Cameron Moll has an interesting blog post up about the “creative pause” we experience in the shower. Creative pause is the “shift from being fully engaged in a creative activity to being passively engaged, or the shift to being disengaged altogether.” You move from a structured thinking to a stream of thinking.

Of course, when I want to complete a structured task, I don’t want to be in the shower. The desk is better environment for completing structured tasks. But the shower is great for brainstorming in an unstructured manner. Shifting your brain into a more relaxed state allows you to attack a problem from a different direction.

I find that a lot of my most creative thinking happens in the shower. The shower helps me develop my thoughts in new directions. It’s also a place for me to escape from stress or cluttered thoughts. These two ideas build on the fact that deliberate breaks can be helpful to problem solving.

There’s something about showering that tends to spawn new ideas which may not occur otherwise. And the frequency with which this occurs seems to suggest that perhaps the occurrence isn’t merely happenstance, but instead a decent model for what has been called “creative pause” — the shift from being fully engaged in a creative activity to being passively engaged, or the shift to being disengaged altogether.

Cameron continues to explain why the shower seems to be so effective at dislocating our minds from a hectic world:

1. There’s little opportunity for distraction.
2. Minimal mental engagement is required for the the task at hand.
3. Showering creates a “white noise” effect.
4. A change of scenery sets the stage for the unexpected.

I wonder how, or if, we can more efficiently harness the power of creative pause. Sometimes I think I should install a waterproof note-taking device inside the shower to record all my thoughts as they happen. But perhaps the conscious act of writing down what you are thinking destroys the creative pause? Because my thoughts in the shower flow quickly and randomly, jumping from topic to topic, the deliberate action of writing something down could disrupt the flow of thoughts. The action of writing is the distraction in point #1 above, and it involves the mental engagement in point #2.

In this way, creative pause is similar to dreaming. My high school chemistry teacher once told me that the best way to solve chemistry problems is in your sleep. He would give up on difficult problems and go to sleep. He would wake up in the middle of the night with a solution, and frantically scribble down the solution on a pad at the side of his bed, as his dreams slipped away.

This may also be evidence that, at some point in the night, you should go to sleep rather than go for an all-nighter. But that’s for a different blog post.

Of course, this is all pure speculation, so I may be completely wrong. I haven’t tried taking notes in the shower (yet). Perhaps the best and only way is to jump out of the shower, wake up from dreaming, and write as fast as you can. This means I need to learn how to write in shorthand.