What makes someone creative? And if you’re not creative, can you learn to be? To answer the second, yes, you can. To a degree, of course, but you can absolutely increase your creativity if you work at it. The Root-Bernsteins liken it to cooking. We can all cook, if we have to, but not all of us cook equally well. But we can all learn how to cook pretty darned well, if we work at it.

You can learn creative thinking, too. The authors looked at the most creative people in the history of the world and found 13 things they all did that contributed to their creativity: Observing, Imagine, Abstracting, Recognizing patterns, Analogizing, Body thinking, Dimensional thinking, Modeling, Playing, Transforming, and Synthesizing. If you don’t even know what some of those things are, join the club. But they are very well explained in the book.

First a caveat: This is not an easy read. It’s one of those books you read some, put it down, read another book, read some more… I’m not sure it’s intended for the average reader, but you may find it worth the journey. It’s not just the vocabulary, though that’s part of it. I’m pretty well read, I’ve got a very good vocabulary. There were several times I couldn’t even figure out the word from the context in this book. For me, that’s refreshing, but it might not be for everyone.

Back to the 13 things, these are all things we all do. The question is how often do we do them and how effectively. If we know what they are and how they work, the theory goes, we can teach ourselves to be more creative.

One thing I loved about the book was that I finally understand what abstract art is about. I still am not really a fan, but the point is the concept: In order to abstract something, you must first thoroughly understand it. Picasso’s Painter and Model Knitting is not just a bunch of squiggles. It is Picasso’s representation of the motion of the knitting needles. They are not stagnant in space, they are continually moving. If it were possible to place laser lights on the tips of the needles, they would “paint” an image very close to what Picasso painted. Or so Picasso thinks.

But possibly the most important lesson of this book concerns specialization. What all the geniuses they site have in common is that they did not specialize. Academics and the arts should be used to studied together to reach a full understanding of anything. They must be taught this way in order for our children to reach their fullest potential. There is poetry in geometry. There is mathematics in music. If you cannot understand that, you cannot fully understand anything. A boy who seemed destined to be a painter, Charles Rees Wilson, actually ended up winning a Nobel prize for developing the cloud chamber. A little girl who grew up sure she was destined to be a poet, instead turned out to be Sofya Kovalevskaya, who made great contributions to differential equations and other mathematic functions.

But the book’s point is that it is not instead, it is because. Think of Leonardo DaVinci, who is known for not only being as good an artist as scientist, but did them simultaneously. Only a whole person, one who can see the science and art together in what they are looking at, can make this sort of contribution. And this is exactly how our public school system is not education our children. In fact, this book would argue, the way we are teaching our children prevents them from accomplishing all they could and is robbing us of future DaVincis and Flemings (think: penicillin).

That’s pretty serious stuff, but they make a great case for it.