Free Imagine: How Creativity Works by Jonah Lehrer Page A

consistently engage in more daydreaming score significantly higher on measures of creativity (to evaluate daydreaming, he gave subjects a slow section of War and Peace and then timed how long it took them to start thinking about something else). “What these tests measure is someone’s ability to find hidden relationships that can help them solve a problem,” Schooler says. “That kind of thinking is the essence of creativity. And it turns out that people who daydream a lot are much better at it.”
    However, not all daydreams are equally effective at inspiring useful new ideas. In his experiments, Schooler distinguishes between two types of daydreaming. The first type occurs when people notice they are daydreaming only when prodded by the researcher. Although they’ve been told to press a button as soon as they realize their minds have started to wander, these people fail to press the button. The second type of daydreaming occurs when people catch themselves during the experiment — they notice they’re daydreaming on their own. According to Schooler’s data, individuals who are unaware that their minds have started wandering don’t exhibit increased creativity. “The point is that it’s not enough to just daydream,” Schooler says. “Letting your mind drift off is the easy part. The hard part is maintaining enough awareness so that even when you start to daydream you can interrupt yourself and notice a creative thought.” In other words, the reason Fry is such a good inventor — he has more than twenty patents to his name, in addition to Post-it notes — isn’t simply that he’s a prolific mind-wanderer. It’s that he’s able to pay attention to his daydreams and to detect those moments when his daydreams generate insights.
    This helps explain another interesting experiment from Schooler’s lab, described in a 2009 paper wittily entitled “Lost in the Sauce.” In this study, Schooler once again had undergraduates read a boring passage from War and Peace. However, he first gave some of the students a generous serving of vodka and cran-berry juice. Not surprisingly, the drunk readers had a tougher time paying attention to the text than their sober classmates and were much more likely to engage in idle daydreams. More important, though, the students given alcohol almost always failed to notice they had stopped paying attention to Tolstoy until probed. Schooler suggests that’s because alcohol induces a particularly intense state of mind-wandering, which he refers to as zoning out. “This is why it’s nice to have a beer or two after work,” Schooler says. “We become a little less aware of what we’re thinking. But that awareness is also the key to a productive session of mind-wandering. You might solve a problem while drunk, but you probably won’t notice the answer.”
    The lesson is that productive daydreaming requires a delicate mental balancing act. On the one hand, translating boredom into a relaxed form of thinking leads to a thought process characterized by unexpected connections, and as a result, a moment of mo-notony can become a rich source of insights. On the other hand, letting the mind wander so far away that it gets lost isn’t useful; even in the midst of an entertaining daydream, you need to maintain a foothold in the real world.
    Schooler has begun applying this research to his own life: he now takes a dedicated daydreaming walk every day. He shows me his favorite route, a hiking trail on the bluffs above a scenic Santa Barbara beach. The landscape is chaparral and oak trees; the only sound is the rhythm of the waves below. “This is where I come to relax,” Schooler says. “But just because I’m relaxed doesn’t mean I’m not working. What I realized is that the kind of thinking I do here [on the hike] is so useful that I needed to build it into my work routine. It wasn’t enough to just daydream in my spare moments, while sitting in traffic or waiting in line. I