Why You Get Your Best Ideas in the Shower

Social media is rife with groups dedicated to sharing so-called “shower thoughts.”

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The proper balance between engagement and disengagement is turbocharged in the shower. John Kounios, professor of psychology at Drexel University and co-author of the book The Eureka Factor: Aha Moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain, thinks he knows why. In the shower we are on-task—washing, shampooing, shaving, in a familiar and purposeful sequence—but we’re also cut off from the world. “There’s sensory restriction,” Kounios says. “There’s white noise and you really can’t see too much.” There’s a tactile component to a shower too. The temperature of the water, Kounios points out, is more or less the same as the temperature of the body, so there is nothing too cold or too hot to draw you out of the literal immersion of the experience.

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Jonathan Schooler, a professor of psychological and brain sciences at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has looked into the shower-thought phenomenon and points to the “hypnagogic state,” the zone just between sleep and wakefulness, as being especially fertile ground for insights. Thomas Edison and Salvador Dali, he says, made it a habit to nap sitting up with objects in their hands, so that when they dozed off, the objects would drop, waking them up and allowing them to snag any insights before they vanished. 

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