The science behind our ‘eureka’ moments, and how to nurture them

There have been countless moments in my life when I wrecked my brain trying to come up with a brilliant idea or strenuously looking for a way to solve a difficult math problem, but I kept hitting a wall and getting nowhere. The idea or solution, however, showed up not when I was sitting at my desk focusing on the problem, but while I was doing the most mundane things, like washing the dirty clothes piled up for weeks or refilling the water filter at 2 a.m.

These accidental discoveries or 'serendipitous' moments, as random as they may seem, have a logic behind it. The Cambridge dictionary defines 'serendipity' as the fact of finding interesting or valuable things by chance. Many great scientific discoveries also happened from serendipity.  Consider the original 'Eureka' moment, when Archimedes came up with the idea of determining the volume of irregular objects while he was in a bath tub. The famed mathematician was tasked to detect fraud by King Hieron II of Syracuse when the king suspected that a goldsmith had cheated him by mixing silver into a crown. It was a common trick to alloy gold with cheaper silver, but the problem was that no one knew at that time how to determine the size of an irregularly shaped object like a crown.

While Archimedes was pondering on this problem, he went to the public baths to relax. There he noticed spilling of water over the edge and had a sudden flash of inspiration. The displaced water must have exactly the same volume as him. And if you know the volume of an object you can easily calculate its density. All Archimedes had to do was find out whether a lump of pure gold, with the same volume as the crown, weighed more. The crown would be lighter than it should be if the craftsman had deviously used some silver instead.  Overjoyed by this insight, he famously ran through the streets shouting 'Eureka!'—a serendipitous flash that not only solved the king's problem but also led him to discover the principle of buoyancy.

This was not plain good luck, but serendipity at work and unlike good luck, which you cannot do much about, serendipity is something you can actually nurture and induce.

Why good ideas come when we're not trying

Serendipitous moments often occur when ideas or "hunches" are detached from their usual fixed positions in the brain and allowed to move freely, collide, and recombine, creating new insights. The logic is that the ideas in the mind exist in a stable, "locked" configuration most of the time. When we're intensely focused, they interact far less.

A shower or a walk pulls us away from the task-driven routines of daily life and places us in a more relaxed, associative frame of mind. The brain becomes less linear, more diffuse. In that freer state, the brain often reconnects forgotten ideas, sparking those satisfying moments of personal epiphany: How did I not realise this earlier?

The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann popularised a method of expanding our memory called the 'zettelkasten' method. To put it simply, the method consists of writing notes on small pieces of paper with a numbering system to be able to link new notes to other notes. Throughout Luhmann's career, he wrote over 70 books and nearly 400 research papers, covering a wide range of topics from art to economics to philosophy. He once said that books would "write themselves" if you had 90,000 notes of various subjects all linked together.

Cultivating private serendipity

While random sparks of moments often induce serendipity, it can also be cultivated through certain environments, or deliberate habits. Periods of wandering, rest, or exposure to diverse inputs, like exploring different subjects, browsing a varied digital archive or open database, sets our preexisting ideas free, letting them mingle with the new ones. Suddenly, two fragments of thought snap together in an unexpected insight that wouldn't emerge in routine, linear thinking.

Serendipitous discoveries often involve exchanges across different disciplines. That's why exposing yourself to a diverse range of subjects at a time can spark serendipity. Reading widely is a way to do that, but in modern life we barely get time to squeeze reading around our work schedule. Listening to an audiobook while commuting or reading a chapter before bed could be possible options.

Rather than passively consuming information in fragments, immersing oneself in a concentrated burst of reading can amplify cross-pollination between ideas. Figures like Bill Gates popularised the practice of "reading vacations," where they consume a diverse range of texts in a short period, allowing insights to remain fresh and interact with one another, like atoms bouncing in motion. But absorbing ideas is only half the process, preserving them is equally essential.

Our brains are amazing at forgetting information. Forgetting is as important as remembering because it protects us from being overwhelmed. For example, remembering not to step on an open manhole might save your life, but remembering what the weather was like on your tenth birthday, doesn't add any value to your life and so your subconscious automatically filters that out. But it also means we lose valuable connections. Of course, it's not only about life and death, our brains also sometimes remember futile details which apparently have no use. Our brains decide what to remember according to 'importance,' and cognitive psychologists note that 'importance' hinges on value, relevance, and repetition.

The German sociologist Niklas Luhmann popularised a method of expanding our memory called the 'zettelkasten' method. To put it simply, the method consists of writing notes on small pieces of paper with a numbering system to be able to link new notes to other notes. Throughout Luhmann's career, he wrote over 70 books and nearly 400 research papers, covering a wide range of topics from art to economics to philosophy. He once said that books would "write themselves" if you had 90,000 notes of various subjects all linked together. This could be one potential method to create an environment in which serendipity could be engineered. Maintaining a digital database of your ideas and personal epiphanies, interconnected through relevance-based hyperlinks, can serve as a modern alternative to the original method.

Crafting a culture of chance

Many workplaces and institutions inadvertently suppress serendipity through compartmentalisation and excessive bureaucracy or secrecy. Traditional innovation systems or closed R&D labs, aim to protect ideas but end up isolating them from the broader networks that could help them grow. Serendipity thrives on openness and exchange. Encouraging cross-departmental collaboration, mixing diverse expertise within teams, and sharing ideas freely across different teams can lead to unexpected innovations with real value for the organisation.

Many forward-thinking companies, including IBM, P&G, and Nike have applied this logic. Nike's GreenXchange initiative, for instance, publicly released hundreds of eco-friendly patents under Creative Commons licenses, inviting other industries to adapt them. In essence, open innovation platforms replicate the evolutionary principle of repurposing, where discarded or idle ideas find new life in unexpected contexts.

Serendipity, ultimately, is a product of the environments we create and the attention we choose to give. In giving our ideas room to roam and meet in unforeseen ways, we invite the world to answer us, often with the very clarity we had been chasing all along.

Miftahul Jannat is a journalist at The Daily Star and can be reached at: miftahul@thedailystar.net

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