Zoning out, mind-wandering and creativity -thwarted by mindfulness?

Living Room
#1

First a disclaimer: I have practiced mindfulness for quite some time now, and have personally found it beneficial. Research in my lab has also shown that it can be pragmatically helpful in clinical settings (e.g. smoking cessation), and can even change brain activity. So take my comments with a grain of salt…

There have been a spate of articles (mostly popular press) that are suggesting that mindfulness isn’t helpful for things like creativity. In this recent article in NYMag entitled “In Praise of Spacing Out” the author highlights some work suggesting that zoning out is good and mindfulness may not be that great. She quotes the authors of one of these books:

“One of the biggest misconceptions people have about mindfulness is that you can train yourself to stay in this mindful state all of the time,” Kashdan said. “And you can’t.” (“God, and why would you even want to?” Biswas-Diener added. “Oh my God, that sounds horrible.”)

While I completely agree that it is difficult to be mindful all of the time (this is after all why we practice), the arguments for why zoning out is a good thing are less convincing. The main ones seem to be centered around creativity and coming up with those “big ideas.”

In a New York Times article published earlier this year, Jonathan Schooler, a well-respected researcher on mind-wandering was quoted as saying:

The trick is knowing when mindfulness is called for and when it’s not. “When you’re staring out the window, you may well be coming up with your next great idea,” he said. “But you’re not paying attention to the teacher. So the challenge is finding the balance between mindfulness and mind wandering. If you’re driving in a difficult situation, if you’re operating machinery, if you’re having a conversation, it’s useful to hold that focus. But that could be taken to an extreme, where one always holds their attention in the present and never lets it wander.”

While one might wonder how much experience these folks have with mindfulness practice, both the NYMag and the NYTimes articles talk about the prevalence of mind wandering being roughly 50% (and there are good data to back up this number).

As a thought experiment, if your mind wandered 50% of the time, and you had an “aha” moment -a real insight- there is a 50/50 chance that the aha moment would arrive at the same time that your mind was wandering. As my PhD mentor used to say, these could be “true, true and unrelated”. In other words, they could be randomly associated -both just happened at the same time but one didn’t necessarily lead to the other; we have to prove causality to make this claim. And this is especially tricky with our brains, which are so good at associating things that happen at the same time.

In my own experience (again I’m biased!), I have found that I actually notice more creative, out of the box ideas after having practiced mindfulness, because I’m actually paying attention, and not as caught up in my preconceived notions of how the world “should” work.

Is this the same for others of you out there with a mindfulness practice? Am I missing something here?

(and if you’re interested in reading a bit more on some of the details of these studies, see this Huffington Post blog entitled “Is Mindfulness Harmful?”.)

#2

Hi Jud

First of all, thank you for this valuable site and the virtual space for this emerging community of contemplative research!

My maximally compressed response to your topic would be: Yes, in my experience mindfulness greatly enhances creativity!
(creativity as in writing research papers, poems and facebook texts as well as in finding novel ways to engage with and adapt dysfunctional patterns in my behavior/emotions/thoughts.)

But. The big but here would be, what do they mean when they talk about being mindful?

If being mindful contains an implicit understanding that we are mindful of something, and that something is only contained in the 5 senses, or as the slogan goes “being in the here and now”. Then I cannot really see how that would make one more creative.

But if we include thoughts in that equation. To be mindful as in being mindful both on the immediate sensory input and also on the seemingly endless streams of thoughts, associations, ideas, criticism, fantasies etc, that race through the mind, then I can see from my own experience how this “being mindful” may increase creativity.

By paying close attention to this stream, and learning how to disengage from not very fruitful thoughts such as quadrillions of “worst case scenarios” and looping ruminations of what others might think of me when I said XYZ,

This in turn could leave more “space” (perhaps corresponding to brain-body resources) for the mind to instead simulate and engage with more important matters and also open up for a greater connection with the senses and internal feelings

(In this theorizing I’m also flirting with the findings on greater connectivity between hemispheres and insula cell denstity in avid meditators )

A pointer here is my bias as a mindfulness instructor.

#3

Hi, @jud. Yes, though of course I share your bias, my experience is like your own: formal mindfulness practice has had a demonstrable positive impact on creativity.

This is particularly so towards the end, or shortly after, a week or longer silent retreat. After the first few days, the mental chatter quiets, opening space for more direct experience of the moment, without being pulled away from surface thoughts.

Towards the end of the retreat, a natural excitement may arise about the outside world, perhaps an eager anticipation. Skill helps one set aside monkey mind from flying off with our attention (flying monkeys… hm…), but an excited state may remain.

This combination of active enthusiasm, with not having surface thoughts damping down the mind, has resulted in tremendous bursts of both frequency and depth of creative expression. For me this manifested as a series of cartoons, one after the other, with new themes and ideas that hadn’t come up before.

In daily life, I’ve found a period of formal practice prior to mental creativity, or musical creativity, increases the flow of ideas or the stability of depth in the flute playing.

#4

Hi @jud,
I agree with what’s been said so far; formal mindfulness practice is very supportive of creativity for me! It helps let go of conditioned and sometimes invasive ways of thinking and reacting, and opens up a deeper, fresher form of attention to new ideas and ways of receiving information. In particular it heightens my sensitivity to sensory inputs, such as sound during jazz improvisation or seeing vibrancy in color in painting. I’ve noticed that after formal practice, I can sometimes access new ways of putting notes and colors together, and can receive the art of others’ in a steadier, deeper way.
I wonder whether the popular ideas of mindfulness and the actual embodied experience of it are not the same. The author of the NYMag article seems to understand mindfulness as a tether, whereas my personal experience of it is much more about letting go.
Although, while it is freeing, it can be uncomfortable to see things as they are (like sometimes on the NYC Subway (!), as the article mentions) or to let go of a really appealing fantasy thought loop. Maybe that’s why it sounds like an apparent tether?

#5

Hi all,

Interesting topic - personally, I’ve found that mindfulness practice has supported creativity, at least in terms of generating ideas (but I’m also probably biased). But when I read the HuffPo article, what immediately jumped to mind was the Science 2010 paper associating increased mind-wandering with unhappiness…and many of the classic creative geniuses were pretty tortured people! This is obviously a huge leap, but interesting to think about. For me, this raises the question of whether there are different types of mind-wandering, productive and non-productive? e.g. letting your mind travel away happily on its own vs mindless attention shifting…

#6

Hi,

Sorry I’m joining this conversation so late but it really struck a chord as I’ve recently had a discussion with a few literary friends about just this. They argued that you have to let your mind wander, and going for long walks to no-where for example can be very inducive to creative thinking. They felt that ‘being mindful’ while they walked would hinder this experience.
I really agree with Richa that I think it’s the difference between having an experiential understanding of mindfulness, and a theoretical one. I’ve had some a great ideas for data analysis (sorry, work reference) while ending a formal practice for example, and I really feel it has a lot to offer in terms of breaking the mind free from habitual behaviour, and seeing other possible avenues based on what is there and not what you percieved to be there. Going back to my friends comments about letting the mind wandering, I think part of the problem, like with most psychological paradigms, is that we’re using everyday words but in a different context. I think their term mind wandering and our term mindfulness have more in common then maybe they first appear to. Both sets of people are relaxing the mind, allowing it to explore itself and see what’s there. So at least from my perspective, I’d say it’s a definition problem.

#7

Zoning ou, or mind wandering, or brain rattling, is average

#8

…rattling is very average. With more practice it is easier to re enter a mindfully state of mind. At the start of a practice session for myself (I.e. Body scan) I try not to be exceptional, just average, expect wandering and aim Tao calmly resume the scan, remembering it is a practice not a performance.