For most of human history, we’ve pretended that the imagination is inherently inscrutable, an impenetrable biological gift. As a result, we’ve clung to a series of false myths about what creativity is and where it comes from. These myths aren’t just misleading – they also interfere with the imagination. In addition to looking at elegant experiments and scientific studies, we’ll also examine creativity as it is experienced in the real world. We’ll learn about Bob Dylan’s writing method and the drug habits of poets. We’ll spend time with a bartender who thinks like a chemist and an autistic surfer who invented a new surfing move. We’ll look at a website that helps us solve seemingly impossible problems and we'll go behind the scenes at Pixar. We’ll watch Yo Yo Ma improvise and we’ll unpack the secrets of consistently innovative companies.
The point is to collapse the layers of description separating the nerve cell from the finished symphony, the cortical circuit from the successful product. Creativity shouldn’t seem like something otherworldly. It shouldn’t seem like a process reserved for artists or inventors or other “creative types.” The human mind, after all, has the creative impulse built into its operating system, hard-wired into its most essential programming code. At any given moment, our brain is automatically forming new associations, as it continually connects an everyday x to an unexpected y. This book is about how that happens. It is the story of how we imagine.
