Fragments: the neuroscience behind daydreaming your way into ideas
A piece of my art from a collection I call “Magic Moon Garden,” which is a sort of deconstructed garden with flowers alongside instead of on top of each other. Find more at www.reveandbloom.com
How we learn to think
“What you really need to succeed in academia is a good chair.”
“What, do you mean to sit in while you write?”
“No, to sit and stare out the window—you can’t write if you don’t sit there doing nothing for a lot of the day.”
—a paraphrased, 20-years-later recollection of a conversation with my undergrad thesis advisor
Professor E was always full of off-the-wall advice, some of it brilliant, some of it well-meaning, and some of it somewhat disastrous, and, to be honest, this conversation as I’m remembering it had all of the above. I was a painfully earnest 20 year old, cloaked perpetually in black (to mourn George W. Bush’s reelection, natch), and very much tended to think my professors had all the answers.
But I remember the advice above seeming quite weird, perhaps impossible, on so many levels
I had a lot of classes.
All of them were upper-level/graduate level major classes with hefty booklists.
I seemed to need much more prep than everyone else I knew to actually write a paper (this is true, and also when I finally get to writing I write very quickly, so it balances out in time if not in panic-levels).
Frankly, my general levels of angsting about whether I was capable of doing good work didn’t leave much time for staring out windows.
In retrospect, though, he was absolutely right. The big turning point in my thesis-writing in the fall of 2005 was me reading a book totally unrelated to my topic. It wasn’t exactly me staring out a window, but the change in focus, the relaxation I felt reading a book for fun, created a totally different frame of mind. All it took was a single line from an unrelated book to totally change how I structured and argued my thesis (some of which was later published, it turned out so well).
2. The power of daydreaming
Brenda: Elise, can I ask you a question? Look at you. Aren't you frustrated? You climb and climb and you don’t get anywhere
Elise: Oh, I love it! Burns off the booze. And, you want to know something? I tell you, I get my best ideas when I’m working out.
Brenda: You? You get ideas?
Elise: Well, it clears out my head, you know, I think straight. Everything just makes sense.
Annie: Well, you better start thinking because we need Morty’s books to prove fraud. Where do you think they are?
Brenda: I know where they are. Morty just bought Shelly a penthouse. That’s where everything is, but we have to figure out how to get in.
Elise: Duarto
Brenda and Annie: Duarto?
Elise: Yeah. Shelly has a new apartment. It needs to be decorated.
Brenda: She’s right. She does get ideas!
The First Wives Club, 1996, planning the caper to get Morty’s books to prove fraud
That Elise, Goldie Hawn’s character in The First Wives Club, would get her best ideas while running on the treadmill is not unusual. But it’s also not that surprising that Brenda (Bette Midler) or Annie (Diane Keaton, RIP) were kind of shocked by it. We know that people say they get their best ideas in the shower or doing the dishes or running, but something inside us doesn’t really believe it. Getting good ideas, our culture tells us, is a rarefied thing that requires one to be brilliant and serious and focused at all times.
Truly, we’re not supposed to get rewarded for lolling about mentally. Daydreaming is something you get punished for in school, not something to celebrate because it unlocks ideas.
And yet, there is now growing scientific evidence that daydreaming, letting your mind wander, not focusing, lets loose our creative brains. When your brain isn’t actively working on something, and you’re doing chores, driving, or even just staring out a window from your lovely corner chair, it activates a pathway through the brain called the Default Mode Network (DMN).
Dr. Ben Shofty, an assistant professor of neurosurgery at University of Utah’s school of medicine, notes that
“Unlike most of the functions that we have in the brain, [the DMN is] not goal-directed,” Shofty says. “It’s a network that basically operates all the time and maintains our spontaneous stream of consciousness.”
The DMN is spread out across many dispersed brain regions, making it more difficult to track its activity in real time. The researchers had to use an advanced method of brain activity imaging to understand what the network was doing moment-to-moment during creative thought.”
In an interview, Dr. John Kounios, a cognitive neuroscience professor at Drexel,
explains that our brains typically catalog things by their context: Windows are parts of buildings, and the stars belong in the night sky. Ideas will always mingle to some degree, but when we’re focused on a specific task our thinking tends to be linear.
Kounios likes to use the example of a stack of bricks in your backyard. You walk by them every day with hardly a second thought, and if asked you’d describe them as a building material (maybe for that pizza oven you keep meaning to put together). But one day in the shower, you start thinking about your neighbor’s walnut tree. Those nuts sure look tasty, and they’ve been falling in your yard. You suddenly realize that you can smash those nuts open using the bricks in your backyard.
The Default Mode Network gets its name from not being the go-to processing space in the brain, from not housing the usual way that our thoughts organize themselves. The DMN is home to the process that exists when we aren’t trying:
It is who you are when untouched by stimuli. This is the place where memories, a collection of events and knowledge about yourself, are housed. It’s known to be the home of mind wandering, dreams, and day-dreaming. It helps you optimize what you need to remember, and what you need to forget. It aids in envisioning your future. It’s a catalyst for wondering, and it’s also the place where you think about things that don’t have an explicit goal. When you’re making art, how you choose to express yourself comes in part from this network. The DMN is a filter for what you think is beautiful or not beautiful, memorable or not, meaningful or not, and it’s what helps to make the arts and aesthetics a very personal experience for each of us.
Ivy Ross and Susan Magsamen, Your Brain on Art, 36
3. What’s my point again? On Einstein, creativity, and judgmental critics
At this point in writing this post, I was stuck. I started making a list of directions I could go in.
I could talk about creative problem-solving.
I could talk about the important of rest.
I could talk about filling one’s creative well without making a reasoned-out plan, and the ways that that could inspire you.
None of it felt quite right.
So I picked up my phone, somewhat frustrated, and started my daily deleting of endless junk emails. In between sales on things I don’t currently need and a parade of newsletters, my brain snagged on an email title that contained the words “intuitive drawing.” “Oh, interesting,” I thought, and clicked in to read the email. But now my wheels were turning, and I wanted to know what exactly intuitive drawing meant, so I turned to the no-longer-trusty-but-still-mostly-unavoidable Google. I looked up intuitive drawing, which is kind of a nebulous term encompassing a lot of methods. Eventually, I ended up at Wikipedia, which still wasn’t terribly satisfying, but did cite this article by Robert and Michele Root-Bernstein in Psychology Today, entitled “Einstein On Creative Thinking: Music and the Intuitive Art of Scientific Imagination”, which says
“For Einstein, insight did not come from logic or mathematics. It came, as it does for artists, from intuition and inspiration. As he told one friend, "When I examine myself and my methods of thought, I come close to the conclusion that the gift of imagination has meant more to me than any talent for absorbing absolute knowledge." Elaborating, he added, "All great achievements of science must start from intuitive knowledge. I believe in intuition and inspiration.... At times I feel certain I am right while not knowing the reason." Thus, his famous statement that, for creative work in science, "Imagination is more important than knowledge" (Calaprice, 2000, 22, 287, 10).”
This article is definitely worth a read in its entirety, but I was struck by the following paragraph, which very much sounds as if Einstein understood the creative role of play that leads to insight in work, before anyone had ever imagined what the acronym DMN could possibly mean:
In other interviews, he attributed his scientific insight and intuition mainly to music. "If I were not a physicist," he once said, "I would probably be a musician. I often think in music. I live my daydreams in music. I see my life in terms of music.... I get most joy in life out of music" (Calaprice, 2000, 155). His son, Hans, amplified what Einstein meant by recounting that "[w]henever he felt that he had come to the end of the road or into a difficult situation in his work, he would take refuge in music, and that would usually resolve all his difficulties" (quoted in Clark, 1971, 106). After playing piano, his sister Maja said, he would get up saying, "There, now I've got it" (quoted in Sayen, 1985, 26). Something in the music would guide his thoughts in new and creative directions.
One of the reasons I balked at my professor’s suggestion in the opening of this post was the ways it seemed to echo the critiques of universities constantly spewed out by Fox News et al. Even family members who loved me couldn’t resist the lure of “What are you studying? Underwater basket weaving? (long laugh at their joke) Academics just sit around all day, doing nothing, wasting time and the taxpayer’s money.” It hurt, because I was working my ass off, and my professors were always busy, and it wasn’t clear to me why defense contractors, off destroying the world, were worth more than what I wanted to be, a teacher and scholar.
The idea of me proving them right by nestling into a cozy chair and staring off into space felt unthinkable. It felt like becoming a caricature.
But what my professor was giving me was advice based in the experience of what it meant to write a book, what it meant to think in a new way. Rushing about and sitting at a computer waiting for an idea to arrive are exercises in frustration, and when you’ve been thinking long enough, you can spot the pitfalls.
I don’t doubt for a minute that Einstein was aware that his piano-playing had the effect his sister Maja noted, even if he was a bit surprised and tickled every time it unlocked something new for him. What all of us today need more of, though, is more of his delight in the process, in thinking a bit differently. Our cultural myths tell us that problems are best solved by tech bros with algorithms at 4:45 am, when the rest of us lazybones are still asleep. I think that’s nonsense.
We all have a DMN running through our brains—why not take it out to play?