Thursday Night Video – Jonah Lehrer on Creativity

When I teach creative endeavors (usually some sort of theater-making) to kids, particularly those of high school age, one of the biggest gifts I can give them is to undermine the myth of genius and allow them to simply create. Too many of them get stuck on the desire to be brilliant, which actually tends to be counterproductive. Jonah Lehrer was on The Colbert Show on Tuesday hawking his book Imagine: How Creativity Works, and he spoke eloquently about creativity.

LEHRER: One of the themes of the book is that these ideas that we assume people just invent out of thin air, that they’re really just new connections between old ideas.