Free Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer

notice new connections, to see the overlaps that we normally overlook. Take, for instance, the story of Arthur Fry, an engineer at 3M in the paper-products division. It begins on a frigid Sunday morning in 1974 in the front pews of a Presbyterian church in north St. Paul, Minnesota. A few weeks earlier, Fry had attended a Tech Forum presentation by Spencer Silver, an engineer working on — you guessed it — adhesives. Silver had developed an extremely weak glue, a paste so feeble it could barely hold two pieces of paper together. Like everyone else in the room, Fry had patiently listened to the presentation and then failed to come up with any practical applications for the compound. “It seemed like a dead-end idea,” Fry says. “I quickly put it out of my thoughts.” What good, after all, is a glue that doesn’t stick?
    That Sunday, however, the paste reentered Fry’s thoughts, al-beit in a rather unlikely context. “I sang in the church choir,” Fry remembers, “and I would often put little pieces of paper into the music on Wednesday night to mark where we were singing. Sometimes, before Sunday morning, those little papers would fall out.” This annoyed Fry, because it meant that he would often spend the service frantically thumbing through his hymnal, looking for the right page. But then, during a particularly boring sermon, Fry engaged in a little daydreaming. He began thinking about bookmarks, and how what he needed was a bookmark that would stick to the paper but wouldn’t tear it when it was removed. And that’s when Fry remembered Spencer Silver and his ineffective glue. He immediately realized that Silver’s patented formula — this barely sticky adhesive — could help create the perfect bookmark.
    So Fry started working, in his bootlegging time, on this new product for his hymnal. After several months of chemical tinkering — the first bookmarks destroyed his books, leaving behind a gluey residue — Fry developed a working prototype, which became the basis for a small test run. “I gave some of them to my cohorts in the lab, to secretaries, to the librarians,” he says. “Basically anybody who would take them.” Although people found the product useful — it was better than folding down page corners — nobody wanted a refill. Instead of disposing of the bookmarks, Fry’s coworkers just transferred them from book to book.
    Fry was ready to give up. But then, a few weeks later, Fry had a second epiphany. He was reading a report and had a question about a specific paragraph. However, instead of writing a note directly on the paper, Fry cut out a square of the bookmark material, stuck it onto the page, and wrote his question there. He sent the report to his supervisor; Fry’s supervisor jotted down his response on a different sticky square, applied it to another document, and sent that back. The men immediately realized they’d discovered a new way to communicate. Instead of writing separate memos full of page references and excerpted quotes, they could stick questions and comments directly onto the text. And these sticky little papers weren’t useful just for documents; every surface in the office was now a potential bulletin board. This time when Fry gave out the products to colleagues, he suggested that they write on them. Within weeks, the 3M offices were plastered with canary-yellow squares. The Post-it note was born.

    It’s not an accident that Arthur Fry was daydreaming when he came up with the idea for a sticky bookmark. A more disciplined thought process wouldn’t have found the connection between Spencer Silver’s weak adhesive and the annoying tendency of those pieces of paper to fall out of the choral book. The errant daydream is what made Post-it notes possible. The boring sermon didn’t hurt either.
    Jonathan Schooler, the psychologist who helped pioneer the study of insight, has recently begun studying the benefits of daydreams. His lab has demonstrated that people who