The Imagination Is Unleashed By

What You Discover When You Look At Creativity From The Perspective Of The Brain Is That It Is Universal. We're All Creative All Of The Time, We Can't Help But Be Creative.

Knowledge Can Be A Subtle Curse. When We Learn About The World, We Also Learn All The Reasons Why The World Cannot Be Changed. We Get Used To Our Failures And Imperfections. We Become Numb To The Possibilities Of Something New

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 Know When We Are Angry; Every Emotional State Comes With Self-awareness Attached, So That An Individual Can Try To Figure Out Why He's Feeling What He's Feeling. If The Particular Feeling Makes No Sense—if The Amygdala Is Simply Responding To A Loss Frame, For Example—then It Can Be Discounted. The Prefrontal Cortex Can Deliberately Choose To Ignore The Emotional Brain.

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. When You Believe Your Flaws Will Be Quickly Corrected By The Group, You're Less Worried About Perfecting Your Contribution, Which Leads To A More Candid Conversation. We Can Only Get It Right When We Talk About What We Got Wrong.

Cities Force Us To Interact With Strangers And With The Strange. They Pry The Mind Open. And That Is Why They Are The Idea That Has Unleashed So Many Of Our New Ideas.