Isaac Asimov Asks, “How Do People Get New Ideas?”

Consider the theory of evolution by natural selection, independently created by Charles Darwin and Alfred Wallace.

.. A person willing to fly in the face of reason, authority, and common sense must be a person of considerable self-assurance. Since he occurs only rarely, he must seem eccentric (in at least that respect) to the rest of us. A person eccentric in one respect is often eccentric in others.

.. Consequently, the person who is most likely to get new ideas is a person of good background in the field of interest and one who is unconventional in his habits. (To be a crackpot is not, however, enough in itself.)

.. My feeling is that as far as creativity is concerned, isolation is required. The creative person is, in any case, continually working at it. His mind is shuffling his information at all times, even when he is not conscious of it.

.. all people at a session be willing to sound foolish and listen to others sound foolish.

.. The optimum number of the group would probably not be very high. I should guess that no more than five would be wanted.

.. there should be a feeling of informality. Joviality, the use of first names, joking, relaxed kidding are, I think, of the essence—not in themselves, but because they encourage a willingness to be involved in the folly of creativeness.

For this purpose I think a meeting in someone’s home or over a dinner table at some restaurant is perhaps more useful than one in a conference room.

.. The great ideas of the ages have come from people who weren’t paid to have great ideas, but were paid to be teachers or patent clerks or petty officials, or were not paid at all. The great ideas came as side issues.

Andrew Wiles: what does it feel like to do maths?

What did it feel like proving Fermat’s last theorem after searching for a proof for so long?

It’s just fantastic. This is what we live for, these moments that create illumination and excitement. It’s actually hard to settle down and do anything – [you’re] living on cloud nine for a day or two. It was a little difficult at first to go back to the normal working life. I think it was hard to go back to normal problems.

.. Now what you have to handle when you start doing mathematics as an older child or as an adult is accepting this state of being stuck. People don’t get used to that. Some people find this very stressful. Even people who are very good at mathematics sometimes find this hard to get used to and they feel that’s where they’re failing. But it isn’t: it’s part of the process and you have to accept [and] learn to enjoy that process. Yes, you don’t understand [something at the moment] but you have faith that over time you will understand — you have to go through this.

.. It’s like training in sport. If you want to run fast, you have to train. Anything where you’re trying to do something new, you have to go through this difficult period. It’s not something to be frightened of. Everybody goes through it.

.. What I fight against most in some sense, [when talking to the public,] is the kind of message, for example as put out by the film Good Will Hunting, that there is something you’re born with and either you have it or you don’t. That’s really not the experience of mathematicians.

.. Sometimes I put something down for a few months, I come back and it’s obvious. I can’t explain why. But you have to have the faith that that will come back.

.. The way some people handle this is they work on several things at once and then they switch from one to another as they get stuck.

.. Once I’m stuck on a problem I just can’t think about anything else. It’s more difficult. So I just take a little time off and then come back to it.

.. I really think it’s bad to have too good a memory if you want to be a mathematician. You need a slightly bad memory because you need to forget the way you approached [a problem] the previous time because it’s a bit like evolution, DNA. You need to make a little mistake in the way you did it before so that you do something slightly different and then that’s what actually enables you to get round [the problem].

So if you remembered all the failed attempts before, you wouldn’t try them again. But because I have a slightly bad memory I’ll probably try essentially the same thing again and then I realise I was just missing this one little thing I needed to do

.. I think that’s sometimes a little frustrating for mathematicians because we’re thinking in terms of beauty and creativity and so on, and of course the outside world thinks of us as much more like a computer. It’s not how we think of ourselves at all.

.. Do you think maths is discovered or invented?

To tell you the truth, I don’t think I know a mathematician who doesn’t think that it’s discovered. So we’re all on one side, I think.

Nancy Andreasen: Secrets of the Creative Brain

Nancy Andreasen is a leading neuroscientist and psychiatrist at the University of Iowa whose fascinating research into the creative mind has been informed in part by the stream of remarkable writers who gather there. She is now conducting a study that uses neuroimaging to visualize the creative brain in action, examining both artists and scientists. Her work also examines the roles of nature v. nurture and the relationship between creativity and mental illness.

  • Preparation
  • Incubation
  • Insiration (eureka)
  • Production

Random Episodic Silent Thought (REST)