A successful industrial designer with a prolific career offers insights for tapping into the mind’s creative power.

Nutting (Language of Nature, 2005) analyzes the creative process using his own industrial design experiences as examples. With a career spanning 55 years, which included designing everything from arcade games to cookware to the Jeep Grand Wagoneer, Nutting has plenty of experiences to formulate his analysis. This slim volume doesn’t outline a step-by-step process for achieving creativity as much as it explains the workings of the brain. It contains a clear, concise and understandable explanation of memory and how it works. The discussions of quantum physics, the creation of the universe and the life and function of atoms are equally straightforward and lucid. These sections are the book’s main strengths: making complex scientific concepts comprehensible. Connecting these concepts to the creative process and explaining how understanding them can improve one’s ability to master one’s own mind is not quite as apparent. Nutting describes “Thought Talk,” a meditative state that stimulates the subconscious mind, as a way of tapping into the mind’s full potential. The book could have done without the inclusion of “Rap-Rhymes,” which are short couplets of rhyme meant to help readers remember important concepts. Inserted in the midst of this succinct text, they are distracting and, in some cases, silly. Nutting ends the book with a “Postface,” and the purpose of this section is even less clear than the Rap-Rhymes; he describes what “might have been” if only someone had listened to his ideas of a universal operating system. Instead, his efforts were sidelined by those whom Nutting believes were shortsighted men, so it was Bill Gates, not Nutting, who emerged as the king of personal computing. Given the many notable accomplishments that Nutting recounts in the book, it makes for a sour epitaph for an otherwise illustrious career.

Clearly explains the science behind the power of creativity.