I quite enjoyed this piece by Mariam Sabri who teaches the history of science in Pakistan. It’s a case for breadth of experience, using evidence from the lives of four medieval Islamic polymaths. Alhazen, for example, worked out his theory of vision while under house arrest, after pretending to be insane so the caliph wouldn't have him executed. Hopefully none of us need an experience quite so extreme as this. :P
I especially enjoyed this bit about Avicenna. When he got stuck on a logic problem, he went to the mosque and prayed for insight. Whether one believes in divine inspiration or not, the outward-oriented mind seems better suited to discover new things than the inward-pointing one. (Maybe prayer is inward, not outward? I don’t experience it this way, but I could see the case for that.)
Avicenna's own habit of praying his way through a difficult logic problem is a case in point: for him, turning to the mosque when reason stalled wasn't a retreat from rigorous thought but an extension of it, since prayer and logical enquiry were both aimed at the same goal of grasping a difficult truth.