Journalist Jonah Lehrer on "How Creativity Works"
Mar 30, 2012Maria Popova recently posted this teaser video for Jonah Lehrer's new book, "Imagine: How Creativity Works,"on her site Brain Pickings. Lehrer explores how creativity "works" by debunking the common misconception that all great ideas are preceded by the elusive a-ha! moment, the moment the proverbial lightbulb goes off. Instead, he insists that frustration is part of the process. Consider us 100% on board.
Lehrer kicks off the book with this intro:
"The sheer secrecy of creativity — the difficulty in understanding how it happens, even when it happens to us — means that we often associate breakthroughs with an external force. In fact, until the Enlightenment, the imagination was entirely synonymous with higher powers: being creative meant channeling the muses, giving voice to the ingenious gods. (Inspiration, after all, literally means ‘breathed upon.’) Because people couldn’t understand creativity, they assumed that their best ideas came from somewhere else. The imagination was outsourced.”
In relation (we believe), Nietzsche may have put it best in his 1878 book, "Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits:"
"Artists have a vested interest in our believing in the flash of revelation, the so-called inspiration… shining down from heavens as a ray of grace. In reality, the imagination of the good artist or thinker produces continuously good, mediocre or bad things, but his judgment, trained and sharpened to a fine point, rejects, selects, connects… All great artists and thinkers are great workers, indefatigable not only in inventing, but also in rejecting, sifting, transforming, ordering.”
So don't give up if your "seething cauldron of ideas," as Lehrer puts it, seems unintelligible or fruitless. It's all part of the process, folks.
-- Perrin Drumm
