Jonah Lehrer Quotes

...Prions violate most of biology's sacred rules. They are one of those annoying reminders of how much we don't know.

People who are more rational don't perceive emotion less, they just regulate it better.

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.

Design is the conscious imposition of meaningful order.

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.

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.)

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.

You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.
From Imagine: How Creativity Works pg 23 (hardcover)

The benefit of such horizontal interactions - people sharing knowledge across fields - is that it encourages conceptual blending, which is an extremely important part of the insight process.

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

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.

You might solve a problem while drunk, but you probably won´t notice the answer

The advantage of knowing where insights come from is that it can make it easier to generate insights in the first place. When we’re struggling with seemingly impossible problems, it’s important to find time to unwind, to eavesdrop on all those remote associations coming from the right hemisphere. Instead of drinking another cup of coffee, indulge in a little daydreaming. Rather than relentlessly focusing, take a warm shower, or play some Ping-Pong, or walk on the beach.

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

When the mind is denied the emotional sting of losing , it never figures out how to win.