Jonah Lehrer quotes

Children can't help but create: they need to put their mind on the page, they want to paint, to sculpt, to write short stories. (Jonah Lehrer)
Creativity is not a trait that we inherit in our genes or a blessing bestowed by the angels. It's a skill. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
Every creative story is different. And yet every creative story is the same: There was nothing, now there is something. It's almost like magic. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
Creativity is a spark. It can be excruciating when we're rubbing two rocks together and getting nothing. And it can be intensely satisfying when the flame catches and a new idea sweeps around the world. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
If you're trying to be more creative, one of the most important things you can do is increase the volume and diversity of the information to which you are exposed. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
I want to give people theories, I want to expose them to scientific stories that force them to re-evaluate the way they use these three pounds of meat inside their head. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
I always wanted to be a scientist, I always thought I'd be a scientist, that was the narrative I was carrying around. I worked in a neuroscience lab as an undergraduate and then after, almost five years in total, but I realized I just wasn't good at science. I didn't have the discipline for it. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
What you discover when you look at creativity from the perspective of the brain is that it is universal. We're all creative all of the time, we can't help but be creative. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
We need to be willing to risk embarrassment, ask silly questions, surround ourselves with people who don't know what we're talking about. We need to leave behind the safety of our expertise. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
The best way to solve a problem? Try explaining it to somebody outside your field. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
The answer will only arrive after we stop looking for it. (Jonah Lehrer)
While human nature largely determines how we hear the notes, it is nurture that lets us hear the music. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
In fact, the only way to remain creative over time--to not be undone by our expertise--is to experiment with ignorance, to stare at things we don't fully understand. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
People assume that they perceive reality as it is, that our senses accurately record the outside world. Yet the science suggests that, in important ways, people experience reality not as it is, but as they expect it to be. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
When we venture beyond the edge of our knowledge, all we have is art. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
The inconsistency of genius is a consistent theme of creativity. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
You know more than you know. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
The imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
there simply is no way to describe the past without lying. Our memories are not like fiction. They are fiction. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
For too long, we've assumed that there is a single template for human nature, which is why we diagnose most deviations as disorders. But the reality is that there are many different kinds of minds. And that's a very good thing. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
...new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time. (Jonah Lehrer)
Rejection process is not fun. It's the red pen on the page, the discarded sketch, sometimes is the only way forward. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
Simply translating the act of the scientist is the first job of any science writer. Then, in my more grandiose moments, the other big job of a science writer is to see connections, to see the forest composed by all these trees. The act of being a scientist, by definition, the act of being a modern scientist requires you to really focus. You have to drill down. You have to spend years studying one brick, one synaptic protein, one kind of thing that turns on the amygdala, one very particular question. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
As much as I loved the ideas, I excelled at experimental failure, I found new ways to make experiments not work. I would mess up PCRs, add the wrong buffers, northerns, westerns, southerns. I would make them not work in quite ingenious ways, and I realized slowly, over the course of those years, that the secret to being a great scientist is to love the manual labor of it. View quote
Jonah Lehrer
Neuroscience has contributed so much in just a few decades to how we think about human nature and how we know ourselves. View quote
Jonah Lehrer