The Source of Creativity

A spiritual soul would tell you it is god.

A scientist would probably tell you he does not know.

Well I am both and neither. Maybe that is why that is not what I would tell you. It takes certain skills to achieve a creative thought. That is unless you believe it appears out of nowhere.
We have to have the conceptional perceptions to understand the answers when they pop into our heads else it will be mostly gibberish. So if you want answers then research is an advantage for it brings you into understanding the images in which answers shall appear.
Unconscious asynchronous operations sometimes take a long time, for it is in the cross referencing of similar information in distant thoughts that is the key to inspiration.

G.I. Gurdjieff

A considerable percentage of the people we meet on the street are people who are empty inside, that is, they are actually already dead. It is fortunate for us that we do not see and do not know it. If we knew what a number of people are actually dead and what a number of these dead people govern our lives, we should go mad with horror.

 G.I. Gurdjieff