Eureka Moment Quotes

It's a weird feeling, scientific breakthroughs. There's no Eureka moment. Just a slow, steady progression toward a goal. But man, when you get to that goal it feels good.

Eureka" can be an answer to a question we have never asked. It can be the articulation of a sudden and unforeseen idea or the expression of a magic moment that throws us into a new world. It acts like a radiant sunbeam that comes out of the blue and illuminates a dim past, opening a new, dynamic horizon. It may even be a trivial but lucky encounter with new friends, who let us be what we are in our imagination: original and undifferentiated. (“Waiting for Eureka” )

If we find ourselves missing the art of living, we must suffer from a lack of fulfillment, joy, and meaning in life. By opening the closets of our minds, igniting the wicks of our curiosity, and unlocking the abandoned doors to our dormant passion, we revive an inspired and creative way of life. ("Waiting for Eureka")

This is how great intellectual breakthroughs usually happen in practice. It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton's famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.

The greatest eureka moment is discovering yourself

We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. I’m arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic.

Miracles do not belong to religions. Miracles belong to the desperate, which is why every religion, every philosophy, and most importantly, every fairy tale always has a moment of salvation, a eureka, an enlightenment. We are all chasing and chasing tails, running and running in circles, until a wolf or the witch or the stepmother jumps out and trips us, and we fall flat, splat, and we lie bare and bleeding and breathless and finally, finally look and see whatever it is---salvation or eureka or enlightenment or a hunter or prince or a glass slipper---in front of us. And that's what miracles are. Not solutions, but catalysts. Not answers, but chances.

It always happened like this: he would look and look for the keys to Satan’s Hearse and then finally he’d just give up and say, “Fine. I’ll take the fugging bus,” and on his way out the door, he’d see the keys. Keys show up when you reconcile yourself to the bus; Katherines appear when you start to disbelieve the world contains another Katherine; and, sure enough, the Eureka moment arrived just as he began to accept it would never come.

Keys show up when you reconcile yourself to the bus; Katherines appear when you start to disbelieve the world contains another Katherine; and, sure enough, the Eureka moment arrived just as he began to accept it would never come.

the human mind works in three elementary phases: saturate, incubate, and illuminate. Time allows us to saturate our mind with context, so we can incubate and spark the eureka moments of illumination that connect the dots, snap together patterns, and discover the options that allow us to find our paths.

This is the Rule of Creative Theft, which says greatness doesn’t come from a single great idea or eureka moment. It comes from borrowing other people’s work and building on it. We steal our way to greatness.

Walking through the West Village one night, he had a eureka moment: He would make a gay bar, but for straight people. It was a brilliant idea. Soon after, he opened the first T.G.I. Friday's on the Upper East Side.

The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings.

I wanna have a Eureka moment,” he said, the way another kid might have expressed longing for a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. She pressed the back of her hand to his cheek and smiled, her face so close to his that he could smell coffee and makeup. “Of course, Colin baby. Of course you will.” But mothers lie. It’s in the job description.

The teacher is a catalyst to convert information from a high energy state (list of facts) to a low energy state (visual concept associated with known concepts).

It’s a weird feeling, scientific breakthroughs. There’s no Eureka moment. Just a slow, steady progression toward a goal. But man, when you get to that goal it feels good.

the Eureka moment felt like a thousand orgasms all at once, except not as messy.

This is my eureka moment;

The Eureka moment arrived just as hebegan to accept it would never come.

Ideas can come from anywhere. You could be sitting in a tub and have a eureka moment. Or in a bus or at your dining table.

People think of these eureka moments and my feeling is that they tend to be little things, a little realization and then a little realization built on that.

Many important discoveries contained a “Eureka moment.

Stay relaxed and wait for your Eureka moment. It will come at a time and places generally when you least expect it to come.

In the folklore of science, there is the often-told story of the moment of discovery: the quickening of the pulse, the spectral luminosity of ordinary facts, the overheated, standstill second when observations crystallize and fall together into patterns, like pieces of a kaleidoscope. The apple drops from the tree. The man jumps up from a bathtub; the slippery equation balances itself. But there is another moment of discovery—its antithesis—that is rarely recorded: the discovery of failure. It is a moment that a scientist often encounters alone. A patient’s CT scan shows a relapsed lymphoma. A cell once killed by a drug begins to grow back. A child returns to the NCI with a headache.

groundbreaking, out-of-the-box innovation rarely comes from a committee process or anxious overseers. It still usually comes from individuals like you who experience the ‘Eureka moment’ and have the ability to see it through.

We like to think of innovation as striking us in a stunning eureka moment, where you all at once change the way people see the world, leaping far ahead of our current understanding. I’m arguing that in reality, innovation is more systematic. We grind away to expand the cutting edge, opening up new problems in the adjacent possible to tackle and therefore expand the cutting edge some more, opening up more new problems, and so on. “The truth,” Johnson explains, “is that technological (and scientific) advances rarely break out of the adjacent possible.

Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it... Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift-wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents. Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step.

That’s the eureka moment, when suddenly you know something. Your hands sweat, you get into all kinds of symptoms of tremendous excitement. First of all, it’s fear. Is it right? And it’s incredible humor. ‘How could it be any other way? It had to be that way! How could we have been so stupid, not to see this?

A eureka moment. It suddenly struck Mintz as so obvious. The executives entrusted with reviewing all of the LJM transactions- Causey, Buy, the board- approached their duties casually, giving everything just the onceover. They seemed to figure that somebody else was doing the tough analysis. But no one was. p.389

It wasn’t a “Eureka!” kind of moment—it was the slow realization that the parts of me that had been empty were starting to fill up again. Yet, as gradual as this all was, there was one surreal moment that crystallized it for me—one moment where I suddenly understood what Idol meant to people and what it was doing for me.

Eureka!"s like the one Archimedes had when he stepped in a bathtub and suddenly realized the answer to the problem of testing metals' density are few and far between, and mostly it's just trying and failing and trying something else, feeding in data and eliminating variables and staring at the results, trying to figure out where you went wrong.

Most of us have one BIG IDEA at some point in our lives. That Eureka! moment. It comes to us all in different ways, often by chance of serendipity.

What have you loved? What stands out in your mind as can’t miss Life Attractions?” “I’m not sure. When people make those bucket lists online, they focus on big, flashy things, like going to the top of the Eiffel Tower or swimming with dolphins or whatever. They’re doing those for Instagram, though, or because they think it’s what they’re supposed to want. I guess they do sound impressive when you say them out loud to other people. But everything I remember as being the best moments of my life has been so…small. Like…running through the sprinklers with my best friend on summer break, getting grass stuck all over my wet feet. The first time my baby sister smiled at a silly face I made. My first real Eureka moment in the biochem lab.

But inspiration can strike in many different ways ... When the philosopher Archimedes stepped into his bath and sloshed water over the sides, the people downstairs were inspired to find a new flat.

This was a eureka moment: I realized that the tasks we had chosen for study were exceptionally effortful. An image came to mind: mental life—today I would speak of the life of System 2—is normally conducted at the pace of a comfortable walk, sometimes interrupted by episodes of jogging and on rare occasions by a frantic sprint. The Add-1 and Add-3 exercises are sprints, and casual chatting is a stroll.

It is rarely the isolated genius having a eureka moment alone in the lab. Nor is it merely a question of building on precedent, of standing on the shoulders of giants, in Newton’s famous phrase. Great breakthroughs are closer to what happens in a flood plain: a dozen separate tributaries converge, and the rising waters lift the genius high enough that he or she can see around the conceptual obstructions of the age.

Eureka!" Mungo yelled. It was a word that wasn't actually a word but which he'd mathematically proved to exist in a parallel realm and he quite liked the sound of it when it came to needing something to yell in moments of cerebral triumph.

I was thinking, Mythili. All those syllables at the end of French words, all those syllables that are wasted because they are not pronounced by the French, where do they go?’ ‘Where do they go, Unni?’ ‘Theyjoin the underground Union of Insulted French Syllables.’ ‘Really?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘What does the underground union do?’ ‘The syllables try to influence mankind. Over centuries, over vast ages, they try to influence man. They give humans ideas, thoughts, doubts, eureka moments. All this to help man create something, a machine probably, that would have such a name, such a word that all the syllables in the Union of Insulted French Syllables would be included and pronounced. Humans think all of science is their creation, but no, Mythili. The insulted French syllables are the ones who are giving us those ideas.’ ‘You are mad, Unni.’ ‘The leader of the union is X.’ ‘X?’ ‘Yes, the most humiliated letter in French even today. There was a time when nobody in France used to pronounce it. Don’t laugh at X, Mythili. He waited for centuries and patiently fed ideas across many generations. And finally mankind discovered the X–ray. Now the French have to pronounce X. They have no choice.

Instruct - Instruct your subconscious mind to find the answer. Incubate - Now, leave the problem aside - don’t work on the problem, go and do something else. Maybe take a shower or go on vacations, etc. Eureka- the moment will jump out of air suddenly, and you will be supplied with the great idea that can transform your life.

We tend to think of imagination and foresight like we are prone to think of life (sometimes) -- as an inscrutable flash of something from the outside that magically takes us over some large boundary in one atomic step. We even call it a flash (of insight), a eureka moment, a light bulb in our heads that suddenly turns on. But if you reflect on this phenomenon for a moment, you know you don't go suddenly from a blank mind to a fully formed solution. You were already thinking about the problem, and other near solutions that don't work, when suddenly you see a new connection that enables you to reuse familiar things on a novel way. Insight comes in small increments, leveraging what was already there.

The multitude of studies that I and other scientists have con ducted on positivity is destined to remain merely interesting dinner conversation until you deepen your self-study. You need to pivot away from what’s worked for others and toward what works for you. Have your own “Eureka!” moments. Discover for yourself what rouses genuine and heartfelt positivity.

As a species, humans straddle a line between external and internal intelligence. With big brains and (typically) small clan size, humans have traditionally harnessed individual cleverness to outcompete rivals for food and mates, to hunt and dominate other species, and, eventually, to seize control of the planet. As later chapters will show, we have also externalized our wisdom in the form of trails, oral storytelling, written texts, art, maps, and much more recently, electronic data. Nevertheless, even in the Internet era, we still romanticize the lone genius. Most of us—especially us Americans—like to consider any brilliance we may possess, and the accomplishments that have sprung from it, as being solely our own. In our egotism, we have long remained blind to the communal infrastructure that undergirds our own eureka moments.

The big question in cosmology in the early 1960s was did the universe have a beginning? Many scientists were instinctively opposed to the idea, because they felt that a point of creation would be a place where science broke down. One would have to appeal to religion and the hand of God to determine how the universe would start off. This was clearly a fundamental question, and it was just what I needed to complete my PhD thesis. Roger Penrose had shown that once a dying star had contracted to a certain radius, there would inevitably be a singularity, that is a point where space and time came to an end. Surely, I thought, we already knew that nothing could prevent a massive cold star from collapsing under its own gravity until it reached a singularity of infinite density. I realised that similar arguments could be applied to the expansion of the universe. In this case, I could prove there were singularities where space–time had a beginning. A eureka moment came in 1970, a few days after the birth of my daughter, Lucy. While getting into bed one evening, which my disability made a slow process, I realised that I could apply to black holes the casual structure theory I had developed for singularity theorems. If general relativity is correct and the energy density is positive, the surface area of the event horizon—the boundary of a black hole—has the property that it always increases when additional matter or radiation falls into it. Moreover, if two black holes collide and merge to form a single black hole, the area of the event horizon around the resulting black hole is greater than the sum of the areas of the event horizons around the original black holes.

There was a graduate student in my cohort, this guy I dated, who told me he came to realize that doing physics is like this: there's a concrete wall twenty feet thick, and you're on one side, and on the other side is everything worth knowing. And all you have is a spoon. So you just have to take a spoon and start scraping at the wall: no other way. He works in a bookstore now. But I think of it this way. There is a jigsaw puzzle. It's infinitely large, with no edges or corners to help you out. We have to put it together: it's our duty. We will never finish, but we have to find our satisfactions where we can: when we place two pieces together that suggest we may have found the place where the sky touches the sea, or when we discover a piece that is beautiful in and of itself, that has an unusual color or a glimpse of an unexpected pattern. And the pieces that do not join together also tell you something. If there are very few eureka moments, then at least there are a thousand little failures, that point the way toward a hundred little joys.

There is a myth about how something new comes to be. Geniuses have dramatic moments of insight where great things and thoughts are born whole. Poems are written in dreams. Symphonies are composed complete. Science is accomplished with eureka shrieks. Businesses are built by magic touch. Something is not, then is. We do not see the road from nothing to new, and maybe we do not want to. Artistry must be misty magic, not sweat and grind. It dulls the luster to think that every elegant equation, beautiful painting, and brilliant machine is born of effort and error, the progeny of false starts and failures, and that each maker is as flawed, small, and mortal as the rest of us. It is seductive to conclude that great innovation is delivered to us by miracle via genius. And so the myth.

The mood at the table is convivial throughout the meal. A dried-sausage and prosciutto plate gives way to briny sardines, which give way to truffle-covered gnocchi topped with a plethora of herbs. Richness cut with acidity, herbaceousness and cool breezes at every turn. A simple ricotta and lemon fettuccine topped with sharp pecorino is the perfect counterpoint. I am not driving, and apparently Anjana isn't, either, so we both order a Cynar and soda. "How can we digest all the pasta without another digestif?" we exclaim to the waiter, giddily. Meat, carbs, sunshine, and lingering music coming from across the plaza have stirred us up, and soon our dessert--- some sort of chocolate cake with walnuts--- arrives. It's dense in that fudgey way a flourless concoction can be, like it has molded itself into the perfection of pure chocolate. The crunch of the walnuts is a counterweight, drawing me deeper into the flavor. I haven't been inspired by food like this in a long time, despite spending so much time thinking about food. The atmosphere at work has sucked so much of the joy out of thinking about recipes, but I find myself taking little notes on my phone for recipe experimentation when I get home. The realization jolts me. I've always felt like I have the perfect job for a creative who happens to also be left-brained. Recipes are an intriguing puzzle every single time. Today's fettuccine is the perfect example. The tartness of the lemon paired with the smooth pasta and pillowy ricotta is the no-brainer part. But the trickier puzzle piece--- the one that is necessary to connect the rest of the puzzle to the whole--- is the light grating of the pecorino on top. That tang, that edge, that cutting spice works in tangent with the lemon to give the dish its power. Lemon alone wouldn't have been enough. Pecorino alone wouldn't have been enough. The dish is so simple, but it has to fit together perfectly to work. These little moments, these exciting eurekas, are the elation I normally get in my job.

WE USUALLY IMAGINE that invention occurs in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads a lone inventor toward a startling epiphany. In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin.

Beauty is a function of truth, truth a function of beauty. They can be separated by analysis, but in the lived experience of the creative act-and of its re-creative echo in the beholder-they are inseparable as thought is inseparable from emotion. They signal, one in the language of the brain, the other of the bowels, the moment of the Eureka cry, when 'the infinite is made to blend itself with the finite'-when eternity is looking through the window of time. Whether it is a medieval stained-glass window or Newton's equation of universal gravity is a matter of upbringing and chance; both are transparent to the unprejudiced eye.

It confirmed Biederman’s sense that “most advances in science come not from eureka moments but from ‘hmmm, that’s funny.

The eureka moment is not the endpoint of innovation, it is the start of perhaps the most fascinating stage of all.

When you file a patent, somebody is almost always there before you. A lot of your argument with the patent examiner is to say: “Look, they may have had the eureka moment when they came back from the timber yard. They may even have created an early prototype.” But none of my forebears had made their prototypes work. Mine is statistically different. That was my decisive advantage. Creativity, then, has a dual aspect. Insight often requires taking a step back and seeing the big picture. It is about drawing together disparate ideas. It is the art of connection. But to make a creative insight work requires disciplined focus. As Dyson puts it: “If insight is about the big picture, development is about the small picture. The trick is to sustain both perspectives at the same time.

While the seven essential elements are a distillation of what we did on an everyday basis, they represent long-term discovery too. An important aspect of this book is the way we built our creative methods as a by-product of the work as we were doing it. As all of us pitched in to make our products, we developed our approach to creating great software. This was an evolution, an outgrowth of our deliberate attention to the task at hand while keeping our end goal in mind. We never waited around for brilliant flashes of insight that might solve problems in one swoop, and we had few actual Eureka! moments. Even in the two instances in my Apple career when I did experience a breakthrough—more about these later—there certainly was no nude streaking across the Apple campus like Archimedes supposedly did. Instead, we moved forward, as a group, in stepwise fashion, from problem to design to demo to shipping product, taking each promising concept and trying to come up with ways to make it better. We mixed together our seven essential elements, and we formulated “molecules” out of them, like mixing inspiration and decisiveness to create initial prototypes, or by combining collaboration, craft, and taste to give detailed feedback to a teammate, or when we blended diligence and empathy in our constant effort to make software people could use without pulling their hair out. As we did all this mixing and combining of our seven essential elements, we always added in a personal touch, a little piece of ourselves, an octessence, and by putting together our goals and ideas and efforts and elements and molecules and personal touches, we formed our approach, an approach I call creative selection.

What we found in our conversations with these superachievers was that success di not come to them in the thunderclap of their Eureka! moments. Talent was just the beginning. Their sustained success depended on many factors -some in their control, and some not- but the first steps of these superachievers were to know themselves and to assess what they had to work with. Then, their progress toward their goals was furthered by their fierce dedication to the day-to-day struggle for achievement.

Life is a journey of exploring yourself... You find your eureka moments by finding a new dimension in you.

If there are very few eureka moments, then at least there are a thousand little failures, that point the way toward a hundred little joys.

Before, he had not realized what he actually wanted. Until today, when he saw how Cheng Yujin bade him farewell so easily, and how she began to talk happily about her and her future husband, Cheng Yuanjing finally understood what kind of answer he actually wanted to hear. He was not her uncle, nor was she his niece. What he wanted was for Cheng Yujin to see him as a man. He wanted her to give him an embroidery, make him pastries, and came to see him — as a man. Cheng Yuanjing had witnessed how Cheng Yujin very attentively cared for other men. Truly tasteless. Lin Qingyuan’s martial and literary skills weren’t as good as him. Her cousin brother was nothing more than a half-grown child. Why did Cheng Yujin so obsessed with them? Upon this inexplicable feeling, he deliberately revealed his identity. Later, Cheng Yujin’s attitude towards him indeed changed. Unfortunately, she still didn’t see him as a man. Since she knew his identity, Cheng Yujin always regarded him as a symbol, a tool that could promote her future husband and son’s position. Sometimes Cheng Yuanjing wanted to knock Cheng Yujin’s head and pried it open to have a look. Since she wanted to marry a wealthy and powerful husband, how could she put her sight on Xu Zhixian and Lin Qingyuan? As a crown prince, he had no shortage of money, property, power, and status. Moreover, he also currently occupied the identity of the Cheng family’s ninth son, which enabled her to get closer with him easily. Such conveniences, such good conditions, yet Cheng Yujin didn’t use it and still dared to talk about her future husband in front of him. For Cheng Yuanjing, Cheng Yujin was an oddity, truly the only one. The more he got closer to her, the more joyful and possessive Cheng Yuanjing became, and the more he couldn’t bear to hear about another man from her mouth.

I wish I had been there when the historian analyzing the letters had the eureka moment: “Hey, wait a second. Whenever he says ‘Mrs. Pouterson,’ I think he means . . . his neighbor’s wife’s vagina??

It was hardly a Eureka moment, although possibly as close to one as I was going to get.

Fine.” Eureka!!! Okay, so it was only one word, but at least I’d moved beyond the undecipherable squeaky noises that had sounded eerily like a dolphin on crack only moments before.

And yet, humor, done well, is one of an organization’s most valuable human resources. Not only is it free, it dissolves silos, builds rapport, increases morale, and opens the mind to creativity. It’s why Isaac Asimov said, “The most exciting phrase to hear in science, the one that heralds new discoveries, is not ‘Eureka!’ but ‘That’s funny.

Creativity requires asking questions for which an answer is not already known. The truth is that innovation is rarely the product of pure inspiration, that “Eureka!” moment when some genius comes up with a wholly new idea. Rather, innovation happens when people see things differently. It starts with a questioning culture that helps people gain new perspective and see things differently. Innovation is generated by great questions in an environment that encourages questions.

being wiser also means being more imaginative. It might not lead to a eureka moment, but it will lead to insight. You think as if you had actually changed your location, while you remain seated in your armchair.

Perhaps the journey towards epiphany is an unseen, steady process towards understanding. Likened to a combination safe, as you scroll the dial towards the inevitable correct combination you cannot tangibly see your progress.

the first retail bar code scanner was used in 1974 to scan a pack of Wrigley’s Juicy Fruit gum in a Marsh supermarket in Troy, Ohio. But

In the bath, there could have been a eureka moment of clarity, a soulful call to acknowledge the journey instead of fixating on the destination, but I only felt the existential dread I’d woken up with—that coquettish desire and Bible-thumping resolution were gone.

You invest so much in it, don't you? It's what elevates you above the beasts of the field, it's what makes you special. Homo sapiens, you call yourself. Wise Man. Do you even know what it is, this consciousness you cite in your own exaltation? Do you even know what it's for? Maybe you think it gives you free will. Maybe you've forgotten that sleepwalkers converse, drive vehicles, commit crimes and clean up afterwards, unconscious the whole time. Maybe nobody's told you that even waking souls are only slaves in denial. Make a conscious choice. Decide to move your index finger. Too late! The electricity's already halfway down your arm. Your body began to act a full half-second before your conscious self 'chose' to, for the self chose nothing; something else set your body in motion, sent an executive summary—almost an afterthought— to the homunculus behind your eyes. That little man, that arrogant subroutine that thinks of itself as the person, mistakes correlation for causality: it reads the summary and it sees the hand move, and it thinks that one drove the other. But it's not in charge. You're not in charge. If free will even exists, it doesn't share living space with the likes of you. Insight, then. Wisdom. The quest for knowledge, the derivation of theorems, science and technology and all those exclusively human pursuits that must surely rest on a conscious foundation. Maybe that's what sentience would be for— if scientific breakthroughs didn't spring fully-formed from the subconscious mind, manifest themselves in dreams, as full-blown insights after a deep night's sleep. It's the most basic rule of the stymied researcher: stop thinking about the problem. Do something else. It will come to you if you just stop being conscious of it. Every concert pianist knows that the surest way to ruin a performance is to be aware of what the fingers are doing. Every dancer and acrobat knows enough to let the mind go, let the body run itself. Every driver of any manual vehicle arrives at destinations with no recollection of the stops and turns and roads traveled in getting there. You are all sleepwalkers, whether climbing creative peaks or slogging through some mundane routine for the thousandth time. You are all sleepwalkers. Don't even try to talk about the learning curve. Don't bother citing the months of deliberate practice that precede the unconscious performance, or the years of study and experiment leading up to the gift- wrapped Eureka moment. So what if your lessons are all learned consciously? Do you think that proves there's no other way? Heuristic software's been learning from experience for over a hundred years. Machines master chess, cars learn to drive themselves, statistical programs face problems and design the experiments to solve them and you think that the only path to learning leads through sentience? You're Stone-age nomads, eking out some marginal existence on the veldt—denying even the possibility of agriculture, because hunting and gathering was good enough for your parents. Do you want to know what consciousness is for? Do you want to know the only real purpose it serves? Training wheels. You can't see both aspects of the Necker Cube at once, so it lets you focus on one and dismiss the other. That's a pretty half-assed way to parse reality. You're always better off looking at more than one side of anything. Go on, try. Defocus. It's the next logical step. Oh, but you can't. There's something in the way. And it's fighting back.

There was no lightbulb moment when somebody shouted: ‘Eureka! Let’s start planting crops!’ Though our ancestors had been aware for tens of thousands of years that you could plant things and harvest them, they also knew enough not to go down that road. ‘Why should we plant,’ exclaimed one !Kung tribesman to an anthropologist, ‘when there are so many mongongo nuts in the world?’39 The most logical explanation is that we fell into a trap. That trap was the fertile floodplain between the Tigris and the Euphrates, where crops grew without much effort. There we could sow in soil enriched by a soft layer of nutrient-rich sediment left behind each year by the receding waters. With nature doing most of the work, even the work-shy Homo puppy was willing to give farming a go.40 What our ancestors couldn’t have foreseen was how humankind would proliferate. As their settlements grew denser, the population of wild animals declined. To compensate, the amount of land under cultivation had to be extended to areas not blessed with fertile soil. Now farming was not nearly so effortless. We had to plough and sow from dawn to dusk. Not being built for this kind of work, our bodies developed all kinds of aches and pains. We had evolved to gather berries and chill out, and now our lives were filled with hard, heavy labour. So why didn’t we just go back to our freewheeling way of life? Because it was too late. Not only were there too many mouths to feed, but by this time we’d also lost the knack of foraging. And we couldn’t just pack up and head for greener pastures, because we were hemmed in by neighbouring settlements,

But how do you get those particular clusters of neurons to fire at the right time? One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll. (A similar phenomenon occurs with long showers or soaks in a tub; in fact, the original “eureka” moment—Archimedes hitting upon a way of measuring the volume of irregular shapes—occurred in a bathtub.)

WE USUALLY IMAGINE that invention occurs in a flash, with a eureka moment that leads a lone inventor toward a startling epiphany. In truth, large leaps forward in technology rarely have a precise point of origin. At the start, forces that precede an invention merely begin to align, often imperceptibly, as a group of people and ideas converge, until over the course of months or years (or decades) they gain clarity and momentum and the help of additional ideas and actors. Luck seems to matter, and so does timing, for it tends to be the case that the right answers, the right people, the right place—perhaps all three—require a serendipitous encounter with the right problem. And then—sometimes—a leap. Only in retrospect do such leaps look obvious.

Outside an airport one evening in Charlotte, as I waited by the curb for an Uber, a stranger approached me and said in a soft, conspiratorial tone: “You’re Adam Schiff, right?” The man was in his midthirties, short, and with a pronounced Southern accent. “Yes.” “You can tell me—there’s nothing to this ‘collusion’ stuff, is there?” “Let me ask you a question,” I responded. “What if I was to tell you that we had evidence in black and white that the Russians approached the Clinton campaign and offered dirt on Donald Trump, then met secretly with Chelsea Clinton, John Podesta, and Robby Mook in the Brooklyn headquarters of the campaign to deliver it. Then Hillary lied about it to cover it up. Would you call that collusion?” “I think I see where you’re going here,” he said, hesitantly. “Now, what if I also told you that after the election, former National Security Advisor Susan Rice secretly talked with the Russian ambassador in an effort to undermine U.S. sanctions on Russia after they interfered to help Hillary win. Would you call that collusion?” He paused for a moment, thinking it over, then said: “You know, I probably would.” His car arrived and he took off, leaving me at the curb. It had been one of those “eureka” moments, and I remember thinking, “Now, if I can only speak to a couple hundred million people.

That eureka moment has been carefully planned and programmed to deliver an insight at exactly the right time. When you put the pieces together before the detectives do, you feel smart, happy, powerful, and in control (exactly the emotions needed to motivate you to buy some canned beer, frozen pizza, and extra-soft toilet tissue). And you tune in next week so you can feel that way again.

The night has so much to offer those who live in their he[art].

Einar had been attracted to the Communist notion that his labor was being exploited by East Coast capitalists. Then one day, listening to a Communist fulminate in Pioneer Square, he’d had a eureka moment in which he realized that the way to get ahead in his new country was to exploit some labor himself.

sometimes the eureka moment came when your mind was distracted, when you suddenly found yourself focusing on something else, usually something mundane. And then, out of the blue, pieces would start to fit together.

Making the movie” is the term that a venture capitalist friend applies to the process of building a start-up. In my friend’s tech-company-as-movie analogy, the VCs are the producers and the CEO is the leading man. If possible, you try to get a star who looks like Mark Zuckerberg—young, preferably a college dropout, with maybe a touch of Asperger’s. You write a script—the “corporate narrative.” You have the origin myth, the eureka moment, and the hero’s journey, with obstacles to overcome, dragons to slay, markets to disrupt and transform. You invest millions to build the company—like shooting the movie—and then millions more to promote it and acquire customers. “By the time you get to the IPO, I want to see people lined up around the block waiting to get into the theater on opening night. That’s what the first day of trading is like. It’s the opening weekend for the film. If you do things right, you put asses in the seats, and you cash out.

They are moments of sudden recognition—moments of shock—in the face of revolutionary change (Caramba!) or a brilliant new possibility (Eureka!).c Both can eventually lead to success (Eureka can lead to a brilliant new idea; Caramba can spark a fantastic reinvention of your boxes) or failure (not capitalizing on a Eureka moment, not recovering from a Caramba moment). And so avoiding Caramba and achieving Eureka is not merely a function of having more or even better ideas. Most Caramba moments are not due to a lack of ideas; rather, they are due to the way ideas are processed. They happen when people don’t move to a new box in time.

That kind of swagger. The “I got this” energy. That’s the Magician. You see this card a lot with successful people, or with people who’ve just found the correct path in their life and have just had that Eureka! moment. He’s President Barack Obama backed by the P-Funk All Stars. Just sit down, kiddo. He’s got this covered.

If we don’t understand someone, we can’t have a eureka moment by imagining his perspective.

He believed that the greatest benefit of solitude is its ability to engender new ideas. A leading scholar of his day, Storr analyzed the lives of great artists—Beethoven, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Sexton, the list goes on—with a psychiatrist’s eye. And he found that the eureka moment (“aha moment” in today’s Oprah terms) does not occur at conference tables. Why does the Buddha meditate alone beneath a tree? Why does Jesus spend forty days in the wilderness? Why does Muhammad withdraw for the month of Ramadan? For that matter, why do so many tribal cultures incorporate a solitary quest into a child’s rite of passage? Solitude is built into the stories we tell ourselves about illumination

People lock themselves in bathrooms’ glass when they want to, I can do that too, of break it and cut myself as I want to all so I want to do bad things, like have sex or throw up, freak and never stop, kill something or someone, have a threesome or something unforgivable or unbelievable to be remembered by- for there not kill themselves, to be like me. So far- I do it every day for them, to slice me up one side and down the other, they have end freaked through me, at least my girlfriend can’t do that as those boys do. (Lunchroom) ‘Liv…? Are reading that same pace of crap again?’ ‘It sucks, not that heard it better than Twilight pace of horse crap, that I could write better in one day- yet come on, like read something else, I am just in love this man writhing I can’t help it, then read something else, by him, I never even thought of that really, in a dumb moment of Eureka! Do you read Twilight? Are you freaking five… that for babies! Said Ray, boy falls to freaked up face guy, and she has no freaking face yet she looks freaking high all the time, oh may- and thing happens. You suck for saying this book sucks! Said liv is awesome! Where does the daemon come out of?

Slogans, plans, hash tags, and eureka moments do nothing in the real world unless they inspire someone to take operational responsibility for making the ideas happen.

The Eureka act proper, the moment of truth experienced by the creative individual, is paralleled on the collective plane by the emergence, out of the scattered fragments, of a new synthesis, brought about by a quick succession of individual discoveries-where, characteristically, the same discovery is often made by several individuals at the same time.

A vertical movement toward market incentives is noticeable, nonetheless. As industrial capitalism arises in England in the eighteenth century, new economic structures raise the stakes for commercial ventures: tantalizing rewards lure innovators into private enterprise, and the codification of English patent laws in the early 1700s gives some reassurance that good ideas will not be stolen with impunity. Despite this new protection, most commercial innovation during this period takes a collaborative form, with many individuals and firms contributing crucial tweaks and refinements to the product. The history books like to condense these slower, evolutionary processes into eureka moments dominated by a single inventor, but most of the key technologies that powered the Industrial Revolution were instances of what scholars call “collective invention.” Textbooks casually refer to James Watt as the inventor of the steam engine, but in truth Watt was one of dozens of innovators who refined the device over the course of the eighteenth century.

how do you get those particular clusters of neurons to fire at the right time? One way is to go for a walk. The history of innovation is replete with stories of good ideas that occurred to people while they were out on a stroll. (A similar phenomenon occurs with long showers or soaks in a tub; in fact, the original “eureka” moment—Archimedes hitting upon a way of measuring the volume of irregular shapes—occurred in a bathtub.) The shower or stroll removes you from the task-based focus of modern life—paying bills, answering e-mail, helping kids with homework—and deposits you in a more associative state. Given enough time, your mind will often stumble across some old connection that it had long overlooked, and you experience that delightful feeling of private serendipity: Why didn’t I think of that before?

They failed to realize that in science, gaps are different from those in murder cases. Every important and well-accepted theory has its share of gaps in the supporting data—and this is particularly true of historical scientific theories that rely on evidence such as ancient fossils (in the case of evolution) or other indirect observations, as contrasted with watching chemicals react in a test tube in real time. The theory of gravity, the big bang theory, the theory of relativity, quantum theory, atomic theory, plate tectonics theory—their histories all consist not simply of eureka moments in the lab, but also of a gradual filling in of gaps, a process that continues to this day. That is the nature of science, which continually tests its theories with new information. With large, explanatory theories such as evolution, the fact that there are gaps in the data is expected—problems arises only when gaps are filled and new information doesn’t fit the theory. Then scientists say that a theory has been “falsified.” This is why ancient Greek mathematicians and naturalists stopped believing the Earth was flat long before cameras were launched into space to photograph the globe—they knew the Earth couldn’t be flat, because the available data did not fit the theory anymore. Ships sailed off in one direction but did not find or fall off an edge. On the other hand, the theory that the Earth is a globe was accepted centuries before it was actually “proved.” That didn’t mean there weren’t gaps—such as why objects on the “bottom” of the globe didn’t fall off into space, as the principles of gravity were not well understood until much later (and gaps in that understanding remain to this day). So gaps in theories are not only real but expected in science—and they do not in themselves disprove or discredit a theory. The board members didn’t grasp that distinction, however, and so they enthusiastically endorsed mentioning “gaps” in the belief that this statement represented a valid criticism of

My Top Eureka Moments: Focusing today is hard…really hard. But it can be learned. It can become a habit. Systems, processes, and routines trump willpower. Letting something go is sometimes the best way to complete it. A not-to-do list is more important than your to-do list. To attain knowledge add things every day; to obtain wisdom subtract things every day. The difference between successful people and very successful people is very successful people say no to almost everything. If you try to help everyone, you will end up helping no one. Neil Armstrong got it right…small steps lead to giant leaps. WWW: What am I doing right now? Why? What should I be doing? Focus on the important, not the immediate. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

Taumoeba-35!” Rocky says. “Took many many generations but finally success!” It’s a weird feeling, scientific breakthroughs. There’s no Eureka moment. Just a slow, steady progression toward a goal. But man, when you get to that goal it feels good.

Although innovation cannot depend on hoping for “Eureka!” moments, Clay Street is all about building an atmosphere in which each team has one (and so far, they all have). “The room is a disaster, a mess; people are frustrated; and someone comes in and says this-and-that—it all comes together out of chaos, a novel and higher order always emerges,” is Kuehler’s scientific description of what happens. “There are always little ideas all along the way, and then comes a moment when they figure it out. It’s magical. You can’t exactly plan for it. You have to be awake, aware, and ready when it does.

Another person might’ve seen the power to dream walk and speak to the dead as a spiritual gift. Ling had no such sentimentality. To her, it was a scientific puzzle, a great “Eureka!” moment waiting to be explored, examined, quantified. Was a visit from the dead proof that time was merely an illusion? Was there something about Ling observing the dead that made it happen, as if the dead needed her consciousness in order to take form? Where did the dead come from? Where did their energy go afterward? What was that energy? Did the existence of ghosts mean that there might be more than one universe, and dreams were the beginning of a way into them? With every dream walk, Ling searched for clues.