Tesla composed like Mozart

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: [email protected]
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