Have you ever been in the shower washing the dirt of your day away and a random, powerful epiphany takes over your thoughts? It may be you’ve thought of a solution to a problem at work you’ve been pondering over for weeks, or even a life-changing decision. Well, let me be the first to tell you these grandiose thoughts don’t come from that Bath & Body Works collection of soaps that you use. It’s actually moreso the act of bathing in general that helps to prompt this moments of creativity.
Research proves that most epiphanies come to you when you are doing a mindless task. It’s when your brain turns to “auto pilot” mode that you actually have the most creative thoughts. According to Alice Flaherty, one of the most renowned neuroscientists currently researching creativity at M.I.T., “the shower can turn into an incubation period for your ideas to give you a distraction that triggers natural dopamine in the brain and provides the break you need to disengage from a fixation.”
Flaherty says that “when you attempt to focus on a problem your brain deactivates its default mode network.” Your brain’s DMN is what allows it to disconnect different regions of your head.
