1. Throughout history, humans have wondered about our mysterious faculty for creative thinking.
2. The belief being, conscious rationality is our supreme intelligence doing all that hard thinking.
3. But the role of some inner creative beast in influencing thought has been a debate before Socrates.
4. Empedocles, a pre-Socratic philosopher, brought a tradition of incubation; a creative healing process.
5. Dionysus was made the Greek god who enabled creativity via escape; from the confines of our selves.
6. For Socrates, a sort of inner madness was a divine form that worked up creativity, imagination and wits.
7. Aristotle thought creativity came from black bile, a body fluid he also linked to melancholy and depression.
8. The roman poet Virgil brought about the concept that creativity comes from abandoning conscious striving.
9. Medieval monks found a model for creative thinking on the interplay between rumination and concentration.
10. The model reflects the process of thinkers from saints to playwrights, poets to scientists, dancers to artists.
11. Thomas Aquinas used to pray immediately after sleeps, to draw out what to write/dictate the following day.
12. Shakespeare found drama in the space between unconscious imagination and consciously controlled artistry.
13. John Milton drew out so much magic from his incubation chamber that he christened it the 'faculty of fancy.'
14. Thomas Edison slept holding steel balls, and scribbled ideas immediately when awaken by the dropping balls.
15. The dancer Ghislaine Boddington took naps in her studio and danced immediately on waking up to feel them.
16. The painter Max Ernst called incubation a chance encounter of remote realities on a place unfit for neither.
17. The social psychologist Graham Wallas famously articulated the four phases of the creative process in 1926.
18. He called stage one preparation; the initial phase marked by part-research, part-entering the frame of mind.
19. He called stage two incubation; the phase of unconscious processing, between rumination and concentration.
20. He called stage three illumination; here the train of association ends, preceded by several unsuccessful trains.
21. He called stage four verification; this is the phase where the idea is finally validated and given shape/form to.
22. Wallas recognised what creative thinkers knew; that unconscious incubation is the mother chamber of thought.
23. It's useful to recognise, as noted by the psychologist Julian Jaynes, that consciousness is not the seat of reason.
24. Or that, as noted by the cognitive psychologist John Kilhlstrom, consciousness isn't needed for complex thinking.
25. But that thoughts, from reasoning to complex/creative thinking, are constructed in the chamber of unconscious.
26. Which the mind scientist Guy Claxton describes is the mind inside the mind that's off limits to conscious observers.