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You'll find this article on page 79 of the magazine.
Tapping the Creative Mind
 IMAGINE: HOW CREATIVITY WORKS
by Jonah Lehrer
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 2012; 279 pp., $26 (cloth)
Reviewed by CHRISTIAN McEWEN
It
is almost thirty years since I wrote my first book review. I was living
in a battered little apartment on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, and
the street noise floated up from far below. “Works! Works!” cried the
dealers on the corner. “Mr. C—Co-caine!” Meanwhile, I was studying Sharon Olds’ The Gold Cell,
reading the poems over and over, and taking time to notice what I
noticed. Thoughts and impressions jostled in the air around me—a rowdy
buzzing contradictory chorus. I watched them shift around the big pale
room. Let the flies settle, I told myself. Let them find their way. By
which I meant: Take it easy; don’t give way to panic. Let your own
ideas gather round. Name them, claim them; let them find some kind of
order. Relax a little. You’ll know what to say. Where
that calm voice came from, I have no idea. It was certainly not what
I’d been taught at school. In my teenage years (I’m talking of an
English Catholic boarding school, circa 1971), the emphasis was on
effort, concentration, visible obedience. Openness and receptivity would
have been construed as laziness. Work, after all, was expected to be work. Such writing as I did was timid and constricted, bland, perfectionist. But
I am older now, thank God, and if there is one thing I have learned it
is the value of receptivity and trust: the tender serendipity that can
be found in slowing down, in simply listening. In Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry,
the poet Jane Hirshfield quotes Pablo Picasso: “The artist is a
receptacle for emotions that come from no matter where: from the sky,
the earth, the piece of paper, a passing figure, a cobweb. That is why
one must not discriminate between things. There is no rank among them.
One must take one’s good where one finds it.” Buddhist
artists of whatever stripe (singer and performance artist Meredith
Monk, poet W. S. Merwin, Hirshfield herself) have learned this lesson
well, their creative work sustained by the resonant “emptiness” of the
meditation hall, their daily practice opening over and over into
inspiration. My friend Susie Patlove, a Tibetan Buddhist and poet, says,
“I don’t know what creativity would look like, if I hadn’t been sitting
for forty years.” Often, as she sits on the meditation cushion, she
finds herself presented with a line for a poem. Later, back at her desk,
she searches for words to describe her experience during meditation,
even while admitting that it is essentially “unsayable.” In meditation
my friend is willing, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, to set down the glass of
apple juice on the table and allow the sediment to fall to the bottom,
till the juice itself becomes unclouded, clear. Jonah Lehrer is no Buddhist, but his new book, Imagine,
is packed with images and anecdotes that reflect the meditative
experience. He has conducted lengthy personal interviews with
psychologists, sociologists, and neuroscientists, and with artists and
writers and inventors, too. This allows him to describe “how creativity
works”—both from within (from the neurological perspective) and from
without (in terms of ordinary daily practice). His aim is mastery, not
mystery; productivity, not peace of mind; and his writing is clear,
competent journalese, not especially dazzling or original. Nonetheless,
his book is well worth reading. At the very least, it reminds us just
what a rich and turbulent brew creativity can be, that “seething
cauldron of ideas,” as the psychologist William James once called it,
“where everything is fizzing and bobbing about in a state of bewildering
activity.” The
contents of that cauldron are not much studied, even now. A survey of
psychology papers published between 1950 and 2000 found less than 1
percent concerned with the creative process. All too often, creativity
is taken to mean just one thing: a gift, a special aptitude, separate
from more ordinary kinds of cognition. But as Lehrer explains, creative
practice is in fact built upon a number of distinct (and often
contradictory) factors. Openness and receptivity alternate with focused
concentration; time alone with time in company; adult efficiency with
childlike wonderment; a sufficiency of sleep with an alert and active
working life; and (perhaps most surprising) the dogged persistence
granted by depression with the joyful alpha waves of relaxation. The
creative person must find ways to befriend his or her own mind,
remaining alert to its constantly changing chemistries, as well as to
what is thrown up at random by dreams, by idle talk, by casual
encounters. In the course of this, he or she develops a certain obdurate
trust, a willingness to pause and to endure confusion, much as an
apprentice meditator learns to do. This does not come easy, whether for
the practicing artist, writer, or musician, or for the high-tech
inventor in Silicon Valley. “I tell you,” said the philosopher Friedrich
Nietzsche, “one must have chaos within oneself to give birth to a
dancing star.” Or, in Bob Dylan’s wryer, warier formulation, “I accept
chaos. I’m not sure whether it accepts me.” In
certain sectors of scientific and corporate America, that chaos is
allowed to run free for a portion of each day in the service of
cutting-edge inventions and ideas. Every afternoon, the psychologist
Jonathan Schooler, for instance, goes for a “dedicated daydreaming walk”
high on the bluffs above a Santa Barbara beach. The wind rustles in the
oak trees and the chaparral; he can hear the gentle boom of the Pacific
far below. This is where he comes to relax. But just because he’s
relaxed doesn’t mean that Schooler isn’t working. “I never have a plan
or a list of things I need to think about,” he says. “Instead, I just
let my mind go wherever it wants. And you know what? This is where I
have all my best ideas.” Recent
studies at Schooler’s laboratory in California confirm that those who
consistently engage in more daydreaming do indeed score higher on
measures of creativity. At
the company 3M, which is based in Minnesota, employees are encouraged
to practice “flexible attention.” Instead of being required to sit at
their desks for eight long hours each day, they are free to go for walks
across campus, to play a game of pinball with a friend, to lie down on a
couch by a sunny window. They practice what is called “the 15 percent
rule,” which is to say they can spend up to 15 percent of their time
“pursuing speculative new ideas.” Such speculation (aka daydreaming) is
understood as a valuable activity in and of itself. As Lehrer explains,
it initiates an “elaborate electrical conversation” between the front
and back parts of the brain, so that the prefrontal lobes (located just
behind the eyes) fire in sync with the posterior cingulate, medial
temporal lobe, and precuneus, something they do not ordinarily do. There
is no question that it can also pay off handsomely, in terms of the
all-important bottom line. Fascinated
as I am by these inside stories, I enjoy Lehrer’s writing most when he
puts creative chaos front and center. I think, for example, of his
account of Bob Dylan’s songwriting breakthrough after his long,
exhausting British tour in 1965. Dylan emerged from that tour determined
to quit the music business. “I realized I was very drained,” he later
said. “I was playing a lot of songs I didn’t want to play. I was singing
words I didn’t really want to sing.” As soon as he got back to New
York, he sped to Woodstock on his Triumph motorbike. He was going to
spend some time alone. He was going to start work on a novel. But then,
all of a sudden, he felt what Lehrer describes as “the itch of insight,
the tickle of lyrics that needed to be written down.” And once he
started, he simply couldn’t stop. “I found myself writing this song, this story, this long piece of vomit, twenty pages long,” Dylan said. “I’d never written anything like that before.” The piece, which was to become the debut single on Highway 61 Revisited,
was angry and incoherent, what the literary critic Christopher Ricks
has called an “unlove song.” But it had its own confidence, its own
astonishing momentum. Its very chaos allowed Dylan to bring together all
his multifarious influences, from Arthur Rimbaud to Bertolt Brecht to
Delta Blues, from Fellini to The Beatles. It was, as Lehrer says,
“modernist and premodern, avant-garde and country-western.” Dylan was
delighted by it. For him, it was his first “completely free song.” That
same year, 1965, Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones had a parallel
breakthrough, though in his case it took place in his sleep. One night
in May, he passed out early, his tape recorder set close beside his bed.
When he woke up the next morning, he discovered that he’d apparently
pressed the record button during the night and the tape had run to the
very end. At first he thought nothing had been recorded. But when he
went back to the beginning and pressed play, “there, in some sort of
ghostly version, [was] the opening of a song.” It was “(I Can’t Get No)
Satisfaction” followed, as he explained to Terry Gross in a 2010
interview, “by forty minutes of me snoring.” Making
time for a long daydreaming walk, “vomiting out” long incoherent
screeds, singing in our sleep—such tactics will not turn the rest of us
into celebrity scientists or world-class musicians. Those who pore over
Lehrer’s book as if it were a blueprint, a recipe book of crucial
revelations, a fast shortcut to their own creative processes, are going
to be disappointed. Understanding the neuroscience of creativity is not
the same as being able to generate such brainwaves for ourselves, or
indeed, to surf those waves. Buddhist teachings make a distinction
between the dharma as it is taught and the dharma as it is practiced and
experienced. The graphic designer Milton Glaser, now in his eighties,
says, “People need to be reminded that creativity is a verb, a
very time-consuming verb. It’s about taking an idea in your head and
transforming that idea into something real. And that’s always going to
be a long and difficult process.” That
said, Jonah Lehrer makes a gallant attempt to provide his readers with
some form of useful “take away.” He advises us, for example, to accept
“Getting Stumped”—as Dylan was— since in the very act of feeling
frustrated, the brain will shift from the left side to the more creative
right side, which in turn can lead to moments of insight. He also
advises grit and perseverance (“Stick With It”), though he is keen too,
like Jonathan Schooler and the 3M employees, that we should remember to
“Take a Break.” Finally, he suggests that we “Become Outsiders,” whether
through actual travel or simply through “sleeping on it” (as Keith
Richards did), and that we allow ourselves to reconnect with our own
childhood inventiveness as we “Channel Our Inner Seven-Year-Old.” Buddhist
practitioners will translate this advice into their own experience on
the cushion and find, perhaps, some interesting parallels. Meditation,
contemplation, chaos, creativity. In the end, they all return us to the
same calm place: the shifting beauty of the present moment, the small
flies buzzing round the empty glass, the sheer astonishment of being
alive.
Christian McEwen is the author of World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down and is the editor of various anthologies, including The Alphabet of the Trees: A Guide to Nature Writing and Jo’s Girls: Tomboy Tales of High Adventure. She has spent the last three years gathering mate- rial for a play about women and money, entitled Legal Tender: Women & the Secret Life of Money, and its linked project, Money Talks.
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