The Swedish neuroscientist Ragnar Granit gave what I regard as a remarkable talk about research and deep thinking as activities requiring personal development and transformation.

It’s a great piece because some of the issues– the distractions of conferences and correspondence, for example– are still very germane.

It gives a sense of the work required to fashion a self that is capable of asking very deep questions, and working and waiting for years for an answer.

And yet at the same time, Granit acknowledges the great role that the subconscious, and what he calls “the secret process of automatic creation” play in our success.

With some justification one can say that today the long, narrow and winding road to real knowledge has become harder to follow. In the face of innumerable distractions it has become increasingly difficult for the individual worker to preserve his identity. This, however, is necessary if he intends to grow and ripen within any branch of science. The point I want to make is that what we read, what we actively remember, and what we ourselves contribute to our fields of interests very gradually build up living and creative structures within us. We do not know how the brain does it, no more than we know how the world of sight gradually becomes upright again when for a while we have carried inverting spectacles. Our knowledge of the workings of our mind is of the scantiest. We simply have to admit that the brain is designed that way.

By “keeping track of one’s identity” I mean cultivating the talents of listening to the workings of one’s own mind, separating minor diversions from main lines of thought, and gratefully accepting what the secret process of automatic creation delivers. I can well understand that many people do not think much of this notion and prefer to regard it as one of my personal / idosyncracies. Others who late in life look over their own activities, are sure to find at least something that looks like a main line of personal identity in the choice of their labors. Up to this point many colleagues are perhaps willing to agree. But a little more than that is meant when I maintain that an active brain is self-fertile in the manner described. I am convinced that if one can take care of one’s identity, it, in turn, will take care of one’s scientific development.

I am emphasizing all this so strongly because there are today so many distractions preventing scientists from enjoying the quietude and balance required for contact with their own creative life. The cities and the universities are becoming more restless, and the “organization men” with their meddlesome paper work of questionnaires and regulations tend to increase in number while the number of teachers relative to students decreases….

In all creative work there is need for a good deal of time for exercising the talent of listening to oneself, often more profitable than listening to others or, at any rate, an important supplement to the life of symposia and congresses. Perhaps this latter kind of life is also overdone in the present age. There are so many of these meetings nowadays that people can keep on drifting round the world and soon be pumped dry of what is easier to empty than to refill.

My plea for a measure of “self-contact” is really that of the poet and essayist Abraham Cowley (1618-1667) who said that the prime minister has not as much to attend to in the way of public affairs as a wise man has in his solitude.