Church said “almost all” of his visionary ideas and scientific solutions have come while he was either asleep or quasi-asleep, sometimes dreaming, at the beginning or end of a narcoleptic nap. Such as? The breakthrough during graduate school that ushered in “next gen” genome sequencing, a fast and cheap way to “read” DNA. “Writing genomes,” or constructing them from off-the-shelf molecules as a way to improve on what nature came up with. Innovations in editing genomes.
These brainstorms, and more, occurred while he was “either daydreaming or night dreaming or in that period when I’m really refreshed right afterward,” said Church, who will be 63 in August. “It took me until I was 50 or 60 years old” to realize that narcolepsy “is a feature, not a bug.”
In 2017, Time magazine named Harvard professor George Church one of the 100 most influential people. Here is the article, interesting throughout, via Michelle Dawson.
Hey! He’s got one of those old Radio Shack portable computers on his desk. Some people really like those. You can edit text files on them, they have a full keyboard, and the battery life is way beyond anything you can get today. I think they use rechargable AA cells, not built-in or proprietary batteries, so no reason you can’t keep using it forever.
The producers aired a small number of “The Big Bang Theory” episodes on a similar meme.
It is quite obvious. I spent my university years drinking when I should have been thinking.
“Even asleep, though, he can hear his name spoken and so wakes up, usually able to answer whatever question has just come his way without asking that it be repeated.”
Seems obvious then… that he not really “asleep”. This would be a more logical conclusion about his true mental state when these “visionary ideas” supposedly come to him.
Most of us have very active thought processes when trying to sleep/wake-up each night/morning, in bed.
Sounds like a hypnagogic state.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypnagogia
I’ve had these, and they can be quite interesting. In one, I envisioned a temple, and I could change the columns from Doric to Ionic just by thinking about it.
Brazilian Army officer was known to sleep while he rode his faithful steed to save time during his Amazonic expeditions.
Brazilian Army Gomes Carneiro officer was known to sleep while he rode his faithful steed to save time during his Amazonic expeditions.
My grandmother was narcoleptic and it had a profoundly negative impact on her life. I would have loved to learn chemistry at her knee, but she provided other valuable lessons.
I.J. Good had success with this method:
“Alan Turing… had caught Good sleeping on the floor while on duty during his first night shift. At first, Turing thought Good was ill, but he was cross when Good explained that he was just taking a short nap because he was tired. For days afterwards, Turing would not deign to speak to Good, and he left the room if Good walked in. The new recruit only won Turing’s respect after he solved the bigram tables problem. During a subsequent night shift, when there was no more work to be done, it dawned on Good that there might be another chink in the German indicating system. The German telegraphists had to add dummy letters to the trigrams which they selected out of the kenngruppenbuch…
Good wondered if their choice of dummy letters was random, or whether there was a bias towards particular letters. After inspecting some messages which had been broken, he discovered that there was a tendency to use some letters more than others. That being the case, all the codebreakers had to do, was to work back from the indicators given at the beginning of each message, and apply each bigram table in turn in the same way as Joan Clarke had done before. The bigram table which produced one of the popular dummy letters was probably the correct one. When Good mentioned his discovery to Alan Turing, Turing was very embarrassed, and said, ‘I could have sworn that I tried that.’ It quickly became an important part of the Banburismus procedure.
Jack Good’s refusal to go on working when tired was vindicated by a subsequent incident. During another long night shift, he had been baffled by his failure to break a doubly enciphered Offizier message. This was one of the messages which was supposed to be enciphered initially with the Enigma set up in accordance with the Offizier settings, and subsequently with the general Enigma settings in place. However, while he was sleeping before returning for another shift, he dreamed that the order had been reversed; the general settings had been applied before the Offizier settings. Next day he found that the message had yet to be read, so he applied the theory which had come to him during the night. It worked; he had broken the code in his sleep. (wikipedia)
Waiting for the sun
neither did it to me, at bottom I had to explain the whole thing and I got only the opening bars of the overture.
It seemed to me a good time to look at the trunk business and rectify it, if needed.
Structure of Benezene also is believed to have been discovered this way.
“Kekulé spoke of the creation of the theory. He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is a common symbol in many ancient cultures known as the Ouroboros or Endless knot).”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benzene
The Kekule benzene story is b.s., repeated also in the article. This daydreaming myth has been debunked by historian of science Alan J. Rocke. I will attach to this message a long screen scrape from the book “Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs” by Andrew Robinson. I am not sure it will fit WordPress’s guidelines though, we’ll see.
Bonus trivia: in years past the test for invention in patent law was whether an invention occurred in a ‘flash of genius’; this legal test has been abolished, since almost nothing occurs in a flash of genius.
Sudden Genius? The Gradual Path to Creative Breakthroughs Andrew Robinson –“Let us zoom in on another well-known, much-discussed, scientific eur eka experience: the discovery of the hexagonal ring structure of the six carbon atoms in the benzene molecule by the German chemist August Kekule´ in the 1860s. This was a crucial step in the foundation of organic chemistry (to which Linus Pauling added in the 1930s by explaining the stability of the ring structure in terms of quantum theory). It offers an excellent illustration of the real complexity of breakthroughs. In 1890, a quarter of a century after the event, Kekule´ recollected what happened in a public speech. A first flash of inspiration occurred some time in 1855 while he was riding on top of a London omnibus in a ‘reverie’ on a summer’s evening after talking chemistry with a friend. Before the conductor at last cried out ‘Clapham Road’, Kekule´ had visualized a dance of atoms, large and small, forming pairs, threesomes, and combinations up to a valency of four, making chains of atoms. But the breakthrough came about seven years later while dozing in front of a fire, he said: During my residence in Ghent, in Belgium, I lived in an elegant bachelor apartment on the main street. However, my study was situated along a narrow alley and had no light during the day. For a chemist who spends his day in the laboratory this was not a disadvantage. [One evening] I was sitting there, working on my textbook, but it was not going well; my thoughts were on other matters. I turned my chair towards the fireplace and sank into half-sleep. Again the atoms fluttered before my eyes. This time smaller groups remained modestly in the background. My mental eye, sharpened by repeated visions of a similar kind, now distinguished larger forms in a variety of combinations. Long chains, often combined in a denser fashion; everything in motion, twisting and turning like snakes. But look, what was that?! One of the snakes had seized its own tail, and the figure whirled mockingly before my eyes. I awoke in a flash, and this time, too, I spent the rest of the night working out the consequences of the hypothesis. Kekule´ concluded: ‘Gentlemen, let us learn to dream, and perhaps then we will find the truth . . . but let us also beware not to publish our dreams until they have been examined by the wakened mind.’ It is a compelling picture. Perhaps too compelling to be strictly true. Indeed, some historians of chemistry have doubted if any such daydream occurred. … Assuming it did happen, how much weight can be placed on it as describing a eureka experience? In 1858, well before the breakthrough, Kekule´ had published a paper setting out his structural theory of how four-valent carbon atoms become linked to form open-chain (‘aliphatic’) molecules, followed by the first volume of his textbook in 1859–61; but during this time he made no published mention of the structure of closed-chain (‘aromatic’) molecules, such as benzene, bar one very cryptic reference that shows he was thinking about the problem. The dream appears to have taken place early in 1862, or at least before Kekule´ got married in June of that year (since he refers in his speech to his bachelor apartment). He did not actually publish his closed-chain ring structure of benzene until 1865–66, some three years after the dream. This period, the late 1850s and early 1860s, was one of spectacular growth in the coal-tar dye industry and also the petroleum industry. Knowledge of organic chemistry expanded rapidly in chemical laboratories, and some of the newly discovered aromatic compounds were clearly similar to benzene (which was discovered in compressed oil–gas by Michael Faraday in 1825). But what was lacking was a concomitant theory of chemical structure into which the new knowledge could be fitted. Several chemists other than Kekule´ were trying to work out the molecular structure of benzene. Josef Loschmidt, for instance, proposed three alternative benzene formulae in 1861, none involving a ring structure; however, Loschmidt chose to symbolize benzene with a large circle to indicate that it was still structurally indeterminate. Archibald Couper hypothesized ring structures in 1858 for two different organic compounds, but neither of them was benzene. Kekule´ was not at all convinced by their work, yet revealed little about his reasons, either in print or in correspondence. It appears that he deliberately kept his thoughts on the subject to himself, while remaining fully abreast of competing ideas. … Confusingly, his breakthrough paper began by claiming that his theory was ‘fully formed’ in 1858—that is, long before the dream in his apartment in Ghent—moreover, the paper failed to emphasize either the benzene ring structure or its potential derivative structures. Nevertheless, the benzene ring was undeniably stated. The more Kekule´ now thought about it, the more his theory of aromatics seemed elegant: ‘an inexhaustible treasure- trove’, as he told a chemist friend in April 1865. … Kekule´’s celebrated dream was therefore part of a continuous period of enquiry into the structure of benzene over more than five years up to 1865, not an isolated insight. It was not truly the eureka experience he implied (he did not use the actual word eureka)—emotionally important though the dream clearly was to Kekule´. Most probably, he started contemplating a ring structure in the late 1850s well before his dream; persuaded his ‘wakened mind’ of its existence from 1862 onwards; but felt insufficiently confident to go public until after the publication of experimental support by others in 1864. ‘Contrary to most accounts, and to the implication of the dream anecdote told out of context, it is now clear that the benzene theory did not fall into Kekule´’s half-awake mind fully formed—or even partially formed’, writes the historian of science Alan J. Rocke after exhaustive consideration of the historical evidence. ‘It was at most the ring concept that arrived by this semi-conscious or unconscious process, a concept which . . . was not without precedent. The theory itself was developed only slowly, one might even say painfully, over the course of several years, before its first codification in 1866.’ Such gradual evolution turns out to be typical of creative breakthroughs, when their histories are examined in detail. They may or may not involve a recognizable eureka experience, but they are always preceded by a long period of thought and labour, and always followed by intensive scrutiny and development”
Interesting that Church considered daydreaming and night dreaming problem solving to be the same. To me they have different characteristics. To me daydreaming problem solving is not that much different from the conciously driven highly rational reasoning which prunes away many of the intuitively unproductive paths while night dreaming problem solving when it happens tends to be the rational part seems to be losing control and is awared that another part is bumbling away with stupid reasoning which sometimes out of the left field solves the problem. So they compliment each other. Day time thinking is time and attention span constrained while night dreaming problem solving has ample time and might continue the following nights.