ABSTRACT
Autobiographical and biographical findings on distinguished scientific geniuses demonstrate that their mental functioning is determined in part by specific feelings, preferences, beliefs, and other similar phenomena. However, psychologists, working in the field of high ability, rarely study these phenomena, which can be referred to as “extracognitive phenomena.” One of the greatest minds of the 20th century, Albert Einstein, in discussions with Max Wertheimer (1959) about the development of the theory of relativity and the way of thinking which led to it, emphasized that:
during all those years there was the feeling of direction, of going straight toward something concrete. It is, of course, very hard to express that feeling in words; but it was decidedly the case, and clearly to be distinguished from later considerations about the rational form of the solution. (p. 228; italics added)
Similarly, Jacques Hadamard (1954) in his study on the psychology of invention in the mathematical field cited Henri Poincaré, a famous French scientist, who asserted that:
it may be surprising to see emotional sensibility invoked a propos of mathematical demonstrations which, it would seem, can interest only the intellect. This would be to forget the feeling of mathematical beauty, of the harmony of numbers and forms, of geometric elegance. This is a true esthetic feeling that all real
mathematicians know, and surely it belongs to emotional sensibility. (p. 31; italics added)
Poincaré (1913) also insisted that “pure logic would never lead us to anything but tautologies. It is by logic that we prove. It is by intuition that we discover” (p. 208; italics added). In a similar way, Rosenblueth and Wiener (1945) emphasized that:
An intuitive flair for what will turn out to be the most important general question gives a basis for selecting some of the significant among the indefinite number of trivial experiments which could be carried out at that stage. Quite vague and tacit generalizations thus influence the selection of data at the start. (p. 317)
Even such a brief account shows the extremely significant role that “feeling of direction,” “sense of beauty,” those processes usually referred to as “intuition,” and other similar phenomena played, and still play, in the appearance of some of the most celebrated creative scientific discoveries.
