Peanut Buttering

What did you think about the last time you brushed your teeth?

It's at this point a well-worn idea that the best ideas seem to come when you're in the shower. For me it's either in the shower, or biking.

But I was recently introduced to the idea of using this phenomenon as a sort of canary in the coalmine:

"A simple test here is to make sure that creative problems circulate in your mind while you are brushing your teeth. You will fail the test if, instead of creative thinking, you are preoccupied with problems at work or in the family." - Genius checklist, Supermemo wiki

I notice there are indeed days when my mind spends extensive time productively wandering, and other days when I rarely enter state of mind.

A somewhat accurate proxy for this is the number of notes I take in a given day in my Drafts app, where I try to write down all the interesting ideas that occur to me in the middle of doing something else. Some days I jot down upwards of a dozen entries, other days none at all.

What makes the difference?

The author of the passage quoted above suggests that both positive and negative stress may monopolize the mind and impinge on creative thought during these times. It's also accurate to think of it as boredom: if you're in an excited emotional state with lots of pressing matters competing for your attention, your awareness is narrowed and thus less likely to expand laterally.

I think another angle is how much true downtime you have -- sometimes I've watched a YouTube video while brushing my teeth, which precludes a wandering mind entirely.

I personally find this a very useful canary. The days when my wanders most are the days when I find myself most curious about the world around me, which itself cultivates delight. I would like to have more such wandering moments in my life.