WISH you were more creative? You don鈥檛 have to look far for tips. There鈥檚 an entire industry dedicated to helping you kindle your spark, replete with gurus offering novel ways to tap into your inner genius.
The industry has taken a biological turn of late, with neuroscientists claiming to have uncovered new perspectives on the genesis of creativity. That has given rise to more empirically based techniques, like deliberate daydreaming (see 鈥淒aydream your way to creativity鈥�).
This development has not gone unchallenged. Critics argue that it is arrogant 鈥渘euroscientism鈥� to imagine that lab studies and brain scans can possibly explain the insights of Bob Dylan or Albert Einstein.
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Perhaps they have a point. But what the neuroscience suggests is that creativity is an everyday phenomenon, and one that can be nurtured to less dramatic effect than such arguments evoke.
Smaller acts of innovation, the type we come up with all the time in our daily lives, may not seem much compared with the work of Dylan, Einstein, Jobs or Picasso. But they made our species what it is today. We should celebrate them, too.