Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
This book is very underappreciated. Ogle translates some of the ideas I’ve been talking about into the world of business and creativity. He popularizes the work of philosopher Andy Clark, who says ideas don’t just exist in one head, but in a whole bunch of minds at once. Ogle argues that we’re embedded in “idea-spaces” and creativity comes from idea-spaces merging together. The simple illustration is Picasso, who existed in the culture of western art, but came across a separate culture, of African masks, and merged the two to create Cubism. Ogle’s book is about how that happens, ranging from Picasso to the invention of the personal computer.
I did notice that Nicholas Kristof, who, like you, is a political columnist for The New York Times, is also turning to neuroscience for explanations. So perhaps it is the way of the future. But what about your next book?
My next book is called Smart World and is by Richard Ogle, who is a private consultant and entrepreneur. And he takes some of these ideas that I’ve been talking about and translates them into the world of business and creativity. And his book is very underappreciated, I think. The other books I’ve chosen are very famous, but this one hasn’t got the attention it deserves.
Ogle is a populariser of the work of a philosopher named Andy Clark, who emphasises that ideas don’t just exist in one head, but they exist outside the mind, in a whole bunch of minds at once. And one of the traits of unconscious thinking is that we’re intensely social, we catch ideas and thoughts in ways we’re not consciously aware of from each other. According to Ogle, we’re embedded in what he calls ‘idea-spaces’, what most of us would call culture. So, for example, the simple illustration is Picasso, who existed in one culture, the culture of western art. He came across a separate culture, of African masks, and he really merged these two cultures to create Cubism. The creativity came from these two idea-spaces merging together. Ogle’s book is really about how that happens, ranging from Picasso to the invention of the personal computer.
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David Brooks is a columnist for the New York Times who writes about politics and American culture. He joined the Weekly Standard at its inception in 1995, and prior to that was op-ed editor at the Wall Street Journal. His books include Bobos in Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There and On Paradise Drive: How We Live Now (and Always Have) in the Future Tense. He argues that it will soon be hard to understand anything about the world around us without a knowledge of the unconscious workings of the brain. So we may as well make a start now, by reading the five books he recommends on neuroscience. The working title of his own book on the subject, due out in January 2011, is How Success Happens.
