The Secrets of Creativity?

The best thing about bad art is that it makes fodder for great reviews. Take the opening line of Mina Strohminger’s review of Colin McGee’s “The Meaning of Disgust”: “In disgust research,” she writes in The Journal of Aesthetics and Critical Art, “there is shit, and then there is bullshit.”

Guess which category she thinks McGee’s book falls under?

The biggest problem with Jonah Lehrer’s new book Imagine, currently residing on The New York Times bestseller list, is that it is too good to generate reviews as colorful as Strohminger’s. Nevertheless, it did lead Christopher Chabris to conclude in the Times that Lehrer’s “stories too often feature clichéd piffle (a chance interaction, he says, can “change the way we think about everything”) and end with treacly flourishes (“This is what we sound like when nothing is holding us back”).”

Chabris makes some very good points in his review, and the back and forth he has been having, since then, with Lehrer is very interesting. (See http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/05/on-bad-reviews/ and http://www.wjh.harvard.edu/~cfc/ChabrisReplyToLehrer.pdf )

But I don’t view Lehrer’s book nearly as critically as Chabris. I see his book, instead, as a thoroughly entertaining, often thought provoking, book, one that a non-expert on the topic of creativity—in other words, someone like me—will learn a great deal from. That said, the merits of Lehrer’s book are hard to determine unless we come to it with appropriate expectations. Popular science writing, if it hopes to be popular, almost never paints as nuanced a picture of the topic as experts want to see.

More on some of these ideas in a minute. But first, some disclosure. I have had the pleasure of talking with Lehrer a couple of times, and he is a really nice guy. So that biases me towards liking the book. On the other hand, I was also biased against the book because of professional envy. As an author myself, but one who hasn’t (yet!) made it on to The New York Times bestseller list, I almost always view successful science writers with an unhealthy dose of jealousy. Another shot against my objectivity.

What I am saying is—I began Lehrer’s book with mixed feelings. It didn’t help that one of his blurbs, from Malcolm Gladwell (there it is again—insane jealousy!) describes Lehrer as knowing “more about science than a lot of scientists.” Really? No doubt he reads a lot of scientific articles. But has he designed experiments, I asked myself? Developed scientific theories? Wrestled with messy data? Seen any of his findings fail to replicate?

Lehrer is a brilliant guy who knows a lot about science and who can’t be held responsible for the people quoted on his book cover. But having read that blurb, I must admit that I began the book with a skeptical eye.

Then in the first chapter, I came across the kind of sentence that triggers my “he’s clueless” antennae. Lehrer tells a colorful tale about Bob Dylan (are there other kinds of Dylan tales?) overcoming a creative drought en route to penning “Like a Rolling Stone.” Lehrer steps back from Dylan’s story to generalize: “Every creative journey begins with a problem,” he writes. “The act of being stumped…is an essential part of the creative process.”

I found my mind wandering back to one of my first research studies. I was a research fellow at the University of Pittsburgh, on my way to the general internal medicine journal club up on the top floor of the hospital. Dressed in jeans and a casual shirt, because I wasn’t seeing patients that day, I stepped onto the hospital elevator, a backpack slung over my right shoulder. Joining me in the elevator were several physicians, who had come from the bedside of one of their patients. Seemingly oblivious to my presence, they discussed their patient’s case in exquisite detail, never stopping to think whether their backpack toting co-passenger ought to be privy to such private matters.

Bam—a creative insight! I decided on the spot to conduct a study, riding up and down hospital elevators to see how often healthcare professionals conducted inappropriate conversations in this public space. I recruited a group of students to ride up and down in hospital elevators. And in a matter of a couple months, I had my data. I published the study in a leading medical journal and it received international attention. For months after that time I would run into medical colleagues at conferences, and receive an almost universal reaction to my study: “Why didn’t I think of that?,” they would ask me. It took one simple insight—“we should listen to these conversations”—and the study practically conducted itself.

Which brings me back to Lehrer’s idea, that “the act of being stumped…is an essential part of the creative process.” In the case of this elevator study, I was never stumped. I never had to spend days or even hours trying to figure out how to study patient confidentiality in a new way. I just got mad at an inappropriate elevator conversation, and decided to find out how often such behavior occurs. And yet the number one comment I received from my colleagues is: “What a stroke of creativity!”

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To Lehrer’s credit, he recognizes that creativity is not a matter of following any kind of simple recipe. One of the pleasures of his book, in fact, is all the contradictory research on imagination, research Lehrer describes in elegant detail, without hiding its complexity.

Being in a good mood, for instance, promotes creativity by opening people up to a wider range of ideas. Being melancholic is good too, because it focuses the mind in ways that can turn rough edged ideas into polished ones.

Lehrer does not delve into these contradictions in deep academic ways. He doesn’t provide readers with a boring typology of creativity here. He doesn’t come up with some unifying theory either, showing which kinds of personality traits or environmental contexts promote which kinds of creative enterprises. Instead, he tells a host of wonderful stories, each of which illuminates some corner of research relevant to this important topic. And he recognizes that to foster creativity, we need to prime lots of different pumps.

Any reader who cares to improve her own creativity, any leader who hopes to increase the productivity of her followers, will find something useful in this book. And for those who do not feel they need any help with their own creative enterprises, you will still enjoy the wide range of tales woven through Lehrer’s excellent tome.

Inevitably, Lehrer simplifies. Or he follow up a story with a wonderful, writerly summary which goes too far, and which contradicts another summary somewhere else in the book. But what do you expect? Creativity is messy. What increases one person’s creativity won’t improve another’s. (A bike ride works for me, for example, but that doesn’t mean the NIH should pay for bicycles in its research grants.) If Lehrer had more carefully parsed the reasons both happiness and sadness improve creativity, if he’d painted a more rigorous theoretical picture of what is happening, he might have written a more academically successful book. But few of us non-experts would have read it.

Freakonomics is not a rigorous economic treatise, but it has spurred many people to dig more deeply into that discipline. It has probably done more to draw talent into the field than any other book written in the last twenty years. Perhaps Lehrer’s Imagine will spur on some creative new research on the topic of creativity. More likely, it will cause companies—and other groups who depend on creativity—to adopt some of the measures Lehrer describes in the book.

Meanwhile, Lehrer is making it harder and harder for me to dislike him. Maybe the melancholy I feel reflecting upon his newest success will spur me on to new creative insights.