Topless Poem by gershon hepner

TOPLESS


In order to have insight, do not concentrate:
relax, let thoughts come while you are not thinking;
the best ideas that we can formulate
may come we are half awake, or drinking.

Richard Feynman used to go for inspiration
to bars where all the women would be topless
and won the Nobel Prize since people of his nation
are famous for not being Yiddish kopless.

Jonah Lehrer (“The Eureka Hunt, ” New Yorker, July 28,2008) writes about the role the right anterior superior temporal gyrus (aSTG) plays in facilitating insight, a phenomenon associated with connotation in contrast to denotation, which is facilitated by the left hemisphere. The right aSTG is linked to aspects of language comprehension, the detection of literary themes, metaphor and the appreciation of jokes. Its insights cannot be forced, and the area works best when a person is distracted. Indeed it is inhibited when a person focuses on a problem. Henri Poincaré’s most famous insight into non-Euclidean geometry came while he was boarding a bus, and he credited his insight to “unconscious work, ” advising people to solve problems by distracting themselves with “a walk or a journey”. Richard Feynman did his best work in topless bars, where he would sip 7UP, “watch the entertainment, ” and, if inspiration struck, scribble equations on cocktail napkins.

7/23/08