Jonah Lehrer Quotes

The vocational approach at NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) helps build grit in students. It teaches them how to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal, to sacrifice for the sake of a passion. The teachers demand hard work from their kids because they know, from personal experience, that creative success requires nothing less.

Just because an idea is true doesn't mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn't mean it's true.

While human nature largely determines how we hear the notes, it is nurture that lets us hear the music.

A few years ago, Tor Wager, a neuroscientist at Columbia University, wanted to figure out why placebos were so effective. His experiment was brutally straightforward: he gave college students electric shocks while they were stuck in an fMRI machine. (The subjects were well compensated, at least by undergraduate standards.)

Every creative story is different. And every creative story is the same. There was nothing. Now there is something. It's almost like magic.

Every creative journey begins with a problem. It starts with a feeling of frustration, the dull ache of not being able to find the answer. We have worked hard, but we've hit the wall. We have no idea what to do next.

...the imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.

And so we keep on thinking, because the next thought might be the answer.

The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,' [T.S.] Eliot wrote. 'But less talent was wasted.

In fact, most of us see perseverance as a distinctly uncreative approach, the sort of strategy that people with mediocre ideas are forced to rely on.