Scientists explain why you have your best ideas in the shower

When you keep turning over that problem in your mind and no amount of logical thinking provides the solution, standing under the shower could be just what you need.

Scientists say they have discovered exactly why people report getting their best ideas just when they are not at their desks and cannot write them down.

The reason is that creative inspiration is much more likely to strike when people are doing a habitual task that does not require much thought than they are through hard work.

Being on “autopilot” lets the mind wander or engage in spontaneous “stream-of-consciousness” thinking, according to experts.

This mental relaxation helps retrieve unusual memories and generate new ideas.

“People always get surprised when they realise they get interesting, novel ideas at unexpected times because our cultural narrative tells us we should do it through hard work,” says Kalina Christoff, a cognitive neuroscientist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. “It’s a pretty universal human experience.”

New research, reported by National Geographic, has found a pattern of brain activity, within what’s called the default mode network, that occurs while an individual is resting or performing routine tasks that do not require much attention.

The scientists showed that the default mode network, which links more than a dozen regions of the brain, becomes more active during tasks that are passive or let your mind wander than during tasks that demand focus.

Roger Beaty, a cognitive neuroscientist and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab at Penn State University, said DMN is “the state the brain returns to when you’re not actively engaged”.

By contrast, when people are carrying out demanding tasks the brain keeps their thinking focused, analytical and logical, rather than creative.

But Prof Beaty said it was unwise to place blind faith in ideas that are generated in the shower or any other bout of mind-wandering because other brain networks are needed to help modify, reject or implement ideas.

Prof Christoff advises paying attention to thoughts and ideas that occur to you in the liminal state between being sound asleep and fully awake or as soon as you wake up from a full night’s sleep.