Showering is a classic example. your mind wanders And suddenly, Eureka! A new creative insight or breakthrough occurs.
Zach Irving, an assistant professor of philosophy at the University of Virginia, explains in a new collaborative study why the wandering mind sometimes finds creative solutions to a problem when a person is busy with a "stupid" task.
The secret seems to be that the task isn't completely insane. A moderate level of interaction is required.
In collaboration with University of Minnesota psychology professor Caitlin Mills and others, an article on the "shower effect" was recently published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and Art .
"Let's say you have a problem," Irving said. "What do you do? Maybe it's not something mind-bogglingly boring, like watching paint dry. Instead, you go for a walk, garden, or take a shower. All of these activities are moderately interesting."
The study confirms this anecdotal evidence and points to the influence of Irving's experimental design.
So what is proof? Don't let your mind wander. This requires a bit of fine tuning.
Wander in the wrong direction
A study published ten years ago in the journal Psychological Science seemed to confirm what many had suspected. When we perform a "low-level" task, our brain tends to wander; and when our brains tend to wander, creativity tends to flow.
"In 2012, there was a conclusion-driven study by Benjamin Baird and colleagues that created a sensation in academia, the media, and the public imagination that seemed to favor creativity and the incubation of creativity," Irving said.
These researchers asked participants to find creative alternative ways to use everyday objects, such as bricks, after an "incubation period" that included tasks of varying mental exertion. The study found that the lower the demand, the better the participants did on the creativity test.
"Compared to performing a complex task, resting or without a break," the study authors write, "completing a simple task during the incubation period resulted in a significant increase in performance compared to prior problems."
However, later studies have yielded conflicting results. Some research seems to have found a connection between thinking and creativity, including among physicists and writers. However, other studies have failed to replicate the original finding that received so much attention. Irving has a theory as to why.
"They didn't really measure mind," he said. "They measured how distracted the participants were."
Another problem with the study and other similar studies, Irving says, is that participants are asked to complete many lab-friendly tasks. They can weigh on the mind but translate poorly to the real world.
"A typical task you use in mind walking research is called the attention-sustained response test," he said. "And this test involves, for example, observing the flow of numbers from 1 to 9 and not clicking when you see a '3.' This is a typical incoherent study. They don't like anything in people's daily lives."
This is important because the shower effect depends on the context you are in.
"Mind wandering can help in some situations, like going for a walk, but not in others, like a boring brain teaser," Irving said of his theory.
Brainstorm for a new design
To test this theory, Irving and Mills, along with their co-authors, asked study participants at the University of New Hampshire to come up with options for using a brick or a paper clip. The researchers then divided the participants into two groups to watch different three-minute videos, which served as an incubation model for the participants' new creative ideas.
The group watched a "sad" video of two men folding laundry.
Another group watched a "moderately entertaining" video. They watched a cheeky scene from the 1989 classic Harry and Sally, in which Meg Ryan's character demonstrates how to convincingly fake an orgasm while sitting in a crowded restaurant.
"What we really wanted to know wasn't what kind of video helps you be more creative," Irving said. "The question was, how does mind wandering relate to creativity in boring and exciting tasks?"
He added, "The reason we used video is because Caitlyn is very involved with this movement in psychology to use naturalistic tasks, which is what humans can do in real life. .
After watching the video, participants were asked to quickly return to the process of compiling a list of alternative uses for a hypothetical rock or paper clip that they had previously been given while working through the ideas that emerged from watching the video.
Participants also reported how much their mind wandered during the video, meaning they moved freely from topic to topic.
Researchers have found that mind wandering helps, but only sometimes. Mind wandering, in particular, led to more ideas, but only when participants saw an “engaging” video rather than a “boring” one.
In other words, there was a positive correlation between the amount of mind wandering and creative ideas during an immersive video. Mind wandering made the participants more creative.
The results form the basis of a model that can now be applied to other types of real-world problems to show how it can generate more creative inspiration.
While the researchers may never study the shower itself, they have said they plan to continue expanding the video display for obvious reasons. For example, one of their future projects will use virtual reality to explore thoughts in a realistic environment, such as walking down a city street.
The research data was collected by Mills graduate student Katherine McGrath for her Dissertation with Honors. Lauren Flynn and Aaron Glasser are the other study authors from Mills and Irving Laboratories, respectively.
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