Looking for a flash of inspiration? Do nothing

09 December 2014 Unknown 0 Comments

image by zurb.com

I want to start a running segment that we'll do occasionally where we appreciate and analyze what has been written about the creative process. I'll start with a book called The Creative Process, edited by Brewster Ghiselin. It's the words of several brilliant people like Albert Einstein, Vincent Van Gogh, and several others that I don't recognize, and Ghiselin edited them into one book. It looks like it's an old book and I found it at the thrift store the other day.

The first chapter is on Henri Poincaré, a mathematician. The first thing that strikes me about his musings on "mathematical invention" are the need for the subconscious mind. He says that when he cannot figure out a problem after working on it for a while, he will drop it and go do something else. He mentions walking but not as the exclusive form of "rest" away from the problem. When he returns to the problem, after about half an hour, the spark of inspiration with the decisive idea hits him.

... the revelation, instead of coming during a walk or a journey, has happened during a period of conscious work, but independently of this work which plays at most a role of excitant, as if it were the goad stimulating the results already reached during rest, but remaining unconscious, to assume the conscious form.

I've heard of going on walks or stepping away from the problem, but he describes it in a way that I've never thought about before. He explains that you need to work before and after your rest.

Working on the problem before sets your unconscious mind to work. He even says that you need to work at the problem for several days of fruitless work before you step away from it.

And then working afterward takes what your unconscious has discovered and brings it to your conscious mind.

It is necessary to put in shape the results of this inspiration, to deduce from them the immediate consequences, to arrange them, to word the demonstrations, but above all is verification necessary.

What do you do when you're stuck? How do you find inspiration to solve problems?