Creativity Quote by Jaron Lanier

Lanier is smuggling a provocation into the language of “innovation”: stop treating people like eyeballs and start treating them like nervous systems. The line has the clipped impatience of someone who’s watched digital culture get flattened into ad inventory. “Different parts of the brain” isn’t a plea for better targeting; it’s a rebuke to the industry’s lazy habit of calling anything immersive “new” while reproducing the oldest move in commerce: slap a logo on the scenery.

The specific intent is to raise the bar for what counts as creative in interactive media. A billboard in a video game is product placement with better graphics, not a reimagining of experience. Lanier, coming out of virtual reality’s early, utopian period, is arguing that interactive worlds can do more than host ads; they can generate sensations, rhythms, and forms of attention that old media can’t reach. He’s pointing toward design that engages memory, proprioception, curiosity, even empathy - not just recognition and recall.

The subtext carries his long-running skepticism about the ad-driven internet: when marketing becomes the organizing principle of technology, the technology narrows. “Profound” is doing moral work here. He’s implying that immersive platforms arrive with an ethical choice: either they become yet another surface for extraction, or they’re built to expand human perception. The cultural context is a decade-plus of brands colonizing games, social feeds, and AR filters, calling it “metaverse strategy.” Lanier’s challenge lands like: if you want to be in our minds, at least earn the real estate.