We all seem to deliberately ignore an obvious part of all this creativity "science": Creativity is the product of *well rested* minds! We all know this, b

We all seem to deliberately ignore an obvious part of all this creativity "science": Creativity is the product of *well rested* minds! We all know this, but we do our best over-work ourselves and other, over-train/educate ourselves and others and "fill up" any free time we have in the sake of "efficiency" and "not falling behind". And I don't even agree with the OP's assumptions that innovation is "slowed to a crawl", it's probably faster than ever before, but nothing nears as fast as it should be with all the new communication and connectivity enhancements (imho they act like a wonder-drug that is so good it unfortunately masks the symptoms of a serious illness - like a really good antiinflammatory + painkiller that can mask the symptoms of one's cancer until it's too late). As a few examples: - in medical research we've built complicated regulations, approval and funding processes and uber-complicated career paths that basically suck away 90% of the time and energy of medical-researchers and doctors, and we wonder why progress is so slow and so many grave errors committed - in software we've gone so deep down the "worse is better" hole that we have all sorts of tools and programming languages that create more problems than they solve, and whole industries dedicated to solving tooling problems that should be trivial if OSs and languages were design with just a bit more hindsight (that we know is possible: take ta re-re-...-re-invention of Lisp and Smalltalk features), and have more time and energy for building cool software that actually does interesting things - in hardware we have over-engineered designs and tools and concepts that are only understandable by a few very smart, well trained, but over worked professionals - when it comes to our children we are so afraid that they will not be "good enough" or that they will be left behind that we try to fill all their time with "useful" activities, as schools fill it with homework ...we basically generate so much needless complexity in everything that we do that most of can never have "well rested minds". And this complexity grows like a freakin cancer and it will also be inherited by our children and their children and will keep their minds busy and tired for all their lives too.