DJ Strouse

My Goodreads Rating: 3 of 5 stars

I dove into this book excited to learn how the minds of great scientists churn but instead was reminded of the great danger that accompanies reading old science texts – lengthy discussions of crackpot theories (i.e. phrenology) and passionate defenses of well-accepted ideas (i.e. not all mental activity is conscious). Taken as a survey of late 19th/early 20th century thinking on creativity and thought, the book reveals how stubbornly we humans cling to the mech warrior hypothesis of behavior – that every nugget of our activity stems from the conscious control of a homunculus nested in his HQ and peering out of our eyes like little windows on a spaceship. Many psychologists and philosophers quoted by Hadamard actually deny the existence of nontrivial unconscious processing in creative thought. If this doesn’t shock or disgust you and you find yourself sympathizing with this notion, go directly to jail. Do not pass Go. Do not collect $200.

Even so, this short book is worth a skim – the survey questions in the appendix alone are worth the price of admission. Hadamard used these questions to drill all his scientist/mathematician buddies on how they think, imagine, and work. The list is even more than a set of questions though – its a set of suggestions. If you’re as narrow-minded and habituated as I am, you’ll likely discover entirely new ways to approach problem-solving and find yourself exclaiming, “People think like that?!” I highly recommend reading the survey before the book itself, as this will get you thinking ahead of time about how you think and offer more context for understanding and possibly assimilating the habits of Hadamard’s buddies.

The writing (or at least the translation) is also pretty amateurish. Parts of this book read like the dinner table reports of a 4th grader telling his mommy and daddy what all his friends did in class today… except instead of eating boogers and tricking Suzy into thinking she was adopted, Hadamard’s friends invent special relativity, bifurcation theory, and cybernetics.

If you can tolerate or skip the many faults of this early thought experiment on thought, however, you’re sure to not only learn something about the great minds of the late 19th/early 20th century, but your own feeble brain as well.

Book Notes (Warning: not guaranteed to be interpretable to outside eyes):

• Invention is combination followed by selection.
  • Selection is the more difficult step.
  • The selection process seems highly emotional. Understanding the emotional character of selection would teach us much about invention.
• Two benefits of incubation:
  1. reset (replenishment of mental resources)
  2. restart (retract assumptions and avoid mental ruts)
• The incubation paradigm changes the role of the scientist to that of a mental farmer – toil hard in the fields of conscious effort (and failure), then later reap the benefits brought on by subconscious processing.
• Ways mathematical minds may differ:
  • accessibility of thought/depth in unconscious (logical vs. intuitive thinking)
  • narrowness of thought (logical vs. scattered)
  • different auxiliary representations (geometric, verbal, auditory, etc)
• Two kinds of invention:
  1. Set goal, seek means
  2. Discover means, seek application (more common in mathematics)
• I wonder how many grand ideas remain just out of reach in the antechambers of the minds of geniuses, perhaps consciously acknowledged but under-appreciated by them, perhaps tacitly assumed, or perhaps subconscious and nebulous.
• The scientist whose aesthetic sense (passion) draws him to discoveries with profound implications is what we call a genius.

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Tags:   brains · creativity · invention · mathematics · philosophy · psychology · thoughtNo Comments