Expert Opinion By Jeff Haden, Contributing editor, Jun 12, 2024
A friend has a whiteboard in his shower because that’s where he gets some of his best ideas. Another keeps index cards in his pocket when he goes for walks. Another keeps a notepad on his nightstand.
Why? Because we tend to be at our most creative when we’re not trying to be creative. In fact, neuroscience says we tend to be at our most creative when we’re not trying to do anything at all.
In the early 1990s, researchers at Washington University in St. Louis were using PET scans to determine which parts of the brain lit up during different types of activity. Since they needed to establish baselines, some participants were put in the scanner and told to do nothing. (The researchers called that a “resting state.”) To their surprise, though, mental energy spiked in various regions of the brain.
It turned out the resting state was more active than the active state.
A few years later, neuroscientist Nancy Andreasen made resting-state activity — what she called “free floating periods of thought” — her focus. No tasks. No inputs. No “intentional” creativity. Just chilling.
As Andreasen writes in The Creating Brain: the Neuroscience of Genius
Most investigators made the convenient assumption that the brain would be blank or neutral during “rest.” From introspection I knew that my own brain is often at its most active when I stretch out on a bed or sofa and close my eyes.
We found activations in multiple regions of the association cortex. We were not (seeing) a passive silent brain during the resting state, but rather a brain that was actively connecting thoughts and experiences.
Andreasen termed that activity REST: random episodic silent thinking. During REST, your brain “uses its most human and complex parts … areas known to gather information and link it all together — in potentially novel ways.”
That’s why you sometimes have great ideas in the shower. Or while taking a walk. Or while folding laundry. When you let your mind wander — when you don’t actively focus on anything specific — your brain makes all sorts of seemingly unconnected associations. You think about the future. You think about the past. You speculate. You synthesize. You test and discard.
As Andreasen writes, “When the brain/mind thinks in a free and unencumbered fashion, it uses its most human and complex parts.”
In simple terms, if you want to be creative, stop trying to be creative.
Or as Steven Johnson writes in The New York Times:
The seemingly trivial activity of mind-wandering is now believed to play a central role in the brain’s “deep learning,” the mind’s sifting through past experiences, imagining future prospects and assessing them with emotional judgments: that flash of shame or pride or anxiety that each scenario elicits.
REST, or mind-wandering, or whatever you want to call it, is easier said than done.
For one thing, stimulation and “focus” are always within easy reach. Plus, it can feel unproductive — and even oddly uncomfortable — not to fill time with some sort of activity. How many people sit in a waiting room and just wait? How many people sit on a plane and just stare at the seat back in front of them?
Yep: Sitting and thinking in a “free and unencumbered fashion” sounds boring.
And it is boring — at least at first. It’s also tough to stick with, especially if you decide to sit in a chair and just stare out the window.
So try this instead. Take a walk. (Then you’ll be double-dipping: A Stanford study published in the Journal of Experimental Psychology found that your creative output increases by as much as 60 percent when you’re walking.)
Just walk. Don’t think about thinking. Don’t think about what you should be doing, should be listening to, should be focusing on. Let your mind wander. In all likelihood, your thoughts will soon drift to a problem you have. Or a challenge you’re working through. Your thoughts will shift forward and backward in time. You’ll sift through hypothetical possibilities and outcomes.
You’ll actively — without trying — connect ideas, thoughts, and experiences.
When you’re REST-ing, you won’t have to come up with ideas. Ideas will come to you because that’s how our brains are wired.
Just make sure you write them down, because our brains are also wired to forget.
Story from Inc.com
Jeff Haden
Jeff Haden is a keynote speaker, ghostwriter, LinkedIn Top Voice, contributing editor to Inc., and the author of The Motivation Myth: How High Achievers Really Set Themselves Up to Win.
