Daydreaming and downtime can lead to solutions for difficult scientific problems and provide inspiration for creative works. Some of history's best-known scientific and literary achievements grew out of such mental meandering
Albert Einstein's unleashed imagination was an important ingredient to his success. After months of intense mathematical exercises he homed in on the gist of his special theory of relativity while taking a break from his work "and let his imagination wander about the concepts of space and time," wrote Guenther Knoblich and Michael Oellinger in the October 2006 Scientific American MIND ....[More]
Relativity Revelation
Albert Einstein's unleashed imagination was an important ingredient to his success. After months of intense mathematical exercises he homed in on the gist of his special theory of relativity while taking a break from his work "and let his imagination wander about the concepts of space and time," wrote Guenther Knoblich and Michael Oellinger in the October 2006 Scientific American MIND. In his mental meanderings Einstein imagined two bolts of lightning striking the front and back of a moving train at the same instant. He realized that those strikes would not seem simultaneous to a person standing next to the track even if they did seem so to an individual on the moving train. Einstein described his moment of insight in 1924: "After seven years of reflection in vain [1898 to 1905] the solution came to me suddenly with the thought that our concepts and laws of space and time can only claim validity insofar as they stand in a clear relation to our experiences; and that experience could very well lead to the alteration of these concepts and laws."
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Explosive Insight
Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard first considered the notion of converting mass into energy after he had read that his colleague Ernest Rutherford had discounted the possibility in a 1934 lecture....[More]
Explosive Insight
Hungarian physicist Leo Szilard first considered the notion of converting mass into energy after he had read that his colleague Ernest Rutherford had discounted the possibility in a 1934 lecture. Then a few weeks later, while crossing a London street, Szilard suddenly realized that if there were an element whose nucleus, when hit by a neutron, would split into two parts and release two of its neutrons, those neutrons could split other nearby atoms. This would lead to a "chain reaction" in which billions of atoms could be split in millionths of a second. And so Szilard came up with one of the core ideas behind nuclear fission, which led to atomic bombs and reactors.
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Atomic Tango
August Kekulé von Stradonitz, who helped found structural organic chemistry in the mid-1800s, is known for a famous reverie that revealed the arrangement of atoms in a molecule....[More]
Atomic Tango
August Kekulé von Stradonitz, who helped found structural organic chemistry in the mid-1800s, is known for a famous reverie that revealed the arrangement of atoms in a molecule. Kekulé had long wondered about this arrangement—and in particular he wanted to know how two molecules that were composed of the same atoms—say five carbons and 12 hydrogens—could be different substances, a blowing agent, say, or an ingredient in toothpaste. The answer came to him while riding home one evening on a horse-drawn "bus". Years later, Kekulé described it this way, according to the book, Eurekas and Euphorias: the Oxford book of scientific anecdotes by Walter Bruno Gratzer (Oxford University Press, 2002), "I fell into a reverie, and lo, the atoms were gamboling before my eyes…. I saw how, frequently, two smaller atoms united to form a pair; how a larger one embraced the two smaller ones; how still larger ones kept hold of three or even four of the smaller; whilst the whole kept whirling in a giddy dance…"
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Carbon Copies
The daydream coalesced later into Kekulé's theory of molecular structure. It solved the problem of five carbons and 12 hydrogens in the following way, using the knowledge that each carbon atom can link to four other atoms in creating a compound....[More]
Carbon Copies
The daydream coalesced later into Kekulé's theory of molecular structure. It solved the problem of five carbons and 12 hydrogens in the following way, using the knowledge that each carbon atom can link to four other atoms in creating a compound. These three compounds create three different substances simply by virtue of structure: pentane [left], methylbutane (aka isopentane) [center], and dimethylpropane (aka neopentane) [right].
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Silver Lining?
Around B.C. 200 the king of the Sicilian seaport city Syracuse posed a puzzle for the Greek mathematician Archimedes. The king had been given a crown that was supposed to be pure gold, but he suspected that the goldsmith had added some silver....[More]
Silver Lining?
Around B.C. 200 the king of the Sicilian seaport city Syracuse posed a puzzle for the Greek mathematician Archimedes. The king had been given a crown that was supposed to be pure gold, but he suspected that the goldsmith had added some silver. Archimedes was to determine, without melting down the crown, whether the king's suspicions were well founded.
Archimedes first studied the problem diligently, testing numerous hypotheses, but could not solve it. So he decided to take a break, asking his servant to draw a bath. As he settled into the tub, the water level rose. Archimedes then realized that the same effect could be used to determine the volume of the crown. He leapt up and ran out into the street naked. "Eureka!" he shouted. He had recognized that equivalent weights of different substances, such as silver and gold, occupy different volumes. By observing the volume of water the crown displaced—perhaps as compared with a gold reference sample of the same weight—he could thus determine whether it also contained a less dense metal such as silver. As it turned out, the king was right to be doubtful: Archimedes' test revealed that silver was present.
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Highway Hunch
Mixing free-thinking into a recipe of science has led to modern-day revelations as well. One Friday night in 1983 Kary Mullis, then a chemist at Cetus Corp., was driving on California Highway 128 from Berkeley to Mendocino where he had a weekend cabin in the woods....[More]
Highway Hunch
Mixing free-thinking into a recipe of science has led to modern-day revelations as well. One Friday night in 1983 Kary Mullis, then a chemist at Cetus Corp., was driving on California Highway 128 from Berkeley to Mendocino where he had a weekend cabin in the woods. He was blithely contemplating the construction of the DNA molecule, out of nucleotides, the building blocks of this molecule of life. At milepost 46.58, he came up with an idea for duplicating DNA fragments in unlimited quantities within a chemical soup of nucleotides, DNA-synthesizing enzymes and other molecular ingredients. Previously, DNA strips could only be made in living cells, laboriously, and in small amounts. Mullis called the technique that grew from his thoughts the polymerase chain reaction or PCR. As a result of his invention, Mullis shared the 1993 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Recalling his driving stints, Mullis said in an interview, "that's when I did most of my thinking….because day-to-day life at the lab doesn't allow a lot of time."
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Mind-Wandering Heights
As children in the 1820s the novelists Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, along with their brother, Branwell, created two make-believe realms called Gondal and Angria in their parsonage on the English Yorkshire moors....[More]
Mind-Wandering Heights
As children in the 1820s the novelists Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë, along with their brother, Branwell, created two make-believe realms called Gondal and Angria in their parsonage on the English Yorkshire moors. Angria, a confederacy of states, teemed with both fashionable aristocrats and lower-class citizens who frequented inns and taverns and similar locales. In various plots Angria would become enmeshed in war, revolution and other dramatic events. In Gondal, Emily and Anne's secret state, warfare and politics alternated with romantic intrigues. Gondal's women were more assertive and resourceful than those of Angria, in which passive beauties pined for their lovers. These two fantasy lands, about which the children wrote in several hundred matchbox-size books, planted the mental seeds for the novels the sisters would write as adults. These masterpieces included Jane Eyre (Charlotte), Wuthering Heights (Emily) and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (Anne).
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Mental Blizzard
Turkish novelist and 2006 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk found inspiration from daydreams for works such as Snow (2004, Knopf). In a speech titled “the Implied Author” that Pamuk gave when he received the Puterbaugh literary prize in 2006 , Pamuk declared: "I long for inspiration to come to me (as poems did to Coleridge—and to Ka, Snow 's hero) in dramatic ways, preferably in scenes and situations that might sit well in a novel....[More]
Mental Blizzard
Turkish novelist and 2006 Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk found inspiration from daydreams for works such as Snow (2004, Knopf). In a speech titled “the Implied Author” that Pamuk gave when he received the Puterbaugh literary prize in 2006 , Pamuk declared: "I long for inspiration to come to me (as poems did to Coleridge—and to Ka, Snow's hero) in dramatic ways, preferably in scenes and situations that might sit well in a novel. If I wait patiently and attentively, my dream comes true. To write a novel is to be open to these desires, winds and inspirations, and also to the dark recesses of our minds and their moments of mist and stillness.
For what is a novel but a story that fills its sails with these winds, that answers and builds upon inspirations that blow in from unknown quarters, and seizes upon all the daydreams we've invented for our diversion, bringing them together into a meaningful whole?"
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YES! Send me a free issue of Scientific American with no obligation to continue the subscription. If I like it, I will be billed for the one-year subscription.
Cognitive science has told us a lot about the brain since George Miller reported his shocking findings in 1956 about the miniscule capacity of the brain's short term memory (STM). He called it a bottleneck on the brain.
That suggested that the brain did not evolve for conscious thinking, that it evolved to produce responses from long term memory (LTM) that required records of particular situations which, when recognised, produced an automatic response.
That mechanism was observed using connections to individual neurons in Macaque brains. A familiar image triggered a fast response. When a novel feature was introduced, the fast response was inhibited and replaced by a modified or new response worked out in conscious STM that was slower and more variable.
This suggests that the human brain evolved a large LTM to store a large number of scenarios needed to produce the high level of skills and wide range of behaviours required to make humans expert hunter gatherers. Lack of innovation for millions of years is evidence that the large brain did not evolve to think, but to not-think, to produce fast, automatic, expert responses to a wide range of situations.
For millions of years the large brain evolved among pre-verbal ancestors to pass on from generation to generation behaviours that worked. Behaviours that did not work were eliminated with the individuals who used them and did not survive.
That model fits the data, and if it that is what the human brain evolved to do, present day humans use it in ways the brain did not evolve to be used.
Richard Nesbitt has shown us that people in different cultures use the brain in different ways. People in western cultures make much greater use of conscious, logical thinking (in limited STM). Most of Edward de Bono's techniques are designed to break the constraints of logic in western cultures. Having constraints in STM suggests that data in the LTM is less constrained by contextual connections.
So maybe westerners use the brain that evolved to load existing hunter gatherer practices into its large LTM now loads lots of knowledge and ideas, connections among which are less structured, making records more available for non-conscious processing, as long as conscious control from the LTM can be diverted.
In effect, the mechanism that inhibited innovation for millions of years is now used in a different way to produce the innovations that mark the difference between modern complex societies and the simple societies of hunter gatherer ancestors among whom the large brain evolved.
The caption for Einstein is incorrect. It says that "Einstein imagined two bolts of lightning striking the front and back of a moving train at the same instant. He realized that those strikes would NOT seem simultaneous to a person standing next to the track even if they DID seem so to an individual on the moving train". (emphasis mine)
But that is not correct: The conclusion from this thought experiment is that although the lightening WOULD seem simultaneous to a person standing on the track, it would NOT seem simultaneous to a person on the moving train. The person on the train would see the bolt that struck the front of the train (the bolt the train is moving toward) before the bolt that struck the back of the train (the bolt the train is moving away from). To the person on the platform, however, the two strikes are simultaneous. So the person on the train would conclude that light from the bolt at the front of the train is moving faster than the speed of light, which cannot be true and thus the special theory of relativity.
4. NonlinearEd
in reply to hoamingin11:04 PM 2/17/11
Hmmm... This ties in nicely with a layman's level thought of mine regarding the effects of environmental stimuli on a child's mind.
Assigning a higher priority and capacity to our "reactive" mind leads me to believe that early life "programming" *might* generate a hard-wired state where early life abuse produces negative compensatory preferences or behaviors that are all but impossible to alter.
I think you're right that the original thought experiment had the trackside observer seeing the flashes as simultaneous, but what the caption says isn't actually wrong - if the person on the train were to see two simultaneous flashes, then they would not be simultaneous to the person standing on the platform.
6. hoamingin
in reply to NonlinearEd10:00 PM 2/18/11
Ed, we live in the midst of the evidence of the effect of environmental stimuli on children's minds. Culture.
The culture of every society differs from cultures of other societies, but is consistent over time, passed on by children absorbing the attitudes and beliefs of the society they grow up in. They absorb most of the beliefs that will guide their future behaviours without conscious thought, and before their brains have developed the capacity for complex reasoning.
Hopefully most children grow up in a positive, supportive environment, but as you point out, some experience abuse. The extent that effects, good or bad, can be described as hardwired depends, I guess, on the intensity of the experience. I would describe the effect of past experiences as influencing, rather than determining behaviour.
A beautifully simple experiment with babies from age 6-10 months (Social evaluation by preverbal infants, Nature 450, 557-559) indicated that babies are born already wired with some positive predispositions. They understand relationships and innately prefer individuals who interact constructively with others. We can assume that these predispositions evolved over millions of years among hunter gatherer ancestors. Those innate predispositions are modified by attitudes that children absorb non-consciously from the society they grow up in, good or bad.
One of my points was that humans in modern societies use the brain in ways that are very different to the ways the brain evolved to be used. The mechanism that evolved to pass on practices that made humans expert hunter gatherers now passes on cultures.
Another point was that Einstein and other subjects of this article used the mechanism that had evolved to preserve past practices, effectively inhibiting innovation for millions of years, to produce new ideas by loading LTM with data that did not exist when the brain evolved, and allowing non-conscious "dream-like" processes to troll through it and produce connections that were not possible through logic.
Friedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz gives two accounts of how he discovered the benzene ring. First he recounted that it came to him in a daydream that he imagined a snake seizing its own tale. Later he stated that it was on a horse drawn bus in London that he had a vision of dancing atoms.
Paul McCartney, of Beatle fame, is so talented as a songwriter that he "wrote" arguably the most played song of all time in his sleep: "Yesterday". When he awoke he rushed to write it all down, exactly as he remembered it from a dream. But he had doubts he really could have done this. He spent a month inquiring with people in the music business if they had heard this song before, so he wouldn't be acused of plagiarism. Not only is the Beatles' "Yesterday" still played all over the world, it is the song most "covered", or recorded, by other artists. Both MTV and Rolling Stone Magazine have voted it as the #1 pop song of all time. So for Sir Paul, not bad work for a hard day's night.
But, that wouldn't be a case of "daydreaming." Full REM sleep dreaming is a different brain phenomena. Nonetheless, it is still interesting the way the brain works on things in the background.
On a side note, despite being written by Paul only, the song is credited to both Lennon and Mcartney and Yoko Ono refused to change even the order of the credit when Paul asked her to.
12. bucketofsquid
in reply to hoamingin03:44 PM 2/24/11
So the interseting question based on your post would be; are we begining to evolve a larger STM to complement our already large LTM? I personally hope that we are because it will lead to greater innovation and flexibility. If it were to replace the large LTM instead of compliment it then we would become flighty geniuses with no long term rapid response capacity.
This is true. Many times, before going to sleep, I was worried about problems I had not solved, but, after a night´s sleep, the correct answers came to my mind. I enjoyed this article very much!
18. irenealhanati
in reply to irenealhanati05:33 PM 3/4/11
It is true. When I wrote, I made a mistake. INTERESTING! Thanks for your correction. Maybe, as a Brazilian whose native language is PORTUGUESE, I wrote thinking about the Portuguese word INTERESSANTE. Very INTERESSANTE!
i m also daydreamer.i am unfortunately 'cyborg'too.u may be aware of this phenomenon.through body implants certain people have taken control of my mind.my ideas are stolen and i am been put into diadvantageous situation.only my zeal to live have put me alive.if u have idea of cybernatic implant innovated by kelvin warwick,please convey me details of same.i m sure that the implant is at work but i m not knowing how it could be detected.certain people talk with me constantly,i too respond them and get feedback.and this is not a case of psychizophrenia.please find out the science.
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20 Comments
Add CommentThese slideshows aimed at craming six pages of ads in a row are so annoying.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisCouldn't read more than two pages.
Cognitive science has told us a lot about the brain since George Miller reported his shocking findings in 1956 about the miniscule capacity of the brain's short term memory (STM). He called it a bottleneck on the brain.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat suggested that the brain did not evolve for conscious thinking, that it evolved to produce responses from long term memory (LTM) that required records of particular situations which, when recognised, produced an automatic response.
That mechanism was observed using connections to individual neurons in Macaque brains. A familiar image triggered a fast response. When a novel feature was introduced, the fast response was inhibited and replaced by a modified or new response worked out in conscious STM that was slower and more variable.
This suggests that the human brain evolved a large LTM to store a large number of scenarios needed to produce the high level of skills and wide range of behaviours required to make humans expert hunter gatherers. Lack of innovation for millions of years is evidence that the large brain did not evolve to think, but to not-think, to produce fast, automatic, expert responses to a wide range of situations.
For millions of years the large brain evolved among pre-verbal ancestors to pass on from generation to generation behaviours that worked. Behaviours that did not work were eliminated with the individuals who used them and did not survive.
That model fits the data, and if it that is what the human brain evolved to do, present day humans use it in ways the brain did not evolve to be used.
Richard Nesbitt has shown us that people in different cultures use the brain in different ways. People in western cultures make much greater use of conscious, logical thinking (in limited STM). Most of Edward de Bono's techniques are designed to break the constraints of logic in western cultures. Having constraints in STM suggests that data in the LTM is less constrained by contextual connections.
So maybe westerners use the brain that evolved to load existing hunter gatherer practices into its large LTM now loads lots of knowledge and ideas, connections among which are less structured, making records more available for non-conscious processing, as long as conscious control from the LTM can be diverted.
In effect, the mechanism that inhibited innovation for millions of years is now used in a different way to produce the innovations that mark the difference between modern complex societies and the simple societies of hunter gatherer ancestors among whom the large brain evolved.
The caption for Einstein is incorrect. It says that "Einstein imagined two bolts of lightning striking the front and back of a moving train at the same instant. He realized that those strikes would NOT seem simultaneous to a person standing next to the track even if they DID seem so to an individual on the moving train". (emphasis mine)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBut that is not correct: The conclusion from this thought experiment is that although the lightening WOULD seem simultaneous to a person standing on the track, it would NOT seem simultaneous to a person on the moving train. The person on the train would see the bolt that struck the front of the train (the bolt the train is moving toward) before the bolt that struck the back of the train (the bolt the train is moving away from). To the person on the platform, however, the two strikes are simultaneous. So the person on the train would conclude that light from the bolt at the front of the train is moving faster than the speed of light, which cannot be true and thus the special theory of relativity.
Hmmm... This ties in nicely with a layman's level thought of mine regarding the effects of environmental stimuli on a child's mind.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAssigning a higher priority and capacity to our "reactive" mind leads me to believe that early life "programming" *might* generate a hard-wired state where early life abuse produces negative compensatory preferences or behaviors that are all but impossible to alter.
I think you're right that the original thought experiment had the trackside observer seeing the flashes as simultaneous, but what the caption says isn't actually wrong - if the person on the train were to see two simultaneous flashes, then they would not be simultaneous to the person standing on the platform.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEd, we live in the midst of the evidence of the effect of environmental stimuli on children's minds. Culture.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe culture of every society differs from cultures of other societies, but is consistent over time, passed on by children absorbing the attitudes and beliefs of the society they grow up in. They absorb most of the beliefs that will guide their future behaviours without conscious thought, and before their brains have developed the capacity for complex reasoning.
Hopefully most children grow up in a positive, supportive environment, but as you point out, some experience abuse. The extent that effects, good or bad, can be described as hardwired depends, I guess, on the intensity of the experience. I would describe the effect of past experiences as influencing, rather than determining behaviour.
A beautifully simple experiment with babies from age 6-10 months (Social evaluation by preverbal infants, Nature 450, 557-559) indicated that babies are born already wired with some positive predispositions. They understand relationships and innately prefer individuals who interact constructively with others. We can assume that these predispositions evolved over millions of years among hunter gatherer ancestors. Those innate predispositions are modified by attitudes that children absorb non-consciously from the society they grow up in, good or bad.
One of my points was that humans in modern societies use the brain in ways that are very different to the ways the brain evolved to be used. The mechanism that evolved to pass on practices that made humans expert hunter gatherers now passes on cultures.
Another point was that Einstein and other subjects of this article used the mechanism that had evolved to preserve past practices, effectively inhibiting innovation for millions of years, to produce new ideas by loading LTM with data that did not exist when the brain evolved, and allowing non-conscious "dream-like" processes to troll through it and produce connections that were not possible through logic.
Thank you for posting this remark. I was trying as hard as I could to figure out why I was so sure the article was incorrect.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHere are two more:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFriedrich August Kekule von Stradonitz gives two accounts of how he discovered the benzene ring. First he recounted that it came to him in a daydream that he imagined a snake seizing its own tale. Later he stated that it was on a horse drawn bus in London that he had
a vision of dancing atoms.
Paul McCartney, of Beatle fame, is so talented as a songwriter that he "wrote" arguably the most played song of all time in his sleep: "Yesterday". When he awoke he rushed to write it all down, exactly as he remembered it from a dream. But he had doubts he really could have done this. He spent a month inquiring with people in the music business if they had heard this song before, so he wouldn't be acused of plagiarism. Not only is the Beatles' "Yesterday" still played all over the world, it is the song most "covered", or recorded, by other artists. Both MTV and Rolling Stone Magazine have voted it as the #1 pop song of all time. So for Sir Paul, not bad work for a hard day's night.
But, that wouldn't be a case of "daydreaming." Full REM sleep dreaming is a different brain phenomena. Nonetheless, it is still interesting the way the brain works on things in the background.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOn a side note, despite being written by Paul only, the song is credited to both Lennon and Mcartney and Yoko Ono refused to change even the order of the credit when Paul asked her to.
Do what I do and block the advert servers. Anything that comes from the main site gets through and the adverts don't.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI noticed that too but would not have been able to describe it so well. Thank you.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSo the interseting question based on your post would be; are we begining to evolve a larger STM to complement our already large LTM? I personally hope that we are because it will lead to greater innovation and flexibility. If it were to replace the large LTM instead of compliment it then we would become flighty geniuses with no long term rapid response capacity.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInteresting but it doesn't sync up with observed facts of mental and personality mutability.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"Interseting"? Grammar fail! Should have been "Interesting". What can you expect from a guy that uses the phrase "grammar fail"?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is true. Many times, before going to sleep, I was worried about problems I had not solved, but, after a night´s sleep, the correct answers came to my mind.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI enjoyed this article very much!
These slide shows are VERY INTERSTING. I wish to thank Sciam for posting them.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishello!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this... great website! thanks...
It is true. When I wrote, I made a mistake. INTERESTING! Thanks for your correction. Maybe, as a Brazilian whose native language is PORTUGUESE, I wrote thinking about the Portuguese word INTERESSANTE. Very INTERESSANTE!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is SO GOOD to have the chance to post comments IN ENGLISH! Thanks, SCIAM!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisi m also daydreamer.i am unfortunately 'cyborg'too.u may be aware of this phenomenon.through body implants certain people have taken control of my mind.my ideas are stolen and i am been put into diadvantageous situation.only my zeal to live have put me alive.if u have idea of cybernatic implant innovated by kelvin warwick,please convey me details of same.i m sure that the implant is at work but i m not knowing how it could be detected.certain people talk with me constantly,i too respond them and get feedback.and this is not a case of psychizophrenia.please find out the science.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this