spectator assumes he knows where the ball is — it’s inside the cup! — the ball is revealed to be elsewhere. “This trick is performed all over the world,” Penn says. “If you see a guy hustling on the street, he’s probably doing cups and balls.”
But Teller was in a diner — he wasn’t carrying his bag of magic supplies. And so he used what he had: rolled-up napkins for the balls, and clear plastic water glasses as cups. The epiphany arrived halfway through the trick. Although it was now possible to follow the crumpled napkins from cup to cup, Teller realized that the illusion persisted. “The eye could see the moves, but the mind could not comprehend them,” he says. “Giving the trick away gave nothing away, since people still couldn’t really grasp it.” Because watchers were literally incapable of perceiving the sleight-of-hand — Teller’s fingers just moved too fast — it didn’t matter if the glasses were see-through and the napkins were visible.
Penn and Teller worked this version of cups and balls into their traveling show. It was a huge hit. Before long, they were performing with clear plastic glasses on Letterman and playing to sold-out crowds in New York City. In the decades since, Penn and Teller have become two of the most successful magicians in the world — they now have their own theater in Vegas and a secret warehouse off the Strip where they develop new tricks. (“I no longer have to find my ideas in diners,” Teller says.) Nevertheless, this popularity hasn’t diminished their avant-garde spirit: Penn and Teller are still determined to deconstruct their own magic.
In their current show, for instance, Penn frequently shouts out the secret while Teller is performing the illusion: “This is just invisible string!” he might say, or “It’s only a mirror!” According to the magicians, their “skeptical shtick” can be traced back to that diner when Teller was forced to make magic with the only things around. “In many respects, that simple idea of clear glasses has come to represent what we’re trying to do,” Teller says. “The reason I will always love our version [of cups and balls] is that, even when you give away the trick — you hide nothing — the magic is still there. In fact, the illusion becomes even more meaningful, because you realize that it’s all in your head. There is nothing special about these glasses and napkins. The magic is coming from your mind.”
Creativity is like that magic trick. For the first time, we can see the source of imagination, that massive network of electrical cells that lets us constantly form new connections between old ideas. However, this new knowledge only makes the act itself more astonishing. The moment of insight might emanate from an obscure circuit in the right hemisphere, but that doesn’t diminish the thrill of having a new idea in the shower. Just because we can track the flux of neurotransmitters, or measure the correlation between walking speed and the production of patents, or quantify the effect of the social network, that doesn’t take away from the sheer wonder of the process. There will always be something slightly miraculous about the imagination.
Nevertheless, this sense of magic shouldn’t prevent us from trying to become more creative. Thanks to modern science, we’ve been blessed with an unprecedented creative advantage, a meta-idea that we can all apply at the individual level. For the first time in human history, it’s possible to learn how the imagination actually works. Instead of relying on myth and superstition, we can think about dopamine and dissent, the right hemisphere and social networks. This self-knowledge is extremely useful knowledge; because we’ve begun to identify the catalysts behind our creativity, we can make sure that we’re thinking in the right way at the right time, that we’re fully utilizing this astonishing tool inside the head. (There is no more important meta-idea that knowing where every idea comes from.) If we want to increase our creative powers, then we have to put this research to work in our own lives. We can imagine more than we know.
The process begins with the brain, that fleshy source of possibility. Although people have long assumed that the imagination is a single thing, it’s actually a talent that takes multiple forms.
Sometimes we need to relax in the shower and sometimes we need to chug caffeine. Sometimes we need to let ourselves go, and sometimes we need to escape from what we know. There is a time for every kind of thinking.
But the brain is only the beginning. We now know creativity is also an emergent property of people coming together. When collaborating with others, we should seek out the sweet spot of Q, just like the artists behind West Side Story. Brainstorming might feel nice, but constructive criticism is always better; every company needs the equivalent of the Pixar bathroom, a space that forces employees to interact as if they were in a dense city.
And then we need to get our meta-ideas right so that we don’t inhibit our collective imagination. We should aspire to excessive genius.
But we must also be honest: the creative process will never be easy, no matter how much we know about neurons and cities and Shakespeare. Our inventions will always be shadowed by uncertainty and contingency, by the sheer serendipity of brain cells making new connections. The science of the imagination doesn’t fit neatly on a PowerPoint slide, and it can’t be summarized in a subtitle. (If creativity were that easy, Picasso wouldn’t be so famous.) Despite all the clever studies and rigorous experiments, our most essential mental talent remains the most mysterious.
The mystery is this: although the imagination is inspired by the everyday world — by its flaws and beauties — we are able to see beyond our sources, to imagine things that exist only in the mind. We notice an incompleteness and we can complete it; the cracks in things become a source of light. And so the mop gets turned into the Swiffer, and Tin Pan Alley gives rise to
Bob Dylan, and a hackneyed tragedy becomes Hamlet. Every creative story is different. And every creative story is the same. There was nothing.
Now there is something. It’s almost like magic.
NOTES
Notes
Introduction
xii “I think P and G”: Swiffer team, interview with the author, Continuum headquarters, Newton, Massachusetts, April 5, 2009; Harry West, follow-up phone interview with author, January 21, 2010.
1. Bob Dylan’s Brain
3 Bob Dylan looks: For a behind-the-scenes look at Dylan’s 1965 British tour, D. A. Pennebaker’s documentary Don’t Look Back remains without parallel. Other valuable secondary sources on the writing of “Like a Rolling Stone” include Greil Marcus’s Like a Rolling Stone: Bob Dylan at the Crossroads (New York: Public Affairs, 2005); The Bob Dylan Encyclope-dia, by Michael Gray (New York: Continuum, 2008); and No Direction Home, by Robert Shelton (New York: Ballantine Books, 1987).
5 “I realized I”: Nat Hentoff, “Interview with Bob Dylan,” Playboy, February 1966.
6 “The doctors would”: Mark Beeman, personal interviews with the author, Northwestern University, April 10 to 12, 2008.
6 the right hemisphere: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/medicine/laure ates/1981/sperry-lecture.html.
9 Schooler presented: Jonathan Schooler, Stellan Ohlsson, and Kevin Brooks, “Thoughts Beyond Words: When Language Overshadows Insight,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 122 (1993): 166–83.
10 “One of the”: Jonathan Schooler, telephone interview with the author, April 6, 2008.
14 By combining both: John Kounios et al., “The Prepared Mind: Neural Activity Prior to Problem Presentation Predicts Solution by Sudden Insight,” Psychological Science 17 (2006): 882–980; Mark Jung-Beeman et al., “Neural Activity Observed in People Solving Verbal Problems with Insight,” Public Library of Science — Biology 2 (2004): 500–10.
17 “I found myself ”: Bob Dylan, radio interview with Martin Bronstein, Canadian Broadcasting Company, February 20, 1966.
22 “Last spring, I guess”: Hentoff, “Interview.”
2. Alpha Waves (Condition Blue)
26 “We’re an unusual”: Larry Wendling, personal interview with the author, 3M headquarters, February 2, 2009.
28 Joydeep Bhattacharya, a psychologist: Simone Sandküler and Joydeep Bhattacharya, “Deconstructing Insight: EEG Correlates of Insightful Problem Solving,” PLoS ONE 3; http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001459.
30 German researchers have found: Annette Bolte, Thomas Goschke, and Julius Kuhl, “Emotion and Intuition: Effects of Positive and Negative Mood on Implicit Judgments of Semantic Coherence,” Psychological Science 14 (2003): 416–22.
32 Consider an experiment: Carlo Reverberi et al., “Better Without (Lateral) Frontal Cortex? Insight Problems Solved by Frontal Patients,” Brain 128 (2005): 2882–90.
33 Their attention defi cit: Holly White and Priti Shah, “Creative Style and Achievement in Adults with Attention-Defi cit/Hyperactivity Disorder,” Personality and Individual Differences 50 (2011): 673–77.
36 Mark Turner, a cognitive: Mark Turner, editor, The Artful Mind: Cognitive Science and the Riddle of Human Creativity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 107–10.
37 “All this creative”: David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1777; reprint Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 11.
41 According to Mary Gick: Mary Gick and Keith Holyoak, “Analogical Problem Solving,” Cognitive Psychology 12 (1980): 306–55.
41 The importance of: Shelley Carson, Jordan Peterson, and Daniel Hig-gins, “Decreased Latent Inhibition Is Associated with Increased Creative Achievement in High-Functioning Individuals,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 85 (2003): 499–506.
42 “We told the”: Marcus Raichle, telephone interview with the author, May 18, 2009.
44 “Certainly she was”: Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927; reprint Boston: Mariner Books, 2005), 163.
46 “What these tests”: Jonathan Smallwood, Jonathan Schooler, and Todd Handy, “Going AWOL in the Brain: Mind Wandering Reduces Cortical Analysis of External Events,” Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience 20 (2008): 458–69.
47 This helps explain: Michael Sayette, Erik Reichle, and Jonathan Schooler,
“Lost in the Sauce: The Effects of Alcohol on Mind Wandering?,” Psychological Science 20 (2009): 747–52.
49 Look at this: Ravi Mehta and Rui Zhu, “Blue or Red? Exploring the Effect of Color on Cognitive Task Performances,” Science 323 (2009): 1226–29.
3. The Unconcealing
51 And so, before: Stan Smith, editor, The Cambridge Companion to W. H. Auden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 22–25; Richard Davenport-Hines, Auden (New York: Pantheon, 1996), 185–87.
63 “There were machines”: Earl Miller, interview with the author, MIT, April 2, 2008.
66 “I was just”: Milton Glaser, telephone interviews with the author, March 20, 2009, and March 21, 2009.
71 The only way: For a lucid summary of Heidegger’s thinking on unconcealment, see Mark Wrathall, Heidegger and Unconcealment: Truth, Language, and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
74 Joe Forgas, a social: Joseph Forgas, “When Sad Is Better Than Happy: Negative Affect Can Improve the Quality and Effectiveness of Persuasive Messages and Social Infl uence Strategies,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 43 (2007): 513–28.
75 In one of: Modupe Akinola and Wendy Mendes, “The Dark Side of Creativity: Biological Vulnerability and Negative Emotions Lead to Greater Artistic Creativity,” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 34 (2008): 1677–86.
76 According to her data: Nancy Andreasen, “Creativity and Mental Illness: Prevalence Rates in Writers and Their First-Degree Relatives,” American Journal of Psychiatry 144 (1987): 1288–92.
77 “Successful writers are”: Nancy Andreasen, telephone interview with author, December 10, 2009.
78 More recently, the: Hagop Akiskal and Kareen Akiskal, “In Search of Aristotle: Temperament, Human Nature, Melancholia, Creativity and Eminence,” Journal of Affective Disorders 100 (2007): 1–6.
80 This was fi rst: Janet Metcalfe, “Feeling of Knowing in Memory and Problem Solving,” Journal of Experimental Psychology 12 (1986): 288–94; Janet Metcalfe and David Wiebe, “Intuition in Insight and Noninsight Problem Solving,” Memory and Cognition 15 (1987): 238–46.
4. The Letting Go
82 “There’s always that”: Bruce Adolphe, interview with the author, American Museum of Natural History, New York City, May 3, 2009.
84 “I was nineteen”: David Blum, “A Process Larger Than Oneself,” New Yorker, May 1, 1989.
85 “If you are”: Yo-Yo Ma, telephone interview with the author, January 10, 2011.
87 Charles Limb, a neuroscientist: Charles Limb and Allen Braun, “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance,” PLoS ONE 3 (2008); e1679.doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0001679.
90 That was the: Aaron Berkowitz and Daniel Ansari, “Generation of Novel Motor Sequences: The Neural Correlates of Musical Improvisation,” Neu-roimage 41 (2008): 535–43.
93 “You have no idea”: Mitch Varnes, interview with the author, Maui, May 16, 2009.
94 In one study: J. Craig and Simon Baron-Cohen, “Creativity and Imagination in Autism and Asperger Syndrome,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 29 (1999): 319–26.
95 “I don’t know”: Clay Marzo, interviews with the author, Maui, May 16–19, 2009.
99 “The hardest part”: Joshua Funk, interviews with the author, Hollywood, March 3–4, 2010.
104 Bruce Miller is: Bruce L. Miller, “Emergence of Artistic Talent in Frontotemporal Dementia,” Neurology 51 (1998): 978–82.
105 Take a 2004 paper: Ullrich Wagner and Jan Born, “Sleep Inspires Insight,” Nature 427 (2004): 352–55.
105 Or consider a: Denise Cai et al., “REM, Not Incubation, Improves Creativity by P
riming Associative Networks,” PNAS 106 (2009): 10130–34.
107 Allan Snyder, a neuroscientist: Allan Snyder, “Savant-Like Skills Exposed in Normal People by Suppressing the Left Fronto-Temporal Lobe,” Journal of Integrative Neuroscience 2 (2003): 149–58.
107 According to Snyder: Allan Snyder, “Explaining and Inducing Savant Skills: Privileged Access to Lower Level, Less Processed Information,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 364 (2009): 1399–1405.
108 It’s at this: E. Paul Torrance, “A Longitudinal Examination of the Fourth Grade Slump in Creativity,” Gifted Child Quarterly 12 (1968): 195–99.
108 Take this clever: Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson, “Child’s Play: Facilitating the Originality of Creative Output by a Priming Manipulation,” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 4 (2010): 57–65.
5. The Outsider
110 “It was a”: Don Lee, interview with the author, Culver City, November 28, 2009, and December 14, 2009.
116 “After spending years”: Alpheus Bingham, telephone interview with the author, December 12, 2009.
118 According to Lakhani’s: Karim Lakhani, “The Value of Openness in Scientifi c Problem Solving,” Technology and Operations Management; http://www.hbs.edu/research/pdf/07-050.pdf.
120 “It was really”: Jeff Howe, “The Rise of Crowdsourcing,” Wired (June 2006): 81–89.
121 Dean Simonton, a psychologist: Dean Keith Simonton, Origins of Genius: Darwinian Perspectives on Creativity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999).
122 “start to repeat”: Dean Simonton, telephone interview with the author, February 18, 2010.
125 Look, for instance: Lile Jia, Edward Hirt, and Samuel Karpen, “Lessons from a Faraway Land: The Effect of Spatial Distance on Creative Cognition,” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 45 (2009): 1127–31.
126 In a 2009 study: William Maddux and Adam Galinsky, “Cultural Borders and Mental Barriers: The Relationship Between Living Abroad and Creativity,” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 96 (2009): 1047–61.
