(2024-04-23) Johnson Mulling Versus Making

Steven Johnson: Mulling Versus Making. ...we ended up explaining to them how the burden of a day job—and other daily imperatives, like parenting—didn't just interfere with writing productivity because it limited the number of hours you could spend at the word processor. The other cost—more subtle but in a way just as important—came from the way daily responsibilities hijacked your mind-wandering time.

that active mode where you are generating material needs to be supplemented by a different mode, where you're away from the computer and that insistent blinking cursor, and your mind is free to wrestle with the unsolved problems of the work, or dream up a potential ending for a chapter, or forge some new connection that had previously not been visible to you. Think of it as the difference between making and mulling

when you are mulling, you don't have that fixed problem in front of you; most of the time you're away from the screen, doing some other activity that doesn't require conscious thought or deliberation.

I have a few rituals during my day where I try to carve out time for mind-wandering. The most important one is my daily walk (walking) to get a coffee at a lovely little neighborhood coffeehouse a few blocks from us in Crown Heights

I deliberately do not listen to a podcast during this time, or even listen to music. It's during this time—maybe thirty minutes tops—that I find myself mulling whatever creative ideas I'm working on

I do something like this at the end of the day, over a glass of wine usually

One of the most remarkable qualities of this mind-wandering state is that it doesn't feel as though you are completely in control of it. Thoughts just seem to pop into your head, as opposed to being consciously retrieved. ("Ideas rose in crowds... until pairs interlocked," the mathematician Henri Poincaré once said of his own mulling process.) As a mental state, it feels very bottom-up, emergent. And it turns out this mental state has a distinct neurological fingerprint that can be detected in a PET or FMRI scan, what scientists now call the "default-mode network", meaning the state the human brain defaults to when it is not otherwise distracted by a specific, effortful task.

The Times piece covered this in much more detail if you're interested, but the quick summary is that in the early days of PET scans, researchers needed to have a set of "control" images

they kept getting this weird result back that seemed initially to be some kind of error: people's brains were more active when they were told to do nothing, and they were more active in very consistent regions

Nancy Andreasen, one of the first scientists to realize that this was not just noise in the data, but in fact interesting signal, noted that most of the default-mode activity took place in what are called the association cortices of the brain, the regions of the brain that are most pronounced in Homo sapiens compared with other primates and that are often the last to become fully operational as the human brain develops through adolescence and early adulthood. “Apparently, when the brain/mind thinks in a free and unencumbered fashion,” she wrote, “it uses its most human and complex parts.”

It's as though we are species optimized for daydreaming

And that finding—the high-level thinking that appears to lie beneath the surface of mere mind-wandering—brings us back to my conversation with my writer friend over dinner.

When I'm really cranking on a book, I'll write two hours a day, max. It's just too mentally exhausting to do more than that. So even with a 9-to-5 job, it's usually possible to find an hour or two to advance the project

The more challenging problem, I think, is that the pressing, immediate objectives of your work life crowd out your more creative mind-wandering

I would wager than more than half of the important ideas I've had for my books have come out of mulling and not making

there's a flow-state quality to a good mind-wandering session

it's not really a skill you have to learn; it's more of an instinct. You just put the phone down, take the AirPods out, stroll down the street for some coffee, and do what comes naturally.