BEHAVIOUR 01 OF 10 . CURIOSITY

Why do I get my best ideas in the shower?

Because the shower is one of the few places you are awake, alone, and not being asked for anything. Your attention turns inward, and the connections your busy brain was blocking finally arrive. The ideas were already in you. The shower just stopped interrupting them.

Four brain states, and only one of them has ideas in it

Your brain runs at different speeds through the day. The field calls them delta, theta, alpha and beta. In plain words, four states, and knowing which one you are in changes everything about when you ask yourself for an idea.

Beta. The busy brain. The fastest, and where you spend most of the working day. Getting things done, using everything you already know. It is the convergent, binary one. Yes or no. I like it, I don’t. Profit or loss. Do this, not that. It is the hard drive that powers task-driven life and it is very good at it. What it is not good at is taking anything new in. In Beta you are spending, not banking.

Alpha. The creative brain. You slow down and open up at the same time. Singular focus. Daydreaming. The place of maybe, could be, would we. It is where spontaneous thoughts and ideas actually happen: at the end of the day when you finally relax, on the drive, and in the shower in the morning when you are mindlessly having new ideas.

And here is the line that should stop you. Most of it happens not at work.

Theta. The dreaming brain. Asleep, but active. Making sense of the day through dreams, and forging the rich new combinations. This is where your deeper resources solve problems on your behalf, which is why you sometimes pass up through theta into alpha and wake in the morning already holding the answer.

Delta. The comatose brain. Almost no activity, so all that energy goes into healing, rebuilding and recovering. Good to go by morning.

Now put the shower back in. You are awake and alone. Nobody is asking you anything. The task is warm and routine and takes almost none of you. That is a straight run out of Beta and into Alpha, and Alpha is where the ideas were waiting all along.

Curiosity is not a thing you do. It’s a way of being awake.

Think, do, be. You can think about curiosity in ten minutes. You cannot do curiosity, because there is no curiosity you can run at two o’clock on a Tuesday. You can only be curious, and then it works on your behalf while you are not looking.

That is why this is a behaviour and not a technique. A technique is something you get out and use. A behaviour is something you are, which means it is still switched on in the meeting you did not prepare for, in the shower, and in the queue at the supermarket where the actual answer usually turns up.

And here is the mechanism, in one line. A new idea is the combination of two or more unconnected things. So the richer the stuff you have taken in, the more combinations are available to you. Curiosity is how the stuff gets in. Everything else in this program is downstream of it, which is why it is behaviour one.

What it looks like when it’s missing

Nine hours of getting things done. Meetings, decisions, this or that, yes or no, the fast binary brain doing exactly what it is for. Then at four o’clock someone books a room and asks who has got an idea.

They are asking the wrong brain.

Nobody has got an idea. They have got the first answer, which is the one already in the filing cabinet, and they will say it out loud because not knowing is uncomfortable and the first answer ends it.

That is not a people problem and it is not a facilitation problem. Nothing went in, so nothing can come out. You cannot combine things you never absorbed.

Where this came from

Mumbai, 2007, on a Dido album.

SonyBMG had asked us to work out why her audience loved her, so we ran a global insight tour. Not focus groups. We went to women in their actual lives, in cafes and restaurants and homes, Shanghai, Sydney, Seoul, Stockholm.

In Mumbai we sat with two young women flatting in a tiny apartment, working the way you work in modern Mumbai. We asked how they listened to music. A laptop running iTunes, and a pair of small external speakers that sounded terrible.

No CDs. No stereo. Nothing physical anywhere in the flat.

I had not seen that before. One hundred per cent digital living, years before anybody had a name for it, happening in a room I was only standing in because of an album campaign.

We came back and said to the label: this is going to blow up, and when it does the gap is sound. Nobody has a quality proposition for people who own no equipment. Build proper speakers into the laptop. Own the sound of digital living.

They said no.

I was in that flat for a record. What I actually saw was the next fifteen years of consumer audio, and the only reason I saw it is that I was somewhere nobody had sent me, paying attention to something that was not on the brief.

Curiosity cannot tell you what you are going to find. If it could, it would be research.

And the honest end of it matters too. Being right is not the same as being listened to. The seeing was free and it was mine. What happened next was somebody else’s decision. This program can give you the first part. Nobody can sell you the second.

That trip gave us something else as well, and it turned into a company. That story is on the Letting Go page.

What the evidence says

Four findings, and together they tell one story.

Curiosity is a state, and the state is greedy. Gruber, Gelman and Ranganath (Neuron, 2014) put people in a scanner with trivia questions. When someone was highly curious, they learned the answer better, and the effect was still there a day later. The interesting part is what else they remembered. Faces shown during the curious state, completely unrelated to the question, also stuck. Curiosity raised activity in the dopamine reward circuit and the hippocampus and the traffic between them. In Gruber’s own words, curiosity puts the brain in a state that sucks in what you are motivated to learn, and everything around it too.

That is the reservoir with a mechanism under it. Being curious does not just get you the thing you were curious about. It opens you to everything else in the room while you are in it.

The turn inwards is visible. Jauk, Benedek and Neubauer (International Journal of Psychophysiology, 2012) found that producing uncommon responses shows a different pattern of alpha activity than producing common ones, which they read as divergent thinking drawing more heavily on internal processing. Put plainly: original answers come from a different direction of attention than obvious ones. Inward, not outward.

Filling the reservoir first is not optional. Sio and Ormerod’s meta-analysis (Psychological Bulletin, 2009) found the incubation effect is real, that divergent thinking tasks benefit from it most, and, crucially, that a longer preparation period before you step away produces a greater effect. There is no incubation without something to incubate. Which is the case against the brainstorm in one sentence: no preparation, nothing to walk away from.

And it really is the shower. Baird and colleagues (Psychological Science, 2012) tested four incubation conditions. Rest did not win. More effort did not win. An undemanding task won, and the benefit tracked how much people’s minds wandered during it. The shower, the drive, the walk with the dog. Not nothing, and not concentrating. Something small enough to let you drift.

None of this is new, and I would rather say so. James Webb Young wrote it down in 1940 in A Technique for Producing Ideas: an idea is a new combination of old elements, you gather the raw material first, then you hand it over to the unconscious, and the answer arrives while shaving, or bathing, or half awake. He was right, he had no scanner, and eighty six years later we are still booking rooms as though he never wrote it.

What to do on Monday

One thing, and it takes a minute.

Think back to your first smartphone. Did you read the manual first, take it to a friend who had the same one, or open it and crack on? Reading is audible, the friend is visual, cracking on is kinaesthetic. Most people lean hard on one.

Now build an anchor from it. One specific track, one specific walk, one specific image that reliably moves you out of the busy brain. Not a mood, a particular thing. Then use it deliberately before you need an idea, rather than waiting to be ambushed by one in the shower.

That is the whole behaviour in miniature. Notice what gets in. Choose the state instead of waiting for it. Capture what arrives, because it arrives once.

Curiosity is behaviour one of ten, and it sits with Empathy in Module 1, Unlock Your Creative Brain.

Sources

  1. Gruber, M. J., Gelman, B. D., & Ranganath, C. (2014). States of curiosity modulate hippocampus-dependent learning via the dopaminergic circuit. Neuron. doi:10.1016/j.neuron.2014.08.060
  2. Jauk, E., Benedek, M., & Neubauer, A. C. (2012). Tackling creativity at its roots: evidence for different patterns of EEG alpha activity related to convergent and divergent modes of task processing. International Journal of Psychophysiology, 84, 219-225. doi:10.1016/j.ijpsycho.2012.02.012
  3. Sio, U. N., & Ormerod, T. C. (2009). Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 94-120. doi:10.1037/a0014212
  4. Baird, B., Smallwood, J., Mrazek, M. D., Kam, J. W. Y., Franklin, M. S., & Schooler, J. W. (2012). Inspired by distraction: mind wandering facilitates creative incubation. Psychological Science, 23(10), 1117-1122. doi:10.1177/0956797612446024
  5. Young, J. W. (1940). A Technique for Producing Ideas.
  6. BIF source: BIF People Behaviours 1. Curiosity, and BIF People Program Introduction (2016), both in BIF PEOPLE PROGRAM MASTER 2025.