The train of thought got derailed around here, and apropos of nothing imagined so far, I recalled a ballad sung by the Adi-Gallong tribe of Arunachal Pradesh, India, stuck in my mind for its happy rhythm. What the words of the song meant I never tried to find out, except that it was built around the motif of cotton picking in Arunachal Pradesh. I am now informed that the ballad is called Oyo Hoi Ya, describing the life of 'Mother Village' and its women in mundane but musically eloquent idioms of the cotton-picking activity.

According to a Yale University computer scientist, David Gelerntner, all human beings "slide along a spectrum of thought processes" on an average day and this could begin with "high-focus" thinking where "we can sandwich many memories and pieces of knowledge and quickly extract the thing they all have in common". It is not so much creative ability as assimilative expertise aiding swift decisions and quick action. Slide along the spectrum to "low focus" and we become less good at homing in on details but our memories are more vivid, concrete and detailed". The linking of memories and knowledge is more by emotion than by reason. When we are at the work place we are in "high-focus"; when we are in love, in "low-focus". It is when people are in "middle-focus" that they are at their most creative.

This is because the mind is free from both obligatory, occupational concerns and mind-numbing, un-reasoning emotions. In "middle-focus", people make unusual connections—Newton and the apple, Archimedes and the bath tub, Kekule and the two snakes, Gandhi and the railway booking in South Africa—and they acquire insights which change the course of science, art and history. Gelerntner calls this mode "unconcentration", which provides a person the right insight into things that already are in high-focus.

Creativity involves more than moments of "unconcentration", relaxation and free association of unconnected thoughts. Human imagination, indeed all imagination, follows rules and thrives on constraints to provide clear-cut definitions to problems for which one seeks creative solutions. Creativity itself is undefinable. It is not originality. One of the easiest things in life is to be original and foolish. For long, creativity remained a mystery better left to poets, artists and the like. It always conjured up the messy, unverifiable world of muses, inspiration and intuition.

Today science has taken over these very traits—unverifiability (the theories of Freud or Hawking), inspirational (Einstein or Planck) and messy (DNA and Darwinism)—and so, things are scientifically expoundable even if not explainable. French mathematician Poincare identified four stages of creativity, which must have inspired the spectrum of high, middle and low focus mentioned above. The stages are: preparation (you try to solve a problem by available, normal means), incubation (when these don't work and in frustration you move to other matters), illumination (the answer comes in a flash, when you are not looking for it), and verification (your reasoning powers re-assert and you are on the way to finding a solution). Most of us give up at the stage of incubation and miss the illumination and, consequently, the experience of creative joy. Mark Twain put it nicely: Happiness, he said, "is like the Swedish sunset. It's always there. Only, people look the other way and miss it".

We all tend to talk about happiness as if it is a mythological creature that lives outside us—up above or over there. It is elusive and uncooperative. It doesn't come when we want it. Like a key, or one's spectacles, we often misplace it. People who give it to you—parents, employers, lovers, children, friends… God—seem to retain the power to take it away and the only place you are likely to hold on to it is in your memories. Little wonder that so many of us spend so much time of our life making ourselves unhappy. We often forget that happiness is not an elixir, but a state of mind that must be earned.

A Chicago-based mind scientist with an unpronounceable name—Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi—has employed verifiable scientific techniques to prove that "happiness is a condition that must be prepared for, cultivated and defended privately by each person". You won't find happiness (or creativity) if you consciously search for it. It's something of a bonus—the fruits of good karma, as per the Gita—that you get when you are immersed in tasks that you find engaging and challenging. He calls this optimal state of mind as "flow"—when our minds and bodies are stretched to their limits in a voluntary effort to accomplish something worthwhile and difficult. A higher stage of this flow is "autotelic self" when a person is able to "translate potential threats into enjoyable challenges". He or she is able to maintain "inner harmony and so is never bored, seldom anxious and spends most waking hours experiencing flow".

The opposite of "flow" is psychic entropy. How you feel when you are running your child's birthday party and the phone rings and someone gruffly tells you that you owe the power board six months' unpaid bills and they are going to disconnect the power lines. You explain that you have paid all dues, there must be a mistake, etc., lose your temper, shout and spoil your mood, spoil the party and try as you might you cannot get back "on top of things". Any bad thing happening makes you unravel a little more.