Jonah Lehrer Quotes

Three individuals form a partnership and agree to divide the
profits equally. X invests $9,000, Y invests $7,000, Z invests
$4,000. If the profits are $4,800, how much less does X receive
than if the profits were divided in proportion to the amount invested?

Unless you experience the unpleasant symptoms of being wrong, your brain will never revise its models. Before your neurons can succeed, they must repeatedly fail. There are no shortcuts for this painstaking process.

To have a style is to be stuck.

Intimacy is made possible by history, for the feeling of love is as much a memory as it is an experience.

If our DNA has a literary equivalent, it's Finnegan's Wake.

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.

...Why are corporations so fleeting?...Instead of imitating the freewheeling city, these businesses minimize the very interactions that lead to new ideas. They erect walls and establish hierarchies. They keep people from relaxing and having insights. They stifle conversations, discourage dissent, and suffocate social networks. Rather than maximizing employee creativity they become obsessed with minor efficiencies.

"The moral of Harlow's experiment is that primate babies are born with an intense need for attachment. They cuddled with the cloth mothers because they wanted to experience the warmth and tenderness of a real mother. Even more than food, these baby monkeys craved the feeling of affection. "It's as if the animals are programmed to seek out love,

Like a work of art, we exceed our materials. Science needs art to frame the mystery, but art needs science so that not everything is a mystery. Neither truth alone is our solution, for our reality exists in plural

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.

A lie told well is just as good as the truth.

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

The world is more random than we can imagine. That's what our emotions can't understand.

Insights, after all, come from the overlap between seemingly unrelated thoughts. They emerge when concepts are transposed, when the rules of one place are shifted to a new domain.

Money chases good ideas