Free-floating periods of thought

After noticing a similar habit among highly creative people (Einstein, Mozart, da Vinci, etc), the neuroscientist Dr. Nancy Andreasen designed a brain-imaging study to explore the neural basis of this habit.

Essentially, these creative people all carved out time each day for...

“Free-floating periods of thought,” Dr. Andreasen writes in her book, “The Creating Brain.”

The specifics of the habit differ.

Leonardo da Vinci, for example, would often sit in front of a painting “and simply think, sometimes for as long as a half day.”

Whereas Einstein loved to aimlessly drift at sea on a little wooden boat he called the “Tinef” (Yiddish for “piece of junk”). He had to be rescued by the Coast Guard so frequently that a friend eventually bought him an outboard motor for emergency use, but Einstein refused it.

“To the average person, being becalmed for hours might be a terrible trial,” the friend said. “To Einstein, this could simply provide more time to think.”

So, Dr. Andreasen conducted the first study of brain activity during “free-floating periods of thought,” when the body is in a “resting state” and the mind is free to wander.

“We found activations in multiple regions of the association cortex,” she writes. “We were not [seeing] a passive silent brain during the ‘resting state,’ but rather a brain that was actively connecting thoughts and experiences.”

Essentially, Dr. Andreasen found that the brain defaults to creativity. When the body is still and the mind is allowed to float freely, the brain engages in what she termed REST (“random episodic silent thinking”).

And during REST, the brain “uses its most human and complex parts...areas known to gather information and link it all together.”

Separate from those that led to Dr. Andreasen's study, I’ve collected many examples of creative people describing their own REST-ful habits:

The legendary designer Paula Scher: “I figured out every identity program I’ve ever done in a taxicab…you sit in the back...look out the window and you can sort of let your mind wander.”

One of the great songwriters of all time, Paul Simon: “I used to go off in the bathroom...turn on the faucet so that water would run—I like that sound, it’s very soothing to me—and I’d play, in the dark, letting my imagination wander.” (During one of these sessions, these words came to him: “Hello darkness, my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again”—which became the opening verse of “The Sound of Silence”).

The filmmaker Quentin Tarantino: “I have a pool...And I hop in my pool and just kind of float around…and then a lot of shit will come to me. Literally, a lot of ideas will come to me. Then I get out and make little notes on that...That will be my work for tomorrow.”

- - -

So whether it’s sitting in front of painting, drifting in a boat, riding in a taxi, playing the guitar in a dark bathroom, or floating in a pool, if you want to be more creative, carve out time each day for “free-floating periods of thought.”