Salvador Dali, best known for his surrealist paintings and perhaps for owning an ocelot as a pet, was one of the first to pursue altered states of consciousness as a means to creativity. He certainly did not know it at the time, but he was capitalizing on a recently discovered function of the brain’s different brain waves.

Leonardo da Vinci, an epitome of the prolific creative, had this simple but effective creativity method: prolific notetaking. Over his lifetime, he accumulated about 13,000 pages of notes and sketches—that’s 13,000 pages each written out by hand. Of those, an estimated 7,000 pages are preserved, like surviving snapshots of the inner workings of a creative genius’s mind. They were filled with drawings of imagined inventions, diagrams of human and animal anatomy, and personal notes and observations that were often written backward—so da Vinci could add a small layer of secrecy to his inner thoughts.

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