[00:11.66]You’ve had a problem, you’ve thought about it till you were tired,
[00:16.58]forgotten it and perhaps slept on it, and then flash!
[00:22.11]When you weren’t thinking about it suddenly the answer has come to you, as a gift from the gods.
[00:30.73]Of course all ideas don’t come like that, but the interesting thing is that so many do,
[00:38.39]particularly the most important ones.
[00:42.20]They burst into the mind, glowing with the heat of creation. How they do it is a mystery.
[00:52.02]Psychology does not yet understand even the ordinary processes of conscious thought,
[00:59.13]but the emergence of new ideas by a “leap in thought” is particularly intriguing,
[01:06.34]because they must have come from somewhere.
[01:11.14]For the moment let us assume that they come from the “unconscious”.
[01:16.65]This is reasonable, for the psychologists use this term to describe mental processes
[01:22.77]which are unknown to the subject,
[01:26.28]and creative thought consists precisely in what was unknown becoming known.
[01:33.57]It seems that all truly creative activity depends in some degree on these signals from the unconscious,
[01:43.67]and the more highly intuitive the person, the sharper and more dramatic the signals become.
[01:51.72]But growth requires a seed,
[01:54.80]and the heart of the creative process lies in the production of the original fertile
[02:01.13]nucleus from which growth can proceed.
[02:04.67]This initial step in all creation consists in the establishment of a new unity from disparate elements,
[02:14.70]of order out of disorder, of shape from what was formless.
[02:21.43]The mind achieves this by the plastic reshaping, so as to form a new unit,
[02:29.48]of a selection of the separate elements derived from experience and stored in memory.
[02:35.78]Intuitions arise from richly unified experience.
[02:41.03]This process of the establishment of new form must occur in pattern of nervous activity in the brain,
[02:48.94]lying below the threshold of consciousness,
[02:52.52]which interact and combine to form more comprehensive patterns.
[02:58.18]Experimental physiology has not yet identified this process,
[03:03.34]for its methods are as yet insufficiently refined,
[03:07.62]but it may be significant that a quarter of the total bodily consumption of energy during sleep goes to the brain,
[03:16.97]even when the sense organs are at rest, to maintain the activity of ten million brain cells.
[03:25.74]These cells, acting together as a single organ, achieve the miracle of the production of new patterns of thought.
[03:36.17]No calculating machine can do that, for such machines can “only do what we know how to design them to do”,
[03:46.18]and these formative brain processes obey laws which are still unknown.
[03:52.61]Can any practical conclusions be drawn from the experience of genius?
[03:58.42]Is there an art of thought for the ordinary person? Certainly there is no single road to success;
[04:07.61]in the world of the imagination each has to find his own way to use his own gift.
