Diffuse Thinking

I recently finished the book Elastic by Leonard Mlodinow. The concept that he primarily covered reminded me a lot of Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman, with some new statistics to back it up. To grossly oversimplify, my takeaways were:

• We should take care of ourselves
• We should take more breaks
• We vastly over-value "left-brained", top-down, logical thinking
• Lateral, bottom-up, or diffuse thinking is, in reality, where the most important contributions to society come from – from the creative combinations of disperate ideas

The idea here is that our conscious "logical" mind – what we normally think of as serious thinking is just one mode of thought and, powerful as it is, it's also extremely limited in many ways, only really able to work with connections it's already made and pathways it's already comfortable with. Top down thinking is not good at combining unrelated ideas or looking at problems in novel ways, that's what diffuse thinking is good at. Diffuse thinking happens by default when our brain is at rest, when we're bored or "idle". We can't force our mind into top down thinking, we need to leave it alone. In this mode our mind is busy pairing seemingly unrelated concepts, and it's responsible for the "light-bulb" moments where we're in the shower or walking or relaxing and suddenly a solution to a sticky problem leaps into our minds.

I've heard this idea in different ways from different sources. In the online course Learning How to Learn Barbara Oakley highlights amazing examples of famous thinkers and inventors who all had some ritual around disengaging from their work and letting their minds work on the issue at hand in the background. I think it was Edison who supposedly would work on an issue for an hour or so and then sit in a chair with a metal ball in his hand. The ball was so that, if he fell asleep he would drop the ball and wake himself up. He didn't want to sleep, he just wanted to let his mind work. It's incredible that these people all somehow intuitively understood the value of disconnecting.

Frustratingly, just when we need this creative mode of thinking the most in order to solve the unique problems before us, we find ourselves in an environment where it's harder and harder to disengage. We have so much vying for our attention, so many ways to avoid letting our minds wander and do that background thinking that will lead us to creative solutions. Our attention is the thing being bought and sold in many cases.

Ironically, I've tended to pride myself on my focus, my ability to zero in on an issue and hammer away at it until it's fixed. And yet I'm convinced after reading books like Elastic that this is exactly what you don't want to do, especially if there might be a creative way to address an issue. Certainly I've often found myself spinning my wheels for hours, only to find a one-line fix the next day. Most likely if I had just stepped away for a few minutes the previous day I could have found the same solution more quickly.

I think this focus is closely related to my tendency to brood on issues, going over and over them in my mind. As though I could find a "solution" to things like whatever I messed up at work, or the stupid email I sent and regretted, or disturbing political news.

Self-reinforcing cycles are a real thing here. We are more expansive and creative in our thinking when we are in a good mood, and when we are more expansive and creative we are more likely to solve problems, which puts us in a better mood. Conversely, when we are anxious we contract and focus narrowly on the perceived threat, and with that narrowed focus our bottom-up thinking is impaired.

According to Dr. Judson Brewer, neuroscientist and author of Unwinding Anxiety, rumination or anxiety can become an ingrained habit in the same way as stress eating or smoking. It can have a triggering event such as an emotion or thought, followed by an automatic behavior such as rumination. The "reward", surprisingly, can be a sense of protection from wild swings in emotion–from anxious to calm and back. In one article he gives an example where research participants were reluctant to let go of anxiety saying "it felt 'safer' to simply stay anxious all the time."

A common thread in several of these books and articles is that mindfulness can be an antidote to distraction and anxiety, and can allow us to access that expansive diffuse thinking mode. As much baggage as the term mindfulness can have it's a simple matter of being able to recognize when our minds are distracted or spinning unhelpfully on a topic that we'd be better of letting go of. Similarly, it can help us to identify and short-circuit anxious rumination once it becomes a habit.