Daydream your way to creativity

 

Sigmund Freud called it "infantile", others were apprehensive that it might lead to psychosis. What's that you might ask? Zoning out, daydreaming, fantasizing, being lost in thought. That process of totally thinking of something random and not focusing on that 20 page paper due at midnight while your computer cursor is at the end of page 4.

Jonathan Schooler, psychologist at the University of California in Santa Barbara, was one of the first to turn his attention to mind wandering. His experiments helped to demonstrate how often our minds drift away: In one study he gave his volunteers War and Peace from Tolstoi to read in his lab. Afterwards he asked them about how often they were zoning out, what they were thinking about and at last he tested their comprehension of the text. He found that people's minds wandered from the words for more than 20 per cent of the time, often without them realizing.

Another study asked people--via a smartphone app--their state of mind during random intervals throughout the day. As a result, the participants reported that their attention was zoning off the task at hand 47 per cent of the time.

For a long time, this lack of concentration would have been considered a severe failing. Instead, the general assumption was that the ability to filter out distractions and focus on a certain task, the so called executive control, lies behind smart thinking. Yet there were hints that concentration was not all it was about. People who can focus well tend to be very good at analytical problems but they often have a hard time when it comes to tasks that require flashes of inspiration.

One of many established measures of flexible thinking is a test known as the unusual uses task. The participants are asked to come up with as many unusual uses for a certain object, such as a brick or a bucket. Next, some of them were given a mindless task to complete, e.g. watching for letters on a screen. Others were given a much more difficult task that needed their full attention. It is not surprising that people drifted off significantly more in the mindless task. Finally, all participants were asked to take another look at the unusual uses task. Those whose minds had been wandering came up with around 40 per cent more answers than on their first try while those who had had to focus on their task did not improve. 

These findings hinted at possible reasons for zoning out: it might lead us to think creatively and outside the limits of our executive control. The ability to link disparate concepts is one important skill for creativity and we might come across while wandering inside our heads. Schooler's experiment was the first direct test to show that the insights really do come from a daydream.

It is also important to mention that the mind wanderers reported that they had not explicitly been thinking about the brick during their mindless task. Schooler concludes that the mindless task might have allowed an unconscious process.

The message is that as we drift off into memories, thoughts of food or plans for our holiday, our brain is busily working on potential solutions for whatever problem we are trying to solve.

To be honest, this article was very revealing to me and helped me understand my own lack of concentration at certain times, such as blog writing.

Franziska