The Night Otto Loewi Couldn't Read His Own Handwriting
In 1921 the physiologist Otto Loewi woke with an experiment in his head, scribbled a note he could not read at six, and got the idea back the following night. His own 1960 account, and what it does and does not teach.
On the night before Easter Sunday in 1921, in Graz, Otto Loewi woke with the design of an experiment complete in his mind. He switched on a light, scrawled a few lines on a slip of thin paper, and went back to sleep.
At six in the morning he looked at the slip. He could not read it.
He spent that day at the laboratory trying to recall what the note meant, and could not. The next night, at three, the idea returned. This time he did not write. He went straight to the laboratory and prepared two frog hearts, stimulating the vagus nerve of the first and pouring its surrounding fluid over the second. The second heart slowed. By five o’clock he had the result that would earn him a share of the 1936 Nobel Prize.
That is Loewi’s own account, set down in 1960 in Perspectives in Biology and Medicine, so the hour belongs to his memory more than to a logbook. He did not write anything down the second time; he moved at once. The first night is the part worth keeping: the idea was real, the note was real, and the handwriting was gone.
This much is inference, not Loewi’s advice: a night-time thought is short-lived, and a note you cannot read is no note. If you’ve tried sleeping on a problem and woke with an answer, one clear sentence beats a full sketch, and morning journaling can pick up from there.
Loewi’s answer to the unreadable slip was to get up and do the work before the thought could fade. The pen, if you keep one by the bed, only has to survive until morning.