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Irving said another issue with the study, and others like it, is the variety of lab-friendly tasks participants are asked to perform.

“They were measuring how distracted the participants were.” “They weren’t really measuring mind-wandering,” he said. Yet other studies failed to replicate the original finding that received so much press. Some studies seemed to find a link between mind-wandering and creativity, including among physicists and writers. “Compared with engaging in a demanding task, rest, or no break,” the study’s authors wrote, “engaging in an undemanding task during an incubation period led to substantial improvements in performance on previously encountered problems.”īut follow-up studies yielded inconsistent results. The study showed the lower the demand, the higher participants scored on the creativity test. Those researchers asked participants to come up with creative alternate uses for everyday items – a brick, for example – following an “incubation period” that involved tasks of various levels of mental demand. “There was this research in 2012, ‘Inspired By Distraction’ by Benjamin Baird and colleagues, that really blew up, both in terms of in science and in media and in the popular imagination, which was mind-wandering seems to benefit creativity and creative incubation,” Irving said. When we perform an “undemanding” task, our brains tend to wander and when our brains tends to wander, creativity tends to flow. Research published a decade ago in the journal Psychological Science seemed to confirm what many people suspected. So what’s the proof? Don’t let your mind wander. The study affirms this anecdotal evidence, elevating Irving’s experimental model for the effect. All these activities are moderately engaging.”

Instead, you do something to occupy yourself, like going for a walk, gardening, or taking a shower. “What do you do? Probably not something mind-numbingly boring like watching paint dry. “Say you’re stuck on a problem,” Irving said.

Written with University of Minnesota psychology professor Caitlin Mills and others, the “ shower effect” paper was published Friday in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.