Creative daydreaming

I’ve long advocated the usefulness of “creative daydreaming.” In fact I wrote a piece on Wildmind several years ago that touched on the subject, which I suspects is a bit taboo with some meditation teachers who are stuck with the idea that we should let go of all thinking.

Anyway, there was an interesting article recently in the New York Times, called Discovering the Virtues of a Wandering Mind, confirming the notion that daydreaming can be a creative act. Fortunately research is being done on the topic, and there are some interesting results:

During waking hours, people’s minds seem to wander about 30 percent of the time, according to estimates by psychologists who have interrupted people throughout the day to ask what they’re thinking. If you’re driving down a straight, empty highway, your mind might be wandering three-quarters of the time…

From one third to three quarters of our time being spent in mental wandering sounds about right. At first, meditation can seem more like “driving down a straight, empty highway,” so I wouldn’t be surprised if beginner’s mind’s wander the vast majority of the time when they first get started.

There’s one questionable assumption:

“People assume mind wandering is a bad thing, but if we couldn’t do it during a boring task, life would be horrible,” Dr. Smallwood says. “Imagine if you couldn’t escape mentally from a traffic jam.”

You’d be stuck contemplating the mass of idling cars, a mental exercise that is much less pleasant than dreaming about a beach and much less useful than mulling what to do once you get off the road.

Actually, there’s not just a choice between mind wandering and “contemplating the mass of idling cars,” but also the option to mindfully observe our present-moment experience, which can be very satisfying in itself. Or we can consciously do something like lovngkindness, which is neither mind-wandering nor simply observing what’s present. But I agree that mind-wandering can help us pass the time when things are dull.

The most interesting thing for me though is where we learn that “studies have found that people prone to mind wandering also score higher on tests of creativity.” We can mindfully allow the mind to wander, gently steering it away from useless thinking (e.g. thinking that leads to stress or depression), and catch the more creative thoughts, filing them for future exploration:

“For creativity you need your mind to wander [...] but you also need to be able to notice that you’re mind wandering and catch the idea when you have it. If Archimedes had come up with a solution in the bathtub but didn’t notice he’d had the idea, what good would it have done him?”

This dynamic is explored in more detail in an article I blogged about a few days back.

When you try to solve a problem, you begin by concentrating on obvious facts and familiar solutions, to see if the answer lies there. This is a mostly left-brain stage of attack. If the answer doesn’t come, the right and left hemispheres of the brain activate together. Neural networks on the right side scan remote memories that could be vaguely relevant. A wide range of distant information that is normally tuned out becomes available to the left hemisphere, which searches for unseen patterns, alternative meanings, and high-level abstractions.

Having glimpsed such a connection, the left brain must quickly lock in on it before it escapes. The attention system must radically reverse gears, going from defocused attention to extremely focused attention. In a flash, the brain pulls together these disparate shreds of thought and binds them into a new single idea that enters consciousness. This is the “aha!” moment of insight, often followed by a spark of pleasure as the brain recognizes the novelty of what it’s come up with.

Now the brain must evaluate the idea it just generated. Is it worth pursuing? Creativity requires constant shifting, blender pulses of both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, to combine new information with old and forgotten ideas. Highly creative people are very good at marshaling their brains into bilateral mode, and the more creative they are, the more they dual-activate.

At the moment I’m teaching teenagers how to use their brains more effectively. One thing I need to do is to find out how they can enhance their creativity. That’s something I’ll have to daydream about…