TRENDING SCIENCE: Why do our best ideas come in the shower?

Brilliance often arrives in this hot and steamy environment. Everyone knows that. There’s even a community on Reddit where people post their epiphanies.

What we don’t know is why our best thoughts come then. A research team at the University of Virginia in the United States may finally have an answer.According to research published in the journal ‘Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts’, a wandering mind is better able to produce a creative solution when we’re engaged in a so-called mindless task.

In other words, instead of dwelling on a problem until you solve it, take a break and do a different task – showering – that is mildly engaging. This setting enables your mind to wander freely. Eureka! Chances are you’ve come up with something clever.

Study co-author Dr Zac Irving, a University of Virginia assistant professor of philosophy, explained in a news item by the same institution: “Say you’re stuck on a problem. What do you do? Probably not something mind-numbingly boring like watching paint dry. Instead, you do something to occupy yourself, like going for a walk, gardening, or taking a shower. All these activities are moderately engaging.”

The researchers used university students to carry out experiments. They had 90 seconds to come up with as many creative alternative uses for either a brick or a paper clip. They were also divided into two groups and asked to watch different 3-minute videos. One was a video of two men folding laundry, while the other was an iconic scene from the American romantic comedy hit movie ‘When Harry Met Sally’.When the videos ended, the groups reported how engaging they were. They gave details about how much their mind wandered from topic to topic while watching the videos. The researchers scored the creativity of their responses based on the number and originality of ideas generated.

The findings showed that when the mind wandered, it resulted in more creative ideas. However, this was true only when the participants were watching the engaging video and not the boring one.

“[W]e find that mind wandering leads to more creative ideas, but only during moderately engaging activities,” the authors concluded in the journal article. “Boring activities lead to either more ideas or more semantically distant ideas overall, but these effects were unrelated to mind wandering. Boring activities may therefore lead to ideas by affording time for focused problem solving, whereas engaging activities may do so by encouraging productive mind wandering.”