One of the stranger articles Inc. magazine ever ran was a 2002 piece about the neuroscience of innovation. Actually, it wasn’t really about innovation as much as where and how innovators get their ideas. Only it wasn’t that either. It was really about what kind of peculiar mind-hacks top innovators use to come up with their ideas and—the strange part—it opens with a discussion of inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil’s employment of lucid dreaming to solve vexing engineering problems.
Here’s a bit of the story:
Every evening before bed, Kurzweil plucks out a vexing problem — perhaps a business strategy, a technical conundrum, or even an interpersonal issue. First he posits the characteristics of a potential solution. Take, for example, the extraskeletal walking system for paraplegics that he’s considering developing. He wants it to be simple enough for a user to put on without help. Lying in bed, Kurzweil begins to fantasize about such a system, sometimes imagining that he’s giving a speech about how he reached his conclusions. “This has the purpose of seeding your subconscious to influence your dreams,” he says. Then he drifts off to sleep.
To read the full, original article click on this link: Mind Hacks: How Innovators Really Arrive At Their Big Ideas - Forbes
