There's a lot of modern pressure to keep our minds focused on an array of matters, but this can be to the detriment of creative thinking - a critical aspect of our being in the world, says neuroscientist Moshe Bar.
Whether it's for the workplace or home life we're expected to be focused and single minded, but that's not how our brains are evolved to work, he tells Nine to Noon.
A former director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at Harvard Medical School, Bar is also the author of Mindwandering - How it can improve your mood and boost your creativity. He has spent a lifetime exploring the vitality that can come from the vague and his book encourages people to 'mind wander' as a means of using their higher faculties of creative endeavour.
Photo: Moshe Bar
His interest in the subject coincided with a number of mini-revolutions that took place in cognitive neuroscience. These included the discovery of a big network of brain regions that are vigorously active and are not supposed to be busy with anything when we aren't, like when we’re stuck in traffic, he says.
Our minds don't simply become less active on these occasions, and remain incredibly busy. We spend half of our waking hours mind wandering, he says.
He began to look at the function of this ‘default’ network and what the nature of ‘mind wondering’ was.
The basic method of measuring how much our minds wander during the day was asking the question what are we supposed to be doing and what are we actually doing, he says.
“It’s called thought sampling. It’s not the most rigorous way, but the best one current. This gauges the frequency and content of our mind wandering."
Another technique employed in his research involves brain imaging, which shows which parts of the brain are active during during experiences.
“We can look at people’s brains when they are doing several different things in what we call functional MRIs. The functional aspect of MRIs is being able to look at activity as they think, or perform tasks like watching happy faces instead of sad faces or whatever. We notice that in between these experimental conditions when we just tend to rest, their mind is not resting at all. If anything, it is more active than during our experiment itself. There is a huge network that is active.”
Mind wandering is distinct from disappearing from active thinking as a means of escapism, or disassociating when we feel unsafe.
Rather, it is a vehicle for creative thinking, for planning and creating mental simulations, which play a critical role in everyday life, for interacting and behaving, he says.
“When we to wander to incubate good ideas, to simulate possible scenarios for the future."
High mental load in modern living leads to less creativity, in general, his research has found.
“The more we load on the brain processes the less we have left for other things. These things can be how much we appreciate aesthetics and if we have less for appreciation of life, we appreciate it to a lesser extent," Bar says.
“We specifically found that in the context of creativity people are much less creative if we load their mind with things.”
As a means of reducing mental load practicing mindfulness is good, as are activities like running and walking in nature. These types of activities can bring about what he calls 'a spirit of incubation', allowing us moments of inspiration and spontaneous flashes of awareness.
“In a way your subconscious takes of a problem of your conscious mind and continues to grind on it in the background until there’s a good creative solution and you feel this this ‘ah ha' moment, of wow, I got this great answer, but we don’t really know where it’s coming from," he says.
“So, it is coming from our subconscious and also from our default network and mind wandering, but for this to happen we need to give it a break.”
But, according to Bar, making your mind blank or staring at a white wall, won’t cut it. Our minds need some type of active stimulation.
“It’s just like when you try to remember something and you’re blocked and you know that doing something else will help it come to you because your self-conscious continues to brew and incubate on this problem and it lets you know when it reaches a solution," he says.
"Similarly diverting your eyes and attention from something that occupies you for extended periods of time, gives a chance to incubate… and find solutions for you.”
Photo: Bloomsbury
Many people narrowly focused on immediate stressers and things they need to get through at work and at home may not recognise that a busy mind can make for sloppy thinking.
“I think most people don’t realise they can do something about it,” he says.
Part of the reason Bar wrote the book was to show people they can do something about it. It also points to when the mind's natural ability to wander and be creative can also be corrupted and subverted.
He says mind wondering, by and large, is a productive and creative process.There are situations were mind wandering however, isn’t productive and can be detrimental for an individual. Those with depression can find themselves with compulsive negative thoughts and can find themselves repeatedly ruminating on the wrong things.
“They can ruminate on something that is useless and torments them, but they get nowhere with this rumination because in a way they are very cyclical, going around in a circle," he says.
"So, in that case your mind wandering is in a way being hijacked by these circular thoughts that if anything just make you more and more depressed or anxious.
“The idea of evolution was to instill this ability in us to mind wander, so we can be creative and productive, and the byproduct is that we sometimes mind wander about things that are not desired.”
Creative thinking is defined by scientists as coming up with something useful and novel and it informs the way we develop as human beings and as a society.
“The nature of this thinking is usually highly associative and highly divergent, pretty much the opposite of rumination. We think in an expansive way and we think in an original manner, and we think broad and fast, he says. "It lets us explore our own memories and we surprise ourselves with the things we come up with.”
The impact of technology is significant in this respect however and Bar says devices like mobile phones are interrupting our ability to mind wander.
“On the one hand instead of spending the next minute wandering I just check out Instagram or Twitter and I’ve wasted precious time from wandering. And also, it can disrupt our mind wandering… with a beep on your phone.”
Mind wandering is spontaneous, it is beyond our control and conscious reach, but we can maximise the conditions most conducive to the process.
Apart from avoiding technological distractions and the impulsiveness to constantly indulge in these, there are other things we can do to engage our creative mind, namely being in a good mood.
Bar says it makes our mind wandering more divergent and creative, whereas being stressed leads to ruminating. If this is the case, it's best to focus on an activity to lift you out of that mood and mental state, instead of expecting creative thoughts to enter your head.
