Incubating an ideawatercolour and crayon
©2016 Charlene Brown
Take a break from solving a problem and do
something else. It is important that this break takes place after giving the
problem some thought, so that the break provides an incubation period for any
ideas you may have begun to form.I should mention right now that the ‘break’
pictured here at the top of the Sea-to-Sky Gondola took place during our annual
Mothers Day weekend in Squamish.
I had
not given any thought at all to the ‘problem’ of taking an online Psychology of
Creativity course which was to begin the day after Mothers Day, and thus had no
preparatory ideas to incubate. Anyway, misleading painting title aside, when we
returned home Sunday night, I found a lot of preliminary reading and a long
interactive lesson module in my email Inbox. Long story short, I got through it
in time for the first 10 am live computer session Monday morning – even after
the belated discovery that it started at 10 am Eastern time (7 am Pacific) but I
digress…
Back to the concept of incubating an
idea. A nap that achieves REM sleep provides
the ideal ‘incubation’ period. If the schedule can’t include this, similar
benefits can be achieved by doing some mind-numbing (and mind-wandering-inducing)
task during the break.
This has been tested in a controlled laboratory setting with boring computer tasks, but most of us are already aware that boring jobs encourage daydreaming. Isn’t it great that scientists have shown this is a good thing!
