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You’ve had a problem, you’ve thought about it till you were tired,forgotten it and perhaps slept on it, and then flash!When you weren’t thinking about it suddenly the answer has come to you, as a gift from thegods.
Of course all ideas don’t come like that, but the interesting thing is that so many do,particularly the most important ones.They burst into the mind, glowing with the heat of creation. How they do it is a mystery.Psychology does not yet understand even the ordinary processes of conscious thought,but the emergence ofnew ideas by a “leap in thought” is particularly intriguing,because they must have come from somewhere.For the moment let us assume that they come from the “unconscious”.This is reasonable, for the psychologists use this term to describe mental processes which are unknown to the subject,and creative thought consists precisely in what was unknown becoming known.
It seems that all truly creative activity depends in some degree on these signals from the unconscious,andthe more highly intuitive the person, the sharper and more dramatic the signals become.
But growth requires a seed,and the heart of the creative process lies in the production of the original fertile nucleus from which growth can proceed.This initial step in all creation consists in the establishment of a new unity from disparate elements, oforder out of disorder, of shape from what was formless. The mind achieves this by the plastic reshaping, so as to form a new unit, of a selection of the separate elements derived from experience and stored in memory. Intuitions arise from richly unified experience.
This process of the establishment of new form must occur in pattern of nervous activity in the brain, lying below the threshold of consciousness, which interact and combine to form more comprehensive patterns. Experimental physiology has not yet identified this process, for its methods are as yet insufficiently refined,but it may be significant that a quarter of the total bodily consumption of energy during sleep goes tothe brain, even when the sense organs are at rest, to maintain the activity of ten million brain cells. These cells, acting together as a single organ, achieve the miracle of the production of new patterns of thought.No calculating machine can do that, for such machines can “only do what we know how to design them to do”, and these formative brain processes obey laws which are still unknown.
Can any practical conclusions be drawn from the experience of genius? Is there an art of thought for the ordinary person? Certainly there is no single road to success; in the world of the imagination each has to find his own way to use his own gift.
