“At any given moment, the brain is automatically forming new associations, continually connecting an everyday x to an unexpected y. This book is about how that happens. It is the story of how we imagine.”

That’s how Jonah Lehrer frames his wide-ranging romp through the world of creativity, touching down briefly on practitioners as diverse as Bob Dylan, the 3M Corporation, Broadway producers, Shakespeare, and Procter and Gamble. By examining the ways and means of the creative “geniuses” who produced “Blowin’ in the Wind,” the Post-It Note, West Side Story, Hamlet, the Swiffer (mop), and numerous other examples of successful innovations, Lehrer illuminates the principles he draws from extensive reading of scholarly research papers on neuroscience and his interviews with their authors and lays the groundwork for a set of observations about how a company or organization, or a government, can foster creativity.

For example, Lehrer notes that creativity is by and large a product of cities — places where people are typically forced to encounter those who have different values, represent different cultures, or simply have different ideas. It’s the interplay of ideas in unexpected ways that give rise to creative breakthroughs.

Interestingly, Lehrer points out that a city’s productivity (as measured by the number of patent applications) grows with size. The bigger the city, the more it serves as a springboard for creativity. But the same is not true of corporations. “Companies exhibit the opposite trend,” he writes — basically because nobody’s really in charge in a city (certainly not the mayor!), so there’s no one who can suppress dissent, but in a large corporation, hierarchical management and the self-preserving habits of bureaucrats so often prevent innovation.

One of the book’s most interesting points is that “human geniuses aren’t scattered randomly across time and space. Instead, they tend to arrive in tight, local clusters.” Lehrer gives the examples of Athens from 440 B.C. to 380 B.C., home of “Plato, Socrates, Pericles, Thucydides, Herodotus, Euripides, Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristophanes, and Xenophon” — astonishing, isn’t it? — and of little Florence between 1450 and 1490. “In those few decades, a city of less than fifty thousand people gave rise to a staggering number of immortal artists, including Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Ghiberti, Botticelli, and Donatello.” Then he turns to the late 15th Century in England under Elizabeth I, featuring not just Shakespeare but also Christopher Marlowe, “Ben Jonson, John Milton, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Fletcher, Edmund Spenser, Thomas Kyd, Philip Sidney, Thomas Nash, John Donne, and Francis Bacon.” This last list is not quite so impressive as the others, but it helps make the point.

Examining the ways and means of genius and the bunching together of brilliant minds under particular circumstances, Lehrer spotlights the policies and procedures he believes can be put to work in schools, in corporations, and in city government to produce new generations of creative minds to solve the ever-more difficult problems humanity faces as the 21st century unfolds.

Jonah Lehrer, 31, is a Columbia University graduate and Rhodes Scholar who writes about psychology and the intersection of science and the humanities. Imagine is his third book, a best-seller just like its predecessor, How We Decide.

(From www.malwarwickonbooks.com)