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THE VALUE OF A MIND ADRIFT

Let’s step back for a moment, and think again about thinking. In what I’ve written so far there is an implicit bias: that focused, goal-driven attention has more value than open, spontaneous awareness. But the easy assumption that attention need be in the service of solving problems or achieving goals downplays the fruitfulness of the mind’s tendency to drift whenever left to its own devices. Every variety of attention has its uses. The very fact that about half of our thoughts are daydreams suggests there may well be some advantages to a mind that can entertain the fanciful.1 We might revise our own thinking about a “wandering mind,” by considering that rather than wandering away from what counts, we may well be wandering toward something of value.2 Brain research on mind wandering faces a unique paradox: top-down intent does not yield a fruitful bottom-up routine. It’s impossible to instruct someone to have a spontaneous thought—that is, to make the person’s mind wander.3 If you want to capture wandering thoughts in the wild, you’ve got to take them whenever they happen to pop up. One preferred research strategy: while people are having their brains scanned, ask them at random moments what they are experiencing. This yields a messy mix of the contents of the mind, including a great deal of wandering. The inner tug to drift away from effortful focus is so strong that cognitive scientists see a wandering mind as the brain’s “default” mode—where it goes when it’s not working away on some mental task. The circuitry for this default network, a series of brain imaging studies has found, centers on the medial, or middle, zone of the prefrontal cortex. More recent brain scans revealed a surprise: during mind wandering two major brain areas seem to be active, not just the medial strip that had long been associated with a drifting mind.4 The other—the executive system of the prefrontal cortex—had been thought crucial for keeping us focused on tasks. Yet the scans seem to show both areas activated as the mind meandered. That’s a bit of a puzzle. After all, mind wandering by its very nature takes focus from the business at hand and hampers our performance, particularly on cognitively demanding matters. Researchers tentatively solve that puzzle by suggesting that the reason mind wandering hurts performance may be its borrowing the executive system for other matters. This gets us back to what the mind wanders toward: more often than not, our current personal concerns and unresolved business—stuff we’ve got to figure out (more on this in the next chapter). While mind wandering may hurt our immediate focus on some task at hand, some portion of the time it operates in the service of solving problems that matter for our lives. In addition, a mind adrift lets our creative juices flow. While our minds wander we become better at anything that depends on a flash of insight, from coming up with imaginative wordplay to inventions and original thinking. In fact, people who are extremely adept at mental tasks that demand cognitive control and a roaring working memory—like solving complex math problems—can struggle with creative insights if they have trouble switching off their fully concentrated focus.5 Among other positive functions of mind wandering are generating scenarios for the future, self-reflection, navigating a complex social world, incubation of creative ideas, flexibility in focus, pondering what we’re learning, organizing our memories, just mulling life—and giving our circuitry for more intensive focusing a refreshing break.6 A moment’s reflection leads me to add two more: reminding me of things I have to do so they don’t get lost in the mind’s shuffle, and entertaining me. I’m suggest some other useful features, if you let your mind drift awhile. THE ARCHITECTURE OF SERENDIPITY

A Persian fairy tale tells of the Three Princes of Serendip, who “were always making discoveries, by accident and sagacity, of things they were not in quest of.”7 Creativity in the wild operates much like that. “New ideas won’t appear if you don’t have permission within yourself,” Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff tells me. “When I was a VP at Oracle, I took off to Hawaii for a month just to relax, and when I did that it opened up my career to new ideas, perspectives, and directions.” In that open space Benioff realized the potential uses for cloud computing that led him to quit Oracle, start Salesforce in a rented apartment, and evangelize for what was then a radical concept. Salesforce was a pioneer in what is now a multibillion-dollar industry. By contrast, a scientist too determined to confirm his hypothesis risks ignoring findings that don’t fit his expectations—dismissing them as noise or error, not a doorway to new discoveries—and so misses what might become more fruitful theories. And the naysayer in the brainstorming session, the guy who always shoots down any new idea, throttles innovative insight in its infancy. Open awareness creates a mental platform for creative breakthroughs and unexpected insights. In open awareness we have no devil’s advocate, no cynicism or judgment—just utter receptivity to whatever floats into the mind. But once we’ve hit upon a great creative insight, we need to capture the prize by switching to a keen focus on how to apply it. Serendipity comes with openness to possibility, then homing in on putting it to use. Life’s creative challenges rarely come in the form of well-formulated puzzles. Instead we often have to recognize the very need to find a creative solution in the first place. Chance, as Louis Pasteur put it, favors a prepared mind. Daydreaming incubates creative discovery. A classic model of the stages of creativity roughly translates to three modes of focus: orienting, where we search out and immerse ourselves in all kinds of inputs; selective attention on the specific creative challenge; and open awareness, where we associate freely to let the solution emerge—then home in on the solution. The brain systems involved in mind wandering have been found active just before people hit upon a creative insight—and, intriguingly, are unusually active in those with attention deficit disorder, or ADD. Adults with ADD, relative to those without, also show higher levels of original creative thinking and more actual creative achievements.8 The entrepreneur Richard Branson, founder of the corporate empire built on Virgin Air and other companies, has offered himself as a poster boy for success with ADD. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says almost 10 percent of children have the disorder in a form mixed with hyperactivity. In adults, the hyperactivity fades, leaving ADD; around 4 percent of adults seem to have the problem.9 When challenged by a creative task, for example, finding novel uses for a brick, those with ADD do better, despite their zoning out—or perhaps because of it. We all might learn something here. In an experiment where volunteers were challenged with the novel-uses task, those whose minds had been wandering—compared with those whose attention had been fully concentrated—came up with 40 percent more original answers. And when people who had creative accomplishments like a novel, patent, or art show to their credit were tested for screening out irrelevant information to focus on a task, their minds wandered more frequently than did others’—indicating an open awareness that may have served them well in their creative work.10 In our less frenetic creative moments, just before an insight the brain typically rests in a relaxed, open focus, marked by an alpha rhythm. This signals a state of daydreamy reverie. Since the brain stores different kinds of information in wide-reaching circuitry, a freely roaming awareness ups the odds of serendipitous associations and novel combinations. Rappers immersed in “freestyling,” where they improvise lyrics in the moment, show heightened activity in the mind-wandering circuitry, among other parts of the brain—allowing fresh connections between far-ranging neural networks.11 In this spacious mental ecology we are more likely to have novel associations, the aha sense that marks a creative insight—or a good rhyme. In a complex world where almost everyone has access to the same information, new value arises from the original synthesis, from putting ideas together in novel ways, and from smart questions that open up untapped potential. Creative insights entail joining elements in a useful, fresh way. Imagine for a moment biting into a crisp apple: the patina of colors on its skin, the sounds of the crunch as you bite into it, the wash of tastes, smells, and textures. Take a moment to experience that virtual apple. As that imagined moment came to life in your mind your brain almost certainly generated a gamma spike. Such gamma spikes are familiar to cognitive neuroscientists; they occur routinely during mental operations like the virtual apple bite—and just before creative insights. It would be making too much of this to see gamma waves as some secret of creativity. But the site of the gamma spike during a creative insight seems telling: an area associated with dreams, metaphors, the logic of art, myth, and poetry. These operate in the language of the unconscious, a realm where anything is possible. Freud’s method of free association, where you speak whatever comes into your mind without censoring, opens one door to this open-awareness mode. Our mind holds endless ideas, memories, and potential associations waiting to be made. But the likelihood of the right idea connecting with the right memory within the right context—and all that coming into the spotlight of attention—diminishes drastically when we are either hyperfocused or too gripped by an overload of distractions to notice the insight. Then there’s what’s stored in other people’s brains. For about a year the astronomers Arno Penzias and Robert Wilson searched the universe with powerful new equipment, much stronger than any that had yet been used for scanning the vastness of the skies. They were overwhelmed by a sea of fresh data, and tried to simplify their work by ignoring some meaningless static they assumed was due to faulty equipment. One day a chance encounter with a nuclear physicist gave them an insight (and eventually, a Nobel Prize). The insight led them to realize that what they had been interpreting as “noise” was actually a faint signal from the continued reverberations of the big bang. THE CREATIVE COCOON

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant,” Albert Einstein once said. “We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”12 For many of us it’s a luxury just to get some uninterrupted private moments during the day when we can lean back and reflect. Yet those count as some of the most valuable moments in our day, especially when it comes to creativity. But there’s something more required if those associations are to bear fruit in a viable innovation: the right atmosphere. We need free time where we can sustain an open awareness. The nonstop onslaught of email, texts, bills to pay—life’s “full catastrophe”—throws us into a brain state antithetical to the open focus where serendipitous discoveries thrive. In the tumult of our daily distractions and to-do lists, innovation dead-ends; in open times it flourishes. That’s why the annals of discovery are rife with tales of a brilliant insight during a walk or a bath, on a long ride or vacation. Open time lets the creative spirit flourish; tight schedules kill it. Take the late Peter Schweitzer, a founder of the field of evaluating cryptography, encrypted codes that look like nonsense to the unschooled eye but protect the secrecy of everything from government records to your credit card.13 Schweitzer’s specialty: breaking codes in a friendly test of encryption that tells you if some adversary like a rogue hacker can crack your system and steal your secrets. This daunting challenge requires you to generate a large array of novel potential solutions to an extraordinarily complicated problem, and then test each one by working it through a methodical number of steps. Schweitzer’s laboratory for this intense task was not some sound-insulated, windowless office. Typically he’d mull an encrypted code while on a long walk or simply soaking up some sun, eyes closed. “It looked like someone taking a nap, but he was doing higher math in his head,” as a colleague put it. “He’d lie around sunbathing, and meanwhile his mind would be going a zillion miles an hour.” The import of such cocoons in time and space emerged from a Harvard Business School study of the inner work lives of 238 members of creative project teams tasked with innovative challenges from solving complex information technology problems to inventing kitchen gadgets.14 Progress in such work demands a steady stream of small creative insights. Good days for insights had nothing to do with stunning breakthroughs or grand victories. The key turned out to be having small wins—minor innovations and troubling problems solved—on concrete steps toward a larger goal. Creative insights flowed best when people had clear goals but also freedom in how they reached them. And, most crucial, they had protected time—enough to really think freely. A creative cocoon.