Charlie Rose

SharkswithfrikingLazers  07/31/2012 01:49 AM Report

The Bob Dylan story is in the comments below.

So what exactly did Mr. Liar-Liar-Pants-On-Fire create?

The idea that creativity can be a rush of vomit?

SharkswithfrikingLazers  07/31/2012 01:39 AM Report

Charlie, Charlie, Charlie,

Where are the tar and feathers when we need them?

At least we can laugh:

"Jonah Lehrer's resignation letter from the New Yorker contains passages from Ruth Shalit's resignation letter from The New Republic."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/us-news-blog/2012/jul/30/jonah-lehrer-quits-new-yorker?newsfeed=true

Saultxyca  04/25/2012 08:13 PM Report

Not to overdraw the circle when Jonah Lehrer cites Steve Jobs making those creative "connections," but Marc Andreesen made the point better when he quipped, "creativity isn't linear," in lightning reply to Charlie's questioning how MSFT could have missed the bucket that was realized by AAPL so many times.

Apple's 'circular creativity' is right there on the infinite loop and in the prospective campus design. In other words, it's more she than he. ;-)

N'est-ce pas? ...

finalfantasytown  04/22/2012 09:42 PM Report

Do you think goat's legs are generally recognized as the most beautiful legs, which can trigger pleasure, in animal kingdom? I think it is true. Why some goats live in desert isolated from outside? what have they done? Do they have creativity in prehuman history?

I keep thinking how Chinese in Ming dynasty wrote out a novel 'the journey to the western', which today they still don't understand it. They tried several times to rediscover the novel. But it is becoming worse and worse, which is, I think, because of lost driving force like domestic animals.

It is interesting that Hephaestus has no leg and he creates Pandora.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  04/22/2012 02:33 AM Report

He mentions a very sad survey of school kids.

When you ask a second grader are you creative 95% say they are. Then by 5th grade it is down to about 50% and by time they are a high school senior less than 10% believe they are creative.

However I do NOT think we are killing creativity off in K-12 and these students internalize a myth that creativity is a rare gift.

Destination Imagination, Odyssey of the Mind, Science Olympiad, Science Fair, Photo Contests, Writing Contests, Art Contests . . . even C-SPAN has a video contest for high school students.

If you want to see a killing of creativity in K-12 go to China or South Korea but for America I think he overstates the case.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  04/22/2012 02:26 AM Report

“Our most important mental talent.”

Yes and no.

Too many weapons of mass destruction.

chawlydollydoodah  04/21/2012 02:25 PM Report

I saw this interview a few nights ago on the television, I was half asleep and was ready to turn it off before it began. I thought this young punk couldn't know anything interesting, but I was wrong, he turned out to be smarter than I thought he would be. I like the idea that creativity comes from resting and taking breaks, since I work my ass off for a living, building with bricks, stone, and 80 lb. blocks. God Damn It!

tabs  04/20/2012 10:26 AM Report

At the end of the interview one was still waitng to learn something new about the creative process. Mr Lehrer to be blunt is a lightweight.

A number of years ago a Doctor of Psychology who has given much thought to Imagination and the Creative process described his theory as being an established order of thought (much like an elliptic orbit) starts to distengrate. Finaly like the breaking of gravitational pull, thought breaks the bonds with the established order of thinking. It is at that moment of breaking away that the spark of light and or creativity takes place. It is then that a new order of thinking begins to be established.

ShalomFreedman  04/19/2012 10:05 AM Report

As a long - time student of creativity I am a bit taken aback by the very confident presentation of Jonah Lehrer. He speaks as if he is revealing to us the new and astounding 'truth' about the situation. But the subject is enormously complex. On the one hand one can take the approach of American Pragmatism of James and Dewey and understand Creativity as pervading every aspect of human experience. It is as natural and real as children suddenly speaking sentences the world has never heard before. At the opposite end one can reserve the concept for those greatest creators of mankind the Shakespeares and the Rembrandts who seem to go beyond anything anyone could imagine before, and bring forth new worlds for us to wonder at. Frankly the finding of certain areas of the brain which connect with certain kinds of human activity seems to me important for medicine more than for real overall understanding of the creative process.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  04/19/2012 02:52 AM Report

Hey let's combine the bathroom idea from Apple with bathrooms at High Schools. We will add management (Principals) and labor (Teachers) to the student bathrooms and have only one male and one female centrally located super bathroom.

Finally a breakthrough in education.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  04/19/2012 02:49 AM Report

Bathroom breakthroughs at Apple—happenstance. Human friction. (Don't forget urgency of having to go!)

Yes Charlie and to take it to the next level trying cleaning your toilet once a week. You would be a better man for it.

I mow my own grass and scrub my own toilet and look how creative I am.

SharkswithfrikingLazers  04/19/2012 02:45 AM Report

Great Creativity Video: http://vimeo.com/38798735

SharkswithfrikingLazers  04/19/2012 02:44 AM Report

"He (Bob Dylan) later describes it as like this uncontrollable rush of vomit."

Lady Gaga told Oprah she has to go off to some place and do things (probably involving drugs) and then she gets a song and sometimes after taking months finally calls her mother and tells her she is back now.

“My creative process can be a bit overwhelming for my mom. Sometimes I need to really shut myself off. Whether I’m drinking too much or whatever it is that I go through—because it is a daunting task to want to please the world… I’m not a perpetually sad or turmoiled human being, but I do undergo cycles of hibernation, where I shut myself off and I beat myself up a little bit… It’s part of my creative process, and it’s nothing that I would want to teach or wish upon anyone.”

http://blog.girlybubble.com/2012/03/22/13-most-interesting-things-revealed-by-lady-gaga-on-oprah/

GREAT STORY ABOUT BOB DYLAN:

LEHRER: So it's May 1965, and he's just returned from a grueling tour, six months tour. He's just finished touring the U.K., and he is burnt out. He doesn't know what kind of songs he wants to sing anymore. All he knows is that his old songs, these folks songs like "Times They Are A'Changing," "Blowing in the Wind," he's done with them. He's tired of being the poet of rock 'n' roll.

And so he tells the manager that he's quitting the music business, he's done with the singing, done with songwriting, he's going to move to a cabin in Woodstock, New York, doesn't even bring his guitar. He's going to be a novelist and a painter.

Here's there for a couple days when he is visited by this thing he calls the ghost. He gets a sudden urge to write, gets out his pen, gets out his paper and just begins to scribble. He later describes it as like this uncontrollable rush of vomit. And really what he's trying to capture there is just this feeling that you can't hold this back, it's just this rush of words that needs to be written down.

And so he begins writing and writing and writing, writes dozens of pages, and within these dozens of pages is this chorus, and it's the chorus of "Like A Rolling Stone." Four weeks later, he's in Studio A, Columbia Records, and after just four takes, they cut it on acetate, and that becomes his defining single, this six-minute single which really changes the sound of rock 'n' roll.

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=148607182

topazgirl  04/18/2012 11:12 PM Report

I see Jonah Lehrer as an incredibly brilliant young man, and I can't wait to hear what he has to say in the years to come. I suggest you listen NOW, REMant, as you will not be around in 30 or 40 years... (and, please get that sour look off your puss!...)

mcan1  04/18/2012 10:52 PM Report

@REMant

Que sera sera.

REMant  04/18/2012 12:07 PM Report

The kid needs to stop talking, start experiencing, and come back in 30-40 years. I believe when he does, if he has bothered to read any history in that time, he will find that it has all been said before, many times over, and usually better the first time. I have no idea what high-hanging fruit would be. A hint: the more memories are used in thinking, the less they continue as simple events, and so the elderly, who've stopped thinking, find they can remember long-forgotten things as they happened. I would think the same happens with names, which seem to disappear into description like computer or Japanese addresses, then reappear. Correlatively, tongue-tied scientists are smarter than lawyers who have a word for everything.