A Mashable Q&A with Jonah Lehrer, Author of Imagine:

Why doesn’t brainstorming work? What should we do instead?

I think the failure of brainstorming is inseparable from its allure, which is that it makes us feel good about ourselves. A group of people are put together in a room and told to free-associate, with no criticism allowed. (The assumption is that the imagination is meek and shy — if it’s worried about being criticized, it will clam up.) Before long, the whiteboard is filled with ideas. Everybody has contributed; nobody has been criticized. Alas, the evidence suggests that the overwhelming majority of these free-associations are superficial and that most brainstorming sessions actually inhibit the productivity of the group. We become less than the sum of our parts.

However, in recent years, scientists have shown that group collaborations benefit from debate and dissent; it is the human friction that makes the sparks. (There’s a reason why Steve Jobs always insisted that new ideas required “brutal honesty.”) In fact, some studies suggest that encouraging debate and dissent can lead to a 40% increase in useful new ideas from the group.

Why does failure seem to be such an important part of innovation?

Because innovation is hard. If it were easy to invent an idea, that idea would already exist. Creative success is not about the avoidance of failure. It’s about failing as fast as possible, going through endless iterations until the idea is perfect.

What about Silicon Valley’s creativity and innovation allowed it to overtake Route 128 as the tech center of America in the latter half of the last decade?

It’s a really interesting comparison, because if you time travel back to the 1960s, you never would have guessed that Silicon Valley would become the tech center of the world. (It was still mostly walnut and apricot farms.) Those Boston suburbs, meanwhile, were dense with engineering talent and technology firms. By 1970, the area bounded by Route 128 included six of the ten largest technology firms in the world, such as Digital Computer and Raytheon. The “Massachusetts Miracle” was underway.

So what happened? The downfall of the Boston tech sector was caused by the very same features that, at least initially, seemed like such advantages…

Followed by an interesting comment from reader Jason Thibeault:

Great interview and looking forward to reading the book. Being a self-professed creative guy (entrepreneur, author, photographer, and definitely a day-time dreamer) I have found that my creativity has expanded over the years with the more information I consume. News, stories, videos, etc. I read constantly. Everything from physics to philosophy to religious texts (even though I am not). Most importantly, books that I wouldn’t normally read about subjects with which I have no affinity. As I’ve done this throughout the years, I’ve come to postulate that creativity is an outgrowth of pattern recognition and the more information you feed a system that’s good at identifying/forming patterns (which the brain really is built to do; it’s why we stereotype and categorize) the more opportunities for patterns you get. When left to its own devices, the brain will constantly try and make “sense” of all the information it gets through all sensory inputs. I know there has been neuroscience research into synaptic strengthening( and even production) based upon pattern recognition. In short, the creative mind lives constantly in a state of chaos with patterns bubbling up (or expressly looked for).