{"id":31256,"date":"2012-08-13T10:10:49","date_gmt":"2012-08-13T15:10:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/?p=31256"},"modified":"2012-08-10T14:19:31","modified_gmt":"2012-08-10T19:19:31","slug":"spacing-out-good","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/jesuscreed\/2012\/08\/13\/spacing-out-good\/","title":{"rendered":"Spacing Out? Good!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

From Charlie Jane Anders<\/strong><\/a>:<\/p>\n

I\u2019m totally into spacing out, finding myself in a reverie, and it is not uncommon to encounter creative ideas in that space-out zone.<\/p>\n

How about you?<\/strong><\/p>\n

We all experience the state of \u201cmind wandering\u201d on occasion \u2014 sometimes it feels almost like going into a trance. You can be in the middle of a meeting at work, and suddenly your mind is just going off on its own, with a train of thought you couldn\u2019t reconstruct afterwards to save your life. Is this phenomenon just a waste of time, or a failure to pay attention on your part?<\/p>\n

Apparently not \u2014 there\u2019s now a fair amount of evidence that this state can be linked to increased creativity. A number of studies have shown that focused attention to a task can reduce your creativity, while a certain amount of mental wandering can actually boost your creative process. For example,\u00a0a 2006 study<\/a>\u00a0by\u00a0Ap Dijksterhuis<\/a>\u00a0and Teun Meurs with the University of Amsterdam found people who engaged in \u201cunconscious thought\u201d before solving a problem did better than people who\u2019d been focused on something consciously.<\/p>\n

Also, a recent study by researchers led by U.C. Santa Barbara\u2019s Benjamin Baird found that people who were allowed to let their minds wander scored better on one measure of creativity \u2014 the \u201cUnusual Task\u201d test. (This research is forthcoming in the journal Psychological Science, but we were sent an early copy.)<\/p>\n

\u201cIt doesn\u2019t really seem to be that they\u2019re thinking about the problem per se,\u201d says Jonathan Schooler at UCSB, one of the study\u2019s authors. \u201cBut it\u2019s encouraging a sort of free association \u2014 a sort of stirring things up \u2014and allowing for an unconscious recombination that primes the pump.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mind-wandering is an \u201cassociative\u201d state, so it makes sense that it would help you to come up with out-of-left-field answers.<\/p>\n

But also, there\u2019s new evidence that when you space out, you\u2019re activating two separate regions of your brain that don\u2019t usually work together. The \u201cexecutive network\u201d in the front of your brain is usually thought to be active when the brain is doing decision-making and problem solving. Meanwhile, the \u201cdefault network\u201d is believed to be active during times when your brain is at rest.<\/p>\n

Until recently, neuroscientists believed that the \u201cexecutive network\u201d and the \u201cdefault network\u201d were mutually exclusive \u2014 one would turn on when the other turned off. But now there\u2019s evidence that both regions are active at the same time, when your mind is wandering.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<\/body><\/html>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From Charlie Jane Anders: I\u2019m totally into spacing out, finding myself in a reverie, and it is not uncommon to encounter creative ideas in that space-out zone. How about you? We all experience the state of \u201cmind wandering\u201d on occasion \u2014 sometimes it feels almost like going into a trance. You can be in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":197,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-31256","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"yoast_head":"\nSpacing Out? 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