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right hemisphere. Just look at poets, who often rely on literary forms with strict requirements, such as haikus and sonnets. At first glance, this writing method makes little sense, since the creative act then becomes much more difficult. Instead of composing freely, poets frustrate themselves with structural constraints.
    But that’s precisely the point. Unless poets are stumped by the form, unless they are forced to look beyond the obvious associations, they’ll never invent an original line. They’ll be stuck with clichés and conventions, with predictable adjectives and boring verbs. And this is why poetic forms are so important. When a poet needs to find a rhyming word with exactly three syllables or an adjective that fits the iambic scheme, he ends up uncovering all sorts of unexpected connections; the difficulty of the task accelerates the insight process. Just look at Dylan’s verb choice in the second stanza of “Like a Rolling Stone,” which contains one of the most memorable lines in the song:
    You’ve gone to the finest school all right, Miss Lonely
But you know you only used to get juiced in it.
    Juiced in it? It’s an incredibly effective phrase, even though the listener has no idea what it means. It’s not until the next cou-plet that the need for juiced becomes clear:
    And nobody has ever taught you how to live on the street
And now you find out you’re gonna have to get used to it
    Dylan uses the surprising word juiced because it rhymes with used, which is part of the snarling line that gives the stanza its literal meaning. Nevertheless, the innovative use of juice as a verb is one of those poetic flourishes that make “Like a Rolling Stone” so transcendent. It’s a textbook example of how the imagination is unleashed by constraints. You break out of the box by stepping into shackles.
    The story of “Like a Rolling Stone” is a story of creative insight. The song was invented in the moment, then hurled into the world. It took only a few seconds before a mental block became a work of art; a season of creative despair gave way to some of the most inspired music of Dylan’s career. In a 1966 interview with  Playboy , Dylan assessed the impact of this sudden breakthrough on his music. “Last spring, I guess I was going to quit singing,” he said. “The way things were going, it was a very draggy situation . . . But ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ changed it all: I didn’t care anymore about writing books or poems or whatever. I mean, here was something that I myself could dig.”
    What Dylan dug was the strangeness of the song, the way it sounded like nothing else on the radio. In that lonely cabin, he found a way to fully express himself, to transform the fragments of art in his head into a new kind of song. He wasn’t just writing a pop single — he was rewriting the possibilities of music.

Ch. 2  ALPHA WAVES (CONDITION BLUE)
    Creativity is the residue of time wasted.
— Albert Einstein
    This is a story about tape. It begins in the summer of 1925.
    Dick Drew was a sandpaper salesman with the Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company. He spent a lot of time demonstrating the effectiveness of sandpaper in auto-body shops trying to convince mechanics to buy his brand. Sometimes, after Drew made his sales pitch, he’d sit in the back of the shop and watch the men work. He soon noticed that all of the mechanics shared a common problem. It occurred when the mechanics were applying two-toned paint to a car. The workers would begin by painting everything black. Then they would protect this new coat of paint with taped-on sheets of butcher paper and carefully apply the second shade — usually a sleek line of white or red. Once the paint dried, the paper was removed. Here is where the process failed: the paper was usually attached to the metal with a strong adhesive, which meant that removing the paper and tape often peeled away the newly applied black paint. And so the frustrated workers would