‘Unloaded’ Minds Are the Most Creative

New York Magazine:

One of the finest subreddits is r/Showerthoughts, wherein redditors “share all those thoughts, ideas, or philosophical questions that race through your head when in the shower.” Posts tend toward the observational and absurd, as in:

• “Barn owls must have been stoked when the barn was finally invented.”

• “If you go into a fake time machine, you still come out in the future.”

• “The reason Hermione was such an “insufferable know-it-all” was so that she could explain everything about magic to the muggles reading thebooks.”

Brilliant, right? Beyond the hilarity, the subreddit is a case study in how routine activities like showering give your mind free space, which often enables weirdness. And new research is finding that this is precisely the sort of situation — high in familiarity, low in demands — where you’re likely to have your most far-flung ideas.

In a study published in Psychological Science, researchers Shira Baror and Moshe Bar at Bar-Ilan University in Israel tested the creativity of study participants while they had high or low mental “loads,” or the amount of things to juggle in their working memory.

Read the whole story: New York Magazine