I thought it was just me.
I didn’t realize it was you too, until I went to Amazon.com to find a waterproof notepad and read your reviews.
The shower appears to inspire many of us and I wanted to understand more. If I could discover what creates this magic, could I find a way to yield the same results in other menial tasks throughout my day? Say for instance, during my commute to work or when doing the dishes after dinner. Can these daily routines become the source of genius?
And when I googled “why do I have great ideas in the shower,” I found an article in National Geographic no less called The science of why you have great ideas in the shower. So again, not a novel idea, and it is back by science!
Apparently, it’s called the default mode network. I like the idea of it being “default” because it seems like we get there naturally, without effort, because who needs more places to add effort these days?
DMN (looky here, it already has an acronym) is “the state the brain returns to when you’re not actively engaged,” explains Roger Beaty, a cognitive neuroscientist and director of the Cognitive Neuroscience of Creativity Lab at Penn State University. This lets your mind wander or engage in spontaneous cognition or “stream of consciousness” thinking, which experts believe helps retrieve unusual memories and generate new ideas.
I copied and pasted both of those sentences right out of the article because, well, they said exactly what they needed to already.
The article does go on to include a cautionary disclosure that there are, in fact, other important networks that also need to be listened to. These are the ones that modify and reject your epiphanies. So just like the silly warning labels on everything we buy today, and the plastic bags they come in, proceed with caution and use common sense when implementing your shower genius ideas. Write them down before they disappear, waterproof notepads do exist for a reason, and then take time to let them sink in and reevaluate their validity. The rest is up to you.
Shower on my friends and let the magic take hold!
***And let me remind you to believe in the phenomenon that occurs when you combine desire, faith, and simple planning to catapult yourself into the realm of all things possible.
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