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The science of having ideas in the shower

nationalgeographic.co.uk

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Re: The science of having ideas in the shower

#151

Post by shen »

myself248 wrote: post #117
asdff wrote: post #100

It makes sense why people get all their ideas in the shower. That's about the only time the modern human has where you aren't distracting yourself with some other external stimuli. I've even seen people use a public urinal with a phone in one hand.

Yup. I've been saying for years, the first things that humans did when we started inventing things, is we got rid of all the "boring tasks" that were letting our brains organize themselves. Chopping firewood? Got machines for that now. Knitting? Mechanized. Walking to the next town over? Now it's a high-concentration game of GTA with a radio for extra distraction. All of these things also had a mechanical element to…

Would you recommend chopping wood or knitting over modern meditation?

Re: The science of having ideas in the shower

#153

Post by astrange »

tnzk wrote: post #4
math_dandy wrote: post #2

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...

Japanese people are very innovative, but aren’t motivated enough to create export-oriented products so you don’t get the end results. It mostly seems to come out in “unproductive” areas like unreasonably good amateur twitter artists.

Re: The science of having ideas in the shower

#154

Post by astrange »

FlyingSnake wrote: post #23
math_dandy wrote: post #2

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!

> I suspect a major cause of the shower gap is energy price gap What a funny assertion. Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Gulf states etc have bottomless supply of cheap energy, where are their innovations?

Just because you produce energy doesn’t mean you can afford buying your own products. One of your customer countries can have lower energy costs simply because their weather is more mild.

Re: The science of having ideas in the shower

#155

Post by astrange »

somishere wrote: post #103

I wasn't too surprised to find r/showerthoughts a few years ago, still going strong: https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/

This is a remarkable example of annoying reddit moderation; it has something like a 50-step workflow you’re supposed to go through before posting so you can feel bad about how your thought isn’t exactly the right kind of shower thought to deserve posting.

Re: The science of having ideas in the shower

#156

Post by sph »

idontwantthis wrote: post #127
sph wrote: post #109

This is my ADHD super power. When I have a problem I take a shower, a walk, play a video game, just to let it stew in the background, sometimes for days. Get intoxicated. You'll eventually get that eureka! effect. It has never failed me. It's often suggested that one needs to work hard to crack a hairy problem. Nonsense. You've got a subconscious system always processing some idea, integrating external unrelated stim…

This is why I’ll never work in an office again. Why would I want to get stuck on a problem and be actively working against solving it because I’m stuck at work with nothing else to do?

Same here. My focused problem solving is powered by my legs: if stuck, I need to pace around with a notepad. Can't do that in an office without weird looks.

When I was a smoker, I took a smoke+coffee break with a notepad to problem solve, that is more accepted in corporate life but I've dropped the habit.

Re: The science of having ideas in the shower

#157

Post by sph »

ehnto wrote: post #144
sph wrote: post #109

This is my ADHD super power. When I have a problem I take a shower, a walk, play a video game, just to let it stew in the background, sometimes for days. Get intoxicated. You'll eventually get that eureka! effect. It has never failed me. It's often suggested that one needs to work hard to crack a hairy problem. Nonsense. You've got a subconscious system always processing some idea, integrating external unrelated stim…

Same, the legwork of "working hard" on a problem for me these days is just making sure I have all the information I need to stew over. I write up a factfinding doc of points in the codebase that I think are relevant, any context that's relevant, and symptoms of the bug. I never used to write it down but I work across a bunch of projects now so I can sometimes have the bug de-prioritised in my brain.

Writing something down, even if not for long term storage, is great. It feels like freeing up RAM that can be used for something else.

But definitely there needs to be preparatory work before you need to let everything stew. Get all the facts, internalise them, and move on.

Re: The science of having ideas in the shower

#158

Post by nullsense »

astrange wrote: post #153
tnzk wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Japanese people are very innovative, but aren’t motivated enough to create export-oriented products so you don’t get the end results. It mostly seems to come out in “unproductive” areas like unreasonably good amateur twitter artists.

Hmm... Japan has the most complex economy in the world though?

Re: The science of having ideas in the shower

#159

Post by nullsense »

AstixAndBelix wrote: post #13

I personally believe that the concept of shower thoughts is a bit detrimental. They are often talked about as being nice little quirks of our lives, when in fact they could be so much more. I have written a little blog post about it [1] [1] : https://but-her-flies.bearblog.dev/shower-thoughts-arent-rea...

It's just the coloquial term for activation of the Default Mode Network (DMN). And yes, it happens everywhere, all throughout the day and to varying degrees.

Also, it's not necessarily always a desirable thing. For example, the practice of mindfulness is literally cultivating the ability to switch off the DMN. The thing that people don't so often click to is whilst it does sometimes lead to those insightful "shower thoughts", it's also what's behind long night torturing yourself ruminating about an upcoming confrontation you're anticipating having with someone etc.

I spent quite a bit of time reading and understanding about the brain and after understanding that the Central Executive Network and the Default Mode Network operate like a see-saw that's mediated by the Salience Network, a great deal more things made sense to me. It helps to know too that for anyone who has experience trauma where they have an elevated HPA-Axis, that the connections between the Salience Network and the Default Mode Network get stronger and hence slipping into rumination becomes the path of least resistance and thus happens more frequently. Actively practicing mindfulness meditation helps counteract this and instead strengthens the connections between the Salience Network and the Central Executive Network.

After learning about the above I discovered Zen Buddhism and realized they've known this intuitively for thousands of years.

Re: The science of having ideas in the shower

#160

Post by myself248 »

shen wrote: post #151
myself248 wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I've been saying for years, the first things that humans did when we started inventing things, is we got rid of all the "boring tasks" that were letting our brains organize themselves. Chopping firewood? Got machines for that now. Knitting? Mechanized. Walking to the next town over? Now it's a high-concentration game of GTA with a radio for extra distraction. All of these things also had a mechanical element to…

Would you recommend chopping wood or knitting over modern meditation?

Knitting, 100%.

The hurdle a lot of people (including myself) feel with meditation is that the benefits are hard to describe and harder to measure, so it's difficult to get into, or to keep going if you feel like you aren't definitely getting something from it right away.

Knitting is every bit as meditative, plus you end up with a scarf or some other useful object, which reduces the hesitancy. You get a hand-made toque AND clearer thinking probably, so even if that "probably" is a hard sell, everyone appreciates a shawl. Plus you get neat stories, like "I was knitting this when I came up with the '602 patent". Some future museum curator is gonna lust over that artifact.

There's no reason you can't apply modern meditative techniques _while_ knitting, either. If you've read up on meditation but found it hard to get going or stick with it, _add_ some repetitive manual work and try again.

Chopping firewood is better for cardiovascular health, but it's difficult to do year round, and the byproduct is only useful to a diminishing number of households that're set up for wood heat. It's also more hazardous if you're clumsy or didn't grow up doing similar work, so think about how many colleagues you'd trust with a knife, much less an 8-lb splitting maul...

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