It’s a well-known but little-understood truth: great epiphanies happen in the shower.
There’s an entire subreddit dedicated to the effect. So why does this hot and steamy environment seem to generate such interesting thoughts?
Scientists have debated the so-called shower effect and why it occurs for years. Now, two new experiments have helped clarify some of the murky findings.
The latest experiments, led by Zac Irving, who studies and teaches philosophy of cognitive science at the University of Virginia, suggest that unwavering focus on a task can be the enemy of creativity.
Instead of dwelling on the problem until it’s solved, the results suggest taking a break and engaging in another mildly engaging task, such as showering. This environment can allow your mind to roam freely, without purpose or direction, albeit with certain limitations.
When your mind is moving, researchers think you’re more likely to come up with something clever.
A completely boring task, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to constrain your mind enough to generate creative ideas. You are likely to get distracted or keep thinking about the original problem.
“Say you’re stuck with a problem,” Irving explains.
“What are you doing? It’s probably not something insanely boring like watching paint dry. Instead, you’re doing something to occupy yourself, like going for a walk, gardening, or taking a shower. All of these activities are moderately engaging.”
Historically, tests of the shower effect have produced inconsistent results. Some studies have found that a so-called low-demand task gets the brain wandering and creativity flowing. But other studies have failed to replicate the results.
Irving thinks this is due to flaws in the experimental design. Much previous research has confused mind wandering with boredom, although in reality, generating unusual ideas may require a fine balance between free thinking and focused thinking.
“They didn’t actually measure mind wandering,” Irving claims. “They measured the distraction of the participants.”
For example, a 2015 study found that having too many off-task thoughts can make it harder to find creative inspiration. In other words, at some point, unlimited thoughts become unproductive.
Moreover, many previous experiments have used various types of laboratory-based distraction tasks that do not translate well to the real world, such as clicking numbers on a computer screen.
Irving and his colleagues designed two new experiments to compensate for these limitations.
The first experiment was based on 222 participants, most of whom were women. In the initial experiment, these participants were given 90 seconds to find as many alternative uses as possible for a brick or a paper clip.
Participants were then randomly assigned to one of two tasks. The first group was asked to watch an engaging three-minute scene from When Harry Met Sally. Meanwhile, another group watched a three-minute video of men folding laundry.
After the break in the video, both groups were suddenly given an extra 45 seconds to add more ideas to their original task.
The researchers rated the creativity of their responses based on originality based on the number of ideas they generated and the novelty of the ideas.
At the end, participants reported how much their mind wandered during the video clips.
Ultimately, the authors found that mind wandering during the engaging video was positively associated with more creative responses.
In contrast, the benefits of boredom did not appear to be driven by mind wandering. After watching the laundry video, the participants came up with less unusual ideas than the other groups.
“Together,” the authors conclude, “these results suggest that different ways of thinking promote creative incubation in engaging and boring tasks. While engaging tasks lead to productive mind wandering, boring tasks may be beneficial because they allow oscillating between periods of focus. and yet limitless.”
In the second experiment, the first experiment was repeated with 118 participants, but this time one half of the group was told that they would return to the original task after the video, while the other half were given only a “vague” hint that this might occur.
Participants then reported how engaging they found the videos.
The results of the second experiment support the central findings of the first experiment. Namely, they suggest that mind-wandering—or free-flowing thought—facilitates the generation of novel ideas, “but only during a moderately engaging activity that imposes certain constraints on thought.”
Interestingly, when participants knew they had to return to the original task, they generated more ideas during the boring video, but with lower creativity scores.
This suggests that they were still thinking about the original task while doing the laundry. The movie scene, on the other hand, was just distracting enough to allow participants to make interesting connections between both tasks.
Further research is needed to explore the “why” of the shower effect, but these new results give us a better idea of ”how” mildly engaging tasks like showering help us generate creative thoughts in the real world.
The study was published in the journal Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts.
