More than 10 hours of sleep and no socks – could this be the secret to thinking like a genius? Celebrated inventor and physicist Nikola Tesla swore by toe exercises – every night, he’d repeatedly ‘squish’ his toes , 100 times for each foot, according to the author Marc J Seifer . While it’s not entirely clear exactly what that exercise involved, Tesla claimed it helped to stimulate his brain cells. The most prolific mathematician of the 20th Century, Paul Erdos, preferred a different kind of stimulant : amphetamine, which he used to fuel 20-hour number benders. When a friend bet him $500 that he couldn’t stop for a month, he won but complained “You’ve set mathematics back a month”. Newton, meanwhile, bragged about the benefits of celibacy. When he died in 1727, he had transformed our understanding of the natural world forever and left behind 10 million words of notes; he was also, by all accounts, still a virgin (Tesla was also celibate, though he later claimed he fell in