peter lloyd

This week Peter Lloyd looks into the debate of Communal Creativity and explores both sides of the argument. In so doing, he himself quotes famous authors and musician on their perspective of plagiarism, originality, authenticity, or what have you.

Les Paul, the great musician and inventor of the electric guitar, said it best; “to this day, no one has come up with a set of rules for originality. There aren’t any.”

Recent prize-winning German novelist, Helene Hegemann, uses sizable chunks of another writer’s original material. Hegemann, in reply to charges of unoriginality, not only admits appropriation, she defends her cutting and pasting. “There’s no such thing as originality anyway, just authenticity.”

Read more Right Brain Workouts by Peter Lloyd.

Read Peter Lloyd’s latest Right Brain Workout discussing the possibility that the invention of cars may have been a Backwards Invention. He explains that not all invention needs to take us in the direction we presume to think of as forward. Sometimes backwards is forward in the same way that less is more.

Take for example the internal combustion engine; sure cars go almost anywhere faster than their predecessors, the horse and carriage. And they do so in quiet comfort. But cars pollute, consume a dwindling resource and put us at deadly odds with others who want to control the same finite resource.

Read more Right Brain Workouts by Peter Lloyd