From Chris Whittaker, High Fremington, North Yorkshire, UK
Philip Ball reports scepticism over the claim by a colleague of chemist Dmitri Mendeleev that the periodic table came to him in a dream (2 March, p 34). But there is evidence of the role of the unconscious mind in problem-solving (28 July 2018, p 34). This seems to be linked to the power of sleep to consolidate emerging ideas (24 March 2018, p 32).
The philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn claimed science is structured by “paradigms” that are replaced not by deliberation and interpretation, but by a relatively sudden and unstructured event. He wrote of scientists speaking of the “scales falling from the eyes” or the “lightning flash” that illuminates a previously obscure puzzle.
In The Art of Scientific Investigation, William Beveridge recounts a number of such descriptions, including the physicist Hermann von Helmholtz reporting: “Happy ideas came unexpectedly without effort, like an inspiration”. All were associated with a period of relaxation, apparently when the unconscious mind had been working on the problem.
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