A question on thought

I have had a question in my mid for some time, and maybe some of the thinkers here can help me with it.

Concerning inspiration and invention. Many people have looked at things and been inspired to improve them or to create a solution to a problem. But what of a person who has not seen nor has an immediate problem to fix. I wanna look at this state beyond a simple answer of "ignorance".

To help illustrate what I'm getting at I'll use some examples.

A person has lived in a cave their entire life and as never seen a flying creature. Having never witnessed flight in anyway would they ever be driven to try to create it?

Would our space race have gone as quickly or developed as fast in the absence of our moon?

A man in africa looks at a picture of a windmill, and then builds one. All the material he used was around him before he saw the picture, and the benefits of this would have been regardless of the picture. He obviously had the intellect to do it, but simply had not conceived of a windmill, until he saw one.

Beyond the simple word of ignorance, is there a term or a school of thought in the learned circles of contemplation that I am not aware of that could help define this idea?

there must be an instinct to the mind that made him built it that way.
like it seemed natural.
im not saying everyone would probably build it the same but he probably got lucky.

Nothing is immediate, it's mostly imagination mixed in with ingenuity and hard work.

The man who looked into the sky and saw the bird thought to himself "I would like to fly." And he would imagine himself as a bird. Da Vinci looked into the sky and said, "I would like fly, but I am not a bird, so how can I fly?" Why did Da Vinci have the idea to build a machine? He used his logic! Putting it like that, the people back in the day had a way easier time coming up with ideas.

But as for a school of thought, if you're really interesting in inventing and the betterment of mankind, nothing better allows this kind of development than studying engineering. Sure, it may seem boring at first, but there's such a HIGH level of thought that comes along with it that will literally make you see the world in a different light. Or if you just study logic as your central science you'll begin to understand things in a different way.

Another great way is meditation and general contemplation. Here's one way to think about it. Go for a walk, think about some things. But stop on one thing (preferably something that strikes your interest) and completely delve into it. Learn everything there is to know about it, and make it yours.

Personally, I think that's what's best.

(P.S. I have no clue if what I said made any sense at all! I'm beyond tired.)

I beleive the word your looking for is 'Intuition'.

Tuition from within. Or to put it another way, 'divine guidance'.

All knowledge is available to us when we access our higher self. Unfortunately, the majority can only catch snippets of this super awareness, and if your not paying attention it will be gone before you realize it was even there for you.

I'll answer with an example of my own; I want to be an inventor.
It is damn hard.

I mean the hard part is actually inventing something that doesn't exist BUT SOMETHING THAT SOME PEOPLE STILL NEED.

I thought long and hard and I came up with a brilliant idea (well, I think it was).
I wanted to create a new kind of tire for bicycles - instead of just one big, round rubber tube filled with air, I'd somehow take the tube and fill it with small plastic bubbles filled with air.
This way you'd never get a flat tire. The problem? It's already invented .

Of course I had inspiration, as I knew about a regular bicycle tire to begin with, but the human mind can accomplish a (moderation of) almost anything after looking at a thing just once.

What's really a head scratcher:

Dreams are all kinds of thoughts put together, right?

So...

Why are babies dreaming? Or more precisely, what are they dreaming about?