It wakes us right up.

To have a style is to be stuck.

The fatal misconception behind brainstorming is that there is a particular script we should all follow in group interactions…. [W]hen the composition of the group is right—enough people with different perspectives running into one another...

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.

Every creative journey begins with a problem. It starts with a feeling of frustration, the dull ache of not being able to find the answer. We have worked hard, but we’ve hit the wall. We...

Just because an idea is true doesn’t mean it can be proved. And just because an idea can be proved doesn’t mean it’s true.

…the imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.

While human nature largely determines how we hear the notes, it is nurture that lets us hear the music.

The great ages did not perhaps produce much more talent than ours,’ [T.S.] Eliot wrote. ‘But less talent was wasted.

The vocational approach at NOCCA (New Orleans Center for the Creative Arts) helps build grit in students. It teaches them how to be single-minded in pursuit of a goal, to sacrifice for the sake of...

…Why are corporations so fleeting?…Instead of imitating the freewheeling city, these businesses minimize the very interactions that lead to new ideas. They erect walls and establish hierarchies. They keep people from relaxing and having insights....

Science has discovered that, like any work of literature, the human genome is a text in need of commentary, for what Eliot said of poetry is also true of DNA: ‘all meanings depend on the...

And so we keep on thinking, because the next thought might be the answer.

It doesn’t matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry — if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep on working until the work...

The only way to maximize group creativity—to make the whole more than the sum of its parts—is to encourage a candid discussion of mistakes. In part, this is because the acceptance of error reduces cost....

How do we regulate our emotions? The answer is surprisingly simple: by thinking about them. The prefrontal cortex allows each of us to contemplate his or her own mind, a talent psychologists call metacognition. We...

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...

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.

Every creative story is different. And every creative story is the same. There was nothing. Now there is something. It’s almost like magic.

…new ideas are merely several old thoughts that occur at the exact same time.