Activate the mind without dwelling anywhere.

-The Diamond Cutter Scripture

Zen Master Tauan (1573-1645): The Inscrutable Subtlety of Immovable Wisdom.

Chapter One, section 1, The Affliction of Ignorant states of fixation, opens with the following paragraph.

Ignorance is written with characters meaning “no enlightenment” and refers to confusion. A state of fixation is written with characters meaning a “state of lingering” and refers to the fifty-two stages of Buddhist practice. Within these fifty-two stages, wherever the mind lingers is called a state of fixation. Fixation means lingering, and lingering means keeping the mind on something, whatever it may be.

While reading this, I remembered that I had seen this idea recently, and with a little thought and file searching, I found it. Paul Graham, of Y Combinator fame’s blog archive.

Graham: What are you lingering on?

July 2010

I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I’d thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I’d go further: now I’d say it’s hard to do a really good job on anything you don’t think about in the shower.

Everyone who’s worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There’s a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I’m increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly. [1]

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That’s the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they’re allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. This means it’s a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.

What made this clear to me was having an idea I didn’t want as the top one in my mind for two long stretches.

I’d noticed startups got way less done when they started raising money, but it was not till we ourselves raised money that I understood why. The problem is not the actual time it takes to meet with investors. The problem is that once you start raising money, raising money becomes the top idea in your mind. That becomes what you think about when you take a shower in the morning. And that means other questions aren’t.

I’d hated raising money when I was running Viaweb, but I’d forgotten why I hated it so much. When we raised money for Y Combinator, I remembered. Money matters are particularly likely to become the top idea in your mind. The reason is that they have to be. It’s hard to get money. It’s not the sort of thing that happens by default. It’s not going to happen unless you let it become the thing you think about in the shower. And then you’ll make little progress on anything else you’d rather be working on. [2]

The reason this struck me so forcibly is that for most of the preceding 10 years, I’d been able to think about what I wanted. So the contrast when I couldn’t was sharp. But I don’t think this problem is unique to me, because just about every startup I’ve seen grinds to a halt when they start raising money — or talking to acquirers.

You can’t directly control where your thoughts drift. If you’re controlling them, they’re not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want to think about.

You don’t have complete control, of course. An emergency could push other thoughts out of your head. But barring emergencies you have a good deal of indirect control over what becomes the top idea in your mind.

I’ve found there are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding. One I’ve already mentioned: thoughts about money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention sink.

The other is disputed. These too are engaging in the wrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely interesting ideas, but without the substance. So avoid disputes if you want to get real work done. [3]

Even (Isaac) Newton fell into this trap. After publishing his theory of colors in 1672 he found himself distracted by disputes for years, finally concluding that the only solution was to stop publishing:

“I see I have made myself a slave to Philosophy, but if I get free of Mr Linus’s business I will resolutely bid adew to it eternally, excepting what I do for my privat satisfaction or leave to come out after me. For I see a man must either resolve to put out nothing new or become a slave to defend it.” [4]

Linus and his students at Liege were among the more tenacious critics. Newton’s biographer Westfall seems to feel he was overreacting:

Recall that at the time he wrote, Newton’s “slavery” consisted of five replies to Liege, totaling fourteen printed pages, over the course of a year.

I’m more sympathetic to Newton. The problem was not the 14 pages, but the pain of having this stupid controversy constantly reintroduced as the top idea in a mind that wanted so eagerly to think about other things.

Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who do you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it.

If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I’ve found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn’t deserve space in my head.

Eddie Sub-note:

“When another blames you or hates you, or people voice similar criticisms, go to their souls, penetrate inside, and see what sort of people they are. You will realize that there is no need to be racked with anxiety that they should hold any particular opinion about you.”
― Marcus Aurelius, Meditations

I’m always delighted to find I’ve forgotten the details of disputes because that means I hadn’t been thinking about them. My wife thinks I’m more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish.

I suspect a lot of people aren’t sure what’s the top idea in their mind at any given time. I’m often mistaken about it. I tend to think it’s the idea I’d want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it’s easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it’s not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.

Paul’s Notes

[1] No doubt there are already names for this type of thinking, but I call it “ambient thought.”

[2] This was made particularly clear in our case, because neither of the funds we raised was difficult, and yet in both cases, the process dragged on for months. Moving large amounts of money around is never something people treat casually. The attention required increases with the amount—maybe not linearly, but definitely monotonically.

[3] Corollary: Avoid becoming an administrator, or your job will consist of dealing with money and disputes.

[4] Letter to Oldenburg, quoted in Westfall, Richard, Life of Isaac Newton, p. 107.

Science of showers helping thought and creativity.

Creativity, at its very core, boils down to this:

“A creative idea will be defined simply as one that is both novel and useful (or influential) in a particular social setting.” – Researchist Alice Flaherty

This applies to every field Flaherty explains, including programming, business, and mathematics together with the more traditional “creative” fields, such as music or drawing. And yet, there is still a very distinct process behind it:

Our brain on creativity: The example of freestyle rap

What is actually active in our brain when we are doing something creatively?

That’s always been extremely hard to track as creativity has always been considered a very vague activity, until recently. Researchers Allen Braun and Siyuan Liu decided to, Track the brain activity of rappers doing freestyle and turn it into a research study.

What Braun and Liu found was fascinating. When we are being creative, some of the everyday brain areas are completely deactivated, whilst others we don’t use in our everyday lives light up:

They explain: “Artists showed lower activity in the part of their frontal lobes called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during improvisation, and increased activity in another area, called the medial prefrontal cortex. The areas that were found to be ‘deactivated’ are associated with regulating other brain functions.”

In layman’s terms, Braun states:

“We think what we see is a relaxation of ‘executive functions’ to allow more natural de-focused attention and uncensored processes to occur that might be the hallmark of creativity.”

When in a creative state the areas in our brain, that we use to make decisions are largely inactive. The “medial prefrontal cortex” area, which is responsible for learning association, context, events, and emotional responses however are extremely active during these creative processes.

This is so fascinating, because, for the first time, there is an activity, Freestyle Rap, that is deeply creative and fairly straightforward to measure.

“From an observers/researchers’ standpoint, it makes sense to substitute free-style rapping for writing, drawing, solving programming problems, and more,” states Braun.

Come to find out, this state of the brain during creative moments, is similar to our brain’s activity whilst we sleep. More on that in a moment!

Why do we have great ideas in the shower then?

The fact that free-style rapping shows us a high level of creativity still doesn’t explain why great ideas happen in the shower.

Alice Flaherty, who I mentioned earlier, is one of the most renowned neuroscientists researching creativity. She has an answer for us. She has found that another ingredient, that’s very important for us to be creative is dopamine.

The more dopamine that is released, the more creative we are, she says:

“People vary in terms of their level of creative drive according to the activity of the dopamine pathways of the limbic system.”

Typical triggers for events, that make us feel great and relaxed and therefore give us an increased dopamine flow are taking a warm shower, exercising, driving home, etc. The chances of having great ideas then are a lot higher.

Dopamine alone, which gets triggered in hundreds of events, where we aren’t very creative, is not the only reason.

Another crucial factor is distraction, says Harvard University researcher and psychologist Shelley H. Carson, author of “Your Creative Brain”

“In other words, a distraction may provide the break you need to disengage from a fixation on the ineffective solution.’’

Think about this… you have thought long and hard all day about a problem. Jumping into the shower is a distraction, and can turn into what scientists call the “incubation period” for your ideas.

The subconscious mind has been working extremely hard to solve the problems you face and now that you give yourself a distraction, letting your mind wander, it can move those subconscious thoughts into your conscious mind.

After you have received an influx of dopamine, you can be easily distracted by some habitual tasks like showering or vacuuming. “A relaxed state of mind is absolutely important to be creative”, says Jonah Lehrer.

“Why is a relaxed state of mind so important for creative insights? When our minds are at ease–when those alpha waves are rippling through the brain–we’re more likely to direct the spotlight of attention inward, toward that stream of remote associations emanating from the right hemisphere.

In contrast, when we are diligently focused, our attention tends to be directed outward, toward the details of the problems we’re trying to solve. While this pattern of attention is necessary when solving problems analytically, it actually prevents us from detecting the connections that lead to insights.

‘That’s why so many insights happen during warm showers,’ Dr. Jay Bhattacharya says. ‘For many people, it’s the most relaxing part of the day.’ It’s not until we’re being massaged by warm water, unable to check our e-mail, that we’re finally able to hear the quiet voices in the backs of our heads telling us about the insight. The answers have been there all along–we just weren’t listening.”

So this seems to be the magic combination: If you are in a relaxed state of mind, easy to distract, and full of dopamine, your brain is most likely to give you your best, most creative ideas.

Science of ambient thinking?

Just moments ago, I quoted Dr. Bhattacharya he stated:

In contrast, when we are diligently focused, our attention tends to be directed outward, toward the details of the problems we’re trying to solve. While this pattern of attention is necessary when solving problems analytically, it actually prevents us from detecting the connections that lead to insights.

In 2001 David Allen released his book, Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-free Productivity, Allen promotes the idea that the human brain is not designed to be utilized as a to-do list. Based on science Allen shows that the brain can only deal with about seven items in short-term, working memory. Mix that part of the system and the administrative controls in the brain cannot rest. As we recognized earlier in the podcast when those systems take breaks during times of creativity.

From the research titled: Getting Things Done: The Science Behind Stress-Free Productivity:

One fundamental criticism of symbolic theories is that if you try to represent all the relevant aspects of the real world with symbols, your representation becomes much too complex to be systematically explored by a computer, and a fortiori by the human brain. Indeed, the brain is limited by the famous “magical number seven” (Miller, 1956): not more than about seven items can be held simultaneously in working memory. A sufficiently detailed description of a real-world situation will typically include hundreds of symbols (words, concepts, features) that can be combined in millions of different ways, making it essentially impossible to manipulate these symbols in order to systematically explore all their potentially relevant combinations.

Instead, the brain relies on its long-term memory, which can store millions of facts, to quickly recognize patterns in incoming information. Recognized patterns function as stimuli that trigger appropriate responses or actions. Unlike a computer program, the neural network structure of the brain is very good at identifying patterns, associating perceived patterns with the appropriate actions, and at storing patterns and associations in long-term memory.

However, it is very poor at simultaneously keeping several such patterns actively in mind while reasoning, because the corresponding patterns of neural activation tend to interfere with each other.

Moreover, activation quickly decays because of diffusion and neuronal fatigue.  Finally, while long-term memory is very effective at recognition, it is rather poor at recall, i.e. reviving memory patterns without perceptual stimulation. This is illustrated by the “tip of the tongue” phenomenon, where a fact, such as a colleague’s name, cannot be recalled—even though you know the memory is there. In that sense, human memory is much less reliable than computer memory for retrieving a fact outside of the concrete context that reminds you of that fact.

In other words, we have to clear our minds (brain-dump) all those “to-do” type tasks in our minds so we can allow our creative conscious and sub-conscious regions to be accessed easier and positively creative.

You may remember that I mentioned the idea of the Most Important Question of Josh Waitzkin’s design in Episode 7, our first Talk ‘O Tuesday Conversation.

Waitzkin’s MIQ process looks something like this…

First, identify your MIQ. At the end of your workday, reflect on what the #1 most important question is for you to answer in your life right now. What’s the question that, if answered, would create the biggest positive impact in your life? At any point in time, there’s only ONE question that’s most important for us to solve in our life. Identifying it is half of the battle.

Now, Write your MIQ down. I do this in my designated MIQ Journal. But you can use Evernote, OneNote, or any other tool you prefer.

Here is the hard part, Stop thinking about the question. Once you’ve written it down, that’s your invitation for the conscious mind to let go of wrestling with the challenge for the rest of the day. Do your best to stay present for the rest of the activities of your day.

After an evening free of the questions thought, and a full night’s sleep, free-write on your question shortly after waking in the morning. Maybe after your shower? When your mind is sharpest and clearest, and after your subconscious mind has had time to connect the dots around your MIQ…do a brain dump about the topic. I often find that a challenge that previously felt intimidating, scary, or complex will feel simpler and easier to face.

Finally, Use your journaling to make a decision.If there’s a decision that needs making, use your journaling to inform it. Trust your gut. Most of the time, you’re able to pick a path right then and there.

Remember Mr. Graham’s thoughts that what is lingering in our minds may not be the best use of that time? And Zen Master Tauan’s description of fixation on a topic? The MIQ process assists in maintaining sub-conscious work on what is important, not the easy thing our mind gets stuck on.

Science of subconscious (sleep on it) creativity?

Researchers Creswell, Bursley, and Satpute at Carnegie Mellon University did some significant research on unconscious thought processes and their effects on decision-making performance. Links to the research are in the show notes.

The paper titled, Neural reactivation links unconscious thought to decision-making performance. Finds that, and I quote:

The nature of the unconscious mind has long challenged philosophers and scientists (Schooler, 2002; Wilson, 2002), but the present work offers a new perspective on this topic by way of examining the brain. We find that brain regions that are active during encoding new decision information reactivate while the brain coordinates responses to other unrelated tasks and that this unconscious neural reactivation is associated with decision-making performance when participants are prompted to make decisions.

In other words, “It shows that brain regions important for decision-making remain active even while our brains may be simultaneously engaged in unrelated tasks, such as sleeping, thinking about a math problem or playing a board game with the family. What’s most intriguing about this finding is that participants did not have any awareness that their brains were still working on the decision problem while they were engaged in an unrelated task.”

I think we have discussed the basic points of The Most Important Question.  I guarantee I will be returning to the topic of the MIQ in future episodes, and diving deeper into these ideas and real-world observations and how they are pertinent to our lives, businesses, and organizations today.

Links to all the quoted resources are in the show notes and in the transcript on my website, Eddiekillian.com

Join me next Tuesday as we continue to travel the path of what is difficult, perilous, and uncertain as we explore introducing A New Order of Things.

I am your host, Eddie Killian. And this concludes Episode 14.

References

Allen, D. (2001). Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity. London: Penguin Books.

Creswell, J. D., Bursley, J. K., & Ajay, S. B. (2013). Neural reactivation links unconscious thought to decision-making performance. SCAN, 863-896.

Graham, P. (2010, July). The Top Idea in Your Mind. Retrieved from Paulgraham.com: http://www.paulgraham.com/top.html

Heylighen, F., & Vidal, C. (n.d.). Getting Things Done: The Science behind Stress-Free Productivity . Brussels: ECCO – Evolution, Complexity and Cognition research group.

Liu, S., Chow, H. M., Erikkinen, M. G., Swett, K. E., Eagle, M. W., Rizik-Baer, D. A., & Braun, A. R. (2012). Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of Freestyle Rap. Nature: Scientific Reports. doi: DOI: 10.1038/srep00834

Waitzkin, J. (2008). The Art of Learning. New York: Free Press.