Approx 650 words - I'll be brief, but feel free to read quickly.
As promised, we are finished with reminiscences of Britain for a while. Also, the family occasion I was leaving for two weeks ago is now complete, and was wonderful. And here I am easing back into normal weekly life and taking stock of the new ideas that came into my mind while I was relaxing. So let’s talk about that: incubation.And I’ll tell you some incubation stories that have often been told before:
Chemist August Kekulé described how he revolutionized our understanding of the structure of organic molecules. Don’t worry if you don’t know what I’m talking about, it’s years since I had any idea of that myself. One evening in London in the 1860s, he caught the last bus home after visiting a friend. He “fell into a reverie, and lo, the atoms were gamboling before my eyes.... I saw how the larger ones formed a chain, dragging the smaller ones after them but only at the ends of the chains....The cry of the conductor: ‘Clapham Road,’ awakened me from my dreaming; but I spent a part of the night in putting on paper at least sketches of these dream forms.”
This is the same Kekulé who’s famous for dreaming the structure of the benzene molecule a few years later. “I turned my chair to the fire and dozed. Again the atoms were gamboling before my eyes... One of the snakes had seized hold of its own tail, and the form whirled mockingly before my eyes. As if by a flash of lightning I awoke; and this time also I spent the rest of the night in working out the consequences of the hypothesis.”
If Kekulé had stayed awake, says creativity researcher Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi, he would probably have rejected the thought of a connection between the sparks of the fire and the shape of the molecule; but in the subconscious, rationality could not censor the connection.
The mathematician Poincaré was working hard on a problem with Fuchsian functions. It doesn’t matter if you don’t know what those are: Poincaré himself said it doesn’t, and I definitely agree. After two weeks he went away on a geology field trip. After arriving at base, “we entered an omnibus to go some place or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step the [solution] came to me, without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it. Upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty.”
When he got home, he worked on a different problem for a while, and then he went away for another break. Suddenly, out walking, another important idea came to him, showing him the link between his two projects.
And soon after that, Poincaré had to go to another city for his military service, and it was while walking in the street there that the one outstanding difficulty with his findings resolved itself.
Okay, so. What’s this all about?
These stories are examples of how inspiration can come when you stop pushing for it. When you work on your subject as hard as you can and for a long time, and then let up for a while.
Be careful here. I’m not justifying not working. I don’t say inspiration can solve a complex problem you haven’t been working on. I do say inspiration can solve a complex problem you have been working on. Notice the subtle difference?
As a friend of mine put it recently, you want to be “on it but off it.”
Something you can try today: when you’ve worked hard on your project, struggling for inspiration, or wrestling with the geometry of a plot, and all the effort you can manage hasn’t solved it, at that special moment don’t be afraid to allow yourself a quiet, private break. Walks and naps are both good.
David
David Jung McGarva
+1 (818) 707 1871
Write me: david at todayiwrite dot com
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