Permission To Seek Diversion
Noodling on yesterday's post about Einstein's productive diversion, I found myself wondering: when is diversion NOT a waste of time? When is it the good kind of procrastination, and NOT the bad kind?
When, if you will, does one have permission to seek diversion?
It reminded me of a story I read in Dean Simonton's "Origins of Genius.":
"Poincare, a French mathematician, has described this process (the largely random production of ideational recombinations) in more detail. In general, creative individuals begin with a problem, for which they attempt to find a solution. This is the phase of conscious preparation. When creators discover that a solution is not immediately forthcoming -- when they find they are 'hitting their heads against a brick wall' -- they eventually give up, turning to other more fruitful activities, whether to creating other products or to the everyday chores of work and life. The creators thereby enter an incubation period with respect to the initial problem. Then without warning, creative persons may experience a sudden illumination. For instance, Poincare offered the following observation: 'I turned my attention to the study of some arithmetical questions apparently without much success and without a suspicion of any connection with my preceding researches. Disgusted with my failure, I went to spend a few days at the seaside, and thought of something else. One morning, walking on the bluff, the idea came to me, with just the same characteristics of brevity, suddenness and immediate certainty, that the arithmetic transformations of indeterminate ternary quadratic forms were identical with those of non-Euclidean geometry.' (ed: Yeah, me too...) Poincare took this unexpected inspiration as 'a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work.' He concurs with Hadamard in holding that much of the ideational recombinations take place below the threshold of consciousness...
"Finally, Poincare uses the atomistic imagery quoted earlier to venture the following conjecture about the progression from preparation to incubation to illumination:
"'The role of the preliminary conscious work... is evidently to mobilize certain of these atoms, to unhook them from the wall and put them in swing. We think we have done no good, because we have moved these elements a thousand different ways in seeking to assemble them, and have found no satisfactory aggregate. But, after this shaking up imposed upon them by our will, these atoms do not return to their primitive rest. They freely continue to dance.. The mobilized atoms are... not any atoms whatsoever; they are those from which we might reasonably expect the desired solution. Then the mobilized atoms undergo impacts which make them enter into combinations among themselves or with other atoms at rest...'"
Which is to say, when you're devoted to solving a problem, and have exhausted every known avenue of exploration, and are utterly disgusted with your apparent failure, then, and only then, do you have permission to seek diversion productively.
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