Jonah Lehrer

How does one measure imagination? Why are some cities centres of innovation? Is the internet making us more or less imaginative? What kinds of classroom techniques increase the creativity of children? Does brainstorming work? Can the colour of paint on the wall or the location of a restroom have a dramatic impact on creativity?

For too long we’ve pretended that creativity is an impenetrable biological gift. As a result, we’ve clung to a series of myths about what creativity is and where it comes from. These myths aren’t just misleading—they also interfere with the imagination. That’s why, in addition to presenting elegant experiments and important scientific studies, Imagine is filled with real-life examples: Bob Dylan’s writing method, the drug habits of poets, an autistic surfer who invented a new surfing move, a website that solves seemingly impossible problems, and the offices of Pixar. Creativity shouldn’t be a process reserved for artists, inventors, or other “creative types.” The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse hard-wired into its most essential programming code. This book is about how that happens. It is the story of how we imagine.

The first book to use the unexpected discoveries of neuroscience to help us make the best decisionsSince Plato, philosophers have described the decision-making process as either rational or emotional: we carefully deliberate, or we blink and go with our gut. But as scientists break open the minds black box with the latest tools of neuroscience, they're discovering that this is not how the mind works.

Our best decisions are a finely tuned blend of both feeling and reasonand the precise mix depends on the situation. When buying a house, for example, its best to let our unconscious mull over the many variables. But when were picking a stock, intuition often leads us astray. The trick is to determine when to use the different parts of the brain, and to do this, we need to think harder (and smarter) about how we think. Jonah Lehrer arms us with the tools we need, drawing on cutting-edge research as well as the real-world experiences of a wide range of decidersfrom airplane pilots and hedge fund investors to serial killers and poker players.

Lehrer shows how people are taking advantage of the new science to make better television shows, win more football games, and improve military intelligence. His goal is to answer two questions that are of interest to just about anyone, from CEOs to firefighters: How does the human mind make decisions? And how can we make those decisions better?

A gifted young writer explores the unexpected links between art and modern science. From a rising journalist and Rhodes scholar, a dazzling look at how five writers, a painter, a composer, and a chef discovered the truth about the mind.

In this technology-driven age, it's tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling and original book, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, where the brain is concerned, art got there first. Focusing on a group of artists -- a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists -- Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the human mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brain's malleability; how the French chef Escoffier discovered umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language a full half-century before Chomsky. It's the ultimate tale of art trumping science.

More broadly, Lehrer shows that there is a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and this is what art knows better than science. An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first-rate science writing, Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges science to listen more closely to art, for the right minds can combine the best of both to brilliant effect.