People think of these eureka moments and my feeling is that they tend to be little things, a little realisation and then a little realisation built on that.

It may well be there is something else going on in the brain that we don't have an inkling of at the moment.

It is always the case, with mathematics, that a little direct experience of thinking over things on your own can provide a much deeper understanding than merely reading about them.

Ambition, idly vain; revenge and malice swell her train.

our present picture of physical reality, particularly in relation to the nature of time, is due for a grand shake up

It is hard to see how one could begin to develop a quantum-theoretical description of brain action when one might well have to regard the brain as "observing itself" all the time!

As you say, the way string theory requires all these extra dimensions and this comes from certain consistency requirements about how string should behave and so on.