All the really good ideas I’d ever had come to me while I was milking a cow,” said the painter Grant Wood, best known for his iconic work American Gothic (1930).1 Where and when do you get your best ideas? Under what circumstances? Is it while relaxing with a glass of wine at night? While taking a shower in the morning? Or while sitting at your desk after that first cup of coffee? Isaac Newton had the capacity to just stand immobile and think, think, think. Are such intense focus and relentlessly logical lucubration the key to creative insight? Not always. Remember, Archimedes had his “eureka” moment when taking a bath. Judging from the working habits of many geniuses, to be creative, one should simply unwind mindlessly—by soaking in a tub, milking a cow, listening to some music, going for a jog, or even taking a train ride. And perhaps most important for creative ideation: get a good night’s sleep, one that is full of fantastic dreams.
WHAT IS A DREAM? WHY DO WE DREAM? WHAT DO OUR DREAMS mean? The genius Sigmund Freud sought to provide answers to these questions in The Interpretation of Dreams (1900). Freud believed that dreams are expressions of not-yet-fulfilled desires hidden in the unconscious. It was a brilliant theory, but no one could scientifically prove it or disprove it, and with the advent of brain-imaging machines, the field of dream psychotherapy shifted from Freudian analysis to neurophysiology.
The key to interpreting the “dream factory,” science now suggests, rests in understanding what happens during rapid eye movement (REM) sleep. REM sleep is that deep, quasi-hallucinatory state we experience at the end of the sleep cycle, but sometimes even during naps. Magnetic resonance imaging scans reveal that during REM sleep, parts of the brain effectively shut down while others power up. The far left and right sides of the prefrontal cortex, which are responsible for decision making and logical thought, turn off, while the hippocampus, amygdala, and visual-spatial cortex, which attend to memory, emotion, and images, become hyperactive.2 The result, perhaps counterintuitively, is that while memories, emotions, and pictures run freely, better problem solving and more creative ideas can result.3 Modern neuroscience is proving the truth of an adage about problem solving: “Better go sleep on it.”
A test by Professor Robert Stickgold at Harvard and his collaborator Professor Matthew Walker, now at Berkeley, demonstrated that subjects were 15 to 35 percent more effective at unscrambling anagram puzzles after having awakened from a REM dream state than they were at solving those same puzzles after awakening from a non-REM state or after attempting to solve the puzzles from a wakeful state.4 In another test, Stickgold showed that if a REM dream was problem specific and the dream content was relevant to a problem to be solved after waking, the subject was ten times as likely to find a solution (in the case of this particular test, an escape from a maze).5 In his bestselling 2017 book Why We Sleep: Unlocking the Power of Sleep and Dreams, Walker made the point that in the superrelaxed state of REM dreaming, the brain is occupied with trying to make sense of things by free-associating over the whole memory bank, pulling together distant and disparate strands of information. “During the dreaming sleep state,” he said, “your brain will cogitate vast swaths of acquired knowledge, and then extract overarching rules and commonalities—‘the gist.’ . . . From this dreaming process, which I would describe as ideasthesia, have come some of the most revolutionary leaps forward in human progress.”6
AFTER OBSESSING OVER THE RELATIONSHIP OF ALL KNOWN CHEMICAL elements in 1869, the Russian chemist Dmitri Mendeleev fell asleep, and the solution came to him: the structure of the periodic table. The author Stephen King has said that his thriller Salem’s Lot sprang from a recurrent childhood nightmare. Julie Taymor, the creative force behind Broadway’s The Lion King, has noted that “a lot of my strangest ideas come from early morning sleep, and it’s really an incredible moment. I get up and the thing has become clear very fast.” Vincent van Gogh said, perhaps metaphorically, “I dream of painting and then I paint my dream.” Much of the surrealist Salvador Dalí’s art looks like the visions one might experience in a dream. Dalí was so obsessed with the creative power of dreams that he would intentionally fall asleep with a spoon in his hand. When he nodded off, the spoon would clatter to the floor, awakening him to the need to capture his sleep-induced thoughts at that somnambulant moment and put them on canvas.7
Just as artists see things as they dream, musicians hear things. Richard Wagner heard the beginning of The Ring Cycle in 1853 after taking a walk and then dozing off on a sofa. Igor Stravinsky recalled the genesis of his Octet for Wind Instruments in these terms: “The Octet began with a dream, in which I saw myself in a small room surrounded by a small group of instrumentalists playing some attractive music. I did not recognize the music, though I strained to hear it, and I could not recall any features of it the next day, but I do remember my curiosity—in the dream—to know how many the musicians were. . . . I awoke from this little concert in a state of great delight and anticipation and the next morning began to compose.”8 Billy Joel has reported dreaming of his pop tunes in orchestrally arranged versions. Keith Richards claims that the song “(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction” came to him in his sleep in a hotel room in Florida, where he had left on a slow-turning tape recorder that captured the opening motif of the tune.9 But the fullest description of musical inspiration born of surreal slumber comes from Sir Paul McCartney.
McCartney’s “Yesterday,” ranked as one of the top pop songs of the twentieth century, emerged from a dream in 1963, first the music and then more gradually the lyrics. McCartney introduced the song at a concert at the Library of Congress in 2010 with the words “The song that we are going to do now [“Yesterday”] to finish the evening is a song that came to me in a dream, so I have to believe in the magic.”10 McCartney has told this story about the origins of “Yesterday” many times: how it came to him when awakening from a dream at his girlfriend’s house and how he went to the piano to set some chords to it. Not believing that a melody could be the product of a dream, he went around for weeks, asking friends such as the producer George Martin, as well as fellow Beatles John Lennon and George Harrison, about its source. “‘What is this song? It must have come from somewhere. I don’t know where it came from.’ Nobody could place it, so at the end I had to claim it as my own. Well, that’s pretty magical, you wake up one morning and there’s this tune in your head. And then about three thousand people go and record it. The original lyrics to it were ‘Scrambled eggs, oh, baby, how I love your legs.’ But I changed them.”
WHAT MIGHT HAVE CAUSED MCCARTNEY’S MOMENT OF NOCTURNAL inspiration? Scientists say neurotransmitters, the electrochemical stimulators or repressors that move impulses from cell to cell within the body. During wakeful periods, the chemical noradrenaline flows through the brain, mobilizing it for action. It functions similarly to the way adrenaline, the “call to action” hormone, functions in the body. During REM dreaming, however, noradrenaline disappears and acetylcholine, known as the “calm and safe” neurotransmitter, comes to the fore, allowing the brain to begin its relaxed, associative free flight.11 The German chemist Otto Loewi (1873–1961) was the first to discover the power of acetylcholine, and he did so, appropriately, in a dream.
An earlier chemist, Henry Hallett Dale, had discovered acetylcholine in 1915. But how it works as a neurotransmitter was not clear until Loewi went to bed on the evening of March 25, 1921. The specifics here are not as important as the context in which Loewi’s insight occurred—in not one but two dreams on successive nights:
The night before Easter Sunday of that year [1921] I awoke, turned on the light, and jotted down a few notes on a tiny slip of thin paper. Then I fell asleep again. It occurred to me at six o’clock in the morning that during the night I had written down something most important, but I was unable to decipher the scrawl. The next night, at three o’clock, the idea returned. It was the design of an experiment to determine whether or not the hypothesis of chemical transmission that I had uttered seventeen years ago was correct. I got up immediately, went to the laboratory, and performed a simple experiment on a frog heart according to the nocturnal design.12
Following his nocturnal insight, Loewi devised an experiment in which he injected acetylcholine into a frog’s heart, causing it to beat, thereby showing how the heart can be stimulated not only by an external electrical charge but also by an endogenous chemical one. (Today, modern devices such as electronic loop recorders and pacemakers monitor and control electric firings within the heart.) Loewi’s discovery brought him the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1936.
There are three important points to be drawn here, with some practical applications. First, as with many nocturnal problem solvers, Loewi had the same dream more than once. Second, he seems to have been fixated on the same problem 24/7, over a long period of time, his insight coming as the endpoint of a seventeen-year period of incubation. Finally, he slept prepared—he kept pen and paper near him. Albert Einstein, too, was determined to always be prepared when an “aha” moment arrived. Once when Einstein was staying overnight with a friend in New York, his host asked if Einstein needed pajamas. The response: “When I retire, I sleep as nature made me.”13 But Einstein did request a pen and a notepad for his bedtable.14 Note to self: keep pen and paper by the bed.
Maybe also put them next to the shower. A 2016 survey reported by Business Insider showed that 72 percent of Americans get their best ideas in the shower. “We did a multinational study,” said University of Pennsylvania psychologist Scott Kaufman, “and found that people reported more creative inspiration in their showers than they did at work.”15 Neuroscientists explain why: dream-influencing neurotransmitters, such as acetylcholine, do not turn on and off like switches in the morning but rather slosh in and out like tides.16 Of course, the shower is relaxing owing to the warm water and the constant “white noise” background that blots out distractions. But most important, a time lag of as much as twenty minutes exists after we awaken before our mind has fully returned to its chemically wakeful state.17 During this “twilight zone” the brain is sensorily awake but still experiences a free flow of ideas. Thus, carpe diem, or at least the first twenty minutes thereof—and, again, keep pen and paper handy.
TAKING A SHOWER RELAXES US, AS DO CONSONANT HARMONIES AND gently rocking rhythms in music, even in the womb. Einstein intuited as much, and thus, wherever he moved, his violin usually accompanied him. The story that Einstein’s second wife, Elsa, told the actor Charlie Chaplin in 1931 suggests that music might be a not-so-silent partner during an important breakthrough moment:
The Doctor [i.e. Einstein] came down in his dressing-gown as usual for breakfast but he hardly touched a thing. I thought something was wrong, so I asked what was troubling him. “Darling,” he said, “I have a wonderful idea.” And after drinking his coffee, he went to the piano and started playing. Now and again he would stop, making a few notes.18
Einstein continued playing in this vein for half an hour while he thought about the significance of his breakthrough. He then went up to his study and, so the story goes, when he came down two weeks later, he held in his hands several sheets on which were the equations for his General Theory of Relativity.19
The tale may be exaggerated, but Einstein’s elder son, Hans Albert, reported similarly that when his father had reached an impasse in his study, he would reenter the family quarters and begin to play his violin to transport his mind to a different state. “Whenever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work he would take refuge in music and that would usually solve all his difficulties.”20
Sometimes even experienced musicians have to relax and get out of their own way. For years, when teaching my Yale course Listening to Music, I would tell students that Mozart had been able to play the piano when upside down. Then I would say, “Actually, it’s not that difficult,” and prove it. I would lie on my back on the piano bench, cross my hands, reach for the keys, and then play. (A video demonstration is posted on my website.) Over time I learned that if I concentrated on where I should put my fingers, I would make mistakes, but I could play flawlessly if I said to myself, “You know this stuff, just take a deep breath, relax, go—it will come.” One year a student pointed out to me something I didn’t realize: “Did you notice,” she said, “that when you played you closed your eyes?” No, I hadn’t, but it made sense. We should all realize that we have much studied material stored in long-term memory; we just need to relax and let it come to the fore.
SUFFERING FROM WRITER’S BLOCK? IF SO, PUT ON YOUR SNEAKERS and dash outside for a two-mile run. This, at least, is the suggestion made in a 2014 article in the Guardian reporting the findings of recent scholarly studies on the relationship between creativity and exercise.21 In fact, current research by several neurologists and psychologists suggests that increased exercise, even walking, enhances cognitive function as well as divergent thinking and creativity.22 But geniuses throughout history already knew this, consciously or not.
In ancient Greece a group called the Peripatetics, followers of Aristotle, conducted their philosophical inquiries while walking around the Lyceum. Charles Dickens walked fifteen miles a day through the streets of London while he conceived A Christmas Carol (1843).23 The son of Mark Twain recounted that his father paced while he worked: “Some of the time when dictating, Father walked the floor . . . then it always seemed as if a new spirit had flown into the room.”24 Bill Gates is a pacer, too. “It helps him organize his mind and see what others can’t see,” says his wife, Melinda.25 The avid walker Henry David Thoreau said in 1851, “The moment my legs begin to move, my thoughts begin to flow.”26 Unusual for a woman in her day, the novelist Louisa May Alcott, as we have seen, was a devoted runner: “I am so full of my work I can’t stop to eat or sleep, or for anything but a daily run,” she wrote while working on Little Women in 1868.27
Whether you walk or run, in nature or in a gym, neurotransmitters are at work, leading to diminished inhibitions, fewer conceptual restraints, and enhanced memory resources. But a caveat for all creative movers: although the place of activity does not matter, the pace does. Increasing the speed of the walk from seventeen-minute miles to twelve-minute miles, or the run from ten-to eight-minute miles, for example, will cause the average brain to shift out of a relaxed mode and into one focused on the mechanics of walking or running.28 Thus, if you are on an exercise treadmill, ignore all the electronic monitors; if you are outside, ditch the Fitbits; on the road, focused concentration is the enemy of creativity.
NIKOLA TESLA WAS RELAXED WHEN HE WALKED THROUGH THE City Park in Budapest one late afternoon in 1882. At age twenty-six, he was in Budapest to work for the new Budapest Telephone Company. A friend, Anital Szigety, had been impressing upon him the importance of regular exercise, so the two customarily took long walks together.29 Tesla recounted the following in his autobiography:
On an afternoon which is ever present in my memory, I was enjoying a walk with my friend in the City Park, and reciting poetry. At that age I knew entire books by heart, word for word. One of these was Goethe’s Faust. The sun was just setting, and reminded me of the glorious passage:
The glow turns back and retreats, done is the day of toil;
Yet it hastens forth, toward a new life;
Ah, that no wing can lift me from the soil
Upon its track to follow, again and again!
A glorious dream!
As I uttered these inspiring words, the idea came like a flash of lightning, and in an instant the truth was revealed.30
What Tesla had discovered was a way of inducing magnetic fields to rotate by means of alternating current, thereby forcing a drive shaft to rotate in a constant direction. From that insight developed the polyphase electrical motor that made Europe and, more so, the United States the industrial colossuses that they would become. Washing machines, vacuums, drills, pumps, and electric fans, among other things, are still powered by Tesla’s perambulatory insight.
But the important point is this: Tesla had been searching for this solution to a problem with the alternating current motor since his earliest days as an engineering student at the University of Graz back in 1875. “I may go on for months or years with the idea in the back of my head,” Tesla said when asked in 1921 about his thought process.31 The “aha” insight finally occurred when he was not consciously thinking about electric motors. He was walking in a park, reciting Goethe’s Faust to his friend, and enjoying the setting sun as the earth rotated. The original German of the passage in question, given above, contains the word rucken (“to turn back”)—the spinning of the earth, the spinning of a magnetic field powered by alternating current. Perhaps not coincidentally, the section of the poem he recited ended with a line beginning Ein schöner Traum (“a glorious dream”). Tesla was relaxed and perhaps in a semiconscious or dreamlike state. The confluence of conscious and unconscious sensations yielded a “eureka” epiphany, but that flash of insight had been seven years in the making.
Suppose you have no desire to exercise your way to an insightful state. Can a vehicle transport you there? Our geniuses suggest yes. Many did their best thinking in trains, buses, carriages, or boats. We have already seen how the journey that transformed Joanne Rowling into the bestselling author J. K. Rowling began on a train as she conceived the Harry Potter series. Walt Disney thought up Mickey Mouse on a train. Lin-Manuel Miranda says that the chorus of the song “Wait for It” in Hamilton came to him while riding on a subway train in New York on his way to a party. He sang the melodic refrain into his iPhone, briefly attended the party, and then completed the song on his subway ride home.32 The common denominator in those experiences: a constant rocking motion and a gentle background rhythm. Is that why we so often fall asleep on a train?
In a letter of 1810, Ludwig van Beethoven told how he fell asleep during a carriage ride from Baden to nearby Vienna: “When I was in my carriage yesterday, on the way to Vienna, sleep overpowered me. . . . Now, as I was slumbering, I dreamed that I was travelling far away, no less far than Syria, no less far than India and back again, to Arabia, too, and at last I came even to Jerusalem. . . . Now, during my dream journey, the following canon [musical round] occurred to me. Yet I had hardly awoken when the canon was gone and I could not recall a single note or word of it to my mind.”33 The next day, by coincidence, Beethoven happened to get into the same carriage to go back to Baden and, as he described it, “Lo and behold, in accordance with the law of association of ideas, the same canon occurred to me; now, waking, I held it fast, as once Menelaus held Proteus, and only granted it one last favour, that of allowing it to transform itself into three voices.” Movement, relaxation, sleep, and associative memory (the same, comfortable venue) all contributed to Beethoven’s short canon created twice in a carriage.
THUS FROM THE TIME OF SOCRATES (DEATHBED DREAM) TO PAUL McCartney (“Yesterday”), geniuses throughout history have affirmed that creative insights arise from relaxed moments both night and day. From these accounts can be extrapolated good advice for aspiring creators today. If you need a fresh idea, go for a walk or a jog, or simply get into a relaxing conveyance so as to allow your mind to range more freely. Don’t drive downtown, where you must pay attention to traffic, but head to wide-open spaces without focus-demanding audiobooks or radio news. Indeed, any sort of “mindless” physical activity involving repetitive motion can set your imagination free. The novelist Toni Morrison would “brood, thinking of ideas,” while mowing the lawn.34 The choreographer George Balanchine claimed, “When I’m ironing, that’s when I do most of my work.”35 When you wake in the morning, just lie there thinking for a few minutes—and don’t reach for your smartphone! At this moment your mind may be at its best. Similarly, don’t consider daydreaming or power napping to be a waste of time—think of them as opportunities to gain insight. Finally, be like Einstein: keep pen and paper by your bed or near the shower so as to be able to capture your best ideas. We all have the habit of wanting to be focused and “productive.” Geniuses have the habit of knowing when not to be.