Random Episodic Silent Thinking
After observing a similar habit among highly creative people (Einstein, Mozart, da Vinci, etc), the neuroscientist Dr. Nancy Andreasen designed a brain-imaging study to understand the neural basis of this habit. Essentially, these creative people all carved out time each day for “free-floating periods of thought,” Andreasen writes in her book The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius. So Dr. Andreasen conducted the first study of brain activity during these “free-floating periods of thought,” when the body is in a “resting state” and the mind is free of inputs, and therefore, free to wander. “We found activations in multiple regions of the association cortex,” she writes. “We were not [seeing] a passive silent brain during the ‘resting state,’ but rather a brain that was actively connecting thoughts and experiences.” Essentially, Dr. Andreasen found that the brain defaults to creativity. When the body is still and the mind is allowed to float freely, the brain engages in what she termed REST (“random episodic silent thinking”). And during REST, Dr. Andreasen writes, the brain “uses its most human and complex parts…areas known to gather information and link it all together—in potentially novel ways.” That’s the theme of this SIX at 6…
The Sound of Silence
For his first 6 years of trying to be a songwriter, Paul Simon wrote terrible songs. “They were all terrible,” his biographer Robert Hilburn said, “I found his old demos—there’s about 50 of them—and it’s unbelievable: there isn’t one good song.” Finally, in the fall of 1963, Simon made a vow: After spending those first 6 years mostly “copying what was on the radio,” Hilburn writes, “he vowed to reach inside to find out if he had anything of his own to say in a song.” To try to find out what was inside him, Simon developed a strange habit. He’d “go off in the bathroom,” Simon explains, “and I’d turn on the faucet so that water would run—I like that sound, it’s very soothing to me.” Night after night in November of 1963, he’d sit in the bathroom alone with the lights off, letting his mind float freely like the water running from the faucet. During one of these REST sessions in his dark bathroom, these words came to him:
Hello darkness, my old friend
I’ve come to talk with you again
Because a vision softly creeping
Left its seeds while I was sleeping
And the vision that was planted in my brain
Still remains within the sound of silence
They became the opening verse of “The Sound of Silence,” a song that led to a record deal with Columbia Records, then a spot at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week ending January 1, 1966, and then a spot at No. 156 on Rolling Stone’s list of the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time.
I Figured Out Every Design I’ve Ever Done In A Taxicab
For a little over five decades, the legendary designer Paula Scher has been highly productive. If you’ve used Microsoft Windows, eaten at Shake Shack, seen the Citibank logo or the Boston album cover, or been to New York City (it’s said that “New York City ate the style identity” that Scher developed for The Public Theater in the early 1990s)—you know some of her work. Asked if she has any productivity tricks, Scher said, “I have a productivity trick that I didn’t know I had until I heard about it on a radio program. NPR did this interview with experts about boredom” and how—with iPhones and emails and video games and Wifi on airplanes and so on—it’s increasingly difficult to sit with boredom. “I didn’t realize until I listened to that broadcast how important boredom is to me,” Scher continues. “I think I figured out every identity program I’ve ever done in a taxicab…Or trapped in some other boring situation, that’s when I get the best ideas.” In another interview she said, “Taxicabs, for me, are very special because you sit in the back, you don’t have to talk to anybody, you can look out the window and you can sort of let your mind wander.” You can REST.
Being Becalmed For Hours Simply Provides More Time To Think
Albert Einstein had a wooden boat he called the “Tinef” (Yiddish for “piece of junk”) on which he liked to aimlessly drift wherever he could find a body of water. “Frequently he would go all day long, just drifting around,” remembered one neighbor. “He apparently was just out there meditating.” He was just out there RESTing. He had to be rescued by boaters or the Coast Guard so frequently that a friend eventually bought him an outboard motor for emergency use, but Einstein refused it. “To the average person, being becalmed for hours might be a terrible trial,” the friend said. “To Einstein, this could simply provide more time to think.”
Accept The Initial Agitation
As I’ve tried to carve out time each day for REST, I’ve found it helpful to say to myself, “Accept the initial agitation.” It’s also what I say to myself every morning when I sit down to read and then when I sit down to write, “Accept the initial agitation.” When you try to focus or when you try to sit with boredom, Dr. Andrew Huberman explains, “the brain circuits that turn on first are of the stress system.” Meaning that when you try to lean into boredom or a bout of focused work, at first, the brain naturally tries to resist. It might have you reflexively reach for your phone, tempt you to pull up your email, or remind you about that text you still need to reply to. In any case, Huberman says, “The agitation and stress that you feel at the beginning is just a recognized gate…There is a gate of entry. You have to wade through some sewage before you can swim in clear water. That’s the way I always think about it.”
When They Seem Least to Labor…
Leonardo da Vinci would often sit in front of a painting “and simply think, sometimes for as long as a half day.” Once as Leonardo was simply thinking, a Duke who commissioned him to create a painting complained about Leonardo’s apparent laziness. “Men of genius,” he replied, “are sometimes producing most when they seem least to labor, for their minds are then occupied in the shaping of those conceptions to which they afterward give form.”