Ap Dijksterhuis

Well, Poincaré said, OK, if my unconscious works on mathematical problems,

I should give it time.

So what he started to do is he worked only four hours a day, two in the morning and two in the afternoon, at least in a conscious way.

He worked in a conscious way four hours a day.

And the rest of the day, he assumed that his unconscious would work on the problems he was working on.

Lawrence Bragg was the youngest Nobel Prize winner ever, and I think he still is.

He was 25 or 26 when he won the Nobel Prize in physics.

And what he did, he had one day a week where he chose to go gardening rather than working in his lab.

And the assumption, of course, is that he was working on his scientific problems unconsciously.

And what is especially amusing about the story is that he was tending the garden of an elderly lady in London who didn't even know that she had this very famous gardener.

And it lasted until one of her friends came and she stood there in front of the window looking outside in the garden and she said...

My dear, do you realize that the Nobel laureate Sir Lawrence Bragg is actually pruning your hedges?

Before that, she didn't have an idea that she probably had the most famous gardener.

But yeah, he really believed in the importance of sometimes doing something completely different.

I once wrote a children's book about psychology and I compared thinking to a whale.

You know, a whale sometimes surfaces, but most of the time a whale is actually underwater and it still continues to swim.

And thinking is like that.

If we set ourselves important goals or if we work on something that we find very important,

We think about it when we pay attention to it, but also when we don't pay attention to it, when we're doing something completely different, like watching a movie, our brain continues to work on that important problem.

For things such as inspiration and creativity and problem solving, this is extremely important.