It is this incubation process happening subconsciously that makes such moments of insight seems like sudden breakthroughs.
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Moreover, by giving our thinking some space, we unlock the full potential of our minds and allow them the freedom and ability to discover the connections that we are having trouble making. When we are distracted by other things, our subconscious is able to incubate and explore the problem at hand. The first part is clear, but the later is far more intriguing. The truth is, much of what is manifest in such breakthroughs is the culmination of previous hard work and subconscious thinking. It’s also about what led up to it and what followed it,” says David Perkins, research professor at Harvard Graduate School of Education. “If you look historically at breakthroughs, the story is never just about the key insight. Simply because the final manifestation happened in a single moment, does not mean that is where the real insight occurred. It was not so much a sudden moment of insight, but rather that he was, “…led to it by steps arising from the individual laws derived from experience.” Translation: it was a progression that took a long damn time.
To summarize, the slow hunch is the premise that ideas take awhile to formulate and do not do so in moments of aha, but rather slowly brewing and forming over time.Įinstein said as much about his idea of special relativity. In his book, Where Good Ideas Come From, Steven Johnson explores the slow hunch. All the same, there is a belief that we are fortunate to have these sudden realizations and attribute our breakthroughs to them, but are they really so sudden? Perhaps not. We’ve heard such stories many times, often called Aha! or Eureka moments, although I don’t think anyone says eureka anymore. The rest is history.Ī similar story is found in how Charles Darwin discovered the theory of natural selection, where it just popped into his head when he was revisiting Malthus’ writings on population growth. Time can beat at different rates through the universe.
When we gazed at the clock tower, he had a sudden moment of clarity… the answer to special relativity was actually quite simple. He was again stumped, so he decided to get some fresh air and hopped on his bike for an excursion through the quaint streets of Bern, Switzerland.Īs he peddled along the cobbled streets he happened to come across the Zytglogge, a famous medieval clock tower in Bern that he had passed hundreds of times before, but this particular time was different. Einstein had been working on a theory for the relationship between space and time for years, but had made little progress.
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