How the Mind Creates Ideas

More and more quantum physicists are speculating about a correlation between how our creative minds process thoughts and the way the universe works. University of Oxford's mathematician Roger Penrose's book The Emperor's New Mindsuggested that the same un-computable but somehow quantum processes might also lie behind human consciousness andcreativity. It appears that the way quantum gravity handles information is much like the way the mind processes creative thought. The physicist Freeman Dyson once said that mind andintelligence are "woven into the fabric of the universe." It appears he was more right than he ever imagined.
In quantum physics an infinite number of subatomic particles exist in multiple states popping out of nothingness and can best be characterized as a set of probabilities. These particles have no real existence until observed. Once observed they are either waves or particles depending upon how the physicist chooses to observe or measure them. An electron or atom (and some would even argue the whole Universe) remains an open field of possibilities until forced into an interaction. It is as if the physical world wants to explore many alternative pathways before collapsing into a settled state. For the champions of quantum consciousness, this seems to be just what the creative human mind does: sample many paths and outcomes before its 'wave function' collapses into the coherent state which is a stream of conscious thought.

Overnight the faith physicists had between mathematical variables and physical properties disappeared. In their place quantum physicists used abstractions such as wave functions and matrices all acting in an unreal causally confused environment. In a famous thought experiment, Nobel laureate Erwin Schrodinger imagined that a cat is locked in a box, along with a radioactive atom that is connected to a vial containing a deadly poison. If the atom decays, it causes the vial to smash and the cat to be killed. When the box is closed,  we do not know if the atom has decayed or not, which means that it can be in both the decayed state and the non-decayed state at the same time. Therefore, the cat is both dead and alive at the same time - which clearly does not happen in classical physics.

Thus, said Schrodinger, the cat must itself be in a superposition of dead and alive states before the observer opens the box, ''observes'' the cat, and ''collapses'' its wave function. This is the revolutionary finding of quantum physics - what forces the range of the potentials to assume one value is the act of observation. Matter and energy are not in themselves phenomena and do not become phenomena until they interact with the mind.
QUANTUM CREATIVITY
Your mind is like the universe. You have billions of bits of thoughts, observations, and information floating around in your conscious andsubconscious mind, totally unobserved, with each bit presenting a multiple of possibilities which evolve and change over time. These thoughts are in multiple states such as words, phrases, metaphors, images, feelings,dreams, symbols, abstractions, voices, and so on. Particles of thought pop up out of nothingness and become entangled with other thoughts influencing each other instantaneously. Much like subatomic particles,  these entities have no real existence; they exist only in a probabilistic state of many different possibilities.
Just as subatomic particles do not exist unless observed, your subconscious thoughts do not exist until you observe them. In other words, there is no thought independent of you,  the observer. It is your conscious choice that is responsible for manifesting both the proverbial falling tree and the you who hears it. No observer, no sound, no tree.
When you are brainstorming for ideas and have a thought, the value of that thought depends upon how you interact with it. We are educated to be critical, judgmental, logical thinkers and to instantly evaluate and judge thoughts based on our past experiences. If there is any ambiguity, the judgment is invariably negative and the thought dissipates back into nothingness. The ordinary mind has no tolerance for ambiguity because it is conditioned to simplify the complexities of life. Aristotelian logic maintains, for example, it is either (A  or not-A). The sky is either blue or not blue. It cannot be both. We are taught to be exclusionary thinkers,  which means we exclude anything that is not immediately related to our subject.
Creative geniuses do not think this way. They know that the sky is a billion different shades of blue. When they brainstorm for ideas,  their first objective is to observe and record all thoughts and ideas as possibilities. They observe without judgment. This is why all their thoughts and ideas come into existence as possibilities. Creative geniuses also think inclusively which means they include everything no matter how unrelated or absurd. This is a basic requirement of creative thinking. Creative thinking requires the generation of associations and connections between two or more dissimilar subjects.
All geniuses produce an incredible number of thoughts and ideas.  One famous example is the journals of Leonardo da Vinci. These journals represent decades of note taking, doodling, diagramming and drawings of his thoughts and observations. Another example of displayed thoughts is the more than 3500 notebooks of Thomas Edison that have been discovered so far.  They are filled in a seeming free flow of associations between a fecundity of thoughts. Thomas Edison, for example, had 3000 recorded ideas for a system of lighting before he stepped back and evaluated them for practicality. Both da Vinci and Edison cross fertilized their recorded thoughts and ideas and looked at them in different ways by drawing and diagramming them.
Creative geniuses intuitively knew that it is important to record their thoughts so they could observe them in their creative consciousness. By recording all possibilities, without judgment, they think discontinuously, which is why geniuses have a tolerance for ambiguity. Much like quantum gravity, as we understand it now, discontinuous thought seems to do away with cause and effect. The logic of tock following tick or output following input just doesn't apply in the quantum gravity universe or in the discontinuous thinking processes of the creative mind.
The production and recording of all possibilities naturally leads to an incredible production of creative products. Bach wrote a cantata every week, even when he was sick or exhausted.  Mozart produced more than six hundred pieces of music. Einstein is best known for his paper on relativity, but he published 248 other papers. Darwin is known for his theory of evolution, but he wrote 119 other publications in his lifetime.Freud published 330 papers and Maslow 165.  Rembrandt produced around 650 paintings and 2,000 drawings,  Van Gogh produced 2000 works of art between 1880 and 1890 (1100 paintings and 900 sketches). That's 4 works of art a week for a decade, and he didn't start making art until his mid twenties. Picasso made over 20,000 works of art ("Give me a museum and I'll fill it he said, and he was right) in his lifetime, including sculptures, paintings and other mediums. Shakespeare wrote more than 40 plays, 154 sonnets, and countless poems. Some were masterpieces, while others were no better than his contemporaries could have written, and some were simply bad. In fact, more bad poems were composed by the major poets than the minor poets. They composed more bad poems than minor poets simply because they produced more poetry.
HARVESTING THOUGHTS
The key to productive creative thinking is to harvest the quantum wave-like proliferations of thoughts which abound in our subconscious mind. We make these real by observing, recording and interacting with them. After a conscious preparation to produce new ideas, list every thought, particle of thought, hunch, and, in short, everything that comes to mind without evaluating or judging.