Welcome to Econ Talk, part of the Library of Economics and Liberty. I'm your host Russ Roberts

of George Mason University and Stanford University's Hoover Institution. Our website is

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Today is June 1st, 2012, and my guest is Jonah Lear. His latest book is Imagine, How Creativity

Works. Jonah, welcome to Econ Talk. Thank you so much for having me on him, a big fan.

Now, until recently, creativity was something of a black box. It was a magical, mysterious

thing. And of course, at various points in your book, you remind us that it still is.

But in recent years, neuroscience has helped us understand more about how creativity

works. What are some of the important things that we've learned about the brain and creativity?

Well, I think the very first thing we've learned is that imagination does exist inside

those three pounds of meat. That even though for thousands of years, we, in a sense, outsourced

imagination to the muses. Now, it's quite clear that it really does come from inside our

brain. I think one thing, the big idea neuroscience has given us, and I think it's very important

to, at the outset, just emphasize, just have provisional all these researches. It's very

much a first draft of what's happening inside the brain whenever we do anything, whether

it's make a decision on an investment task, or you give people a set of difficult creative

problems. This is very much a first draft. But I think what neuroscience has revealed

so far is that really creativity is not a single thing at all. That even though I think we've

often used creativity in the singular, the term turns out to be a catch-all for a variety

of distinct thought processes, each of which are useful at various phases of the creative

...