I understand the nature of inspiration. When a lot of different circuits thinking about a particular area get activated inside you, you feel inspired. I am talking about Archimedes' inspiration when he shouted "Eureka". After you have studied something for a while, the circuits representing it have their own life. When the activity increases beyond a typical level, you can feel changes happening inside you without necessarily much effort on your part.
As any process carried in a biological medium, inspiration is finite and will pass with time. Certain kinds of inspiration can be verbalized and thus fixed, but I often find that -- as with writing this very essay -- verbalization stifles, kills inspiration. I sometimes avoid verbalizing my thoughts too early, too quickly, because I feel that it restricts the free flow of ideas and allows me to notice only the few main thoughts, while all the other obertones get suppressed. If instead I nurture the inspiration for a little longer, if only for another quarter of an hour, I may allow it grow to a level where writing down a sentence or two is not entirely detrimental to the creative impulse. Even then I often have to be careful: if I start writing down all of my ideas in great detail, the verbalization effort immediately puts creativity to a halt, and I may end up writing down about a half of what I had to say, and forgetting the other one. What I sometimes end up doing instead is noting just some words or short sentences, then switching back to nonverbalized thinking, until I am confident that I have written down all the main themes. After that I go over my notes and expand on every word, thought, or idea, feeling confident that I won't forget the rest.
People used to think that inspiration came from God. This was not a bad way to think about it at all. The point is that inspiration is external to us and is not under our complete control. Conversely, the concept of "personal creativity" where the artist is seen as the source of the creation, puts too much pressure on a person, as if this person was indeed "creating" art or science out of thin air. In fact, the mental representation of something new is created in the author's mind much like elaborate ornaments are created out of snowflakes --- basically, because of the laws of nature. It is then because of the nature of the mind that those patterns are interpreted as new thoughts, new insights that one has arrived it. Really, the neurons in one's head have just arranged themselves in another kaleidoscopic picture. Nothing has really been created, it is just a combinatorial rearrangement.
As already mentioned, inspiration is a biological process, and thus is finite. If not used promptly, it will disappear. One gets distracted, tired, goes to bed, and the inspiration passes; combinations that were possible stay unrealized. This is not really different from missing out on other opportunities in life: the door has closed, the train has departed, and what was merely possible remained, as it was, unrealized.
As any process carried in a biological medium, inspiration is finite and will pass with time. Certain kinds of inspiration can be verbalized and thus fixed, but I often find that -- as with writing this very essay -- verbalization stifles, kills inspiration. I sometimes avoid verbalizing my thoughts too early, too quickly, because I feel that it restricts the free flow of ideas and allows me to notice only the few main thoughts, while all the other obertones get suppressed. If instead I nurture the inspiration for a little longer, if only for another quarter of an hour, I may allow it grow to a level where writing down a sentence or two is not entirely detrimental to the creative impulse. Even then I often have to be careful: if I start writing down all of my ideas in great detail, the verbalization effort immediately puts creativity to a halt, and I may end up writing down about a half of what I had to say, and forgetting the other one. What I sometimes end up doing instead is noting just some words or short sentences, then switching back to nonverbalized thinking, until I am confident that I have written down all the main themes. After that I go over my notes and expand on every word, thought, or idea, feeling confident that I won't forget the rest.
People used to think that inspiration came from God. This was not a bad way to think about it at all. The point is that inspiration is external to us and is not under our complete control. Conversely, the concept of "personal creativity" where the artist is seen as the source of the creation, puts too much pressure on a person, as if this person was indeed "creating" art or science out of thin air. In fact, the mental representation of something new is created in the author's mind much like elaborate ornaments are created out of snowflakes --- basically, because of the laws of nature. It is then because of the nature of the mind that those patterns are interpreted as new thoughts, new insights that one has arrived it. Really, the neurons in one's head have just arranged themselves in another kaleidoscopic picture. Nothing has really been created, it is just a combinatorial rearrangement.
As already mentioned, inspiration is a biological process, and thus is finite. If not used promptly, it will disappear. One gets distracted, tired, goes to bed, and the inspiration passes; combinations that were possible stay unrealized. This is not really different from missing out on other opportunities in life: the door has closed, the train has departed, and what was merely possible remained, as it was, unrealized.
