Ten Years in the Tub (122 page)

     
  
Fings Ain't Wot They Used T' Be: The Lionel Bart Story
—David and Caroline Stafford

     
  
Beautiful Ruins
—Jess Walter

     
  
Citizen Vince
—Jess Walter

     
  
Ready Player One
—Ernest Cline

I
am a creative professional. The temptation to qualify that sentence with an “I suppose” or a “for want of a better description” or an “on a good day” or a “whatever you might think” or just a simple “not” is almost overwhelming; it feels as though I just began a column with the sentence “I am very good at sex.” Actually, it's even worse than that. I am likely to have sex with only a very small minority of you, for various reasons that we don't need to go into here, some of them surprising, so word is unlikely to spread. But you can all buy or borrow a book or a movie or even an album I've written, and make up your own minds about my creativity. One of the many admirable things about Jonah Lehrer's
Imagine
is that he does not argue that to be creative is the same thing as to be special, or clever, or gifted, and that's what sounds uncomfortable about that opening sentence: I seem to be saying something more than “I make stuff up,
and someone shells out for it.” I'm not, though. Honestly.

The first half of
Imagine
is about what happens in our brains when we make stuff up, and it's riveting, especially, perhaps, if that's what you're paid to do. The frequent appearance in this column of biographies, typically biographies of artists, can be explained by my enduring interest in this very subject. The main reason I pick up those books in the first place is because I want to know how Preston Sturges or Richard Yates or Lucille Ball or, most recently, Charles Dickens did what they did; I want to know what it felt like to be them. Well, Lehrer's subject is the mother ship. This is the literary biography that bypasses the details of advances and failed marriages, leaves out the names, even, and attempts to deal with the literal source of all creativity. There are many reasons why Dickens became Dickens, but none of them would have counted for anything had it not been for the alpha waves emanating from the right side of his brain, the part of us that enables insight and epiphany, working in conjunction with his prefrontal cortex, where his (admittedly prodigious) working memory was kept. Coffee and alcohol might have helped, and his legendarily long walks played a part, too. Dickens wouldn't have known about amphetamines, which were first created in Germany in 1887, seventeen years after his death—is there nothing this column doesn't know? But if he had, he'd have shoveled them in like M&M's, which, incidentally, weren't actually patented until 1941. (OK, I'll stop now. It's not even actual knowledge I'm dispensing. It's bits of Wikipedia.) It also helped, Lehrer explains, that he traveled and lived in a city, and that he had to battle with constraints of form, in his case imposed by the monthly serialization of most of his books.

Most of us sense, vaguely, that a walk will clear our heads, that drugs and coffee might help us to concentrate, that we find it easier to create if some kind of boundary is placed around our imagination. When a teacher asks for a story about anything at all, then the student will struggle; tell a kid that you want a story about a talking sponge who wants to take part in the Olympics and you'll get something pretty cool. What's enthralling about Lehrer's book is that he has neuroscientific explanations for why our habits and dependencies work. Speed, for example, increases the amount of dopamine in the synapses, and this helps us to pay attention: suddenly everything seems interesting. This
means it's an editing drug rather than a creative drug, because we suddenly find we're getting pleasure from, say, messing about with the rhythm of a single sentence. In one of the most thrilling parts of this book, Lehrer compares the taut, spare, simple (and brilliant) poetry Auden wrote while using Benzedrine with the long “vomit”—Dylan's word—of “Like a Rolling Stone,” an epiphanic right-hemisphere production if ever there was one.

The breadth of reference in
Imagine
is a joy in itself: Auden and Dylan, Milton Glaser, Yo-Yo Ma, John Lasseter, Clay Marzo, and Arthur Fry, who came up with the Post-it note. But the real stars of the book are the scientific researchers. It turns out that there is no area of creativity that someone hasn't devised a test for. Brian Uzzi, for example, wanted to test the optimum conditions for group creativity, so he chose the Broadway musical as his ideal model, and produced a study of every musical staged between 1877 and 1990. He used reviews and box office as his indicators of success, and came up with a measure,
Q
, to quantify the density of the connections between the major collaborators, the director, producer, composer, librettist, and so on. How often had the people behind a production worked with each other before? How often did they admit new people into their working circle? And what he found was that you needed a medium
Q
score for a successful show. A flop was more likely with either a high or a low
Q
—a high
Q
possibly indicating staleness and a refusal to find room for fresh ideas and voices, and a low
Q
suggesting inexperience and unfamiliarity with the creative processes of colleagues. The conclusions are interesting, of course, but the fun comes when you attempt to imagine Brian Uzzi's working life, which for the last part involved poring over 1930s theater programs. Charles Limb at Johns Hopkins found a way to scan the brains of jazz pianists while they were improvising. Earl Miller has taught monkeys to press buttons when a picture of randomly scattered dots on a screen looks a little bit like another picture of random dots. Jonathan Schooler evaluated daydreaming by making subjects read one of the less-gripping passages from
War and Peace
after a slug of vodka. (And there we have it: the true value of literature. The stupor it induces results in creative thinking.) Joe Forgas at the University of New South Wales hid plastic animals and toy soldiers near the checkout counter of a stationery store on rainy days and made the shop play
sad music, in order to collect data on whether people noticed more when they were depressed. (They did—four times as much.) These people, the Uzzis and the Schoolers and the Limbs, are all ingenious, charming, and almost certainly insane.