Welcome to our collection of quotes by Jonah Lehrer. We hope you enjoy pondering them and please share widely.
Wikipedia Summary for Jonah Lehrer
Jonah Richard Lehrer (born June 25, 1981) is an American author and blogger. Lehrer studied neuroscience at Columbia University and was a Rhodes Scholar. Thereafter, he built a media career that integrated science and humanities content to address broad aspects of human behaviour. Between 2007 and 2012 Lehrer published three non-fiction books that became best-sellers, and also wrote regularly for The New Yorker and Wired.com.
Starting in 2012, Lehrer was discovered to have routinely recycled his earlier work, plagiarised widely from colleagues, and fabricated or misused quotations and facts. Scrutiny began when freelance journalist Michael Moynihan identified multiple fabrications in Lehrer's third book, Imagine: How Creativity Works (2012), including six quotations attributed to musician Bob Dylan. Imagine and Lehrer's earlier book How We Decide (2009) were recalled after a publisher's internal review found significant problems in that material. He was also fired from The New Yorker and Wired. In 2016, Lehrer published A Book About Love, to negative reviews.
Neuroscience has contributed so much in just a few decades to how we think about human nature and how we know ourselves.
Every creative story is different. And every creative story is the same. There was nothing. Now there is something. It's almost like magic.
We see them most when we are o nnthe outside looking in.
In fact, the only way to remain creative over time -- to not be undone by our expertise -- is to experiment with ignorance, to stare at things we don't fully understand.
We need to be willing to risk embarrassment, ask silly questions, surround ourselves with people who don't know what we're talking about. We need to leave behind the safety of our expertise.
Grit is the stubborn refusal to quit.
By the age of 3, children from wealthier households hear, on average, about 500,000 encouragements and 80,000 discouragements. The ratio is reversed in households on welfare.
The inconsistency of genius is a consistent theme of creativity.
And so we keep on thinking, because the next thought might be the answer.
While human nature largely determines how we hear the notes, it is nurture that lets us hear the music.
The best way to solve a problem? Try explaining it to somebody outside your field.
New ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.
For too long, we've assumed that there is a single template for human nature, which is why we diagnose most deviations as disorders. But the reality is that there are many different kinds of minds. And that's a very good thing.
Distance and difference are the secret tonic of creativity. When we get home, home is still the same. But something in our mind has been changed, and that changes everything.
Harlow would later write, If monkeys have taught us anything, it's that you've got to learn how to love before you learn how to live.
Design is the conscious imposition of meaningful order.
Knowledge can be a subtle curse. When we learn about the world, we also learn all the reasons why the world cannot be changed. We get used to our failures and imperfections. We become numb to the possibilities of something new.
People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be.
Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true.
Creativity is a catchall term for a variety of distinct thought processes.
Cities force us to interact with strangers and with the strange. They pry the mind open. And that is why they are the idea that has unleashed so many of our new ideas.
The imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.
Rejection process is not fun. It's the red pen on the page, the discarded sketch, sometimes is the only way forward.
I want to give people theories, I want to expose them to scientific stories that force them to re-evaluate the way they use these three pounds of meat inside their head.
Every creative story is different. And yet every creative story is the same: There was nothing, now there is something. It's almost like magic.
If you're trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed.
Children can't help but create: they need to put their mind on the page, they want to paint, to sculpt, to write short stories.
What you discover when you look at creativity from the perspective of the brain is that it is universal. We're all creative all of the time, we can't help but be creative.
Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It's a skill.
Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we're rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world.