and the ship is struck by lightning and everybody has to pump until they make landful. the passengers have to take turns because the ship is filling with heart. so it is hard, it is hard to get around. it's hard to get around the united states. to go from new york city to albany, new york, if you took a hours, that would take you three days, on our own horse or a coach. if you took a boat up the hudson, that would take three days if the wind was right. if the wind was bad it could take you a couple -- ten days to t ..what, few hours. so, yes, there are restrictions that come from not being able to get around.

but the flip also this weekend questions and comments from calm brokaw in depth and they live at noon eastern. booktv every weekend on c-span2. >> spend the weekend in oklahoma city with booktv and american history tv. literary life with a booktv on c-span2 including the misread political books. oklahoma university president and senator david boren on a letter to america. also rare books from galileo, copernicus and others from the

history of science collection. sunday at 5:00 eastern oklahoma history of american history tv on c-span3 tour the oklahoma city bombing memorial with the code designer tory. sir and look at african-american life in 1920s oklahoma and native american artifacts from the special collections at the oklahoma history center. c-span local content of vehicles explore the history of literary life in cities across america. this weekend from oklahoma city on c-span2 and 3. >> you are watching booktv. up next jonah lehrer looks at the science of creative thinking and howard canceled societal problems. this is just under an hour. >> thank you so much for having me. thank you for coming. the tremendous honor and pleasure to be here to talk about creativity. i would like to begin tonight

with a story about bob dylan. takes place in early summer of 1965 when he was finishing up his tour. as dylan has been struggling to maintain a non performance schedule. he travelled across the northeast on a bus in small college towns and crossed over to the west coast and crammed in a hectic few weeks of concerts and promotions. he was parading in front of the press with an endless series of questions from what is the true to why is there a catch on the cover of your last album? when he wasn't sir early he was often sarcastic telling journalists he collected monkey wrenches be drizzle was born in mexico and songs inspired by chaos, watermelons and clocks. that last line almost made him smile. by the time he arrived in london it was clear that the tour was taking a toll. the singer was skinny from

insomnia and killed. his nails were yellow from nicotine and his skin had a ghostly pale power. he looked like an underfed angel. for the first time his shows fell formulaic as if he were seeing the lines of someone else. the rarely acknowledged the audience or pause between songs. he seemed to be in a hurry to get offstage. before long it all became too much. scoring inning when he decided he was leading an impossible life. the only talent he cared about, his ceaseless creativity was being ruined by fame. the breaking point was after a brief vacation in portugal when he came down with a vicious case of food poisoning. the illness forced him to stay in bed for the week giving him a chance to reflect. i realize he was drained. hamas claims on that didn't want

to play. last shows were in london and he said he was quitting the music business. he was finished with singing and songwriting and was going to move to a tiny cabin in woodstock. he had become a pop icon but was ready to renounce it all. he rode his triumph motorcycle lot of new york city. he did not even bring his guitar. of course our story doesn't end here. bob dylan did not retire in 1965. every few relaxing days in woodstock just when he was most determined to stop creating music he was overcome with a familiar feeling. he would later remember a sense he had something to say so he did the only thing he knew how to do. he grabbed a pencil and started

to scribble. once he began his hand did not stop moving for several hours. i found myself writing this song, this long piece of obama 20 pages long. i had never been anything like that before and it came to me that this is what i should do. he is describing the uncontrollable rush of a creative in sight. words that can't be held back. i don't know where my songs come from. like a ghost is writing a song. it gives you the song and it goes away. you don't know what it means. once the ghost arrived he just wanted to get out of the way. in retrospect this frantic composition allow him to fully express for the very first time the full diversity of his influences. in these lyrics we can hear his mental blender at work as he mixes together scraps of selena,

we need guthrie and robert johnson. songs as modernist and free modern, avant-garde and country western. this is why he is bob dylan. he found a strange threat connecting different voices. in those frantic first minutes of writing he found a way to make something new out of this list of influences drying them together into a catchy song. when he gets to the core and he knows this is the course when he committed to paper, the visceral power of the song becomes obvious. how does it feel to be without a home like a complete unknown leaders like a rolling stone? the following week on june 15th, 1965, he brings a sheaf of paper to the cramped space of studio a at columbia records. after if four takes the musicians are only beginning to learn their parts like rolling stone is cut on acetate. those six minutes of raw music would revolutionize rock-and-roll. bruce springsteen described his

single on the radio as one of the most important moments of his life. the story of like a rolling stone, the reason i'm telling you about bob dylan tonight is because it is a great story of an insight. it captures a moment of insight. at times such stories feel like romantic cliches. the make believe breakthroughs that happens to archimedes and newton under the apple tree and yet insights do happen. they are a genuine mental event. they are responsible for the theory of gravity and like a rolling stone. in recent years psychologists and neurosciences have tried to understand the mystery of these moments. why these he tiffany's come was when we do and it turns out there are two defining features of such moments. the first is the answer comes when you least expect it. we write our best song when we have given up songwriting. the second key finding feature as soon as the answer arrived it feels like the answer so the

solution is attached to this sense of certainty. it is not clear how one could study such moments. you can't put undergrad and a brain scanner and have an epiphanies. we are ready for you. that would be an inefficient way to collect data. what scientists had to do was generate lots of moments of insight on the fly. i am talking about mark beamon at northwestern. a set of word problems called compound remote a soviet problems. the acronym is a bit unfortunate -- crap. i will give you treat reword and find one that form the compound word. we will do the first one together. the three words are pine, crab and soft. the answer is apple.

pineapple, crabapple, applesauce. apple is the insight. if it pops into your head you had a moment of insight. three words are age, mile, send. it is almost certainly end in sight. popped into consciousness. you were not shy about shouting it out because you knew it was the answer. didn't have to make sure -- nothing ----check the word you knew. we had a collective moment of insight. the first thing discovered when they would give students these compound remote a soviet problems was they show a sharp spike in activity in a part of the brain called the interior sir. temporal gyrus. a bit of cortex in the back of your right hemisphere just behind the ear. nobody knows much about it. was previously associated with the processing of jokes.

people for a punch line this makes a little bit of sense. watching romeo and juliet and romeo declares juliet is the son it personally is a metaphor. juliet lights up his words the way the sun makes up hours. we don't make a list of all the things juliet and sons have in common because they have nothing in common. it makes sense but looking past the similarities and looking for the underlying theme remote associations actually share. that is what it takes to understand a metaphor. similar mental process is required when we try to solve a compound remote associate problem. we never used-crab and sauce in a sentence before. those words don't go together frequently.

one area is finding one another word which in this case is apples that connects these three words so would find the same fragile thread of connection between seemingly unrelated nouns, ideas eager to associations. when you need a big breakthrough struggling with a very hard problem you are probably going to need some remote associations. you need to bind together ideas that seem to be completely unrelated and completely disconnected and that is where the interior superior temporal gyrus comes to hand. the importance of this bit of cortex in the back of your right hemisphere, brought people up to an e g machine and measures the ways of electricity pouring out of your head. and in conjunction with the team of scientists at university college that they could predict to eight seconds in advance whether someone would have a

moment of insight. they could look at your e g waves and say you are wasting your time. you should just go home. you could sit here all day and won't have an insight. or they could say brace yourself. seven second there's a pretty good chance you may have an epiphanies. crucial question is what is predictive signal is. turned out to be something called alpha of waves. like most things alpha waves are pretty mysterious. they're closely associated with states of relaxation. things that reliably induce an outpouring of alpha waves are things like taking a warm shower, going for a walk on the beach, taking a nap on the couch, drinking beer and watching television. whatever it is you do that puts your mind at ease and gets you to stop thinking about work chances are involves production of alpha waves. the reason the state of relaxation are so important is

when we are not relax and really focused and vigilant our attention out here is consumed by the noise of the world. we are obsessed with the problem so the problem of pine crab and sauce is like a broken record and ends up with a wrong answer which is a big block sitting at the front of consciousness. a common wrong answer is free. we can't get past 3. the problem seems impossible. until we are relaxed and taking a shower or shampooing our hair and alpha waves are turning the spotlight of attention in words and at long last we hear the quiet voice from the back of are head from the interior sir. temporal gyrus which spring the answer apple. maybe the answer has been there for hours and days or weeks. we didn't give ourselves a chance to listen. there's something

counterintuitive. most people assume when faced with a difficult problem what they should do is just some red bull or do whatever they need to do to chain themselves to the desk to continue staring straight ahead. when the problem seems impossible go on vacation, drink a beer and go for a long walk. the answer will only arrive after we stopped looking for it. when i -- my favorite quote from albert einstein is creativity is the residue of time wasted. we need to get better at wasting time. i wish i could stand up here and tell you the way to solve every creative problem is to take a

long shower. that relaxation was the universal cure and alpha waves are always the right approach the that is not good. creators believe in a flash of revelation. this so-called inspiration shining down from heaven as a ray of grace but this is often a lie. in reality all great artists and thinkers are great workers. to prove his point he described beethoven's musical notebooks which documented the composer's painstaking process of inventing a melody. wasn't on, and for him to go through 70 versions of a single musical phrase before settling on the final one and make many changes. even beethoven had to refine his ideas struggling with his music until the beauty shown through. let's not sugarcoat.

this rejecting process isn't fun. it is the red hen on the page, look fresh prototype and failed first draft. nevertheless such a merciless process is often our only way forward. we keep on thinking and paying attention because that next thought might be the answer. what b find this creativity? turns out to be largely defined by a psychological trait called grid. we the people on the far right side of the bell curve. creators like bob dylan and pablo picasso and steve jobs. at first glance it is not clear what is special. give them an iq test and they will look pretty normal. often not smarter than the rest of this and a battery of personality tests and it is not quite clear what makes them unique because they are pretty standard personalities. little more open to experience but that is about it. i would argue really what the

find these productive creators, these people we are also jealous of is they are greedier than the rest of us. more persistent and more stubborn. they simply refuse to quit. i am reminded of j k rowing and suffered 12 rejections from publishers but kept on writing about this with your in coffee shops while her little baby daughter napped. that to me defines grit. the best way to explain is a story about supermarket cashiers. in the early 1980s paul said it decided to figure out which cashiers in a supermarket in a variety of supermarket chains, which cashiers were the fastest so came up with a simple test that the ten minutes to complete. gave people items, check out as many items as possible in the

next ten minutes. these people are motivated to go fast and want to perform well so you hold motivation content and see what people are capable of. what they're catchier talent is capable of. that is what he did. this simple can minute test to hundreds of cashiers in different supermarket chains and sure enough got the standard bell curve of human performance where some cashiers were much faster than others. some could check out a lot more items in ten minutes. i figured out which are the fastest and found a way to measure the checkout speed of supermarket cashiers but then kept thinking about it and realized about this time electronic scanners were being introduced across the country and realized if i got access to the scanner data i wouldn't need to give them this test. would need to take of their time but look at scanner data and see which cashier's check out the

most people over the course of hours or a day or week so he got access to the data and another bell curve of human performance where some cashier's check out a lot more people and a lot more items over the course of the typical working day. then he hit the bright idea to see if there was a correlation between these bell curve. when he discovered to his shock is the correlation was easily zero. it was statistically indistinguishable from nothing. there was no correlation between this maximal test, this ten minute test of cashiers and on the other hand this measure of typical performance how these can she is did when they didn't think anyone was watching. this is the typical typical maximal distinction and it is a pretty important problem. we live in a world obsessed with maximal tasks from the i.q. test to the s.a.t. which determines what college we can go to. we assume when you want to measure someone's potential you give them a short quiz.

and yet in so many situations in example after example we find these maximal tests failed to predict what really matters which is performance in the real world. perfect example of maximal tests fail comes from the nfl combine which is this two day carnival of maximal tests every player has to go to. it is the 40 yard dash and vertical leaps and bench presses. the assumption seems like a reasonable assumption is players who do well at the combine will do better in the pros because they have more in a physical talent. they are better athletes. less year two economist at the university of utah decided to see if this was true. if the combine predicted anything about performance in the pros and they discovered the nfl combine was a gigantic waste of time and money. every test failed to predict anything at all about performance in the pros. the sole exception was the 40

r---yard dash. the reason they failed to predict what matters is what they can't measure and that is character traits like grit. it is a new character traits identified by a psychologist that can and it represents two separate things. the first is how committed you are to a bowl. have you always wanted to write that novel, become an actor, sold this scientific problem? is that something that has long obsess you? the second thing it tries to measures when working towards that goal how stubborn are you? when you separate the inevitable failure and frustration are those a sign you should try something new or that you should double down and work even harder? those are the two things great attempts to measure. that you first pioneered at west point because west point have a

problem that every year in the first six weeks of west point that are tough and you wake up and get your hair shaved and turn a squishy citizen into a hard soldier. 5% of cadets dropped out and west point was trying for years to predict retention. that these maximal tests nothing predicted it. duckworth identified and gives everyone this grid survey you can take on her website. the first test that allows west point to predict retention. they have been using every year. duckworth has gone on to show in so many different fields and domains from 12-year-old to the national spelling bee to teachers in teach for america that bridge is the most predicted variable you can look at. of trying to predict which 12-year-old will win the spelling bee the one with the highest i.q. score were the best grades grit is particularly important when it comes creativity. creativity is never easy. if it were easy the idea what already exists. the product already been invented.

the book would already have been written. creativity always involve lots of failures and drafts and iterations. is never easy. woody allen said creative success, 80% of creative success is simply showing up. grit allows you to show up again and again. so far i have been attempting to describe these two distinct forms of creativity which depend on very distinct mental processes in the brain. the more practical lesson is different kinds of creative problems benefit from a different kind of creative thinking. the question is how to adjust our thought process to the task at hand. when should we daydream and take warm showers and when should we drink another cup of coffee? what requires relaxation and what requires grit? the good news is the human mind has a natural ability to diagnose problems and assess the kind of creativity we need.

these assessments have an eloquent name. they are called feelings of knowing. they occur whenever we suspect we can find the answer if only we keep thinking about the question. one of my favorite examples of knowing is one word is on the tip of your tongue. frustrating mental moment. walking down the street and you see someone. a distant acquaintance from high school or remote friend on facebook and you know you know their name but can't place it. it always kill me. i hate it and yet it is kind of profound because how do you know you know something if you don't actually know it? why are you so convinced the memory is here like an overstuffed file cabinet if you can't remember it? this return subsidies mysterious feelings of knowing. that tip of the tunnel sensation. as annoying as it is, a hunch reminding you if you keep searching for the name the next ten and its eventual you will find it.

it is somewhere inside your head. when it comes to creative problem-solving, feelings of knowing our important advantage. numerous studies demonstrate when it comes to problems that don't require in sight for one of these big remote associations, the mind is remarkably accurate at assessing a likelihood that a problem can be solved. we grant it a question and we know the answer is within our reach if only we put in the work. the end result is we are motivated to stay focused on the challenge. what makes these feelings of knowing more useful so they become attached to sense of progress, this was demonstrated by janet metcalf at columbia university who had people working on creative problems. whether they felt they getting closer or warmer to the solution. when the subject of working on problems that were typically sold in moments of insight they reported no increase in warmth until the answer appeared. they went from freezing cold to burning hot. there was no feeling of knowing.

in contrast metcalf put down problems that required insights. typically answered only after people reported a gradual increase in warmth which reflected their own sense of progress. what is impressive and amazing about such estimates is people were able to assess their closeness to a solution without knowing what the solution was. this ability to calculate progress is a very important part of the creative process. when we don't feel we're getting closer to the answer we have hit the wall. we need an insight. in these instances we should rely on the right hemisphere which excels at revealing remote associations focusing on the problem will be a waste of mental resources. we will simply stare at our computer screen and repeat our failures. we should find a way to relax. the most productive thing we can do is forget about work. however, when the feelings of knowing are telling us we're

getting closer than we need to keep on struggling. we should continue to pay attention until it hurts to rely on those muscles of grit. before long that feeling of knowing will become actual knowledge. so far i have been talking about individual creativity, how we invent and how we should invent when we are alone. i would like to spend my remaining time talking about creative collaboration. interesting evidence suggests these collaborations are becoming more important. best demonstrated by the work of ben jones. an economist at northwestern. twenty million peer reviewed science papers over the course of the 20th century and go back to 1950. decades after world war ii. the most important papers in his field. most highly cited papers were almost always the product of a single author. a lone genius who all by themselves shifted the paradigm

all by themselves. think of einstein, darwin, people like that. in the 1990s the digital no longer the case. what jones has found these teens, co-authors, big academic collaborations are almost always responsible for these papers. this trend is accelerating by 20% every decade. the reason this trend exists is pretty simple. our problems are no longer the case. many of these problems that remain exceed the capabilities of imagination. how should we work together? what is the best template for group creativity? there's lots to say on this subject. don't rainstorm. whatever you do don't brainstorm. very bad idea.

seeking the input of outsiders, people who are able to see more because they know a little bit less. but i the to focus on a single scene in group collaboration which is the importance of spaces that bring a diverse mixture of people together. physical spaces that brings us together. one of my favorite examples is the picks are studios designed by steve jobs when he was head of the animation studio. the or original plan for the picks are studio called for three buildings. they bought this beautiful parcel of land, three separate buildings. one would feed the animators and won the computer scientists. one would be for everyone else. riders, directors, editors and so on. steve jobs said this is a terrible idea. wheat for them up. he insisted that there be only one big the building. keep the old cannon factory, the shell of it that was on site. not enough to put people in the same building. you have to force them to

interact. he carved out a beautiful atrium and started putting everything important in the atrium. he put the mailbox and coffee shop and cafe and gifts for their. he realized even that is not enough. he built a beautiful cafe and served less food. computer scientist would still just talk with computer scientists and animators would have lunch with animators. they would be forced to share knowledge and success of a company like pixar depends on whether or not these different cultures can interact. whether the animators are seeking to learn every day from computer scientists and vice versa. jobs at his idea that there are two bathrooms in the entire studio. this is the big studio. he put those back rooms in the atrium. at first everyone thought this was the worst idea. it takes five minute walking

from end to end to go to the bathroom. it is so inefficient. i am spending an hour every day walking to the bathroom. there has to be a more efficient way. now you hear these bathroom epiphanies stories talking about the great conversation they had while washing their hands or the unexpected encounter that led to this new idea that they bumped into this stranger in the hall when walking to the bathroom. it is the human friction that makes this park and the genius of steve jobs interior design was all about maximizing the human fraction. there is nice empirical support for this coming from a study led by isaac kohen at harvard. he said 35,000. the papers by other harvard researchers mapping out the location of every single co-author. what he discovered was physical location matters. when co-authors were located closer together their papers

tended to be of higher quality as measured by subsequent citations. the best research was consistently produced when scientists were working within ten meters of each other and the worst tended to emerge in collaboration more than a kilometer apart. in other words our most important new ideas don't arrive on the screen. rather they emerge from idle conversation. from too many people sharing too small a space. it is a little surprising. go back 15 years and you heard people constantly declaring the death of geography. thanks to these wonderful new tools we have, e-mail, skype, video chats we no longer need to live in cities. we no longer need to commute to office buildings. we can just telecommute. it would be so much easier. but that hasn't happened. the opposite happened. cities are more valuable than ever. more people are moving to cities

than ever before. since the invention of skype attendance at business conferences has nearly doubled. in this day and age when we can interact and share information remote we we have this intuition that we have to meet in the flesh. we have to have those incidental conversations, random encounters. online tools, they are wonderful. i use them all the time but there about maximizing efficiency, making our lives easier. creativity isn't about to eat fish and sea. creativity is about serendipity and that requires these accidental encounters in the flesh. the last night the i've liked to end with is a provocative one and it speaks directly to the difficulty of fostering innovation. suggests many of the things we do with the best of intentions from brainstorming meetings to

innovation that they get in the way. they hinder our ability -- the spirit of physicists-he is interested in why some cities have more patterns per-capita than others as why crime is lower in some cities than others and correlate and help predict those differences. one of my favorite points has to do with the difference between companies and cities. he enjoys pointing from a certain perspective companies and cities look very similar. they look large conglomerations of big clusters of people in a fixed physical space and yes -- companies and cities have one interesting difference which is cities never die. cities are indestructible.

you can nuke a city ended flat comes back. terrible earthquake and the city will still bounceback. companies on the other hand are incredibly fragile and fleeting. they dial the time. the average lifespan of a fortune 100 company. they la huge multinational firms weekend that life without the average life span is 45 years. twenty% of fortune 5 funded companies die every decade. what explains the difference? why are cities in moral and companies so fragile? collective -- that is one explanation. west takes a slightly different tack. what he found is as cities get bigger they exhibit the interesting trend called super landscape. as cities get bigger everyone in the city becomes more productive. they make more money and invent more trademarks by every metric you look at. when people moved to bigger

cities and the cities get bigger those people become more productive. this is one of the big trends. by the end of the 20 first century a.d.% of the world will live in big metropolitan areas. when we are around other people we have random conversations while waiting at the sidewalk, all that friction and spillover and everyone's and while all those bumps add up. they lead to a good deal. companies exhibit the opposite trend. as companies get bigger they have some linear scaling. everyone in the company becomes less productive. less profit per capita. less profit per employee. fewer patents for employee. fewer trade marks per employee. over the long run it is a dangerous trend because you keep getting bigger. wall street says you have to get bigger. grow the bottom line. yet you get bigger fixed costs that you're coming up with fewer new ideas for every new

employee. you are more dependent on old ideas and in gauge expensive acquisitions for your new ones and old ideas don't work anymore. all of a sudden you are stuck with expensive bureaucracy and no good ideas. that is when companies go belly up. what explains this difference? wire cities superlinear and make us more creative and companies do the opposite? because companies get in the way. they erect walls and silo knowledge and tell us to brainstorm. they try to micromanage the creative process. and it leads to good ideas and block serendipity. these free-wheeling chaotic places. they let us do our thing.

he can tell us where to live or who to talk to but that is a good thing. they have that friction. to manage us, and the thing about the creative process is can't be managed like that. was a advice is simple? when in doubt, imitate the city. in closing, i would like to point out the imagination has always seems like a magic trick of matter which is why we have always blamed our best ideas on the uses. by finally understanding where creativity comes from where our new ideas come from we can have a few more of them. we can make ourselves a little bit more creative but we must also be honest. the creative process will never be easy no matter how much we know about neurons and cities.

the imagination is not on power point slide and can't be summarized in a subtitle. creativity with that easy bob dylan wouldn't be so famous. clever studies and rigorous experiments are most essential talent remains our most mysterious. the mystery is this. although the imagination is inspired by the everyday world, by its flaws and duties we are able to see beyond our sources and imagines things that only exist in the mind. there was nothing, now there's something. almost like a magic. thank you for your time and attention. thank you for coming. we have time for questions. thank you very much. thank you. thank you very much. [applause] >> microphone for the question and answer period. raise your question and wait for the mike to come to you. we will take the first one over

here. >> hi. you make very compelling arguments and you are really funny. good evening. brainstorming, i haven't read the part yet where you disproved it but i heard you on npr. my experience in the corporate brainstorming is it was the beginning of collaboration. if you just put things on the board and then leave. but if it is the beginning of a way of doing ambience or having ambiance of creativity and openness there's some collaboration. would you comment on that? >> really good point. if one were to use brainstorming as a morale booster, way to foster a more communal ambiance in the office than i am all in favor of it. if it is a few good technique that is about making us feel good that is great. the problem is too many people use brainstorming as an idea generation task which is held as originally pitched and sold.

brainstorming was invented by an ad executive named alex osborn. in a series of best-selling business books in the 1940s and 50s he outlines amazing new creativity technique called brainstorming. two simple rules. first rule was whatever you do you don't criticize. imagination is very meek and shy and if it is criticized it will clammed up. it won't free associate at all. quantity and quality. these two simple rules were great at unleashing ideas. they were the best way to generate new ideas in a group. as i point out in this book the empirical evidence on brainstorming is pretty clear that brainstorming as an idea generation cast gleefully means of getting great ideas on the board doesn't work. people in study after study come up with better ideas when they were alone on a problem than when they come together and

brainstorming. it is less than the sum of our part. the reason it doesn't work gets us to the first rule which is now shall not criticize because it turns out -- uc-berkeley, constructed criticism is good for us. that it unleashes the imagination. when you bring together groups and one group engaged in brainstorming and another engaging in debate and dissent. you encourage them to debate the ideas of others. those that debate and dissent these subjects do stuff like come up with ways to reduce traffic in the bay area. those debate and dissent come up with new ideas and those ideas are better as well as rated by a panel of judges. that is the reason debate and dissent is a good thing from the perspective of the imagination. when we are free associating by ourselves and all ideas are good ideas and there is no criticism,

the superficial surface of the imagination. most free associations are pretty baal. if i ask people to free associate on the color blue the first answer will be green followed by ocean. if you are creative you may get to jeans. our free association is bound by language and language is full of clichess where criticism comes in. when people are in a group in beijing in debate and dissent they dig deeper and are surprised and fully engage and listening to other people and actually awake. that is a good thing. we are going to come up with better ideas and take the vantage of the fact the we are not working by ourselves but working in a group. brainstorming as a morale booster i am all for it. as a means of getting people to spend time with each other is great. as an idea generation cast it needs to be replaced.

>> a second one over here. >> thank you. my name is daniel. what is your opinion on the emergence of incubator that special the -- how do they process creativity innovation? maximize learning? >> they are a great idea. they build on a long standing tradition in silicon valley in the bay area. one thing jeffrey west found is silicon valley has for decades ever since the end of world war ii vet accretive place. san jose region on a per caught farmers selling venting patents at an absurd clip. one explanation when you talk to urban theorists is san jose has been great at fostering horizontal -- always good at bringing together people from different companies and different domains to have beers at cafes. a club where steve jobs

convinced them to launch apple and they brought the ear of the prototypes of the first-ever computer to the computing club and solicited advice from people in all sorts of different companies. that is great for creativity. money comes to these incubators and they do the same thing to set an accelerated pace. one of the lessons one gets when you are trying to figure out why do some entrepreneurs, what is their secret of success? what separates them from the less innovative and successful ones? one of my favorite studies was by a sociologist at princeton who tracked 766 graduates of stanford business school who had started their own companies at silicon valley and what he found is those entrepreneurs, and drop back social network. a circle of friends. of computer programmers and other computer programmers also went to stanford and made time

to spend time with microbiologists from somewhere else. electrical engineers and people from different backgrounds who spoke different languagess that use different acronyms and those with social networks that were three times more innovative than those with predicted social networks. measured innovation in the number of patents and how much money they made and so on. one thing those incubators' do is force us to mingle with people from all sorts of different places who no different things and expose us to lot of ideas. steve jobs has this line about creativity is just connecting things and so many of those connections will come from other people watch as why is important to seek out diversity and genuine intellectual diversity. >> one up here? thanks. >> i want to follow up on the previous question about brainstorming and that is if you could say something more about

the emotional environment. what i have heard is this do not criticize part of brainstorming is about reducing the fear level because you can engage in dissent and debate but if there's a level of fear and intimidation or of 40, authority, that cuts off. >> there's not a neat answer to this. this person that picks are -- x --pixar the review footage from days and weeks before and a large group of five or 50 people proceeds to be constructed it. find ways to make it better. is not a classic brainstorming session. it is all about criticism and finding those flaws and fixing them. that is often a difficult process. sometimes you get your feelings hurt.

sometimes it will involve being scared before you open your mouth and i don't think there are any companies that have mastered the approach yet. they use an approach called plusing. when you criticize an idea you can't just tear it down. you have to make it better. they borrow this from improv. the yes and technique. that does help. that is one way to reduce the fear level land it is not a panacea. you still have moments when you probably lose some ideas to the inevitable anxiety. you don't want to get criticized. a natural reaction. a lot of work remains to be done in figuring out how to replace brainstorming and create a corporate culture that isn't intimidating, isn't too caustic. i don't think there's a clear answer yet. i do think we also need to be honest that creativity requires trade offs. we could go into a room and no one's feelings get hurt and we

would be just as effective. it would be great if we are just as creative and don't walk ten minutes to the bathroom. one of the lessons of a place like pixar is true innovation requires trade offs. one of my favorite quotes in the book is from the director of police story iii. he said too many companies are obsessed with the absence of failure. picks are -- pixar knows that creating something innovative will result in a lot of favor. no success like failure. the goal at pixar is fail as fast as possible. how do you fail as fast as possible? identifying failures quickly. that is where criticism is essential. the goal of the group is not to minimize fear or make everyone feel good. the goal is recent people come

together. the reason they collaborate is to identify those failures and guidry those failures and repeat the process for four years or five years and at the end you have a good 90 minutes cartoon. that will involve some unpleasant moments too and we should sugarcoat that. >> one last question here. >> i have heard it said that the u.s. educational system is good at fostering creativity compared to other countries. i am wondering if you think that is true. if so, how does it? what was good about it and what can be improved? >> in general i am pretty skeptical of the generalization of what countries are good at creativity and which aren't. and tracing it to the educational system. i think there is so much to learn about what creativity is. we don't know how the to measure it at all which is why we try to isolate steve jobs from brain scan or bob dylan.

we would be befuddle. look at albert einstein's brain and it looks very normal. so much about creativity. tough to make those cross-cultural generalizations. in terms of whether the u.s. educational system is good at fostering creativity, i am not sure i would go there unfortunately. i would be pretty good at killing at. the good news about teaching kids creativity is kids are born creative. we are all born wanting to draw. wanting to put the mind on page. to express what is inside here. you talk to educated sir reference to the fourth grade slump which is about in fourth grade were kids lose this interest in spontaneous creation and drawing and painting and writing poetry and writing short stories. that is because it seems about that age they realize one can make mistakes. you can draw the long line on

the page. focusing on fourth and fifth grade this crucial window that we have to focus energies here and make sure we don't kill creativity. it is not lost in this crucial transition that kids continue to innovate and want to create even in sixth grade. that is one thing we have to do. we also in terms of how to change the educational system have to expand our notion of what productivity looks like. this narrow vision of what it means to be a good thinker and that is to focus. serve straight ahead. one of the first lessons we teach. stop staring at the window. stop daydreaming. focus. in many tasks in many situations focus is essentials but when it comes to creativity we have to be honest that it will involve lots of as einstein put it

wasted time. lots of daydreaming. lots of talking out of turn. a hard problem is how to incorporate that in the classroom. if i were a teacher i would not want that in my classroom. that would make life a lot more difficult. but if you are interested in fostering creativity, coming up with a culture that is more creative we have to learn to embrace people who think differently. interesting studies on a the hd --adhd which is a disability that deserves to be treated but when you look at high functioning people, with adhd their more likely to become creative achievers and this is true in the whole range of the spectrum. people with low leighton inhibition which means they are distractable. when the air-conditioner turns on can look up or when they hear a cocktail party or here an interesting conversation they

can't help but eavesdrop. they're always being summoned by something over here and over here. we see that as a liability. it is harder to concentrate. work done by jordan at harvard university. his explanation is when you are distracted will, remote -- districtable most distractions are waste of time you will see that and try to bring it here and there will be no relevant connection and your job is to get rid of it as quickly as possible but every once in awhile one of those distractions that you can't help but take into account some unexpected source of information every once in awhile will lead to a really good new idea. one of the things we have to do as a society, as a culture is there's no single way we shall

always be thinking. sometimes what we need to do is daydream. simply stare at the window. that is where the best idea will arrive. thank you for coming. thank you very much. [applause] >> is there a nonfiction offer or book you would like to see featured on booktv? send us an e-mail at booktv@c-span.org or tweak as at twitter.com/booktv. here is a look at the upcoming book fairs and festivals across the country. the south carolina book festival will be in columbia, south carolina from may 18th to the 20th. it features 70 authors, writing classes and panel discussions. the same weekend, maryland hosts the book festival. booktv will be live with many authors including gary crisp and adam andfeel. book expo america is in new york city june 4th through the sixth.

it will feature of their breakfasts and several panel discussions. look for coverage of this festival in the future on booktv. on june 9th and tenth booktv will be live from chicago. for more details about coverage check our web site at booktv.org. and for upcoming lists visit booktv.org and click on the book fares tap the top of the page. please let us know about book fairs and festivals in your area and we will add them to our list. e-mail us at booktv@c-span.org. sunday on q&a. >> i don't regard this as the biography of lyndon johnson. i want each book to examine the political power in america. this is a kind of political power. seeing what a president can do in a time of great crisis, how he gathers and what does he do

to get legislation moving, that is a way of examining power. i want to do this in full. it takes 300 pages. so i couldn't -- i said let's examine this. >> the passage of power. the years of lyndon johnson. his multi body biography of the 36th president at 8:00 on c-span's q&a and look for the second hour of conversation sunday, may 20th. >> we are very proud today to have c-span in the state of oklahoma to show off our great state and we're looking forward to to the communication and c-span doing all we can to highlight some of the wonderful traditions, culture and history and great progress we have made. >> with the help of cox communication cable partners we bring you to oklahoma city on

booktv. coming up in the next two hours we will visit local bookstores and talk with offers about a wide variety of books and topics focusing on current events and american history. >> even if we pass this bill, the battle will not be over. what happened is part of a larger movement that reaches and every section and state of america. >> in a moment the triumph of voting rights in the south with keith gatti. >> the most significant piece of federal legislation ever passed. the only federal law that allows the national government to suspend a state law in order to protect the rights of individuals on the fourteenth amendment. >> in 30 minutes for u.s. senator and current university of oklahoma president david boren talks about his book