Creative ideas come to us, in physicist Nikola Tesla’s phrase, “like a bolt of lightning.” Creative thoughts that shift our contexts or reveal new meaning are discontinuous leaps from our ordinary stream-of-consciousness thoughts. Henri Poincaré pondered a mathematical problem for days, but nothing happened in his conscious, step-by-step thinking. But later, on a trip, a new context for mathematical functions came to him unexpectedly, discontinuously, as he was boarding a bus. He later reported the idea had no connection to his thoughts at the time, or to his previous thinking on the subject.
The king of Syracuse, in ancient Greece, wanted to find out if a certain crown was made of real gold, and who but his favorite scientist, Archimedes, could determine this without mutilating the crown? It is said that Archimedes suddenly hit upon the idea for an answer when he set foot in a full bathtub and the tub overflowed. So exalted was he that he ran naked in the streets of Syracuse shouting “Eureka! Eureka!” (“I found it! I found it!”) The solution Archimedes discovered started a new branch of hydrostatics.
The mathematician Carl Friedrich Gauss provides an example of the discontinuity of a creative insight in this way:
Finally, two days ago, I succeeded, not on account of my painful efforts, but by the grace of God. Like a sudden flash of lightning, the riddle happened to be solved. I myself cannot say what was the conducting thread which connected what I previously knew with what made my success possible.1
Notice the insistence on the role of the “grace of God.” This undoubtedly reflects Gauss’s keen awareness that he did not make the discovery via step-by-step thinking.
The composer Brahms also saw the discontinuity of his insight as help from God. He described his creative experience composing his most famous music with these words:
Straightaway the ideas flow in upon me, directly from God, and not only do I see distinct themes in my mind’s eye, but they are clothed in the right forms, harmonies, and orchestration. Measure by measure the finished product is revealed to me when I am in those rare, inspired moods.2
Here is an equally compelling quote about the suddenness of creativity from the great composer, Tchaikovsky:
Generally speaking, the germ of a future composition comes suddenly and unexpectedly. … It takes root with extraordinary force and rapidity, shoots up through the earth, puts forth branches and
leaves, and finally blossoms. I cannot define the creative process in any way but [by] this simile.3 The English romantic poet P. B. Shelley expressed the discontinuity of writing poetry succinctly: “Poetry is not like reasoning, a power to be exerted according to the determination of the will. A man cannot say, ‘I will write poetry.’ The greatest poet even cannot say it.”
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow puts his experience of discontinuity while writing a ballad in a somewhat different way:
Last evening I sat till twelve o’clock by my fire, smoking, when suddenly it came into my mind to write the ‘Ballad of the Schooner Hesperus,’ which I accordingly did. Then I went to bed, but could not sleep. New thoughts were running in my mind, and I got up to add them to the ballad. I felt pleased with the ballad. It hardly cost me any effort. It did not come into my mind by lines, but by stanzas.4
Note the words “not … by lines, but by stanzas.” Not bit by bit, but as a whole, discontinuously. This wholeness is characteristic of the quantum nature of creative insights, and even when an idea is only part of a whole solution, it acts as a seed for the wholeness that follows.
There is also ample evidence of discontinuity in dream creativity. Chemist Dmitri Mendeleev, who discovered the famous periodic table of chemical elements, said, “I saw in a dream a table where all the elements fell into place as required.” Mathematician Jacques Hadamard reported discovering the long-sought solutions of problems “at the very moment of sudden awakening [from dreams].” Beethoven wrote about finding a canon while in a dream:
I dreamt that I had gone on a far journey, to no less a place than Syria, on to Judea and back, and then all the way to Arabia, when at length I arrived at Jerusalem. … Now during my dream journey, the following canon came into my head. … But scarcely did I awake when away flew the canon, and I could not recall any part of it. On returning here however, the next day … I resumed my dream journey, being on this occasion wide awake, when lo and behold! In accordance with the law of association of ideas, the same canon flashed across me; so being now awake I held it as fast as Menelaus did Proteus, only permitting it to be changed into three parts.5
Objective Data
From the objective standpoint of scientific materialism, subjective reports of discontinuous shifts in consciousness like those cited above are suspect as evidence for the discontinuity in creativity, but there is objective evidence, too, of such quantum leaps of creativity! There is the phenomenon of quantum healing (spontaneous healing without medical intervention) that must be seen as a creative breakthrough, as the following case history shows.6 A patient designated as S.R. was diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease. S.R. was pregnant and did not want to lose the baby. So she refused chemotherapy and found a new doctor under whose supervision she had surgery, even radiation treatment, but the situation continued to get worse.Her physician was researching LSD therapy for cancer. S.R. took a guided LSD trip during which the doctor encouraged her to go deep inside herself and communicate with the life in her womb. As S.R. did that, her physician asked if she had the right to cut off the new life. It was then that S.R. had the
sudden flash of insight: She had the choice to live or die—a quantum leap. She chose life. It took a while after this insight, and a lot of lifestyle changes, but she was healed—quantum healing. You can deny the veracity of what she did or said, but the hard fact remains that she was healed without medical intervention. Incidentally, she also gave birth to a healthy child.
Thanks to Dr. Deepak Chopra and researchers at the Institute of Noetic Sciences in California, there is now much documented data of such quantum healing—spontaneous healing without medical intervention.7 Another source of objective data in support of quantum leaps of creativity consists of the many fossil gaps that are found between otherwise continuous fossil lineages.8 There is also a source of suggestive support for the discontinuity of creativity. Mythology, said the philosopher William Irwin Thompson, is the history of the soul (consciousness). The importance of discontinuity in creative acts is immortalized in India by the Valmiki myth: Ratnakar was a hunter who once killed two birds who were making love. He became so moved after realizing what evil he had done that lines of poetry spontaneously came out of his mouth and he was transformed. Later he became known as Valmiki and wrote the great Indian epic of the Ramayana. In the West, very tellingly, there is the myth of Newton’s apple—the falling of an apple is said to have triggered a discontinuous shift in Newton’s discovery of gravity.