How Einstein Thought: Why Combinatory Play Is the Secret of Geni...

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How Einstein Thought: Why Combinatory Play Is the

Secret of Genius
Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought.
BY M ARI A PO P O VA

For as long as I can remember and certainly long before I had the term for it
Ive believed that creativity is combinatorial: Alive and awake to the world, we
amass a collection of cross-disciplinary building blocks knowledge, memories,
bits of information, sparks of inspiration, and other existing ideas that we then
combine and recombine, mostly unconsciously, into something new. From this
vast and cross-disciplinary mental pool of resources beckons the infrastructure of
what we call our own original ideas. The notion, of course, is not new some
of historys greatest minds across art, science, poetry, and cinema have articulated
it, directly or indirectly, in one form or another: Arthur Koestlers famous theory
of bisociation explained creativity through the combination of elements that
dont ordinarily belong together; graphic designer Paula Scher likens creativity to
a slot machine that aligns the seemingly random jumble of stuff in our heads into a
suddenly miraculous combination; T. S. Eliot believed that the poets mind
incubates fragmentary thoughts into beautiful ideas; the great Stephen Jay Gould maintained that connecting the
seemingly unconnected is the secret of genius; Gutenbergs invention of the printing press embodied this
combinatorial creativity; even what we call intuition is based on the unconscious application of this very mental
faculty.

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How Einstein Thought: Why Combinatory Play Is the Secret of Geni...

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The concept, in fact, was perhaps best explained by Albert Einstein, who termed it combinatory play. (Einstein
famously came up with some of his best scientific ideas during his violin breaks.) From his Ideas and Opinions
(public library) the same invaluable volume that gave us the beloved physicists timeless wisdom on kindness and
our shared existence comes Einsteins single most succinct articulation of how his mind works, driven by this
powerful combinatorial creativity. The 1945 letter was written in response to French mathematician Jacques S.
Hadamards survey of the mental processes of famous scientists, inspired by polymath Henri Poincars famous
meditation on the subject and published as An Essay on the Psychology of Invention in the Mathematical Field, with
Einsteins missive included as a testimonial:
My Dear Colleague:
In the following, I am trying to answer in brief your questions as well as I am able. I am not satisfied myself
with those answers and I am willing to answer more questions if you believe this could be of any advantage for
the very interesting and difficult work you have undertaken.
(A) The words or the language, as they are written or spoken, do not seem to play any role in my mechanism
of thought. The psychical entities which seem to serve as elements in thought are certain signs and more or less
clear images which can be voluntarily reproduced and combined.
There is, of course, a certain connection between those elements and relevant logical concepts. It is also clear
that the desire to arrive finally at logically connected concepts is the emotional basis of this rather vague play
with the above-mentioned elements. But taken from a psychological viewpoint, this combinatory play seems to
be the essential feature in productive thought before there is any connection with logical construction in
words or other kinds of signs which can be communicated to others.
(B) The above-mentioned elements are, in my case, of visual and some of muscular type. Conventional words
or other signs have to be sought for laboriously only in a secondary stage, when the mentioned associative play
is sufficiently established and can be reproduced at will.
(C) According to what has been said, the play with the mentioned elements is aimed to be analogous to certain
logical connections one is searching for.
(D) Visual and motor. In a stage when words intervene at all, they are, in my case, purely auditive, but they
interfere only in a secondary stage, as already mentioned.
(E) It seems to me that what you call full consciousness is a limit case which can never be fully accomplished.
This seems to me connected with the fact called the narrowness of consciousness (Enge des Bewusstseins).
Ideas and Opinions is superb from cover to cover, the kind of book you return to again and again, only to find new
layers of meaning with each reading. Complement it with this vintage technique for producing ideas and Einstein on
the secret of learning anything.

Published August 14, 2013

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