Facts You Didn’t Know About Spending More Time in the Shower – Have you ever stopped for once to wonder at this amazing fact? Why you’re always creative in the shower, coming up with clever ideas and solutions to many problems.
Let’s find out why…..
Rather than constantly grinding away at a problem or desperately seeking a flash of inspiration, research from the last 15 years suggests that people may be more likely to have creative breakthroughs or epiphanies when they’re doing a habitual task that doesn’t require much thought—an activity in which you’re basically on autopilot.
This lets your mind wander or engage in spontaneous cognition or “stream of consciousness” thinking, which experts believe helps retrieve unusual memories and generate new ideas.
“People always get surprised when they realize they get interesting, novel ideas at unexpected times because our cultural narrative tells us we should do it through hard work,” says Kalina Christoff, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “It’s a pretty universal human experience.”
Now we’re beginning to understand why these clever thoughts occur during more passive activities and what’s happening in the brain, says Christoff.
The key, according to the latest research, is a pattern of brain activity—within what’s called the default mode network that occurs while an individual is resting or performing habitual tasks that don’t require much attention.
Researchers have shown that the default mode network (DMN)—which connects more than a dozen regions of the brain—becomes more active during mind-wandering or passive tasks than when you’re doing something that demands focus.
Simply put, the DMN is “the state the brain returns to when you’re not actively engaged,” explains Roger Beaty, a cognitive neuroscientist and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab at Penn State University. By contrast, when you’re mired in a demanding task, the brain’s executive control systems keep your thinking focused, analytical, and logical.
A cautionary note: While the default mode network plays a key role in the creative process, “it’s not the only important network,” Beaty says. “Other networks come into play as far as modifying, rejecting, or implementing ideas.” So it’s unwise to place blind faith in ideas that are generated in the shower or during any other bout of mind wandering.
What is the Default Mode Network?
Marcus Raichle, a neurologist at the Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, and his colleagues serendipitously discovered the default mode network in 2001 when they were using positron emission tomography (PET) to see how the brains of volunteers were functioning as they performed novel, attention-demanding tasks.
The team then compared those images to ones made while the brain was resting and noticed that specific brain regions were more active during passive tasks than engaging ones.
However, because the function of each brain region isn’t well characterized and because a specific brain area can do different things under different circumstances, neuroscientists prefer to talk about “networks of brain areas,” such as the default mode network, which function together during certain activities, according to John Kounios.
A cognitive neuroscientist and director of the Creativity Research Lab at Drexel University in Philadelphia.
Raichle named this network the “default” mode network because of its heightened activity during idle periods, says Randy L. Buckner, a neuroscientist at Harvard University. But it’s something of a misnomer because the default mode network is also active in other mental tasks, such as remembering past events or engaging in self-reflective thought.
The network is also “involved in the early stages of idea generation, drawing from past experiences and knowledge about the world,” explains Beaty.
“When you’re not actively working on a problem, the brain keeps spinning and you can get restructuring of elements of the problem, pieces get reshuffled, and something clicks.” The DMN, he adds, “helps you combine information in different ways and simulate possibilities.”
Researchers have discovered that when it comes to measures of creativity, there’s a positive correlation between creative performance and gray matter volume of the default mode network. In other words, as far as creativity goes, size matters when it comes to the DMN.
To investigate changes in brain activation and connectivity between different regions of the DMN, researchers asked volunteers to alternate between activities involving high cognitive effort (naming colors), low cognitive effort (reading words), and no cognitive effort (resting).
They found that the default mode network was most active when the participants were at rest and more active during the low effort task than the high-effort one, according to the study in the April 2022 issue of Scientific Reports.
This suggests that DMN activity can toggle up and down, as if on a dimmer, perhaps stopping at intermediate points along the way, depending on the level of cognitive challenge that’s required.
The link to creative thinking was demonstrated in a study published in January that involved patients who were awake during brain surgery so surgeons could map the exposed cortical surface for language functions.
As direct electrical stimulation was applied to their default mode network or another area of their brain, the patients were asked to perform an “alternate-uses task” that involved inventing unusual uses for an everyday object—in this case, a paper clip—which is a way of evaluating divergent thinking abilities.
Conclusion
The researchers found that the patient’s ability to successfully perform the alternate-uses task depended on the strength of connections between nodes of the default mode network.
