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If we try to hide our mistakes, as I did, any error can become a catastrophe. … The only way to prevent big failures is a willingness to consider every little one.

Jonah Lehrer’s $20,000 mea culpa.

Whether or not this was the case with Lehrer, neurologist Oliver Sacks has some interesting things to say about memory and plagiarism.

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Does brainstorming work? A colorful stop-motion synthesis of existing research by Jonah Lehrer.

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Recognizing that anyone is capable, under the right circumstances, of anything, is the first step to guarding against the evil from within.

Jayson Blair on Jonah Lehrer.

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This is the essence of the popular arts in America: Be a magpie, take from everywhere, but assemble the scraps and shiny things you’ve lifted in ways that not only seem inventive, but really do make new meanings. Fabrication is elemental to this process — not fakery, exactly, but the careful construction of a series of masks through which the artist can not only speak for himself, but channel and transform the vast and complicated past that bears him or her forward.

On Bob Dylan And Jonah Lehrer, Two Fabulists – the only piece on the Lehrer scandal worth reading comes from NPR, who remind us that the only transgression here is in failing to enact the different standards of journalism and art.

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“The answer will only arrive after we stop looking for it.”

Jonah Lehrer, author of the excellent How Creativity Works, on the origins of creative insight and why you need grit.

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“Cities smash us together. Cities force us to interact and interaction is good. Human friction is very, very healthy.”

Jonah Lehrer, author of How Creativity Works, on why cities are the knowledge engines of the 21st century.

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The driving forces behind biases—the root causes of our irrationality—are largely unconscious, which means they remain invisible to self-analysis and impermeable to intelligence. In fact, introspection can actually compound the error, blinding us to those primal processes responsible for many of our everyday failings. We spin eloquent stories, but these stories miss the point. The more we attempt to know ourselves, the less we actually understand.

The New Yorker’s Jonah Lehrer on why smart people are more susceptible to cognitive bias. Also see Dan Ariely on why more creative people are more prone to dishonesty and David McRaney’s You Are Not So Smart.

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A daydream … is just a means of eavesdropping on those novel thoughts generated by the unconscious. We think we’re wasting time, but, actually, an intellectual fountain really is spurting.

In his new neuroscience blog for the New Yorker, the inimitable Jonah Lehrer reports on a new study exploring the virtues of daydreaming.

As any noteworthy scientist or creator can attest, discovery often happens in that intuitive space of unconscious association.