Why you get all your best ideas in the SHOWER: Focusing on a moderately engaging task boosts your creativity more than just letting your mind wander aimlessly, a study has found
- Participants were shown a “boring” video or clip from Harry and Sally
- They were then asked to name alternative uses for paperclips and bricks
- Those who saw Harry and Sally came up with more ideas
- The results suggest that focusing on moderately engaging tasks encourages your creativity more than just letting your mind wander aimlessly
The shower is not only the place where we want to clean ourselves, but for many people it is also the place where we come up with our best ideas.
But what exactly makes the shower so ideal for creative breakthroughs?
Focusing on a moderately engaging task like showering boosts creativity more than just letting your mind wander, according to a new study.
dr Zac Irving, a psychologist at the University of Virginia and co-author of the study, said: “Let’s say you’re stuck in a problem. How are you?
“Probably nothing as boring as watching paint dry.
“Instead, you occupy yourself with something like going for a walk, gardening or taking a shower. All these activities are moderately engaging.”
The shower isn’t just where we go when we want to get clean — for many people, it’s also where we get our best ideas (stock image)
Forgetting is a form of learning, the study claims
Instead of our memories fading over time, forgetting is actually an active form of learning that helps our brain access more important information.
That’s the conclusion of experts from Trinity College Dublin and the University of Toronto, who said “lost” memories aren’t actually gone, they’re just being made inaccessible.
Memories, they explained, are permanently stored in clusters of neurons, with our brain deciding which ones to access and which irrelevant ones to lock away.
These decisions, they said, are based on feedback from the environment, theoretically allowing us flexibility in the face of change and better decision-making as a result.
If the results are correct, they could lead to new ways to understand and treat the memory loss associated with diseases – such as that seen in patients with Alzheimer’s.
Researchers were inspired to investigate the topic by a 2012 study that found that our brains tend to wander and creativity flow when we’re performing a low-demand task.
In their new study, the team asked participants to think of alternative uses for a brick or a paper clip.
Participants were divided into two groups, each watching a different three-minute video.
The first video was “boring” and showed two men folding laundry.
In contrast, the second video was “moderately appealing” and contained “that” cheeky scene from the 1989 film “When Harry Met Sally” in which Meg Ryan’s character demonstrates how to fake an orgasm.
“What we really wanted to know wasn’t which video will help you be more creative,” said Dr. irving
“The question was how does mind wandering relate to creativity in boring and engaging tasks?”
After watching the video, participants were asked to quickly list their alternate uses for the brick or paperclip.
They were also asked to report how much their mind wandered during the videos.
The results showed that the participants who watched the clip of Harry and Sally had more ideas than those who watched the boring video.
In their study, published in Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts, the team concluded: “We find that mind wandering leads to more creative ideas, but only in moderately engaging activities.
“Boring activities result in either more ideas or more semantically distant ideas overall, but these effects were unrelated to mind wandering.
“Thus, boring activities can generate ideas by providing time for focused problem-solving, while engaging activities can do so by encouraging productive mind-wandering.”
The news comes shortly after researchers found it’s actually possible for your mind to go completely blank.
The second video was “moderately engaging” and featured “that” cheeky scene from the 1989 film “When Harry Met Sally” in which Meg Ryan’s character demonstrates how to fake an orgasm
The researchers examined 36 people who were placed in an MRI machine and asked them to describe their thoughts.
People found that their minds were blank about five to seven percent of the time.
The scan results showed her brain went into an almost sleep-like state, with constant activity in all regions, rather than the variable activity in different brain areas associated with thinking.
The researchers now suspect that there is a good evolutionary reason to switch off when concentration would be better – to prevent our brain from becoming too tired.