A Mental Spring Cleaning
Who wouldn’t want to be a scientist or an artist? Long hours spent toiling in obscurity or in the company of fellow social misfits inclined to wear their sweaters inside out and backward and get into fistfights? (O.K., I’m not sure about the scientists, but it’s true for artists.) Judging from the surge in books urging us to engage our imaginations artistically and intellectually, you all want to.
But perhaps you’re feeling stymied because all of your ideas seem played out? Well, don’t despair. AsAustin Kleon explains in his manifestoSteal Like an Artist (Workman), all new ideas are grown from the seeds of the old. His advice: Be a shameless, relentless magpie, and scavenge images and concepts from the world around you. Develop your own vision by looking through the eyes of your creative heroes. Read. Oh, and don’t quit your day job.
InImagine (Houghton Mifflin),Jonah Lehrer explores the new science of creativity, demystifying the notion that a good imagination is a “gift” rather than a thought process that can be learned. Lehrer explains how centralizing your company’s loo ups creativity—employees informally collaborate en route—while official brainstorming sessions dampen it, and how the best way to power through a creative block is, surprisingly, to disengage.
The ted-heads among you know all aboutJohn Brockman’s Edge.org, an “online salon” where brainiacs rap about the questions that keep them up at night. In 2011, Brockman posed the following query to 151 of the brightest minds in the known universe: “What scientific concept will improve everybody’s cognitive tool kit?” He compiled the results inThis Will Make You Smarter (Harper Perennial), a provocative, wiz bang collection of essays by experts in fields as wide ranging as neuroscience and economics, philosophy and biological anthropology, addressing such topics as collective intelligence and the paradox of daydreaming.
Of great interest to me is Nobel Prize–winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s essay on the “focusing illusion”: the way in which people greatly misjudge the impact that certain circumstances or goods–like losing a job or owning a Birkin bag–will have on their quality of life. Politicians, who rank right up there with marketers in terms of powers of manipulation, are expert at exaggerating the importance of issues on which they’ve focused their attention–like the idea that if women are given sovereign right over their bodies and allowed to choose whether or not to procreate, the human race will die out.
Still anxious? Take comfort in the fact that these books encourage you to not fear being wrong and failing big, since that’s a necessary part of intellectual development. Now, go get a crayon.
Related:Read Michael Lewis’s profile of psychologist Daniel Kahneman, and take“The Quiz Daniel Kahneman Wants You to Fail.”
