Jonah Lehrer: Meta-Lessons - Fail Big, Grit, and Growing Up

For Jonah Lehrer: First we smirk, then we work.

by Don Mangus

“When I walked into the classroom of Silas Cooper, a drama teacher at the school, I couldn’t help but notice the handwritten banner hanging above the door. This is what it said: FAIL BIG.” – Jonah Lehrer, “The Shakespeare Paradox,” Imagine How Creativity Works

I greatly enjoyed Jonah Lehrer’s first two popular science books, Proust Was a Neuroscientist and How We Decide. These were written in a breezy Malcolm Gladwellesque style -- quick and fun reads, peppered with intriguing research-based observations.

I was dealt quite a surprise when I surfed over to Amazon to order his latest, Imagine How Creativity Works. Instead of finding a nicely discounted copy as expected, I found instead that the book ”was no longer available.” Frantically searching eBay and abe.com, the few copies I found listed were listed at sky-high collectible prices. How could this be? This was a brand new publication. Could the title really be that popular?

A quick fact-finding search on google revealed just the opposite. The book was now somewhat of a literary scandal – ashamedly recalled, and thus made in short supply. Apparently, according to his peers, Mr. Lehrer had taken unconscionable “journalistic shortcuts.” He “fabricated and fabulized” many of his quotes, and was also guilty of egregious blogging transgressions dubbed “self-plagarism.” Undaunted, I ordered the cheapest copy of the book I could find online. I wanted to read this book more than ever.

When it arrived, the back of the hard cover boasted two of the highest back-of-the-dust jacket accolades possible:

“Jonah Lehrer’s new book confirms what his fans have known all along – that he knows more about science than a lot of scientists and more about writing than a lot of writers.” – Malcolm Gladwell author of The Tipping Point and Outliers

“Jonah Lehrer may be the most talented explainer of science that we’ve got. His engrossing investigation of creativity and its sources makes Imagine his best book yet.” – Joshua Foer author of Moonwalking with Einstein

Ouch! After the scandal broke, such ringing endorsements might now feel a bit embarrassing to two of my all-time favorite science writers. As I read Imagine, I searched the text for clues as to what went through Jonah Lehrer’s mind -- why he took the “literary liberties” that led to his fall from grace. I think I found a few in these passages, mostly gleaned from his chapter titled “The Shakespeare Paradox” (bold emphasis mine).

(page 221) – “… But Shakespeare didn’t just read these texts and imitate their best parts: he made them his own, seamlessly blending them together in his plays. Sometimes this literary approach got Shakespeare into trouble. His peers regularly accused him of plagiarism, and he was often guilty, at least by contemporary standards. What these allegations didn’t take into account, however was that Shakespeare was pioneering a new creative method in which every conceivable source informed his art. For Shakespeare the art of creation was inseparable from the act of connection…”

(pages 246-7) -- “…But Dylan wasn’t just copying these tunes; his close study was an essential part of his creative method – learning an old song meant he was on the version of inventing a new one...

…One consequence is that virtually all of Dylan’s first seventy compositions from ’Blowin’ In the Wind’ to ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’, have clear musical precursors….

…T. S. Eliot said it best: ‘Immature poets imitate. Mature poets steal.’ Even at the age of twenty-one Dylan was a mature poet. He was already a thief.”

…What kind of culture have we created? Is it a world full of ideas that can be connected? Are we willing to invest in risk takers? Do our schools produce students ready to create?...

… We have to make it easy to become a genius.”

(pages 252-3) – “…The mystery is this: although the imagination is inspired by the everyday world – by its flaws and beauties – we are able to see beyond our sources, to imagine things that exist only in the mind. We notice an incompleteness and we can complete it; the cracks in things become a source of light…

…Every creative story is different. And every creative story is the same. There was nothing. Now there is something. It’s almost like magic.”

So it seems Jonah Lehrer took the “poetic license” and “incompleteness” parts of the creative process to heart with his “fabulized” quotes and research. He engaged in creative storytelling rather than hard-and-fast journalism or science. I for one, forgive him this sin. He certainly has FAILED BIG in the eyes of his peers.

However, I sincerely hope Mr. Lehrer will learn and recover from this “scandal” and write again. Science is always being revised anyway. I never regarded these popular science books as other than a stimulating source of wonder and inspiration.

In the grand scheme of things I prefer to save my slings and arrows for other “system gamers” such as self-serving, exempt-from-the-law Congressmen, do-nothing government watchdog agencies, and corrupt financial power brokers.

I will close my Imagine essay with some passages about persistence (or grit) and growing up from Jonah Lehrer’s book that I hope he will also take to heart.

(page 56) -- “…The reality of the creative process is that it often requires persistence, the ability to stare at a problem until it makes sense, It’s forcing oneself to pay attention, to write all night and then fix those words in the morning. It’s sticking with a poem until it’s perfect; refusing to quit on a math question…

… The answer won’t arrive suddenly, in a flash of insight. Instead, it will be revealed slowly, gradually emerging after great effort.”

(page 232-3) -- “…It doesn’t matter if people are playing jazz or writing poetry – if they want to be successful, they need to learn how to persist and persevere, how to keep working until the work is done…”

And finally,

(page 109) -- ‘’Picasso once summarized the paradox this way: ‘Every child is an artist. The problem is how to remain an artist once we grow up.”

Don’t quit, and keep writing, Mr. Jonah Lehrer. Remain an artist.

Jonah Lehrer's Imagine: The Pulled Book

I continue to enjoy reading the now-tragically ironic Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer. I guess he just created his quotes! I'm about halfway through it. I found this rather harsh passage on Wikipedia,

"A review of Imagine: How Creativity Works in The Washington Post said, 'Lehrer practices what he preaches, showing an appetite for learning, a determined effort to cross fields and disciplines, and a delight in exploring new possibilities.'

By contrast, The New Republic, called the book 'inaccurate,' 'simplistic,' and 'glib,' and concluded, 'Like Malcolm Gladwell and David Brooks, Lehrer writes self-help for people who would be embarrassed to be seen reading it.'

The New York Times published two reviews of Imagine. The first called Lehrer 'adept' at 'teasing out the social and economic implications of scientific theories while commuting easily among the realms of science, business and art. He deconstructs the creative process behind a Bob Dylan song with the same verve he brings to the story of how Procter & Gamble created the Swiffer, its New Age mop.'

But the second, in The New York Times Book Review, criticized Imagine for its 'many elementary errors' and 'formulaic' approach, as well as for 'Lehrer's failure to grasp some fundamental principles of scientific thinking.'

Before it was pulled from the shelves by the publisher, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Imagine was on the Los Angeles Times' hardcover nonfiction bestseller list for many weeks.^"

So, what's so embarrasing about reading self-help books, anyway? Personally, I rather enjoy some of them. I enjoyed reading Galdwell and Brooks' book as well. I personally think Jonah Lehrer should write another book, about this fall from grace and what he's learned from it!

Jonah Lehrer: How To Raise A Superstar

By Jonah Lehrer, Wired Science Blogs, August 24, 2010


(Note from Don: After his fall from grace Jonah Lehrer's old blogs now carry this disclaimer):

Editor's Note: Some work by this author has been found to fall outside our Editorial standards. Not all posts have been checked. If you have any comments about this post, please write to research@wired.com.

The 10,000 hour rule has become a cliche. This is the idea, first espoused by K. Anders Ericsson, a pyschologist at Florida State University, that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice before any individual can become an expert. The corollary of this rule is that that differences in talent reflect differences in the amount and style of practice, and not differences in innate ability. As Ericsson wrote in his influential review article “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance”: “The differences between expert performers and normal adults are not immutable, that is, due to genetically prescribed talent. Instead, these differences reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance.”

On the one hand, this is a deeply counter-intuitive idea. (It’s best articulated in Gladwell’s excellent Outliers and Daniel Coyle’s The Talent Code.) Although we pretend to be egalitarians, we really believe that the talented are naturally “gifted”. You and I can’t become chess grandmasters, or NBA superstars, or concert pianists, simply because we don’t have the necessary anatomy. Endless hours of hard work won’t compensate for our biological limitations. When fate was handing out skill, we got screwed.

And yet, the 10,000 hour rule also echoes a long-standing belief about how talent happens. Let’s call this the parable of Tiger Woods. The story goes something like this: When Tiger Woods was an infant, his dad, Earl, moved his high chair into the garage. This was where Earl practiced his golf swing, hitting balls into a soccer net after work. Tiger was captivated by the swift movement. For hours on end, he would watch his father smack hundreds of balls. When Tiger was nine months old, Earl sawed off the top of an old golf club. Tiger could barely walk – and he had yet to utter a single word – but he quickly began teeing off on the Astroturf next to his father. When Tiger was 18 months old, Earl started taking him to the driving range. By the age of three, Tiger was playing nine hole courses, and shooting a 48. That same year, he began identifying the swing flaws of players on the PGA tour. (“Look Daddy,” Tiger would say, “that man has a reverse pivot!”) He finally beat his father – by a single stroke, with a score of 71 – when he was eleven. At fifteen, he became the youngest player to ever win the United States Junior Amateur championship. At eighteen, he became the youngest player to ever win the United States Amateur championship, a title he kept for the next three years. In 1997, when he was only 21, Tiger won the Masters at Augusta by the largest margin in a major championship in the 20^th century. Two months later he became the number one golfer in the world.
The lesson of Tiger Woods is that the best way to become a superstar is to start young and get in those 10,000 hours as quickly as possible. That’s why Earl put a club in the hands of a toddler, and why Mozart was composing music before most of us can do arithmetic.

However, a series of recent studies by psychologists at Queen’s University adds an important wrinkle to the Tiger Woods parable. The scientists began by analyzing the birthplace of more than 2,000 athletes in a variety of professional sports, such as the NHL, NBA, and the PGA.  This is when they discovered something peculiar:  the percent of professional athletes who came from cities of fewer than a half million people was far higher than expected. While approximately 52 percent of the United States population resides in metropolitan areas with more than 500,000 people, such cities only produce 13% of the players in the NHL, 29% of the players in the NBA, 15% of the players in MLB, and 13% of players in the PGA.*
I can think of several different explanations for this effect, none of which are mutually exclusive. Perhaps kids in small towns are less likely to get distracted by gangs, drugs, etc.

Perhaps athletes outside of big cities go to better schools, and thus receive more attention from their high school coaches. Perhaps they have more access to playing fields. Perhaps they have a better peer group. The scientists summarize this line of reasoning in a recent paper: “These small communities may offer more psychosocially supportive environments that are more intimate. In particular, sport programs in smaller communities may offer more opportunities for relationship development with coaches, parents, and peers, a greater sense of belonging, and a better integration of the program within the community.”

But there’s another possible explanation for this effect, which was nicely summarized by Sian Beilock, a psychologist at the University of Chicago and author of the forthcoming Choke. She proposes that an important advantage of small towns is that they’re actually less competitive, thus allowing kids to sample and explore many different sports. (I grew up in a big city, and my sports career basically ended when I was 13. I could no longer compete with the other kids in my age group.) While conventional wisdom assumes that it’s best to focus on a single sport as soon as possible, and to compete in the most rigorous arena – this is the essential lesson of Tiger Woods – Beilock argues that that’s probably a mistake, both for psychological and physical reasons:

Sampling a variety of activities lowers the likelihood of burnout in one sport and increases children’s feelings of confidence because they get to see the results of their hard work in different settings. In addition, playing different sports lessens the occurrence of sports-related injuries that may end an athletic career. It’s common today for a 10-year-old baseball pitcher to need the tendon replacement surgeries for an injured elbow that were previously restricted to college and major league pitchers. This is the type of injury that sports medicine doctors argue is the direct result of arm overuse and sport specialization at too young an age.
Findings like the birthplace effect suggest that we need to rethink the idea that kids should receive year-round training in one sport early on. Although this early specialization certainly worked for Woods, for most kids, less sport-specific training seems to be the key to athletic success. Of course, this doesn’t mean limiting practice overall. Indeed, smaller cities offer more opportunities for unstructured play than larger cities, which results in more opportunities to hone general coordination, power, and athletic skills. These longer hours of play also allow kids to experience successes (and failures) in different settings, which likely toughens their attitudes in general.

This is a nice addendum to the 10,000 hour rule. While deliberate practice remains absolutely crucial, it’s important to remember that the most important skills we develop at an early age are not domain specific. (In other words, Tiger Woods is not using the same golf swing he relied on as a 5 year old.) Instead, the real importance of early childhood has to do with the development of general cognitive and non-cognitive traits, such as self-control, patience, grit, and the willingness to practice. This is also the lesson of a recent study on Australian football players:

The developmental histories of 32 players in the Australian Football League (AFL), independently classified as either expert or less skilled in their perceptual and decision-making skills, were collected through a structured interview process and their year-on-year involvement in structured and deliberate play activities retrospectively determined. Despite being drawn from the same elite level of competition, the expert decision-makers differed from the less skilled in having accrued, during their developing years, more hours of experience in structured activities other than Australian football.

What Beilock suggests is that the most important skills for success – the domain general traits that allow us to persist in the face of challenges and perform under pressure – are more likely to emerge when we pursue a variety of athletic activities at a young age, which tends to happen in smaller communities. (Big cities, in contrast, encourage a more single-minded focus, since any particular sport is more competitive.) We won’t be good at all of these sports, but that’s probably a good thing. The struggle will make us stronger.

*According to the researchers, the location of our birth matters much more than several other celebrated correlations, such as the “January effect” in which kids born in the first months of the year are more likely to excel in sports.

On Jonah Lehrer; Corbett: ‘I think we should all stop using the term “self-plagiarism”

I must admit, when I first read of this debacle, I was puzzled by the charge of "self-plagarism" leveled at the recently disgraced science writer Jonah Lehrer (whose books I really enjoyed).

Corbett: ‘I think we should all stop using the term “self-plagiarism”

 

by Craig Silverman

Published July 11, 2012

Most, if not all, the many articles about Jonah Lehrer this week have described what he did as self-plagiarism.

Lehrer reused previously published sentences and paragraphs form his work and presented them as new in the New Yorker and other places. At least 13 times, according to the latest count.
But the Lehrer incident led several journalists to suggest that self-plagiarism is an inaccurate term, and in some cases to propose an alternate.

First was Washington Post blogger Erik Wemple with a post this morning:

Enough with “self-plagiarism.” Plagiarism means taking someone else’s work and representing it as your own. Lehrer took his own work and presented it as his own (fresh) work. That’s bad, but it’s not so bad that it should be described with any variant of the term “plagiarism.”

During a Poynter chat today (scroll to the bottom for a replay), Mallary Tenore asked participants, including me, if the term fits the crime. Reuters Jack Shafer said it doesn’t:

The writer in me rejects the term. Am I stealing from myself when I withdraw money from my bank account? No. So it’s not plagiarism … it’s something stranger. But what?!

I also received a comment today from Phil Corbett, The New York Times associate managing editor for standards.

“I don’t mean to split hairs, but I think we should all stop using the term ‘self-plagiarism,’” he wrote in an email. “It confuses the issues, and it’s a contradiction in terms. Plagiarism by definition is passing someone else’s work off as your own. You can’t plagiarize your own work.”

He continued:

Recycling previously published material, without letting readers or editors know, may be bad; it may be lazy; in many cases it may be completely unacceptable. But it ain’t plagiarism.

So of it’s not plagiarism, what is it? Shafer offered his preferred term in the chat:

What Lehrer did is clearly an act of onanism.

Let me save you the time of looking it up (I had to), and just note that it means masturbation.

A crafty word, but will it resonate with people who didn’t receive Jesuit schooling?
Wemple half-jokingly offered another term: Recycliarism.

I replied to Corbett to see if he thought  ”recycling material” was preferable, since he used it in his email. But I also noted that, “as a term it may lack the element of deception when applied to people who do this and do not properly disclose it.”

Would that mean we use “recycling material” and “recycling material without disclosure”? Or “onanism” and “abusive onanism”?

There seem to be levels of severity with the recycling of material. One key element is whether it was done deceptively; another key element, whether it was done repeatedly.

Rather than focus on a new term, however, Corbett suggested we should strive to be more clear about what happened.

“You’re right that ‘recycling material,’ by itself, is probably inadequate since in some cases recycling might be O.K., whereas in other cases it’s clearly not,” he wrote. “Maybe we just need to use a few more words to explain what actually happened. But I do worry that ‘self-plagiarism’ muddies the waters.”

Related disclosure: Craig Silverman was a candidate for The New York Times Public Editor job when he wrote this story.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist

Here's a fun, Gladwellian-type read by Jonah Lehrer. The chapter on the French chef Ecoffier and the discovery of the taste sensation of "umami" is especially well done.

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

In this technology-driven age, it’s tempting to believe that science can solve every mystery. After all, science has cured countless diseases and even sent humans into space. But as Jonah Lehrer argues in this sparkling debut, science is not the only path to knowledge. In fact, when it comes to understanding the brain, art got there first.
Taking a group of artists — a painter, a poet, a chef, a composer, and a handful of novelists — Lehrer shows how each one discovered an essential truth about the mind that science is only now rediscovering. We learn, for example, how Proust first revealed the fallibility of memory; how George Eliot discovered the brain’s malleability; how the French chef Escoffier discovered umami (the fifth taste); how Cézanne worked out the subtleties of vision; and how Gertrude Stein exposed the deep structure of language — a full half-century before the work of Noam Chomsky and other linguists. It’s the ultimate tale of art trumping science.
More broadly, Lehrer shows that there’s a cost to reducing everything to atoms and acronyms and genes. Measurement is not the same as understanding, and art knows this better than science does. An ingenious blend of biography, criticism, and first-rate science writing, Proust Was a Neuroscientist urges science and art to listen more closely to each other, for willing minds can combine the best of both, to brilliant effect.