The hypothesis here is that if you work hard on a problem, you soak your subconscious with it. Wrestling with a problem helps you build a mental model of what you know and what you don’t—providing the subconscious with building blocks to work with. (You can’t have genuine intuition and inspiration in areas where you lack knowledge.) Then, once you... See more

what passed through the mathematicians as they struggled with problems were such things as vibrations in their hands, nonsense words in their ears, or blurry shapes in their heads.