by Russell Newton

Dali and Da Vinci

Salvador Dali, best known for his surrealist paintings and perhaps for owning an ocelot as a pet, was one of the first to pursue altered states of consciousness as a means to creativity. He certainly did not know it at the time, but he was capitalizing on a recently discovered function of the brain’s different brain waves.

Leonardo da Vinci, an epitome of the prolific creative, had this simple but effective creativity method: prolific notetaking. Over his lifetime, he accumulated about 13,000 pages of notes and sketches—that’s 13,000 pages each written out by hand. Of those, an estimated 7,000 pages are preserved, like surviving snapshots of the inner workings of a creative genius’s mind. They were filled with drawings of imagined inventions, diagrams of human and animal anatomy, and personal notes and observations that were often written backward—so da Vinci could add a small layer of secrecy to his inner thoughts.

Dali and Chasing Hypnagogic Sleep

Salvador Dali, best known for his surrealist paintings and perhaps for owning an ocelot as a pet, was one of the first to pursue altered states of consciousness as a means to creativity. He certainly did not know it at the time, but he was capitalizing on a recently discovered function of the brain’s different brain waves.

Neuroscientists have recently shined the spotlight on what’s known as theta waves.

Theta waves are a kind of brain wave present during periods when you’re halfway between sleep and wakefulness, or between deep daydreaming and active alertness. During such “theta states,” you’re not fully awake but not quite asleep either. Such states also include times when you’re engaged in such a monotonous or automatic task (e.g., freeway driving, brushing your hair) that you mentally disengage from it and wander into a state that’s deeply relaxed but short of sleeping.

According to educator Ned Herrmann, it’s during the theta state that people often get good ideas and creative insights, because in such a state, thought censorship is suspended, thoughts move more freely, and creative juices flow more abundantly. It turns out that sleepiness, and in the same vein drunkenness, can actually work wonders for improving your ability to solve problems that require creative insight.

In support of the above notion, author Jonah Lehrer highlights several studies that illustrated how the grogginess of a sleepy or drunk brain can actually improve creative problem-solving ability. In one study, a group of patients with brain injuries resulting in severe attention deficits performed significantly better at solving creatively challenging puzzles compared to normal participants.

Likewise, another study showed that groggy students did better at solving creative problems, and still another study showed similar results after challenging drunk students to tackle such tests. The lack of focus brought on by cognitive deficit, sleepiness, or drunkenness appeared to have allowed the participants a more diffuse way of thinking, such that they were able to consider a wider range of possibilities as their imaginations ran free.

Dali certainly wasn’t privy to any of this information, but he espoused a technique he called “slumber with a key” to get himself in such a halfway dream state, also known as hypnagogic sleep. In this technique, Dali sits in his chair and holds a key, which is poised just above an upside-down plate. As he dozes off, his hand relaxes and drops the key, which loudly clangs onto the plate and jolts him to wakefulness. Other practitioners of this technique were reportedly Alexander the Great, Thomas Edison, and Albert Einstein as well.

Dali said this practice immersed him to the briefest of naps, not longer than a quarter of a second, and the feeling of having barely lost consciousness for such a fleeting moment revived his physical and psychic being into an immensely creative state. In this way, he kept himself on the edge of consciousness and unconsciousness to effectively reap the rewards of theta waves.

If following Dali’s key technique seems a little too dramatic for your taste, there are other methods you can do in daily life to take advantage of that theta or halfway dream state toward improving your flair for problem-solving. Think of the most pressing problem or immediate task you need to accomplish for the day just as you begin to wake in the morning.

Reflect on that concern while your eyes are still closed and your brain still feels a bit dreamy or groggy. During this half-asleep state, let yourself ruminate on a single problem or task without consciously forcing it to take a specific route. Simply allow your mind to sit with that problem. If you happen upon a useful idea or solution in that process, grab a pen and paper or your phone and note down your ideas there so you don’t let them slip away into nothingness once you gain full consciousness. Later, revisit these inspired ideas and polish them into a workable solution.

Da Vinci and the Habit of Prolific Notes

Leonardo da Vinci, an epitome of the prolific creative, had this simple but effective creativity method: prolific notetaking. Over his lifetime, he accumulated about 13,000 pages of notes and sketches—that’s 13,000 pages each written out by hand. Of those, an estimated 7,000 pages are preserved, like surviving snapshots of the inner workings of a creative genius’s mind. They were filled with drawings of imagined inventions, diagrams of human and animal anatomy, and personal notes and observations that were often written backward—so da Vinci could add a small layer of secrecy to his inner thoughts.

Wherever he went, da Vinci always carried paper on which he could immediately jot down his passing thoughts, sights he noticed all around him, impressions and observations, information from people he admired, jokes that amused him, and drawings of his visions and imaginings. Many of the pages he filled had a simple sketch at the center, a label on top, arrows signifying major content, annotations along the margins, and sometimes a summary at the bottom.

Da Vinci also did most of his sketches on individual sheets of paper, which allowed him greater freedom to experiment with mixing and matching different pages together. In the process, he got to connect, reconnect, and group together ideas, facts, and observations in both familiar and unusual ways, helping enhance his creative eye even more.

Notetaking significantly aided da Vinci’s creativity because by writing things down, he kept his observations, ideas, insights, and even passing thoughts always present and available for his perusal. He could take an observation from a previous year and pair it with something from his morning, and it would clarify his thoughts. Even though those observations or thoughts might not have seemed that significant when he wrote them, it mattered a lot that he noted them down and preserved them in those pages.

Some of them were certainly trivial and unimportant but were recorded anyway—this is an important point, for we only know what is trivial in hindsight, so we should be writing everything .

Sometimes ideas just need to be preserved and kept on hold for a time, until you encounter a situation later on that would be the perfect opportunity for that idea to be applied. Da Vinci made sure he didn’t let an observation or idea go to waste, and such a habit made all the difference. So if you want to boost your creativity, take a leaf out of da Vinci’s book—and write notes on it. It may feel like you’re not accomplishing anything at first, but the key is to wait until you have a certain number of notes to draw back on. That’s when this effect gets amplified, much like compound interest on a bank savings account.

A library with two books is not such a great resource, but a library with two hundred books can start to become a formidable repository of information.