Learn more and here for Roger’s excellent website.

 From the bestselling author of How We Decide comes a sparkling and revelatory look at the new science of creativity. Shattering the myth of muses, higher powers, even creative “types,” Jonah Lehrer demonstrates that creativity is not a single “gift” possessed by the lucky few. It’s a variety of distinct thought processes that we can all learn to use more effectively. Lehrer reveals the importance of embracing the rut, thinking like a child, and daydreaming productively, then he takes us out of our own heads to show how we can make our neighborhoods more vibrant, our companies more productive, and our schools more effective. We’ll learn about Bob Dylan’s writing habits and the drug addiction of poets. We’ll meet a bartender who thinks like a chemist, and an autistic surfer who invented an entirely new surfing move. We’ll see why Elizabethan England experienced a creative explosion, and how Pixar designed its office space to get the most out of its talent. Collapsing the layers separating the neuron from the finished symphony, Imagine reveals the deep inventiveness of the human mind, and its essential role in our increasingly complex world. from Johah Lehrer’s website.

From Kirkus Reviews, 04/15/96:

A mostly fascinating look at what makes creative people who they are, gleaned largely from interviews with 91 individuals from a wide variety of fields. Despite the subtitle, social psychologist Csikszentmihalyi, who invented the idea of “flow” and authored a book with that title, writes relatively little about the enjoyable, ego-and time- transcending absorption in a task that is conducive to creativity and high achievement. Rather, he focuses on the interplay creative person, and the “domain” (sociologese for “field”), including the receptivity of experts to new ideas and inventions. He quotes extensively–too much so–from the subjects he and his research team interviewed, but there are some gems among these passages, such as writer Madeleine L’Engle’s observation that to produce good literature, “your intuition and your intellect should be working together . . . making love.” Csikszentmihalyi’s weakest section consists of detailing ten personality polarities that supposedly distinguish creative individuals, but that are also applicable to “balanced” or “fulfilled” individuals. His best sections consist of longer profiles of individuals as varied as poet Anthony Hecht, ecologist Barry Commoner, and astronomer Vera Rubin. Also valuable is a concluding prescriptive section with some helpful advice to the average person on how to make his or her thinking and way of living more creative, particularly a passage on how to rethink and use a disappointing experiences, such as being passed over for a promotion. Unfortunately, redundancies make the work too long by at least a third, and some meaningless or fatuous generalizations alsomar the presentation (e.g., “Recent studies suggest that the amount of dalliance, marital infidelity and sexual experimentation [among creative people studied] is much less than earlier estimates had suggested”). Still, the rich anecdotal material Csikszentmihalyi has mined and analyzed make this an important study of a vital topic. ($40,000 ad/promo) — Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Elizabeth Gilbert muses on the impossible things we expect from artists and geniuses — and shares the radical idea that, instead of the rare person “being” a genius, all of us “have” a genius. It’s a funny, personal and surprisingly moving talk.

Novelist Amy Tan digs deep into the creative process, looking for hints of how hers evolved.

How do creative people come up with great ideas? Organizational psychologist Adam Grant studies “originals”: thinkers who dream up new ideas and take action to put them into the world. In this talk, learn three unexpected habits of originals — including embracing failure. “The greatest originals are the ones who fail the most, because they’re the ones who try the most,” Grant says. “You need a lot of bad ideas in order to get a few good ones.”

 Sir Ken Robinson makes an entertaining and profoundly moving case for creating an education system that nurtures (rather than undermines) creativity.

• The Moment with Brian Koppelman The Moment is a fascinating podcast featuring interviews with all kinds of creatives from very different industries, discussing the moment that sparked their career. It’s insightful, interesting, and great proof that you never know what moment will change your life.
• The 99% Invisible podcast is about things you don’t think about—the unseen process of design and architecture that goes into the stuff we interact with every day. From the inflatable men at used car dealerships, to the classic design of mailboxes with red flags, 99% Invisible covers a huge range of subjects.

Your Creativity

• Guided Meditation for Creativity on youtube
• “awaken your creativity” from Chopra
• Boost your creativity with MindValley
• Check out several guided meditations from Insight Timer
• 10 Guided Meditations to Boost Creativity

More on meditation:

• How to Apply Mindfulness to the Creative Process

• Using Mindfulness to Jumpstart Creativity at Work

• Does Meditation Boost Creativity?

• HBR: Can 10 Minutes of Meditation Make You More Creative?

Quotations on creativity

Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks. Yo-Yo Ma