It’s well known that being exposed to lots of noise is harmful – it raises blood pressure, increases stress levels and hampers performance. However, in contrast, the benefits of silence for our brains are more recently being established.
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How often do your thoughts become clearer once given a bit of time to settle? Or an idea emerges from what originally seemed like a confusing mess of information? If we understood what occurs in our minds, perhaps we wouldn’t be so surprised when this happens.
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Do you ever feel frustrated when you doze off when you don’t want to? But, what if dozing in and out of sleep was actually a helpful state to be in? What if we gave into it a bit more often (as long as we’re in a safe space and not operating machinery!).
At the onset of sleep there’s a state we enter called ‘hypnagogia’, which we experience as being half-asleep, half-awake. Charles Dickens talked of this as a time that enables the mind to “ramble at its pleasure.”
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Not all ingenious ideas come about in a flash.
Not everyone experiences Eureka moments such as those made famous by Archimedes the Greek mathematician and scientist who worked out that the way to tell if the king’s crown was made of pure gold or of cheaper metal was by the amount of water it displaced. His Eureka moment is said to have come about whilst stepping into his bath and realising that the amount of water displaced was proportional to the weight of the object immersed in it.
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We all have a natural disposition to daydreaming. In fact, people spend nearly 47% of their waking time thinking about something other than what they’re doing, regardless of their activity.*
For over 60 years, Psychologist Jerome L. Singer has pioneered ground-breaking research into daydreaming. He identifies three different styles.
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At a time when many are in lock down, with the usual routines gone and people left trying to work out new ways of spending their time, what if we used this time to tackle problems differently too?
Studies show that incubating ideas substantially increases our likelihood of solving a problem. Interestingly, this is most likely with longer incubation periods and when not cognitively overloaded with tasks*. So if you find yourself facing longer periods of time indoors and with less routine or demanding work to occupy your mind, you may be able to make particular use of this habit to incubate ideas.
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What's your typical doodle? Flowers? Houses? Stars? Faces? These are amongst the most common. Or are you someone who finds themselves scribbling the same abstract or geometric shapes over and over in different ways? Whatever your preference, you’re not alone in your doodles.
While scribbling in the margins, shading in the shapes and creating random patterns doesn’t sound particularly productive, there may actually be cognitive benefits of doodling.
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In February 1869 Dmitri Mendeleev had a dream. It turned out to be quite an important dream which delivered an important outcome – the periodic table. Mendeleev had been working tirelessly to solve an incredibly complex problem: how to logically organise all the known elements in the universe. He had created a set of cards of all the elements that he would regularly shuffle and deal, with the hope that he find the rules that would explain how they all fitted together. He did this repeatedly and failed to crack the code. However, it was his dreaming brain that eventually solved what his awake brain could not.
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