Of Ideas and Boredom

Why the greatest ideas come to us in the shower

Dear Sara,

How do you fare? Well, I hope. I pray the mysterious journey we call life has been kind to you. That there have been no blocks upon your path and that the sun still shines for you. Speaking of blocks, I have been acquainting myself with my own unique kind: Writer’s block.

It’s a nasty one. You’re busy cruising down the hill of intended literature and BAM!! your thought process stops suddenly and all the words you had inside of you tumble out your mouth and into your morning coffee. And yes, it is this dramatic. This event, of course, leaves one listless and a little off. It is like a mental flu, slowing down every single process in your skull. It is like looking for something at the bottom of a large purse, in the dark, whose shape you do not know. ( Now thinking about it, what is in your purse, really? What is it that fills that… — Wait, don’t answer it… I sense danger ahead).

So, there I was, trying to figure out what to write. What words to pour onto this digital paper and what they would address. Easier said than done. So I decided to figure out how to generate ideas. The solution turns out to be something horrifyingly simple ( Yes my love, I am abusing the word ‘horrifyingly’ again — The Horror!!! ). The solution turns out to be something that Humanity has been doing for centuries on end. Something we turn away from in the easiest of ways. Boredom.

Our brains, you see, are these huge pattern-matching machines. So good at it that we tend to see patterns where there are none. Optical illusions are the best example of this, followed closely by Jesus in pancakes. The face on the moon or the “irrigation canals” on Mars are other great examples. The brain takes new knowledge and compares it to existing knowledge in fascinating ways. Like a child playing with a Rubix cube, our brains try to make sense of information both concrete and abstract. This is why we learn simple concepts and proceed to complex ones. The simplicity allows us to build basic building blocks which provide a reference point for the new complexity.

But our brains, amazing as they are, are biological machines. They are slow and imperfect at memory. They need time to move memories from short-term to long terms storage. They need time and some room to do that. And this is where Boredom kicks in. Boredom is quite simply an uncomfortable lack of activity. There’s this amazing study where people were locked in a room with absolutely nothing to do except for a button placed in front of them that would deliver a painful electric jolt. Give enough time, a huge fraction of the test subjects chose to get electrocuted rather than sit there bored.

And when we are bored, our brains start looking at existing information, matching huge networks of data that you’ve been gathering through the day, mashing that up with your experiences and coming up with new solutions to old problems.

Boredom generates ideas.

That’s why when you’re in the shower, water cascading down your shoulders and your mind heads off in a direction, it somehow comes back with some random crazy idea that would never have struck you anywhere else. It is like a curious child in a museum, messing around with every item and yet treating each with reverence. Some people have learned to harness this power by converting it into ritual. Through meditation and taking a moment of silence, they avoid the daily distractions ( I should write you a letter about this ) and give their brains a moment to do what it does best… patterns.

My love, I hope this has convinced you to take an hour off every day. DIsappear into silence. Who knows what you might find. Have a boring day, won’t you?

Yours, Always,

Lawrence

#Boredom #Creativity #Showers