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Author’s Note: A Serbian version of the following article appeared in a column in the October 5, 2006 Issue (No. 2910; pp.34-35) of NIN (НИН), a weekly national magazine of Serbia (former Yugoslavia), under the title of

Tesla Composed Like Mozart

(Tesla je komponovao kao Mocart; Тесла је компоновао қао Моцарт)

The Serbian version was translated by NIN staff from the following original English version under another title below. An article in English and in greater details will appear in an official commemorative volume, in honor of Nikola Tesla on the occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth, to be published in Novi Sad, Serbia, near the end of 2006 under the title below. This year also marks the 250th anniversary of the birth of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.

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Tesla and Creativity: Hidden Messages From His Life

Felix T. Hong, Professor of Physiology, Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan USA

Decoding hidden messages contained in Nikola Tesla’s book “Moji Pronalasci (My Inventions)” and in a letter of Wolfgang Mozart reveals the secret of human creativity in science, technology and humanities. There is also an important message for educators: Students trained in Tesla’s thinking style showed significant improvement in learning as well as in problem-solving ability.

The thought process of geniuses or individuals with superior mental abilities has captured the fascination of philosophers and scientists perhaps since the inception of these professions. Introspective reports by geniuses regarding the process of their mental creation have been a major source of information about human creativity. Yet, these introspective reports were regarded by mainstream psychologists as a helpful but vague hint, at best, or downright unreliable, at worst. In the previous century, investigators made repeated attempts to demystify the creative process of scientific geniuses with only modest success. I believe the lack of a contrasting model for comparison with geniuses’ mental process might be one of the major factors for the apparent failure. Perhaps the opposite of geniuses are not idiots or other patients with mental deficiency. Nor did a comparison of geniuses with ordinary intelligent folks shed much light. In hindsight, ordinary intelligent folks share part of the mental process with geniuses, but geniuses pushed the process to the limit.

My interest in human creativity started as a hobby. I made no serious attempt to investigate the problem until one day I seemed to stumble upon a key clue during my teaching activities. I was astonished, at first, to find that some of our premedical students had learned physiology by memorizing the course content as a collection of well established rules or recipes, and by learning the detailed procedures of using these memorized rules to solve problems like inexperienced cooks following the instructions of a cook book. Although they often achieved good grades in standardized testing, they appeared to be intellectually inadequate when the test problems required synthesis of acquired knowledge. For lack of a better term, I referred to them as dumb high-achievers in my publications. I further coined a term to describe their cookbook style thinking process: rule-based reasoning. In a way it is similar to digital computers’ step-by-step algorithm. I also coined a term for the desirable thinking style: picture-based reasoning. Soon, I realized that the two reasoning styles correspond, in the psychology literature, to what had been known as verbal thinking and visual thinking, respectively. In fact, visual thinking had long been advocated by scientific geniuses such as Henri Poincaré, Albert Einstein, and Nikola Tesla, but was deliberately ignored by mainstream psychologists because of the subjective nature of their introspections. It did not take long for me to recognize that dumb high-achievers were the missing link and their thinking style was the contrasting model to geniuses’ visual thinking.

My 2003 visit to the Nikola Tesla Museum was the culmination of my quest for geniuses’ secret. It was a pleasant surprise to find Tesla’s autobiography “Moji Pronalasci (My Inventions)” contained most of the clues to deciphering the enigma of creativity. Nikola Tesla, our quintessential genius of all time, had a special gift, which had first disguised as a persistent affliction during his childhood and which had tormented him immensely.

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In my boyhood I suffered from a peculiar affliction due to the appearance of images, often accompanied by strong flashes of light, which marred the sight of real objects and interfered with my thought and action.

What tormented Tesla during his childhood were not real images, which his eyes actually saw, but something called imagery, which existed in his imagination, and which is also known as the mind’s eyes. For most people, visual imagery is not as clear and well defined as true images. But Tesla’s imagery was unusual, because he had a hard time telling the imagined from the real images. Frankly, being a non-expert, I cannot give a conclusive diagnosis. Shall I just say it was an exaggerated form of visual imagery?

When a word was spoken to me the image of the object it designated would present itself vividly to my vision and sometimes I was quite unable to distinguish whether what I saw was tangible or not. …… They certainly were not hallucinations such as are produced in diseased and anguished minds, for in other respects I was normal and composed.

In ordinary folks, visual imagery is sometimes voluntarily called for or habitually called for when it is needed. In Tesla’s case, it was automatic and was forced upon him. He could not willfully suppress it until he found out that it could be replaced by his own willful thinking.

To free myself of these tormenting appearances, I tried to concentrate my mind on something else I had seen, and in this way I would often obtain temporary relief; but in order to get it I had to conjure continuously new images.

His imagery was akin to hallucinations, except that he was not insane. It was his seventeenth year of age that he suddenly realized that his affliction was a hidden asset, and a blessing in disguise, as far as his career of inventions was concerned.

Then I observed to my delight that I could visualize with the greatest facility. I needed no models, drawings or experiments. I could picture them all as real in my mind. Thus I have been led unconsciously to evolve what I consider a new method of materializing inventive concepts and ideas, which is radically opposite to the purely experimental and is in my opinion ever so much more expeditious and efficient.

There is little doubt what Tesla practiced was an extreme form of visual thinking. Few of the rest of us could match him in terms of details, intensity and precision of visual imagery. His method of carrying out an experiment or manipulation mentally not only saved him time and expenses, but also enabled him to capture fleeting ideas, which would have been lost forever otherwise.

The moment one constructs a device to carry into practice a crude idea he finds himself unavoidably engross with the details and defects of the apparatus. As he goes on improving and reconstructing, his force of concentration diminishes and he loses sight of the great underlying principle. Results may be obtained but always at the sacrifice of quality.

The above explanation of the shortcoming of actually doing an experiment made a perfect cognitive sense. An idea triggered by inspiration is extremely volatile; it persists in one’s short-term memory only briefly, thus allowing for an extremely narrow window of time to be captured. Tesla’s exquisite ability thus enabled him to have many more brilliant ideas than an ordinary folk.

Let us see whether visual thinking can also be applied to music creativity. In a letter written to an admirer, Baron von P, Mozart claimed to be able to hold an entire music score in his short-term memory so that “[he could] survey it, like a fine picture or a beautiful statue, at a glance.” Mozart’s picture metaphor implied that what he had practiced was similar to Tesla’s visual thinking except what his mind saw (or, rather, hear) is the entire sound pattern instead of an entire diagram of one’s invention. What Tesla and Mozart both practiced was known as parallel processing in artificial intelligence (AI) jargon. This is evident in the same letter: “Nor do I hear in my imagination the parts successively, but I hear them, as it were, all at once (gleich alles zusammen).” Here, Mozart tried to contrast his thinking style to verbal thinkers’ style of one word at a time or one sentence at a time, also known as sequential processing in AI jargon.

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One of the mysteries of creativity was highlighted by a remark of mathematical genius, Carl Friedrich Gauss. In referring to a long-standing problem, which he had just solved, Gauss said, “The riddle solved itself as lighting strikes, and I myself could not tell or show the connection between what I knew before, what I last used to experiment with, and what produced the final success.” Tesla also used the metaphor of lightning to describe his sudden discovery, but he then went on to describe the visual image that he had seen in his “mental operations” (thinking). Piecing all these hints together, there is little doubt that Gauss solved his problem by visual thinking and his inspiration came from part of a picture like a lightning flash. Due to the fleeting nature of short-term memory, it is not surprising that Gauss soon forgot which part of the picture had given him the crucial clue. The suddenness of the discovery was also a consequence of parallel processing. Unlike looking up clues from a collection of rules in a rulebook, access to part of the information contained within a picture is usually less orderly, known in computer science jargon as random access. That is to say, one needs not examine a picture from top to bottom, and from left to right, in an exhaustive manner. Instead, one can jump from part to part in no pre-determined order. Furthermore, intuition, which psychologists found to be hard to describe, can also be easily explained. Intuition, which is an overall feeling about a picture, is difficult to articulate for precisely the same reason why a picture is difficult to describe in words.

An additional mystery was a phenomenon known as serendipity. Quite a few novel discoveries appeared to be the consequence of an accident, which ordinary folks would regard as a failure, but a genius saw an unexpected opportunity in it. What made a genius recognize his or her opportunity? Louis Pasteur had a punch line to characterize the peculiar situation. He said, “ In the fields of observation chance favors only the prepared mind.” What constitutes a prepared mind has been a subject of speculations. Mainstream psychologists thought a prepared mind simply knows more, has better techniques, practices more, works harder and is more motivated.

Let us take Tesla’s one-time colleague and professional rival, Thomas A. Edison, as an example. Edison was working on a different project when his assistant made a noise by accidentally touching a milling machine with a sharp tool [Author’s Note: A factual correction is in order. The noise came from a telegraphic repeater spinning out of control. ]. Edison instantly captured the hint, which gave him the inspiration to invent the first phonograph. Unless Edison was thinking all the time about the photograph project and even when he was actually working on another project, how could he possibly recognize his opportunity in a totally unexpected circumstance? Furthermore, the recognition must be in terms of picture or sound patterns rather than words. There was simply no way for Edison to formulate his expectation in words before he eventually solved his problem. Thus, anyone who could work on a project and think about another got to have a multi-track mind — the hallmark of a visual thinker. Legend had it that Mozart sometimes transcribed a finished work on paper while he composed another work or while he carried on a conversation with others.

More messages were hidden in Moji Pronalasci, but restriction on space does not permit me to go on. However, I am almost certain that, if our readers start to emulate Tesla’s thought process consciously, they will have the joy and gratification of finding out more hidden messages from his behaviors. It seems to me such an adventure would be the most appropriate way to pay tributes to Tesla’s legacy on this special occasion of the 150th anniversary of his birth.

About the author:

Felix T. Hong can be reached at the following email address: fhong@med.wayne.edu