“Several scientists have told me that the fringes of sleep set the problem-sodden mind free to make uninhibited, bizarre, even random connections taht may throw up an unexpected answer. One said that the technical trick that led to one of his most admired discoveries–it was about the fundamental, molecular nature of genetic mutations–had sprung to mind while he was lying insomniac at three in the morning. Another said he was startled from a deep sleep one night by the fully worked-out answer to a puzzle that had blocked him for weeks–except that at breakfast he was no longer able to remember any detail except the jubilant certainty. So the next night he went to sleep with paper and pencil on the bedside table; and when, once again, he awoke with the answer he was able to seize it.
More usually, though, in the classic strategy for achieving enlightenment the weeks of saturation must be followed by a second stage that begins with the problem is deliberately set aside–put out of the active mind, the ceaseless pondering switched off. After several days of silence, the solution wells up.”
“And I think one way to tell when something important is going on is by laughter,” [Lewis] Thomas [a researcher on the biology of medicine at the Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center] went on. “It seems to me that whenever I have been around in a laboratory at a time when something very interesting has happened, it has at first seemed to be quite funny. There’s laughter connected with the surprise–it does look funny. And whenever you can hear laughter, and somebody saying, ‘But that’s preposterous!–you can tell that things are going well and that something probably worth looking at has begun to happen in the lab.”
–Both quotes from The Search for Solutions, by Horace Freeland Judson (1980)
“If the Lord does not build the house,
in vain do its builders labor;
if the Lord does not keep watch over the city ,
in vain does the watchman keep vigil.
In vain is your earlier rising,
your going later to rest,
you who toil for the bread you eat:
when he pours gifts on his beloved while they slumber.
Truly sons are a gift from the Lord,
a blessing, the fruit of the womb
Indeed the sons of youth
are like arrows in the hand of a warrior.
O the happiness of the man
Who has filled his quiver with these arrows!
He will have no cause for shame
when he disputes with his foes in the gateways.
–PSALM 127
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