Matt Richtel - Inspired: Understanding Creativity: A Journey Through Art, Science, and the Soul

In the beginning, as the biblical story goes, darkness was upon the face of the deep. Pitch black, everyplace. Quiet, natural, desolate, but roiling with emerging life. Organisms competed to survive, innovative by their very nature, mutating new forms of cells, giving rise to more advanced combinations of traits, developing hearts and lungs, protective fur, powerful sight, claws, arms and legs that eventually let them stand upright, one baby step after the next until there was an actual baby step. By a human being. Still, there was darkness, at least at night, until... Aha!, a person discovered how to create fire. And it was good.

Then, others found inspirations drawing pictures on the cave wall, made visible in the firelight; the paintings stirred emotions, as did the songs people wrote and sang around the flame. The creations came naturally, spurred by deep primal urges as visceral as hunger. And they became more refined with craftsmanship. They were beautiful, ingenious, sometimes dangerous.

Fire could rage out of control and a village or forest burn down. So other people eventually came up with buckets for water and then fire hoses, and salves for burns, and antibiotics for healing. One creation built on the next, little inspirations mixed with skill becoming like magnets drawing other ideas, a virtuous cycle. Often with a curious twist.

Many of the new creations posed new problems later known by a phrase that someone coined: unintended consequences. Think of the combustion engine, which allowed us to travel farther and faster in cars but had the unintended consequence of causing many people to die in road collisions andaha! a new ideaseat belts, and they were good. Then the exhaust from the cars led to climate change and a person came up with the battery-powered Tesla. And it was really good, especially when it self-parked. And the scientists begat solar technology, abundant energy extracted from rays of sunlight. But what about all those displaced coal workers? What discoveries would help them, the legions feeding their families from mining fossil fuels?

This book is the story of human creationa rolling series of inspirations, little, medium, and immense, virtually all their creators lost to history. This is natures call-and-response: rising challenges and new solutions, creation and disruption and creation again. It is the story of how we create, and how any of us can. How you might.

There are many troubling things in the world today. This book is the good news. Its about hope. The marvelous accident of persistent creativity. The promise that new ideas will come again and again, as inevitable as the ocean waves and the up and down path of the sun.

This isnt philosophy, or esoteric science. This is personal. This is about the inspirations stirring in each of usfor a business, screenplay, recipe, community program, political movement, painting, phone app, technological advance, new medicine, or song; heck, for that matter, perhaps an entire musical? Why not?

Because its just a germ. Because would-be creators are afraid, feel they lack expertise or that the idea doesnt exist for a reason, that it sounds nuts when said aloud. Because people are taught to color inside the lines. Because, in a way, the act of creativity is terrifying.

Just about every creator has been there. They feel a spark, an urge, a calling, the muse. Or they realize theyd felt it all along and they give in to it, embrace it, and they createoften with an abandon of self-fulfillment and joy unknown in virtually any other pursuit. Sometimes they change the world.

Where do these ideas come fromthe creative force behind art, science, music, business, technology? How do they become something new? Not from any miracle and not merely from luck or hard work. Inspiration, innovation, and experimentcreation and the creative process go by many namescan all be explained by biology, neurology, and other basic sciences. Creativity was inside of us all alonginside each of usin the beginning. From darkness, creativity lights the way forward, as it has done over and again in the past. It is in us now, especially now, in crisis, even chaos. This book is about how it works.

Our story starts in Jerusalem.