[00:05.87]037.A Leap in Thought [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.

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