Phil Spector (Co-Producer): We tried to listen to John’s album through four speakers and ended up John, Yoko, engineers, about twenty of us, falling on top of each other in the middle of the room – madness!

As I have always been interested in those kinds of progressive things to do with sound reproduction, I wanted to create a mix where you could actually feel you were in the studio. The sound would be coming out pretty much like a U-shape – and you’d be sitting in the middle of the U, with some ambience behind you, but not a total surround. Nothing would be artificially ‘surrounded’. I didn’t like the idea of doing a surround sound where you’d be in the middle of the band. But you wanted to be in the studio, so the mix was around you. Now, I know this may sound odd at first, but depression—although a scary and depressing word in itself—is a wonderful feeling, *WHEN* used as a tool for creativity. Michael Ramsden apes John’s guide vocal, with fantastic screams and vocal gymnastics from a duetting Yoko. The short version: Lehrer draws together some interesting ideas, but I feel like his rhetorical flourish sometimes gets in the way of the point he's trying to make. His main point here is that creativity and innovation arises when we freely mingle within diverse ideas, but sometimes it seems like he's too busy boosting for entrepreneurs and big cities, and he lets that get in the way of his central thesis. (Side note: I waffled between 2-stars and 3-stars.) Next, you could add smell and touch to add just another layer of depth to your movie scenes. The more time you take to draw out all these perceptions from your book, the more rewarding your experience.The premise of Imagine is theologically flawed and spiritually dangerous. That premise is that deep down man is GOOD. If man is "bad" it's because of "external" notions that he's brainwashed with by society. Notions such as good and evil, right and wrong, just and unjust, truth and lies. Strip away these external notions of absolutes and what you're left with is a purer, cleaner, ultimately GOOD man.

The problem is that it makes everything he does unreliable. It's easy to discover that he has made up the Dylan bits, but what about all his other 'sources'. They are completely discredited now as well. On the other hand, the book does explain why Silicon Valley became innovative after the development of electronics. There are a couple of reasons, all having to do with the sharing of information among engineers there. They tend to have after-work drinks at a small number of watering holes. Non-compete clauses are not enforced there. And, there is a high rate of turnover among the technically skilled engineers. Halfway to the final version (which was take 29) comes this beauty with Joey Molland and Tom Evans from Badfinger on acoustic guitars. In 1971, before they recorded the strings in New York, John, Yoko and Phil did a stereo mix at Ascot Sound Studios, and having that original mix without strings helped in matching the new mixes to the originals. Using that as a starting point, we expanded it out as far as it felt it needed to go – in most cases, it was vocal work.The second half of the book, titled "Together", was more interesting to me. For example, I did not know that the area of San Jose was highly innovatives long before the inventions of electronics. Even when the area was agricultural, for the past hundred years it scored high in terms of the number of patents per capita. I'm not sure this can be explained; unfortunately, the book does not really explore the reason for this. Why else would they positioned in the text as they are? if not to culminate with entrepreneurs in big cities?

John & Yoko had hired very skilled and experienced sound engineers who used high quality equipment and knew how to mic and record onto tape with great expertise, so the technical quality of the recordings was also excellent. Many of those mics are so good they are still in use today. Unfortunately, Lehrer does get one thing totally wrong. He slags off the great Alex Osborn, because his idea 'brainstorming' doesn't really deliver. This is a classic misunderstanding that tends to come if you don't actually read Osborn's books. He never intended brainstorming to be used in isolation to generate ideas. It's an idea collection technique, not a generation technique - it's supposed to be used alongside a generation technique, which Lehrer doesn't mention. He also collapses the creative process, usually at its best consisting of at least four stages, into a single event and so totally fails to understand it.First sentence: Imagine there's no heaven. It's easy if you try. No hell below us. Above us, only sky. Imagine all the people living for today. How many different habitats are shown in the pictures? How are they similar / different? What plants and animals might live there? How are they adapted to live in each environment?