A Stroke Of Genius

IN A SMALL city in Switzerland on a fine spring day in 1905, a young patent clerk left his one-year-old son and wife at home to go see his best friend about a riddle. The two friends loved exchanging ideas, from philosophy to physics, from art to electricity, and this morning our young patent clerk wanted to discuss a problem that had been vexing him for some time.

For the past year, he’d been especially focused on a physics theory he’d begun formulating ten years ago. He laid out every detail of the problem he had been struggling with, and for an entire day the two friends analyzed ideas and rehashed every aspect of the dilemma.

As the sun set, the young man finally concluded that the theory he’d been working on for a decade was going nowhere. It had hit a brick wall. Demoralized and dejected, he declared that he was giving up the entire quest. And so Albert Einstein shuffled home and went to sleep.

You can imagine his friend’s surprise the next morning when, answering an urgent knock, he opened the door to see Einstein, who bypassed polite greetings and blurted out, “Thank you. I’ve completely solved the problem.” With that, he returned home and began to write. Einstein spent the next six weeks writing out one of the most important scientific contributions of all time: the special theory of relativity.

What happened inside Einstein’s brain that night? After years of effort, why did the answer suddenly appear just when he had given up? 

Einstein’s experience was a classic example of the way our brain creates breakthrough ideas, completely new and novel ways of solving problems and looking at the world. And believe it or not, if you’ve ever had a breakthrough, the exact same thing happened inside your brain, too.

For many, breakthroughs are like butterflies—beautiful and awe-inspiring, yet erratic and elusive. In fact, breakthroughs are not accidental, they can be induced, and we are going to show you how. Thanks to new neuroscience research, we now know how the breakthrough process works and we have tools to access it. Breakthroughs, like butterflies, may fly an unpredictable path, but it is possible to capture them if we build the right net. 

Find out more in The Net And The Butterfly, on sale February 7th. Http://a.co/27h2sC7 Preorder now!