A homage to the creative mind and spirit - amazing how many things we take for granted came to be.

This book was a interesting look at people being creative throughout history, with their focus od bending, blending, and breaking. I wished it had focused more on the human brain though.

I had high hopes for this book, but I found it a little like I find meringue: too sweet, with a lot of volume and not much substance.

Too sweet
The overall tone is one of human triumphalism. Isn't it wonderful that we're such a creative, imaginative species? And while I recognize that I may be unduly influenced by the time in which I read this, whatever it is that makes humans different from other species has also made us the most destructive inhabitants of the planet. There's little acknowledgement of that fact, or consideration of how to address it.

With a lot of volume
By weight of ink, this book is overwhelmingly examples. Sometimes those examples appear in single sentence lists: "Synthetic biologist, app developer, self-driving car designer, quantum computer designer, multimedia engineer..." or "...we wouldn't have sonnets, helicopters, pogo sticks, jazz, taco stands, flags, kaleidoscopes, confetti or mixed drinks."

But also the repetition comes in the structure of the book. There are three chapters devoted one each to the ideas of bending, breaking and blending. The idea itself takes a sentence or two to describe. The rest of the chapter are made up of examples.

That pattern of one simple idea, reinforced by (too) many examples, applies to most of the other chapters as well.

Not much substance
I think I could summarize the book thusly without being terribly unfair:

Humans are uniquely capable of imaginative creativity because our brains have evolved to seek out novelty. We can classify all human creativity into three practices: bending things we know in novel directions, breaking things we know into constituent parts and reassembling the parts into something novel, and blending two different things that we know into a novel thing. What we create must be genuinely novel, but not too novel or it won't be culturally acceptable.

If we want to encourage creativity, we need to create environments in which those practices can be effective. And we can do so in business and in school."

Bend, break and blend is the core of the book, but at least as presented it's really just a conceptual framework. Maybe it has a neurophysiological basis, but if so it's not described. Maybe we really can capture all of human creativity with those three words, but there's no real effort to support that conclusion.

So by the end of the book, besides being irritated by the authors' prolix prose, I was left feeling like I hadn't learned anything particularly new.

This book is a great study on creativity and how it continually changes the world. As the authors point out, the human brain craves change and deviations from the norm. This drives us to create new things and new ways of doing things, while drawing inspiration from the world around us.

Full of historical case studies and a little neuroscience, this is an encouraging "call to create". I think anyone who has had a creative burn out or gotten in a slump should read this to remind them of why they create and how they can move forward. There's also a great bit at the end full of ideas for encouraging the next generation to create!

3.5

David Eagleman'ın daha önce Incognito ve Beyin kitaplarını okumuş, oldukça sevmiştim. Bu kitap ise bahsettiğim bu iki kitaptan farklı bir kitap. Yaratıcılığı, teknoloji ve sanat üzerinden anlatan yazar bu kitapta beni pek kazanamadı. Kötü kitap değildi ama önceki iki kitabına benzer türde bir kitap olduğunu düşünmüştüm ama öyle olmadığını anlayınca okuma keyfim çok düştü.

Good book categorizing different types of innovation and the folks and groups who helped drive that innovation. I enjoyed how the author valued ideation and failing fast. Different ways of creating ideas were explored and highlighting the fact that it was rare that anyone individual or group created something truly new without failing and building on the ideas of others.

Really interesting and informative. Covers creativity and innovation over several centuries and in many fields, not just what's traditionally considered "art."

I've read other books by Eagleman (a neuroscientist) and found them very interesting. I bought this one after seeing Eagleman do a talk here in Melbourne earlier this year. There's actually not all that much neuroscience in this look at creativity that he's co-written with musician Brandt. It's a bit of a breezy overview with lots of examples of creativity in science, the arts and business. A few good ideas in the chapter on creative schools.