12 ms·
The science of having ideas in the shower
- math_dandy 4y agoAnecdotally, Americans tend to shower more often than Europeans. Perhaps this explains why more tech innovation tends to happen in America these days? I suspect a major cause of the shower gap is energy price gap, leading one to conclude that cheap energy increases innovation!
- CSDude 4y agoSource required.
- math_dandy 4y agoRecent visit to my in-laws in Germany.
- DoingIsLearning 4y agoAh so elderly couple in Germany allows you to conclude that the whole of Europe showers less than your household, a household which is also representative of the whole American continent, did I get that right?
- svnt 4y agoAhem… whoossshhh
- kylecazar 4y agoI'm sure like everything else, times have changed and Western Europe and the US are now more similar (if not the same) in their shower habits. But I'd like to provide another anecdote just for fun, from 6 years of living in Spain beginning 20 years ago. It was, at that time, certainly considered unique to shower every day, in a mid-sized northern Spain city. Unless every other friend in my residencia was weird in this regard, which is unlikely. Interestingly, they also had a communal pool. Swimming to them rendered a shower that day unnecessary. Note -- I didn't notice any notable signs of bad hygiene, though. Anyway I'm sure there are studies that show we're all converging on similar routines!
- Al-Khwarizmi 4y agoCurious. I'm from a mid-sized northern Spanish city, always shower once a day, most of my family and friends do as well. People I know from the south of Spain even shower more than once a day (it's hot down there). And in Spain there is the meme that French and British people shower much less than the Spanish. No idea if there is truth to it (although when I lived in the UK, I was shocked at how seldom the British people I was sharing house with showered, but that's a sample size of two).
- tpmx 4y agoMaybe something to do with electricity suddenly being 5-10x more expensive than usual.
- jtbayly 4y agoSkyrocketing energy prices projected to cause unprecedented drop in already dangerously low rate of European innovation!
- tpmx 4y agoEuropean innovation is doing quite well. As usual it's the part where we actually make money off the innovations where we suck. Good trolling effort though! ;)
- tnzk 4y agoIt fails to explain why Japanese people who shower literally everyday don't lead innovations...
- b3morales 4y agoDon't they? In consumer electronics they certainly did for a good chunk of the past 50-60 years.
- DoingIsLearning 4y agoIn Brazil two showers a day are pretty common. So access to R&D funding is probably far more relevant for innovation indexes than people's hygiene.
- Existenceblinks 4y agoJapanese people are very creative in my perception. I'm in Thailand where if you aren't taking shower 2 times a day, you are considerably "bad hygiene". In winter, at least 1 time in the morning. You will feel "I'm dirty" outside if you don't.
- hbarka 4y agoThe Global War on Terror (GWOT) revealed remote places where the Toyota Hilux refused to break
- astrange 4y agoJapanese people are very innovative, but aren’t motivated enough to create export-oriented products so you don’t get the end results. It mostly seems to come out in “unproductive” areas like unreasonably good amateur twitter artists.
- nullsense 4y agoHmm... Japan has the most complex economy in the world though?
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- nanomonkey 4y agoCan you explain the energy price gap portion of your hypothesis? From my personal experience showers take less energy than a bath. For my usage, if I block the drain, take a shower, there will only be about a foot of water in the tub, maybe a 1/3 of what I would need to take a bath. Are you assuming other forms of washing or that Americans shower more frequently? Just curious!
- dsr_ 4y agoYou have a three foot deep bathtub? I'm jealous. Standard American bathtubs are 60" long, 30" wide, and 18" tall -- external dimensions. That's what you'll see in 90+% of apartments and homes.
- myself248 4y agoMaybe they mean ankle deep. A foot turned sideways is only ankle-high, you see... (Metric ain't got nothin' on this kind of versatility, baby!)
- nanomonkey 4y agoYou're correct, its actually considerably less than a foot of depth from one shower. It's probably 1-3 inches from my usage, but I take quick showers. More to my point, a bath's water and energy usage is multiple showers from my experience.
- meindnoch 4y agoAs they say, once you have eliminated all which is impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth! But perhaps there are still a few more probable hypotheses to test before we settle on your shower theory… Would you agree with that, my friend?
- FlyingSnake 4y ago> I suspect a major cause of the shower gap is energy price gap What a funny assertion. Russia, Iran, Venezuela, Gulf states etc have bottomless supply of cheap energy, where are their innovations?
- Existenceblinks 4y agoAhh funny my country is very hot, in summer I'd shower 3 times (I wish for 4 sometimes). It's too hot to come up with any idea. It's only thankful to have water run through.
- bertjk 4y agoCan I ask, in places where showering that often is the norm, does one change into a new set of clean clothes each time? And does this basically triple the laundry chore burden?
- Existenceblinks 4y agoI'm in Thailand. Same should be applied with "tropical climate" countries. Basically it's hot and humid. Cloths are usually not thick as it's hot, so 2-3 days per laundry for 2 people is ok. It's only annoying when there's not enough favorite cloths. Smell of sweat / odor happens very soon than those who live in cold+dry area.
- ad404b8a372f2b9 4y agoI feel like that has to be cultural rather than price based. The French shower more often than Americans for example and we have higher energy prices.
- ford 4y agoIs there more research on how boredom relates to creativity in general? I've been wondering recently about how my default in most cases is to look at my phone (reddit, social media, texting). That must detract from my net new ideas. I know many a child driven to weird ideas, fun games, and general creativity from lack of anything else to do. It's probably a spectrum (reading reddit/HN/etc. is likely to introduce new ideas), but I'd venture to guess that most people could stand to trade a lot of their daily phone time for some intentional boredom.
- Swizec 4y agoYou need time to think but you also need something to think about. A favorite quote on the topic whose source I never remember: The news doesn’t tell you what to think, it tells you what to think about. Hamming talks about this effect as The Open Door Policy in his wonderful you and your research talk – https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html The key seems to be to tend to your inputs, make sure they’re decent quality and on topics you care about, then create time away from inputs to ruminate and ponder. Reading outrage-of-the-day content won’t give you better software engineering insights in the shower. But reading hyped-tech-trend-of-the-month content might. Conversely, if your mind is constantly engaged in other people’s thoughts, it won’t have time to create its own. For me personally that means avoiding external stimuli for the first 2 to 3 hours of the day (doesn’t always work).
- AstixAndBelix 4y agoThat's something you can easily experiment on yourself, unless you're hopelessly addicted to your entertainment devices
- ArjenM 4y agoI'm extremely easily bored so creative state of mind is my every day normal I guess. Only tricky part is that it's a gradual process over a short time of basic information gathering that has to be captured in the right contexts back and forth for me. All these comments here also bring new insights, overlapping feelings and an idea we are all in this mess together. To boredom!
- 4y ago
- luxuryballs 4y ago“If you’ve ever emerged from the shower or returned from walking your dog with a clever idea or a solution to a problem you’d been struggling with, it may not be a fluke.” Did we really need someone to tell us this? Do people just assume everything is a fluke until some higher authority tells you otherwise?
- ricardo81 4y agofluke as in chance/luck. Which is pretty much everything without a scientific basis.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- karencarits 4y agoUntil one has at least some systematic data on the "flukes", I think it seems the safest to use "coincidence" as the default
- Finnucane 4y agoIt’s clearly not flukes. It’s not random. It happens often enough to make a clear pattern. No one would even write an article like this if it weren’t common experience.
- Ar-Curunir 4y agoif you read the article you would find that most of it is focused on why this is the case, instead of whether this is the case.
- fnordpiglet 4y agoThat’s just the introduction to frame the topic. The article explains how we now understand the biological mechanics of why. That’s what they pay journalism students to do, otherwise they would be on welfare.
- svnt 4y ago
- ilyt 4y agoNever had shower moments, only "it's late and I should be asleep but brain decided to solve some random problem instead" moments.
- AstixAndBelix 4y agoI personally believe that the concept of shower thoughts is a bit detrimental. They are often talked about as being nice little quirks of our lives, when in fact they could be so much more. I have written a little blog post about it [1] [1] : https://but-her-flies.bearblog.dev/shower-thoughts-arent-real/ https://but-her-flies.bearblog.dev/shower-thoughts-arent-rea...
- binkHN 4y agoI concur. I sometimes get "shower thoughts" while doing the dishes.
- nullsense 4y agoIt's just the coloquial term for activation of the Default Mode Network (DMN). And yes, it happens everywhere, all throughout the day and to varying degrees. Also, it's not necessarily always a desirable thing. For example, the practice of mindfulness is literally cultivating the ability to switch off the DMN. The thing that people don't so often click to is whilst it does sometimes lead to those insightful "shower thoughts", it's also what's behind long night torturing yourself ruminating about an upcoming confrontation you're anticipating having with someone etc. I spent quite a bit of time reading and understanding about the brain and after understanding that the Central Executive Network and the Default Mode Network operate like a see-saw that's mediated by the Salience Network, a great deal more things made sense to me. It helps to know too that for anyone who has experience trauma where they have an elevated HPA-Axis, that the connections between the Salience Network and the Default Mode Network get stronger and hence slipping into rumination becomes the path of least resistance and thus happens more frequently. Actively practicing mindfulness meditation helps counteract this and instead strengthens the connections between the Salience Network and the Central Executive Network. After learning about the above I discovered Zen Buddhism and realized they've known this intuitively for thousands of years.
- Sozar2000 4y ago[dead]
- zxcvbn4038 4y agoOne of the best parts of remote work is when I have a tough problem I can just walk into the bathroom and take a shower to solve it - I just need to make sure my hair is dry before the next meeting. I never could have done that pre-Covid since everyone would have wanted to know where I was if not sitting at my desk, and the few places I worked with gyms came with a long list of co-workers I’d rather not be showering with!
- Iwan-Zotow 4y ago[dead]
- Existenceblinks 4y agoHmm, it's a mixed quality of ideas. Sometimes it sounds very revolutionary, but then given a full thought around it starts to be just alright. Sometimes I think I finally solve a way of doing thing in code, turns out it's good, for now. Some realization are incredible though like .. why you were so dumb in front of computer.
- 99failures 4y agoFor starters there's less [performance] anxiety while taking a shower of doing mundane tasks. In a way it's the "monday night quarterback" meets the "you missed a spot over there" syndrome; the farther away we are from the point where the rubber meets the road, the more we can observe objectively and have higher level of thinking. The problem at hand is how to juncture the thinking/intention with proper action.
- gazby 4y agoThis effect used to be the bane of my ADHD-addled existence until I found these: https://www.myaquanotes.com/ https://www.myaquanotes.com/. I buy them in 5 packs now.
- mentos 4y agoIts my working theory that artists (The Beatles or John Carmack) are always operating in this type of mental 'shower' environment. Makes me wonder if maybe there is a 'myaquaguitar.com' alternative haha
- diemes1 4y agoNever seen John Carmack described as an artist before
- boredemployee 4y agocould writing code be considered as an art? genuinely asking
- jonsen 4y ago"Art is a diverse range of human activity, and resulting product, that involves creative or imaginative talent expressive of technical proficiency, beauty, emotional power, or conceptual ideas. There is no generally agreed definition of what constitutes art,...": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art
- sowbug 4y agoThis article is teaching me that I misunderstood what the default mode network (DMN) is. I was introduced to the term while reading how psychedelics affect the brain. As I understood it, the DMN is a mediator among the many thoughts that normally compete for your brain's attention. By temporarily suppressing the DMN, psychedelics give the weirder thoughts a better chance at center stage. Thus the black dot on the wall looks more like a spider, and a normally tenuous connection between Concept X and Concept Y might lead someone to discover a mechanism for cold fusion while tripping. This article's explanation, on the other hand, fits the DMN moniker better: it's what your brain does when it isn't doing anything. If psychedelics replace a default value with an uninitialized variable, then the resulting behavior is undefined. This would explain why so-called "set and setting" are so important while experiencing psychedelics. A preoccupied mind doesn't use the DMN. So it would follow that a preoccupied mind wouldn't benefit as much from a suppressed DMN, because it wouldn't have any reason to try activating it.
- beams_of_light 4y agoHaving done LSD, I can’t imagine doing anything resembling coherent productivity while tripping. The best I could do was try to process all the crazy shit happening. There was certainly no room for note taking.
- duncancarroll 4y agoIf you think your shower ideas are good, you should try meditation!
- sammalloy 4y agoI’m more of a brisk walk kind of guy, day or night. I’ve always had the best ideas pop up during walking rather than from showering or meditating. It’s the increased cerebral blood flow to the brain that works like a charm.
- mmaunder 4y agoI have a theory that it’s also related to heat. Try drinking a pot of coffee in a hot tub if you can find one, set to a high temp. It’s quite the creative experience.
- codazoda 4y agoI’m going to try this
- robotguy 4y agoI’m convinced that it’s the hot water on the back of my neck opening up blood vessels and increasing oxygen to my brain.
- dunefox 4y agoThis sounds like it's more related to heart attacks. I don't think this is healthy.
- telchior 4y agoI've always enjoyed drinking hot coffee / tea on hot days, and found out this is a sort of tradition for some people (e.g. kopi in Singapore). Supposedly, it cools you down by kickstarting your sweat, but for me it also makes me feel instantly clearheaded (whereas the caffeine high takes 30ish minutes). Maybe some of us need that kind of stimulation just to feel fully awake. I'm a generally lethargic person, and in that state I can't really think clearly. A little shock to the central (or sympathetic?) nervous system helps counteract that and get the ideas or work flowing.
- myself248 4y agoHave you tried a sauna?
- higgins 4y agoduring a cold shower my best idea is "I THINK I'M CLEAN ENOUGH!"
- pbhjpbhj 4y agoAt what point in the shower? Maybe there could be a drain based sensor that would tell you you're clean enough -- like how some dishwashers work? Ever think there could be one spot on your body you've never actively cleaned, it has a unique bacterial signature from that time as a child you sat on a recently crushed meteorite, it's the sole remaining life from an alien World! No, just me then.
- anonomousename 4y agoThat spot might be your navel. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/1-458-bacteria-species-new-to-science-found-in-our-belly-buttons/266360/ https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2012/12/1-458-bac...
- kaveen 4y ago[flagged]
- dws 4y agoVisualizing being the shower can also sometimes work. I got stuck on a problem a while back, and tried leaning back, closing my eyes, and imaging being in a warm shower with a head full of shampoo. Voila!
- ngc248 4y agoisn't it just diffuse learning? I also get amazing ideas when I am bored and my mind is wandering.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoMy breakthrough idea come mostly when I'm exercising (read: running). It's one of the reasons I don't run with music / audio. Instead, it's just me and the road. Initially, I thought it was a personal quirk. Then I read the book "Your Brain at Work" by David Rock. At this point, I'm due for a re-read. https://www.amazon.com/Your-Brain-Work-Revised-Updated/dp/0063003155 https://www.amazon.com/Your-Brain-Work-Revised-Updated/dp/00...
- Waterluvian 4y agoMaybe I’m discovering the obvious, but I began using THC for sleep in my 30s and as a side effect, I kinda get a little bit high for about 20 mins before bed. I’ll be having a shower that usually turns into a bath for safety and I just close my eyes and think. And it’s truly miraculous… My brain just wanders so freely among the ideas of the day. But what interests me most are these “eureka!” moments. They’re so fast and fleeting and my brain struggles to focus that I rush to orate them to my phone before they fade. It’s an interesting sensation to have where I’m confident that the idea was brilliant but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was seconds later. Upon review the next day, 75% of the time the ideas are gibberish and I have a laugh at my own expense. The other 25% aren’t brilliant but are colourable and sometimes actually pan out. Usually about software design or parenting.
- thewizardofaus 4y agoI experience EXACTLY the same thing moments before falling asleep (no thc). It's truly amazing. If I manage to jolt myself awake I will write them down, otherwise they will be surely forgotten. And the ratio is similar to yours, good idea/gibberish(or not feasible).
- Waterluvian 4y agoIs it just as amusing to you, the sensation of being 100% convinced the idea is absolutely brilliant, only to review it and find its nonsense?
- Hbruz0 4y agoI've also experienced that a few times while semi-asleep, it is really intriguing. I haven't been able to write the ideas down yet, and had a tendency to discrad them at the thought that being in that state made the ideas sound amazing but wouldn't be in retrospect. I wonder how that phenomenon works, and if taking any psychoactive drug would produce similar results.
- leetrout 4y agoYou can force the hypnagogic state by holding something heavy that you drop as you fall asleep. https://institutducerveau-icm.org/en/actualite/sleep-and-creativity/ https://institutducerveau-icm.org/en/actualite/sleep-and-cre...
- nathias 4y agoI wake up with the solutions to whatever I uploaded as a problem during the day, it only works if I think the problem is important so it isn't really often.
- dr_dshiv 4y agoCarl Sagan talked about this effect — in combination with cannabis: https://www.organism.earth/library/document/mr-x https://www.organism.earth/library/document/mr-x
- alexpetralia 4y agoOne thing I noticed is that while I had good ideas in the shower, I couldn't remember them! (no pen/paper, phone, etc.) So, I started using mnemonics to remember my thoughts[0]. Now I take showers without feeling the anxiety of forgetting all the thing I thought about (e.g. chores, talk to someone, respond to email, write down an idea, etc.). [0] https://alexpetralia.com/2017/12/31/shower-recall/ https://alexpetralia.com/2017/12/31/shower-recall/
- lofaszvanitt 4y agoEhh, I have the eureka moments in the bed and ideas during walking/listening to something or reading something offtopic. After all memory retrieval is avalanche based. I turn off the PC, get in the bed, 5 minutes later I have the answer for that hard problem. I have noticed that sitting before the monitor sucks your brain down and hard problem solving or planning need some horizontal positioning, without any electronic device.
- andix 4y agoI think that’s why it’s sometimes important to just leave from work, if you’re doing something hard and get stuck. If you keep working hard, you may not find any solution. It happened really often to me, that on the next day the solution for the problem was „just there“. It just doesn’t fit our working culture, if our leave two hours early and if the boss asks you say: „I have to do a lot of complicated work, that’s why I’m leaving early“.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- QuantumGood 4y agoLeft/right brain isn't an accurate summary of the brain, but a useful distinction: • Left brain is thoughts, analysis, pattern following, etc. • Right brain is awareness without analysis, flow state, performance awareness To "listen" to your right brain awareness, you need to shut down the left brain at least a little bit. You need at least a little bit of space (or flow state) to hear the right brain. The left brain pushes itself on you. The right brain needs to be listened to be heard.
- asdff 4y agoIt makes sense why people get all their ideas in the shower. That's about the only time the modern human has where you aren't distracting yourself with some other external stimuli. I've even seen people use a public urinal with a phone in one hand.
- myself248 4y agoYup. I've been saying for years, the first things that humans did when we started inventing things, is we got rid of all the "boring tasks" that were letting our brains organize themselves. Chopping firewood? Got machines for that now. Knitting? Mechanized. Walking to the next town over? Now it's a high-concentration game of GTA with a radio for extra distraction. All of these things also had a mechanical element to them. Hands busy, mind wanders. We've _so_ deprived our brains of this organizing time, that we had to _reinvent boredom_, and now we call it meditation.
- shen 4y agoWould you recommend chopping wood or knitting over modern meditation?
- myself248 4y agoKnitting, 100%. The hurdle a lot of people (including myself) feel with meditation is that the benefits are hard to describe and harder to measure, so it's difficult to get into, or to keep going if you feel like you aren't definitely getting something from it right away. Knitting is every bit as meditative, plus you end up with a scarf or some other useful object, which reduces the hesitancy. You get a hand-made toque AND clearer thinking probably, so even if that "probably" is a hard sell, everyone appreciates a shawl. Plus you get neat stories, like "I was knitting this when I came up with the '602 patent". Some future museum curator is gonna lust over that artifact. There's no reason you can't apply modern meditative techniques _while_ knitting, either. If you've read up on meditation but found it hard to get going or stick with it, _add_ some repetitive manual work and try again. Chopping firewood is better for cardiovascular health, but it's difficult to do year round, and the byproduct is only useful to a diminishing number of households that're set up for wood heat. It's also more hazardous if you're clumsy or didn't grow up doing similar work, so think about how many colleagues you'd trust with a knife, much less an 8-lb splitting maul...
- somishere 4y agoI wasn't too surprised to find r/showerthoughts a few years ago, still going strong: https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Showerthoughts/
- astrange 4y agoThis is a remarkable example of annoying reddit moderation; it has something like a 50-step workflow you’re supposed to go through before posting so you can feel bad about how your thought isn’t exactly the right kind of shower thought to deserve posting.
- somishere 4y agoHaha, no doubt! But fun to read no less.
- s-xyz 4y agoGoing to keep up those daily walks and perhaps extend them!
- sph 4y agoThis is my ADHD super power. When I have a problem I take a shower, a walk, play a video game, just to let it stew in the background, sometimes for days. Get intoxicated. You'll eventually get that eureka! effect. It has never failed me. It's often suggested that one needs to work hard to crack a hairy problem. Nonsense. You've got a subconscious system always processing some idea, integrating external unrelated stimuli while you're doing something else: what is commonly called thinking outside the box. The hairier the problem, the least effective pointed focus is to crack it. You can't think outside the box if you're putting all your effort on the box. Go do something else. Conscious thought and focus is but a very small part of our intelligence. Learn to delegate some tasks to your background process.
- idontwantthis 4y agoThis is why I’ll never work in an office again. Why would I want to get stuck on a problem and be actively working against solving it because I’m stuck at work with nothing else to do?
- sph 4y agoSame here. My focused problem solving is powered by my legs: if stuck, I need to pace around with a notepad. Can't do that in an office without weird looks. When I was a smoker, I took a smoke+coffee break with a notepad to problem solve, that is more accepted in corporate life but I've dropped the habit.
- grugagag 4y agoI was a cigarette smoker too. I was doing the same thing and it worked wonderfully but I had to stop the nasty smelling habit. However, those vice forced brakes every 1-2 hours or so made me a lot more productive overall. Current office culture is very much desk bound, walking around, is not encouraged at all, and if I squint I could sort of see it in the product itself
- ehnto 4y agoSame, the legwork of "working hard" on a problem for me these days is just making sure I have all the information I need to stew over. I write up a factfinding doc of points in the codebase that I think are relevant, any context that's relevant, and symptoms of the bug. I never used to write it down but I work across a bunch of projects now so I can sometimes have the bug de-prioritised in my brain.
- jagthebeetle 4y agoI see this concept often cited when mathematicians talk about how they had a breakthrough on a proof, but I have to say, I don't think I've ever noticed it in myself, sadly. I have good ideas, and sometimes I need a break before my idea generation is back to a good state. Perhaps this is because I spend most of my time coding on complicated but not groundbreaking stuff. But a little bit of jealousy certainly at seeing this described as a "universal human experience."
- AtomicOrbital 4y agoneuroscience major unmet milestone will be when folk can hit replay to review adjacent past thoughts and perceptions... Monster catalyst to reward those fleeting ahaaas streams which spark off the best thoughts
- velcrovan 4y agoI still have not read anything on this topic (models of human thought, creativity and emotional affect) so clear and interesting as David Gelernter’s “The Muse in the Machine” (1994).
- farrarstan 4y ago[dead]
- whywhywhywhy 4y agoIf you're on a train or a bus and staring at your phone rather than the window then you're cheating yourself out of zero effort free ideas.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- quickthrower2 4y agoI never have shower ideas, but I do have walking and driving ideas.
- andirk 4y agoWhat about grocery store ideas?
- quickthrower2 4y agoSubset of walking I guess!
- justinlloyd 4y agoI have long held that a good night's rest, a long shower or a walk in nature are some of the best debugging and software architecture design tools that developers have at their disposal. We've all been pulling those late nights and long hours banging our head on the desk just to figure it, only to step away and figure out what we want in that Zen like moment of the morning shower. You absolutely need to put hands on keyboard to get your work done, but generally the amount of code pounded out is (usually) inversely proportional to the amount of thought I've given to the solution.