Although these days we rarely tell stories about the muses visiting mere mortals and inspiring them with creative ideas, the stories we do tell haven't changed all that much. We like stories of epiphanies. We like it when the hero is stuck and suddenly the answer just comes to her. Even if the idea didn't come from a muse, the language we use to retell moments of creative insight still describes these moments as if something arrived from outside the individual. This is the Eureka Myth, the notion that all creative ideas arrive in a “eureka” moment. We tell stories about other people's genius ideas as if the idea came suddenly; we conveniently gloss over the tireless concentration that came before the insight, or the hard work of developing the idea that will come afterward. These stories tend to make the idea, not the person, the center of the narrative. I wonder if on some level we like these stories so much because the Eureka Myth offers us another excuse for our own lack of ideas: they just haven't come to us yet. Perhaps one day they will. In the meantime, we cling to well-known stories, like the one about an apple falling from a tree.

We've all heard the story. Isaac Newton sat under an apple tree. The young polymath was contemplating the nature of the universe, stuck on the challenge of explaining what kept it together. As he sat there, back resting against the wide trunk of the apple tree, the tree blessed him with the inspiration he needed. A falling apple struck Newton on the head and triggered something in his mind, causing him to theorize that some force must have been pulling the apple toward the earth. Perhaps the force that pulled the apple might be the same force that pulls upon the moon and keeps it orbiting the earth. Newton had his eureka moment and his answer. The apple fell, and Newton discovered the force of gravity. It's a fascinating and compelling story. Which is why it has stayed around so long despite the event's having never actually happened.

The earliest recorded account of Newton's skirmish with an apple comes from one of his younger contemporaries, William Stukeley, who would eventually write a biography of Newton. In his biography, Stukeley tells the story of how the two shared dinner together at Newton's home and retreated to the garden afterward for tea. Stukeley writes that he and Newton were prompted to discuss gravitation because of the falling of an apple from a tree in the garden. Their discussion ended with the assertion that the size of an object affected its gravitational pull.¹

That's it. No bombardment of apples. No sudden flash of insight. Stukeley's apple incident could barely be said to have added anything new to what Newton already knew about gravity. At best, the apple encounter Stukeley described could have prompted Newton to begin working on a mathematical formula to explain gravity. But as the story was told and retold by many people, including notable authors such as Voltaire² and Isaac Disraeli,³ the apple gradually changed its trajectory from falling on the grass to falling directly onto Newton.

Next to Newton's apple, the next most popular eureka myth is the story of Archimedes' bath, which actually coined the term eureka. Archimedes' cousin, King Hiero, had given Archimedes a special challenge. Hiero had received a crown supposedly made of pure gold. Hiero wanted to know if the gold crown was genuine or fake. Just in case it was genuine, Hiero insisted that Archimedes could not destroy the crown. He could not melt it down or cut into it to examine its composition. After working on the problem for some time, Archimedes decided to relax and take a bath. He filled the tub to the edge and settled in. As he did, he noticed that some of the water had spilled over the side. The presence of his body had caused the water level to rise. Immediately, Archimedes realized he had his solution. He knew that he could determine the density and thus the composition of the crown by submerging it and measuring the displacement of the water. Archimedes was so excited by his revelation that he leaped up from his bath to tell the king. As he ran naked down the streets toward the palace, he reportedly shouted, “Eureka,” which in Ancient Greek meant “I've found it!”

Most likely, neither of these stories actually happened as they are now told. But true or not, what these stories ignore is the hard work on either side of the “Eureka.” In Newton's case, most of the historical evidence supports that he had already been thinking about gravity's effect on planetary movement. At best, the fall of the apple only triggered Newton's mind into making the connection between the pull of gravity on small, planet-shaped objects (like apples) and the possibility that a large pull existed between the earth and the moon. Even after the apple incident, it was several years before Newton presented a finalized mathematical explanation for gravity. Likewise, in the case of Archimedes, we tend to ignore the work he'd done before relaxing to take a bath. Somehow Archimedes must have learned or calculated the formulas for how to turn a water displacement measurement into a measurement of density. After the bath, of course, he actually had to take the measurements and run the calculations.

These two accounts are the most famous, but certainly not the only stories involving the Eureka Myth. When stories of creative insight or sudden inspiration are told, many elements seem to get left behind in the retelling. In the case of Newton, his own retelling of the story may have pruned away some of the more accurate details. These are definitely more entertaining renditions of these stories, but they are far less truthful. The Eureka Myth doesn't offer much in the way of guidance for generating creative ideas or innovative breakthroughs. Instead, the myth reduces idea generation into something more providential—if you're in the right place at the right time, then your idea will manifest itself when triggered by something outside your control. There's nothing in the Eureka Myth, nothing in these stories, to tell us how to produce these moments of insight. If something sudden does happen, what inside the mind triggers it? Surely there has to be something we can do to help trigger a creative revelation besides being hit by falling apples or spilling water onto our bathroom floor.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has been searching for that something. In one of his more famous research projects, he studied the thought processes of ninety-one prominent creative individuals, including writer Robertson Davies and famed scientists Linus Pauling and Jonas Salk. Rather than probing the inner workings of their minds through psychological testing or brain imaging, Csikszentmihalyi focused his research on their own perspectives of the thought process they each used. His goal was to understand how they believed they generated their creative insight. In short, he was looking for how they produced eureka moments, if they produced them at all. What he found was that almost all of the people he studied shared a similar creative process that consisted of five stages: preparation, incubation, insight, evaluation, and elaboration.⁴ Note that Csikszentmihalyi's stages include a moment of insight, when it feels as though all the pieces of the puzzle have fallen into assembly. However, where the Eureka Myth would tell us that these insights are triggered by a chance happening, Csikszentmihalyi has placed this moment in the center of a larger and more elaborate process. It includes one stage that is often overlooked, especially inside our working life: incubation.

Incubation is the stage where people briefly step back from their work. Many creative people intentionally set a project aside and take a physical break from their work, believing that this incubation stage is where knowledge from preparation is digested and ideas begin to come together below the threshold of the conscious mind. Some people juggle various projects at the same time under the belief that while their conscious mind is focusing on one project, the others are incubating in the unconscious. In fact, these incidents are more common than the famed eureka moments of Newton and Archimedes. Edison, Michelangelo, Darwin, van Gogh, and da Vinci all took on various different projects simultaneously, regularly switching back and forth between them.⁵ Csikszentmihalyi's research allows for this, asserting that the unconscious mind is capable of keeping many ideas incubating in parallel, even if the conscious mind can focus on only one thing at a time. He writes that “cognitive accounts of what happens during incubation assume … that some kind of information processing keeps going on even when we are not aware of it, even while we are asleep.”⁶ Once the incubation stage has run its course, which could be a few days or several years, it should lead a person into the insight stage. This is where the feeling of “eureka” happens, where the ideas being incubated have fermented into a possible solution that can be tested and implemented. Sometimes the insight can seem as though it came from nowhere; other times it still takes intense focus on the project to yield a productive insight.

Csikszentmihalyi wasn't the first to describe such a series of stages. Late in the nineteenth century, French mathematician Henri Poncairé attempted to describe the process of creative discovery in four distinct phases: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. Poncairé's four stages are quite similar to the five stages Csikszentmihalyi's creative geniuses described. Although both describe the moment of illumination and the requirement of verification, the period of incubation is perhaps the most aligned. Both Poncairé and Csikszentmihalyi argued that eureka moments don't just happen; they are preceded by research and preparation and are birthed from a period of mental unfocus.

If Poncairé and Csikszentmihalyi's concept of incubation is accurate, then it should be possible to prove the occurrence of incubation empirically. It turns out that it is possible, but quite difficult—so difficult, in fact, that researchers have only recently found evidence for an incubation effect. A team of psychology researchers from the Centre of the Mind at the University of Sydney designed an experiment that divided ninety undergraduate psychology students into three groups.⁷ Each group was tasked with completing what is known as an alternate uses test, in which participants list as many possible uses for common objects as they can imagine. In this case, the participants were told to list possible uses for a piece of paper. The number of original uses that were generated would serve as a measurement of divergent thinking, an important element of creativity. The first group worked on the problem for four continuous minutes. The second group was interrupted after two minutes and tasked with generating synonyms for each word from a given list (considered to be another task that required creativity), then given two more minutes to complete the original test. The final group was interrupted after two minutes and given the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (considered a completely unrelated task), then given two more minutes to continue working on the original alternate uses test. But all groups were given a total of four minutes to work on their list of possible uses for a sheet of paper. The research team was then able to compare the creativity that resulted from continuous work, work with an incubation period during which a related task was completed, and work with an incubation period during which an unrelated task was completed. The researchers found that the group given a break to work on an unrelated task (the Myers-Briggs test) generated the most ideas, averaging 9.8 ideas in four minutes. The group given a break to work on a related task placed second, averaging 7.6 ideas generated. The group given no break but four continuous minutes of work time generated the fewest possible uses, averaging 6.9 ideas. The research team had validated the idea that incubation periods, even those as brief as a few minutes, can significantly boost a person's creative output.

Another study, this one led by Benjamin Baird, a psychologist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, whose research focuses on the role of conscious attention in thought processes, offers a peek inside the minds of the incubating participants in the aforementioned study.⁸ The participants in Baird's study went through a series of tests similar to those of the previously described subjects, except that instead of doing related or unrelated tasks as incubation time, they were given tasks that were cognitively demanding or undemanding. Demanding tasks required working memory and cognitive processing; undemanding tasks simply required reaction time. A control group worked only on creative problems, with no break task. After their incubation task, the participants were given a commonly used survey that measured the frequency that participants' minds wandered during the task, such as when thinking about personal worries, past events, or future plans. Not surprisingly, participants performing the undemanding incubation task reported that their minds had wandered significantly more than those performing the demanding task. Those whose minds had wandered most also scored significantly better on their creative measures—they reported more possible uses for their objects. Baird and his team showed that incubation periods which allow the mind to wander offer a significantly stronger boost to creativity, suggesting that individuals whose minds regularly wander may be more creative in general. Such mind-wanderers appear to have tapped into the power of incubation.

There are a lot of different explanations for why incubation works to produce eureka moments or creativity boosts. Besides giving your mind the chance to rest, one of the more popular explanations is known as “selective forgetting.” When presented with complicated problems, the mind can often get stuck, finding itself tracing back through certain pathways of thinking again and again. When you work on a problem continuously, you can become fixated on previous solutions. You will just keep thinking of the same uses for that piece of paper instead of finding new possibilities. Taking a break from the problem and focusing on something else entirely gives the mind some time to release its fixation on the same solutions and let the old pathways fade from memory. Then, when you return to the original problem, your mind is more open to new possibilities. When this return is triggered by a chance event or observation, it can often feel like the eureka moment of the Newton and Archimedes legends.

It's likely that Newton found the beginnings of his formula for gravity and Archimedes realized his method for testing the golden crown after a period of incubation. They allowed their minds to relax, and a chance observation directed their attention back to their problems, causing them to stumble on new possibilities. It was incubation that led to a solution, not falling apples or spilled bathwater. So why do the eureka stories persist? Probably because history has a story-centric nature, and tales of fallen apples and relaxing baths are far more engaging than the truth.

In the 1930s, Norman Maier designed an experiment to explain why we describe our moments of insight as sudden inspiration.⁹ Maier was a renowned experimental psychologist who did most of his work at the University of Michigan. In his experiment on moments of insight, he set individual participants in a large room filled with an assortment of objects, from extension cords and poles to tables and chairs. From the ceiling, Maier had suspended two long ropes, one in the center of the room and one next to the wall. Although the ropes were long, they were placed far enough away from each other that you couldn't grasp one rope and walk over to the other. Maier's challenge to each participant was simple: tie the two ropes together. Specifically, think of as many methods as possible to connect the ropes.

There are a variety of solutions to Maier's problem, and the majority of participants came up with three fairly easily. Most participants thought (1) to move one rope as close as it could get, tie it to a piece of furniture, and then grab the second rope and bring it to the tied-down rope; (2) to tie the extension cord to the end of one rope and pull it to the other; and (3) to use a pole to fish one rope and drag it to the other. While most participants thought of these three solutions, a minority thought of a fourth: set the first rope swinging back and forth, then grab the second rope and walk toward the swinging rope, catching it when it swung close enough to be reached. For those in the majority, who didn't think of this solution on their own, Maier gave them a small hint. Ten minutes into the experiment, he walked by one rope and “accidentally” brushed it with just enough force to start it swinging. After watching this subtle motion, most of the participants thought of the fourth solution. Strangely, when Maier later asked all the participants how they thought of the swinging solution, only one mentioned Maier's accidental brush. The rest described it as a flash of insight and constructed elaborate explanations of their thought processes involving things like monkeys swinging from trees or childhood tire swings. Maier's experiment demonstrates what most psychologists call confabulation—in hindsight, people are often quick to invent explanations for unknown behaviors. Confabulation is how stories of falling apples are written. When incubation yields insight from an unknown source, confabulation is there to help develop a grander and more satisfying tale.

Although an empirical explanation of the Eureka Myth is vital to understanding the truth about innovation, it's equally important to emphasize that neither Newton nor Archimedes would have ever had his eureka moment without going through the other stages in Csikszentmihalyi's creative thought process. Without adequate preparation, their minds may never have generated the correct solution. Likewise, without evaluation and elaboration, their ideas would not have been validated, and we might still be without a formula for gravity. In addition, without the incubation process and the elaboration that follows, we might also be without another life-changing innovation: the Post-it Note.

In 1966, a young chemist named Spencer Silver joined the R&D division of 3M (Minnesota Mining and Manufacturing Company). After two years of working on various projects, Silver turned his attention to improving one of the company's more established product lines: adhesives. Silver worked on this project off and on for five years but was only able to develop an inferior adhesive.¹⁰ Whenever he tinkered with the formula, he could only produce an adhesive that was less sticky than existing products. He felt that there had to be a use for what he was working on, but was unable to figure out what that was. Silver persisted, showing the project to as many people in the company as he could, hoping they might be able to find a use for his technology. Unfortunately for Silver, it seemed as though no one he talked to could help him.

Art Fry, a chemical engineer to whom Silver had once presented the project, was a singer in his church's choir. Fry struggled with how to mark the pages in his hymnal without damaging the book. Bookmarks worked, but they had a tendency to fall out when he opened the book while he was singing. One Sunday morning when Fry was in church, his mind drifted to the stalled project, and he connected the dots between his hymnal and Silver's project. If he were to coat his bookmarks with Silver's glue, they would stay inside his hymnal to mark the pages during the service but could later be removed without damaging the book. Fry returned to work, contacted Silver, and for two years the duo worked on a prototype for a semipermanent bookmark as an unauthorized side project, eventually building a manufacturing setup in the basement of Silver's home. After several more years tinkering with manufacturing, they presented the product to people inside 3M. The reaction was positive; people enjoyed using the removable bookmark, and word quickly spread. But there was a problem. Most of the test bookmarks were used once. They were tucked inside a book, and the book was placed on a shelf to wait for the reader's return. If the bookmarks were reused, Fry's colleagues would just remove them from one book and put them in another. The product worked well, but it wasn't being used often enough to show market demand.

A few weeks later, while working on an unrelated project, Fry had another insight. He was reviewing a report and was unclear about a particular paragraph. Instead of writing a memo or making a phone call, Fry reached for one of his removable bookmarks. He wrote his question on the bookmark and stuck it to the report before sending the document up to his supervisor. To his surprise, his supervisor returned the report with the answer to Fry's question written on a different bookmark and stuck on top of Fry's original. Fry realized that these bookmarks could be used as a way to communicate. He could leave brief notes to colleagues and stick them in places where they would be easily seen. “During a coffee break we thought, ‘Aha! we don't have just a bookmark, what we have is a whole systems approach,'” Fry said, recounting his and Silver's second discovery.¹¹ Fry distributed the bookmarks throughout his company with new instructions: to write notes on them. Within a few weeks, the offices of 3M were filled with small squares of paper stuck to every imaginable surface.

In 1980, a full twelve years after Silver's invention of an “inferior adhesive,” 3M released the Post-it Note to the mass market. On the surface, this story looks like another tale of eureka moments. But consider the story against Csikszentmihalyi's five-stage creative thought process. Silver and Fry spent whatever time they could in the preparation stage. They would experiment with the formula, tinker with a manufacturing process, and even discuss the project with various colleagues. Because it was a side project, they were forced to constantly take incubation periods to refocus on their main projects. It was during one of these incubation periods that Fry had his first insight, sticking the adhesive onto bits of paper and using them as bookmarks. Silver and Fry moved from this insight into evaluation, but the evaluation wasn't great. It was a good product, but not one with much market potential. Again during another incubation period, Fry had his second insight: he used the bookmark as a note. This time, when they moved to evaluation and elaboration, they found success. Even after both insights, there was still much work that needed to be done to test whether the eureka moments' insights had helped them create a marketable product.

We like stories of sudden inspiration like that of Newton and the apple or Archimedes and the bathtub. However, just as in the case of the Post-it Note, these flashes of genius are actually part of a larger process of creative work. Each stage in the process is vital to innovation. Without preparation, our mind doesn't have much material to work with. Without incubation, we can become fixated on solutions that don't work and never generate the insight we need. Even after we have an insight, we must evaluate our idea and elaborate on it before it becomes something tangible. The Eureka Myth can lead people astray, encouraging them to sit underneath trees or take endless baths hoping for the right moment of inspiration. The lesson of incubation is to work hard on a creative task or difficult problem, but to shift tasks when we get stuck, giving ourselves permission to let our minds wander to something else for a little while. We might just find that our mind drifts back to the problem, but this time it offers a new solution.

3. Patricia Fara, “Catch a Falling Apple: Isaac Newton and Myths of Genius,” Endeavour 23 (1999): 167–170.

4. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Creativity: Flow and the Psychology of Discovery and Invention (New York: HarperPerennial, 1997).

7. Ellwood and others, “The Incubation Effect: Hatching a Solution?” Creativity Research Journal 21 (2009): 6–14.

8. Benjamin Baird and others, “Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation,” Psychological Science 23, no. 10 (2012), 1117–1122.

9. Norman R. F. Maier, “Reasoning in Humans: II. The Solution of a Problem and Its Appearance in Consciousness,” Journal of Comparative Psychology 12 (1931): 181–194.

10. David Owens, Creative People Must Be Stopped: 6 Ways We Kill Innovation (Without Even Trying) (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2011).

11. Quoted in Matthew May, The Laws of Subtraction: 6 Simple Rules for Winning in an Age of Excess (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2012), 184.