ABSTRACT
In the literature on great inventions we can find some illustrative examples referring to insight and restructuring in creative problem solving. So, for example, the famous chemist Kekulé reports that he found the ring structure of Benzol after a long and tedious period of cogitation when he dreamed about a snake biting its tail. The mathematician Poincaré (1908) reports that his idea of a new class of mathematical functions appeared suddenly and unexpectedly while he was boarding his vehicle during a journey. Amazingly, the purpose of his journey was to take a break from his unsuccessful and frustrating work on this problem. Similar anecdotes have been reported with regard to other scientific inventions, such as the decoding of genetic information. When Watson (1968) was asked how he deciphered the double helix structure he answered that he discovered this structure while playing with model devices that represented the already known basic sequences of deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA). While playing with the devices he arrived at the spontaneous insight that these devices had to be arranged as a spiral stairs.
