Imagine

While skateboarding through New York City, a boy pauses at the Museum of Modern Art and decides to head inside. Suddenly, his imagination kicks into gear: Figures from three legendary paintings step through their canvases to join him—the cubist figures from Picasso’s “Three Musicians,” the woman and lion from Rousseau’s “The Sleeping Gypsy,” and the…

Although Jonah Lehrer discusses brain functions and their connections to different forms of creativity in Imagine: How Creativity Works, the real delights and revelations here are his stories of individuals, companies and cities that fostered new ways of looking at problems and new ways of solving them.

Creativity—whether it manifests itself as a Bob Dylan…