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Step 4 • Incubate!

If you have labored over a problem and haven't found a satisfactory solution, you run the risk of frustration. Creative people of all sorts—writers, artists, composers, and scientists— often get the feeling of being "blocked up" on a problem—their minds just refuse to function on it any more. The best thing to do when this happens to you is to get away from the problem— let up on your mind.

Your conscious mind is only a small part of the mental powers at your disposal. Back in the memory cells of your mind may be dozens of facts and associations that you have completely for­gotten about and so haven't brought into use on your particular problem. But they are still there, in the subconscious. If you can just open up the communications channels, they may come out to help you find the solution to your present problem. In fact, you may find that a subconsciously produced idea is better than any that you were consciously able to develop, simply because it will have the benefit of all the experience and knowledge you have accumulated in your lifetime. The human brain actually has ten thousand times as much "memory capacity" as the best present-day electronic computer, and it can store and retain and recall this data for sixty to ninety years or longer.

There are other advantages to incubating, also: For one, it can give your mind a change of pace—a chance to inject new light into your search for a solution. For example, one business book author reported that while he was working on a rather "meaty" volume, he was incubating a sexy novel! And, he claimed, in mentally developing the characters and situations of his novel, he found that he would occasionally gain a new insight into the psychological aspects of his heavier subject and was able to improve the contents immeasurably. "Besides," he said, "It was nice to be able to get away from business once in a while!"

This touches on another prime advantage to incubation periods: they give ideas time to "grow." Psychologist Allan B. Chalfont put it this way: "Perhaps in the course of several days or weeks this thing that started with just the germ of an idea has developed into a full-fledged idea, complete with trimmings. And, in its full-fledged state, it is many times as exciting as before."

Still another advantage of learning to deliberately harness your subconscious, which is what incubation amounts to, is that it greatly increases the mental energy you have at your disposal. Some authorities consider this a significant "secret" of powerful minds: they have established a high degree of compatible co­operation between their conscious and their subconscious think­ing processes. After all, a man's conscious mental effort is some­thing that is subject to fatigue and exhaustion. Experiments have demonstrated, however, that the real thinking part of the brain, the cerebral cortex, is never completely at rest unless it is under the influence of powerful drugs—and even then, we are not sure that it can be put completely to "sleep." This means, of course, that your so-called "subconscious" can be kept working for you even when you are asleep.

Among the people who believed in the power to incubate deliberately were such minds as Josef Hofmann, Paderewski, and Fritz Kreisler, all great musical composers who made it a practice to spend hours in "idle" thinking. 'Charles Tellier, the French engineer, claimed that his greatest discoveries were made in the course of quiet strolls while his mind was busy enjoying the peaceful scenery. One observer reported that John Jacob Astor's most striking characteristic was the patience with which he would wait for one of his ideas to come "into full flower." Sir Isaac Newton was another scientist who believed in thinking continually by harnessing his subconscious, as was John Von Neumann. Von Neumann is reported to have believed that pure concentration alone was never enough to solve difficult mathe­matical problems and that these were solved in the subconscious. He would, therefore, frequently go to bed at night with a problem in the unsolved state and wake up in the morning and scribble the answer on the pad he kept on the bedside table. And therein probably lies the key that these minds used to unlock their sub­conscious mental powers:

To make your subconscious work for you intentionally, you have to give it specific assignments. You must turn your problems over to your subconscious mind in the form of definite jobs to be done after giving it all the essential facts, figures, and argu­ments to work with. This may seem to be a contradiction of the statement that incubation consists of forgetting the problem, or putting it out of your mind, but it is not, really. The trick is that just before you deliberately put the problem out of your mind, you just as deliberately review everything you have done on it. And then change your pace.

The great mind of Leonardo da Vinci was kept at work full time in this manner. Leonardo described his method this way: "I have found in my experience that it is of no small benefit when you lie in bed in the dark to recall in imagination, one after the other, the outline of the forms you have been studying." And, he reported, he would frequently awake in the morning with a solution to such a problem.

Many creative people have, of course, benefited from non-deliberate incubations. They would work on a problem until they had just plain "fagged out" on it; then, through fatigue or other necessity, would have the current of their thinking changed. And then would come the "bolt from the blue." Those creators, like Leonardo, who have studied themselves generally agree on what happened, and from them we have learned what we know about this subconscious "tool."

There is, of course, something else that must go along with this deliberate charge to the subconscious: an open, receptive mind, sensitized to the possibility of a new idea ready to be born. When the first hint of a solution creeps into your conscious thinking, you must then be ready to grasp it firmly and pull it bodily out into the light of conscious examination. You should, at the very least, make a written note of it. If it can be visualized, make a sketch of it. And make sure that either the note or the sketch can be deciphered later. The idea that comes in a flash can go in a flash!

The process of incubation has often been referred to as "sleeping on a problem." In actual practice, particularly in business, where problems can come thick and fast, the time you will have to incubate any particular problem may only be time that you can readily "make" in the course of the day. It may be just a matter of breaking away from your desk for a walk to the water cooler or for a "coffee break." Or it may be timing your activity on a problem so that you can mentally lay it aside while you go out to lunch.

It is nice when you do have overnight or a two- or three-day spell in which to let your subconscious take over the problem, and if you can allow yourself the time, then take it. But, at the same time, don't let incubation become an excuse for procrastina­tion. You can polish and refine and improve on an idea to the point where the original spark of the idea is smothered and lost. So give yourself enough time to incubate—but don't make it forever. After all, you are after accomplishment—not mere mental gymnastics!

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