Jonah Lehrer delves into creativity, the neuroscience, individual aspects, and social aspects of creativity. He looks at its source and at society’s reaction to creativity. Throughout the book, he inserts lots of anecdotes to make various points. Unfortunately, it often feels like the stories are selected a bit too much to make his points, and that he tells the stories too much using his own narrative leading the reader to conclusions he wants you to reach.
The first part of the book was very interesting, discussing recent learnings from neuroscience. He throws in some interesting anecdotes about strong creative moments building a case for how little we really understand creativity and how it appears unexpectedly. He then discusses how we can help it along and enhance it.
The middle of the book was the part I had the most difficulty with. He builds on the social aspects of creativity and imagination, concluding that cities are an important breeding ground for creativity. I don’t have an issue with that as much as how he gets there, using weak arguments and trying to build a case for cause and affect relationships where there is really only a case for weakly-related events. One instance of that is showing a relationship between walking speed and creativity. Then concludes that a high walking speed increases inter-personal interactions, leading to the exchange of ideas and thus spawning creative moments.
The book does end more strongly, looking at how we treat creative moments, and how we (don’t) nurture them in children. He does make a good case that our education system as it is implemented discourages children from being creative, we make them to be alike and assume they all learn in the same manners. It isn’t better as adults, where work environments can also discourage creative moments.
He does make several good points and has some interesting information. But his repeated jumping to conclusions and is poor arguments make me disappointed in the book that could have been so much more.