how, to use the language of driving again, shift your mind up a gear
and find its most creative speed.
There is one chemical in the brain that may be of particular
interest if we are looking to provide fuel for our minds: gamma-
aminobutyric acid. It appears that this neurotransmitter helps your
brain to lock out unwanted stimuli and focus on what it wants to
do. We secrete this chemical when we are in a state of flow,
absorbed in a task. It seems that the chemical affects the membrane
of neurons so that they will only respond to chosen stimuli. This
helps to explain why, when you are totally engaged in learning
something, you fail to hear other people’s noise. We also secrete
gamma-aminobutyric acid during the night, which offers some
insight into why you can switch off from noises that might other-
wise disturb you.
Inspiration, ideas, and learning
Just occasionally, like Archimedes in his bath all those years ago, we
are suddenly blessed with a moment of inspiration. You may remem-
ber that he had been struggling to work out how to prove that the
emperor’s crown was made of gold. To do this, he had to be sure of
the density and weight of the metal used in the crown. Sinking into
his bath after another fruitless session in his workshop, history has
it that he noticed how his body displaced water. He cried “Eureka!”
as inspiration suddenly arrived: he had realized that the weight of
the water displaced was the weight of the body that had displaced it.
All of us are occasionally capable of an “aha!” moment, when
a new idea is born. Our learning in these situations is mysterious
and unpredictable. We often do not know how we have had a new
idea. To begin to understand this area a little, we will need to spec-
ulate about what Archimedes was doing before he took his bath.
How many different ways of working out the amount of gold in the
emperor’s crown had he tried? Did his insight arrive precisely
because he was relaxing in a bath rather than laboring away in his
workshop? What was it about his state of mind that made him
receptive to new thinking?
Harnessing Your Creativity 147
