Do you ever wish that annoying colleague or friend who always wants to “improve” your ideas would just go away? You know the one I mean, he (or she) isn’t mean spirited or particularly unkind, just always a bit critical. Well, be careful what you wish for. More and more studies show that creativity flourishes not in an environment devoid of criticism but one filled with supportive critique. “Supportive,” of course, is key. The idea is to improve – to point out the strengths, certainly, but also and more importantly the weaknesses of an idea in order to make it better. This isn’t criticism for criticism’s sake; it’s...

Creativity is all the rage these days: what it is, how you develop it, the various ways in which you express it. A slew of bestselling books, including my favorite Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer, offers insight into the nature, origin and application of our fundamental, foundational, and phenomenal ability to engage in creative acts. While the approaches and analyses differ somewhat at various points, one of the major points of convergence revolves around destroying the myth of the “solitary genius.” Creativity doesn’t, in other words, happen in a vacuum – creative ideas are always inspired, nurtured, cajoled, and...

I’ve been working through Jonah Lehrer’s How We Decide, a really fine book that explores the neuroscience behind how we make decisions. In one of the early chapters, Lehrer describes the role dopamine neurons play in decision-making. Essentially, they are those elements of the brain that register experience and create emotions. Interestingly, these neurons actually learn from experience. That is, they take note of successes and failures and improve their predictive performance (creating an emotion before something actually occurs – pleasure at the sight of an ice cream cone, anxiety when noticing that the back door to the house is...

Here are three pieces I enjoyed reading this week but haven’t had time to comment on (yet!) – perhaps they will supply you with some Memorial Day Weekend reading: 1) Jonah Lehrer, author of Imagine: How Creativity Works and How We Decide and one of my favorite science writers, dives into recent research that thinking about God improves self-control. In fact, even when subjects in a psychological test weren’t either a) religious or b) consciously aware that they were thinking about God, they still exercised more self-control when their attention was turned to subjects usually connected with God. In addition to reporting on...