His
particular gift was the power of holding continuously in his mind a purely
mental problem until he had seen straight through it. I fancy his pre-eminence
is due to his muscles of intuition being the strongest and most enduring with
which a man has ever been gifted. Anyone who has ever attempted pure scientific
or philosophical thought knows how one can hold a problem momentarily in one’s
mind and apply all one’s powers of concentration to piercing through it, and
how it will dissolve and escape and you will find that what you are surveying
is a blank. I believe that Newton could hold a problem in his mind for hours
and days and weeks until it surrendered to him its secret. Then being a supreme
mathematical technician he could dress it up, how you will, for purposes of
exposition, but it was his intuition which was pre-eminently extraordinary –
“so happy in his conjectures,” said de Morgan, “as to seem to know more than he
could possibly have any means of proving.”
– from “Newton, the Man,” The World of Mathematics, by John Maynard Keynes
Sounds to me like this man was the one-in-ten-millionth man able to harness the
benefits of NZT without an actual pill.
Now ... how would one go about lowering those odds, if one was to go about it intentionally?
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