How to Differentiate Random Thoughts and Great Ideas When Your Mind Wanders
You may have come across a way to solve your problem and achieve a goal.
Mind wondering lasts for some seconds or minutes. I used to think mind wandering is a bad thing. It’s not true.
I never learned how to control it when I was a child or after growing up.
Have you?
Mostly, I think you just go along with it when it happens.
It happens when you are doing something important, something usual, or something that makes you feel relaxed.
1. Our minds wander
When mind-wandering is about wandering something irrelevant to a task you do, I do think this:
“Why am I thinking about this?”
“Oh, that may be an idea.”
Not until I started doing my graduate studies. I started hearing my fellow students saying they keep notes, jotting down ideas. One of them even saying that she woke up at night and wrote them down because she kept her notebook and pen next to her bed.
While reading news articles and your mind starts wandering somewhere, thinking about something else. Or when you are reading a book.
We may hear people around us talk about writing down ideas or thoughts for your article content, and so on. But we never really hear how or out of what.
It takes up your time to finish your reading once your mind wanders around for some unrelated things. Because you were consumed by it and because you were not in control of it.
2. It has been studied recently
When you decide you want to read this book, for example, that’s the deliberate constraint you choose to be in it. When your mind is drifting away in the context of the story you are reading: that is the automatic constraint.
When you have worries in life, for example, your thoughts bring you to those topics. It is free movement. And the unrelated thought is about going somewhere during the weekend pops up in your mind. Research led by UC Berkeley studied these four types of mind wandering while participants were doing a task.
The results were published early this year.
So, what happens in our brain?
3. The brain is doing it (for you) during increased alpha waves
This is part of the cognitive process that we all have, and it helps us find an incredible idea, Forbes said.
The study results illustrate that EEG data exhibit the changes (variabilities) and power in the frontal area when divergent and creative thinking happened in participants’ minds. These appeared during a simple task where participants reported their flick of thoughts coming to their minds. Both task unrelated (e.g. plan for the weekend) and free-moving were evident (e.g. thoughts jumps from one topic to another); however, their occurrence rates were different (the unrelated thoughts were 66% versus free-moving 47%).
As psychologists have found, the mind-wandering state isn’t bad. It happens whether or not we are doing some tasks or not. And that may help us solve problems. Like the problems that cannot be solved when we are focused or trying too hard.
Learn how to channelize it since it’s inevitable for human minds to wander.
We have experienced it all our lives, like sleep, the cycle we go over and over. It must be something important in our lives.
If you know you can take control, then it isn’t a bad thing.
4. Take control of it
While you read, your mind may wander somewhere, thinking about something a bit off track from the reading content.
Zachary C. Irving sums up well how we can digest this notion of mind-wandering:
“On the one hand, mind-wandering seems essentially purposeless; almost by definition, it contrasts with goal-directed cognition. On the other hand, empirical evidence suggests that our minds frequently wander to our goals. My solution to the puzzle is this: mind-wandering is purposeless in one way — it is unguided — but purposeful in another — it is frequently caused, and thus motivated, by our goals.”
There is no guarantee that all our wandering leads us to an innovative idea.
Like the study results of UC Barkeley show, the random thoughts/task-unrelated thoughts occur a little more than free-moving thoughts (your thoughts linking one topic to another which is more likely to be associated with ideas).
We can analyze the usefulness of our mind-wandering once we are off the task.
In another research, Gable et al. studied the phenomenon surrounding creative ideas and the importance of daily ideas are to the participants at the time of occurrence and the follow-ups. Participants were physicians and professional writers.
“We found that ideas that occurred during mind wandering did not differ from on-task ideas on same-day ratings of creativity or importance.” — Shelly L. Gable, Elizabeth A. Hopper, and Jonathan W. Schooler
What they found was this. Participants rated their thoughts higher as creative ones after 3 months and 6 months compared to when the thoughts occurred.
That’s pretty important to note. And it is natural to understand it — at the moment when a thought just pops up, you can’t really tell if it’s a great idea unless it is something like a line of code to solve your programming problem, and you intuitively know it’s correct.
So, how are you able to say it was a great idea?
Capture it, and use it.
Nir Eyal suggests trying three things in his article How to Tame Your Wandering Mind and Actually Get Some Work Done:
(1) Make time to mind-wander
(2) Catch the action
(3) Note and refocus
As he says, you need to know these. When it happens in just a few seconds, it won’t become a distraction in what you are doing. But when it does, don’t let it drift you away from your important work. Knowing that you have jotted down the thought, you can shift back to whatever you were doing and think about it later.
By reexamining the ideas later, you take control of a small bud of thought — it may or may not be very useful after all.
Recently, I did it. I drew my ideas while relaxing facing the TV. I used the image and created it using a software called Blender. And I wrote an article related to it and used the image. So, about a month later, I can say it turned out to be a great idea! I’m glad I drew it when my mind wandered the shape of a robot, and I made part of it before writing an article for Start it up.
Your brain is super busy. It tries to help you solve problems when you aren’t aware of them.
It seems it is inevitable that our mind wanders — we better know how to maneuver it.
Recap the above
1) Our minds wander.
2) It has been studied recently.
3) The brain is doing it (for you) during increased alpha waves.
4) Take control of it by noticing it, do not be drifted away but take a quick note if you are on an important task. Make time to reflect on it and think about its usefulness.
Thanks for reading!
Kaori writes about multiple genres. Find her recent articles and support her by going ( → here).
