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The Lavin Agency is a speakers bureau, based in New York City and Toronto. We exclusively represent leading thinkers, writers, and doers who inspire ideas and dialogue that make the world a better place. |
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Notes"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."Lavin speaker Jonah Lehrer talking about cities and creativity, from a chapter in his new book, Imagine, with Richard Florida. Via The Atlantic.
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"Jonah Lehrer’s Imagine is the most important book to hit design in many years, because it goes to the heart of how the mind works and offers surprising and immediately useful ideas on the neurological origins of creative insight."
Paddy Harrington, of acclaimed studio Bruce Mau Design, in his latest post for Fast Company’s design blog.
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NotesJonah Lehrer’s new book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, is out today! It’s about “our most important mental talent: the ability to imagine what has never existed before.”
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Notes"Creativity is not magic, and there’s no such thing as a creative type. Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It’s a skill. Anyone can learn to be creative and to get better at it."Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works, in a recent essay for The Wall Street Journal.
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NotesDave Eggers, Miranda July, and Jonah Lehrer talk about the whole tortured artist thing on a panel dedicated to art and creativity. What makes artists like Boy Dylan and Pablo Picasso so lastingly creative? Jonah says it’s something called “GRIT.”
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NotesWhere does innovation come from? Here’s neuroscience speaker Jonah Lehrer weighing in, as part of a Wall Street Journal panel. Lehrer’s upcoming book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, examines this very question.
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Jonah Lehrer’s latest from his Wired blog “The Frontal Cortex” looks at why creativity seems to benefit from constraints. An example? In a psychological test on university students, half were forced to listen to an audible obstacle (a voice repeating unrelated words) while being presented with a series of challenges while the other half were given the challenges in peaceful silence. When shown the picture above:
The students were more likely to automatically respond that the pictures contained (in clockwise order, from the top left corner) an E, S, H and A…(In contrast, those subjects not first exposed to an obstacle insisted that the picture contained an A, H, S and E. They were entirely tuned to the particular.) The psychologists refer to this shift as an expansion of “perceptual scope,” suggesting that the obstacle had literally increased what the subjects were able to notice. The struggle allowed them to see the whole.
