Bathrooms and Good Ideas: What’s The Link?

Good ideas are all around us. But is there anything we can do to encourage these ideas?

Well, it seems that our humble bathrooms may hold the answer. Hold on… bathrooms and good ideas? What’s the link?

It was whilst showering a few days ago (…not the last time I showered, I assure you) that I realised I wanted to find out exactly why so many of our thoughts come to us in the bathroom. These thoughts and ideas may not solve world hunger and probably aren’t a solution for world peace – but they are important aspects that are crucial in our everyday lives.

For example, as a writer I sometimes struggle to …well…write. I’ll sit at my desk for what seems like hours (it isn’t – in case my boss is reading), staring at an enormous amount of white space where my article should be.

And sometimes I have to crack on with other pieces of work in the meantime. Once I’m in the shower, though, it’s an entirely different story. I struggle to contain all the crazy thoughts that are going round.

Once I’m done, I jump out of the shower, onto my phone and type a slew of incoherent notes into my phone.

I’ll give you a slice of my life. The following list is a small selection of notes that are currently saved on my phone:

• Why do cats lick you? (This was as a result of my cat licking my ankles after I’d stepped out of the shower.)
• Green places to visit in England and Wales (An idea for an article.)
• Recipe with roquito peppers (I tried them recently and decided I’d buy some… then realised I don’t cook.)
• Online dating (…again, for an article. I promise.)

The contents of the aforementioned list all came to me whilst in the shower. OK – so they may not be ground breaking but they all came out of nowhere, at different times but in the same environment. Why is that?

Armed with this curiosity, I wanted to find out the science behind our shower ideas. Is it the bathroom setting that encourages our creative spark? Or is it just a simple case of relaxation and letting loose?

I spoke to Dr. Paul Howard-Jones, a reader in neuroscience and education from the University of Bristol to find out more. Paul’s area of interest includes bringing all the issues from neuroscience and how the brain works into education and how we learn.

Q: How would you say we can be more creative?

A: When we do a lot of work in our professional lives, a lot of it is about focusing our attention in a very narrow way, on a very few items that are closely related to a particular issue. To do that, we often close the curtains, we tell everybody to go away, we try not to get distracted and that type of work often requires us going through a very well defined set of stages in order to analyse, evaluate possibilities and reach a solution through a step-wise approach but there is another type of thinking which requires a much broader attentional state.

That requires a completely different type of environment; we often need to be relaxed and not worried about our ideas being evaluated.  Things such as a change in context or change in environment is really helpful so things that actually disrupt our normal way of thinking can be really supportive for coming up with new ideas because it prevents us from becoming too narrowly focused on just the obvious things that are associated with a particular problem.

It’s really about moving between these two states – being very narrowly focused and being very broadly focused. One of the problems that many of us have is that we do get stuck in a rut; we get fixated on a particular small set of solutions, a particularly small set of ideas. That’s when you get stuck in the analytical mode and you’re not able to make contact with these broader, less associated issues that might be helpful in finding a solution and that’s when you need to chill out and relax. That’s where the idea of showers comes in really.

Q: Is that why we get ideas in particular settings?

A: Back in, as early as the 1920’s, there was this idea that tallies with the more modern way of thinking in terms of moving between these two states; you had to think about the problem for a little bit and focus on it and then you had to go through to an incubation stage.

An incubation stage is where you relax and get right away from everything and completely chill out. It was regarded as a very mysterious period that would ultimately lead to illumination and suddenly this idea would just come into your mind. We have a better idea of how that works now but in no way does that more scientific understanding detract away from that wonderful mysterious aspect of the creative process. You do often need this incubation period before an idea suddenly appears to arrive out of nowhere.

There are loads of examples so for example, Planck came up with quantum theory when he was getting on a tram and wasn’t even thinking of anything to do with quantum physics.

Another example is Kukulé who came up with the idea of the Benzene ring whilst he was half asleep next to the fire.

The other one is Archimedes and the word Eureka, famously attributed to him, who came up with the idea of having a test for density whilst he was having a bath. The idea was that he stepped into the bath, noticed the water level rose and suddenly understood that you could measure volume in this way. Density is mass divided by volume but how do you actually measure the volume of things that are very irregular? His problem was to work out if a crown was made of gold or not.

The other way of looking at this is that the possibility of just being in the bath helped him gain that insight because he was relating something such as the bath to the problem of working out whether gold was really gold or not. They are two completely unrelated things but only in that relaxed state of actually being in the bathroom and being in the bath was he able to gain that insight.

Water has a long history of being relaxing. Trickling streams have always been associated with relaxation and I think that is probably key to understand the effects of water on creativity.

Q: Can our creativity be influenced by doing something enjoyable?

A: I think that anything that relaxes you can influence creativity. If you think about it, when you fall asleep at night, if you’re particularly chilled you quite often start entering that fantasy world where you start thinking of things you normally wouldn’t think about.

When you’re very relaxed, in fact, you can move your mind a lot more easily and are in contact with thoughts and memories that you’d long ago forgotten so that relaxed state is incredibly important for not focusing too much on a limited set of ideas and being able to make contact with ideas which are much further away. It’s making those remote associations and remote connections – and that is much easier when we’re not stressed.

Anything that relaxes you like a bath or shower is really good for that and that’s why I think so many people have good ideas in the bathroom. I know, because I’m the same way. An awful lot of ideas I do get in the shower – so it is true.

Q: So, do we create ideas better when we are alone?

A: We know that evaluation, or rather, apprehension of evaluation limits the number of ideas you can come up with so that’s why in brainstorming sessions it’s always really important not to be critical of ideas but to get everything up on the board to begin with.

But of course, in a private place, somewhere you know you’re not going to be interrupted is also really helpful because you’re less aware of the possibility of your thoughts being interrupted and being judged.

You’re freer to roam wherever your mind wants to roam.

Q: Would you suggest anything for actively trying to capture our ideas and influencing our creativity whilst in the bathroom?

A: I think the danger is, if you start making the bathroom into a workplace it might lose those qualities that are important for feeling relaxed and being able to travel mentally and seek out unusual ideas so I think it’s probably better to leave your notepad out of the bathroom!

It’s important, in a way, not to start littering the bathroom with things that remind you of work because that will be counter-productive. Once it starts resembling the work environment you’ll start feeling less able to relax and it is that relaxation that is so important.

There was actually a study done in the 90’s where they let people float in flotation tanks and then they asked them to come up with as many ideas as they possibly could. I think it was the Guildford Brick Test – it’s a standard test of creativity – so you ask people to think of as many ideas as they can for a brick – what could you use a brick for? Now, the solution is infinite but we do tend to dry up quickly, we become fixated. The people who had been in the floatation tanks, though, came up with many many more ideas after they’d had a very long soak rather than those people who did not.

This is just a classic example of how being in a watery, relaxing environment can be very helpful for making it more productive and you might say, ‘…but those ideas were probably rubbish’ where in actual fact the quantity of ideas seems to be closely related to the quality of ideas.

Anything which disrupts or changes the context in which you’re thinking is likely to be helpful in coming up with ideas. In terms of bathrooms – instead of taking in notebooks and things for you to write your ideas down which encourages you to feel like you’re on some sort of schedule and all the peripherals of work – it would actually be better to have something on the walls. Things that take you to different places, to different parts of your life, different memories, maybe places you haven’t been to and make sure they are widely spaced in terms of their meaning and their context. Include unrelated pictures which cover a diverse range of ideas and contexts and then change those pictures regularly. These parts of the bathroom environment may even contribute to your creativity.

Q: What other kinds of tests have been done to track creativity?

A: Other tests have been done which change the context so an experiment we did with children was to get them to map out different things, different unrelated aspects of their life and then we gave them a task. They had to come up with a design idea; we moved them on from point to another in what we call the ‘Brain Train’.

We asked them to come up with their favourite film or best holiday or anything like that and then moved them on to the next station to think of some more ideas and then later to the next station and so on.

Q: Is there anything we can do whilst in an environment where we can’t kick back and relax to inspire good ideas?

A: Another thing you can do is to talk to people. Social interaction will inevitably bring about new associations and new ideas and possibly with people you might not normally talk to as well. There’s evidence to suggest that there’s a part of your brain which is very much related to automatic obvious responses and we have to suppress that part of the brain when we come up with new ideas.

The evidence shows we don’t have to suppress it so much when we share ideas with other people – we don’t have to put so much resource into ignoring the obvious because those people produce new connections for us with our own ideas and also from sharing with other people.

Other things like going for a walk in the park and the other thing that is really important is sleep. It has been shown that a good regular sleep can improve the number of insights that you get the next day.

Q: Do you think more experiments will take place that measure the effect of water on creativity?

A: Water is a bit lethal in some of the environments that they do neuroimaging so it’s not very easy! But I do think it would be a very interesting avenue to explore – the connection between water and creativity and the experience of water because it does take you to another place.

It’s a very overwhelming experience for your body to be covered or submerged in water and the total change it brings about. It does bring about a change in mind set which we’ve all experienced in some way so I do think it would be a very worthwhile avenue to research in terms of understanding how to foster creativity and to understand more on the effects of water.

Now that I’ve shared my horribly embarrassing ideas – I’d like to hear from you! What ideas have you come up with in the shower? Drop me a comment below, Facebook or Tweet us.