The science of having ideas in the shower

Anecdotally, Americans tend to shower more often than Europeans. Perhaps this explains why more tech innovation tends to happen in America these days?

I suspect a major cause of the shower gap is energy price gap, leading one to conclude that cheap energy increases innovation!

It fails to explain why Japanese people who shower literally everyday don't lead innovations...

Is there more research on how boredom relates to creativity in general? I've been wondering recently about how my default in most cases is to look at my phone (reddit, social media, texting).

That must detract from my net new ideas. I know many a child driven to weird ideas, fun games, and general creativity from lack of anything else to do.

It's probably a spectrum (reading reddit/HN/etc. is likely to introduce new ideas), but I'd venture to guess that most people could stand to trade a lot of their daily phone time for some intentional boredom.

“If you’ve ever emerged from the shower or returned from walking your dog with a clever idea or a solution to a problem you’d been struggling with, it may not be a fluke.”

Did we really need someone to tell us this? Do people just assume everything is a fluke until some higher authority tells you otherwise?

You need time to think but you also need something to think about.

A favorite quote on the topic whose source I never remember: The news doesn’t tell you what to think, it tells you what to think about.

Hamming talks about this effect as The Open Door Policy in his wonderful you and your research talk – https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html

The key seems to be to tend to your inputs, make sure they’re decent quality and on topics you care about, then create time away from inputs to ruminate and ponder. Reading outrage-of-the-day content won’t give you better software engineering insights in the shower. But reading hyped-tech-trend-of-the-month content might.

Conversely, if your mind is constantly engaged in other people’s thoughts, it won’t have time to create its own. For me personally that means avoiding external stimuli for the first 2 to 3 hours of the day (doesn’t always work).