Jonah Lehrer: How Creativity Works – Wired, New Yorker, How We Decide Author

The How We Decide Writer Platformed by the New York Times, Wired and the New Yorker

Whenever a book on creativity is released by a New York Times best-selling author (the guy behind How We Decide), who also happens to be a writer for the New Yorker and Wired, I have a strict policy. Buy the book.

(So far this has happened to me once.)

Jonah Lehrer’s new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, starts with a niche story about a bored-out-of-his-mind Bob Dylan, whose life became a bit of a sacrifice to creativity. In it, Dylan’s portrayed as an “underfed angel” lamenting the downsides of pouring one’s life into a creative field. Eventually, the legendary song-writer and anyone reading the book realize together that for any one of us to “reinvent ourselves,” we have to “believe we have nothing left to say”.

This sample is representative of the book to come, which was released just four days ago. It’s cleverly anecdotal, even historical, with bits of niched pop culture commentary and a few diagrams, making the contents itself a smorgasboard of creativity. And Lehrer touches on all the expected stops–collaboration, neurons, Pen and Teller–with a few unexpected twists and turns that might jump start a lagging creative’s mind. Creativity doesn’t rest in a singular idea or methodology, he repeatedly insists, favoring instead a bundled way of looking at thoughts and motivations. And really what you just might need to do, he tells disciplined writers and artists and innovators, is (gasp) step away from your work. And when you get through Lehrer’s insights, there’s a back-of-the-book bonus: his bibliography alone is like inviting a creative junkie to feast.

Jonah Lehrer is fond of saying mankind barely yet understands those “three pounds of meat in our heads”. This is certainly true, but Imagine is a good start.

You can check out Jonah Lehrer’s blog here.