From “The Discipline of Inspiration: The Mysterious Encounter with God at the Heart of Creativity” by Carey Wallace
Modern neuroscientists have begun to map the activity of inspiration, name the implicated chemicals, push pins into the hidden quadrants of our minds. Psychologists have identified some of inspiration’s visible triggers: nature, drugs, grief, discipline, rest, surprise. Titans of industry interested in potential profits from new ideas now run their own more-or-less scientific experiments to bolster creativity among their workers, with everything from snack bars to rock concerts to nap pods.
Science today knows more than it ever has about the neighborhood of inspiration in the mind and the external conditions that cultivate it. But many of the scientific advances of the past decades have only served to underscore how much we still don’t know, and how uncertain what we do know is.
As electron microscopes and supercolliders allow us to break open and peer through the atom, we’ve discovered that, at the most granular level we can perceive, the most basic laws of classic physics seem to warp: matter is actually energy, light is both particle and wave. Ovr half the universe is indiscernible to any of our senses. Chaos pervades the entire system. And when we are able to observe, the simple fact that we watch changes the outcome.
Modern science has tamed electricity, put humans on the moon, and wiped entire diseases from the earth. It will no doubt continue to build on its already remarkable accomplishments. And it’s possible that scientists in the future will come to empirically provable conclusions about the smallest units of matter – or the human mind.
But it’s also possible that, when science finally does lay any of these areas bare, we may discover that empirical tests are not sufficient to observe, let alone understand, all things.