#diffuse thinking

So I described this thing about neurons and connections and wiring... and how the wiring makes a difference.

The question is, do we have control over how information moves through all those neurons across all those connections?

The answer is yes.

Here's my testimony:

Off the top of my head, I have two examples.

One is a straight up neurons that fire together wire together deal. The second is an example of diffuse thinking.

Okay.

So one of my Go-To Full Court Press moves for tapping more creative ability than I'm consciously packing is to engage in focused, sustained work on a particular creative challenge for a number of days. After that, ideas start popping into my consciousness.

Good ideas.

The most recent example is a play I'm writing then set aside. I got most of it started through straight up conscious imagination. Once I was into it, though, ideas began to appear. 

Good ones.

There are lots of ways to think about this, by the way. Muse is the most common. I think of mine as a red vault tucked into the floor of a massive cathedral somewhere deep inside my brain. I know stuff goes in there. Things I experience. Things I learn. Whatever I intentionally send in there.

And I definitely know what comes out. The stuff that magically appears in my conscious awareness. 

But inside that vault?

I have no idea.

I have no clue what happens in there.

I just know I'm continuously grateful for the gifts that flow from it.

Okay. So I set the play I was writing aside because, well, because there was no deadline. 

By the way I do much, much better with deadlines. I won't lie.

Then maybe a year later I think it's stupid to just stop like that so I pulled out the work I'd already done, read through it from front to back, and then started tweaking, expanding, and creating.

And after a few days of that?

Yup. You guessed it.

Ideas started showing up on my mental front porch again.

Good ones.

Out of the blue. At times I wasn't even working on the play. Once, ideas even showed up while I was driving.

That line, by the way, neurons that fire together wire together, also describes building up muscle through daily exercise. It also describes what happens to those muscles when you stop exercising. Not wire together. So my process, essentially, this process is intended to beef up a specific neutral network to the point where it does some crazy heavy lifting for me. And then when I stop putting in the work... it stops putting in the work.

Booooo, but...

I get it.

😕

The second example from my creative experience is called diffuse thinking.

It's a way of thinking that I tap into by going for a walk, engaging some activity while at the same time considering some creative challenge that's on my plate.

Diffuse thinking is different from blunt force intentional problem solving that activates a particular neural network. Diffuse thinking activates neurons in disparate parts of the brain because now the brain's directing and coordinating some other activity. So sending a thing to consider into that mental machinery at work necessitates something that reminds me of a roundabout detour. It's certainly not straightforward linear thinking. My thoughts seem to go places of which I can't be aware because I'm doing something physical that also must be attended to. So in-between those times when I'm aware that I'm thinking, my thoughts slip from my conscious awareness and, next thing I know, I'm making progress with some new ideas, some new elements with which to play, some new strategy or even the next little bit of what I'm working on.

I used this method the most over the last two years. Intentionally, that is. Because if this is a project that involves and engages me for more than a few days, I start waking up with ideas. You see, it turns out, I actually have a night shift.

Huzzah!

And yes. I have to write down whatever it is I wake up with. Like, right away. I have to write it down immediately or else it disappears, vanishes in the air like smoke.

But man. 

Good stuff.

😁

Hmmm.

I actually just thought of one other way I go about thinking... now that I'm into this a bit.

I mentioned the other day how I begin projects by investing my time in sustained script reading, trying to understand the written word and its intentions first.

It's a process that doesn't happen at a computer. I don't read PDFs on screen. Any screen. I actually read hard copy, printed to paper I hold in my hands.

I read and study it in our living room, on our balcony, or down by the lake. I do that in order to allow my brain to focus only on the words and their meaning.

Nothing else.

It's a part of my creative process that has to be walled off from other parts. The process simply works better that way.

Now, if you're one of those people who can get results across all aspects of your job at the same location... good on ya.

But if it's a struggle, or if you're wondering if there's a better way... 

Lemme start by pointing out that our brains are sensitive to physical place. It can actually create a kind of mental rut that, if you do admin in your office most of the time, for example... your brain gets kind of optimized for it in that place. Which can make it challenging to attempt mental tasks of different natures.

Like writing.

Like creating.

Like considering and juxtaposing and iterating possibilities.

You might find your efforts sluggish in a way. Which can be frustrating. Which may be cause to believe you need to concentrate harder.

But.

You would be wrong.

For the blank canvas part of the creative process, the very first second of it, you don't need to focus more...

You need to focus less.

You need your thoughts to meander inside your conscious and subconscious brain. You need your thoughts to do some magic in there. Which isn't about focus.

A friend of mine is a magnificent songwriter who always starts with the music. Then, when it comes time to conjure the lyrics, he tries to do that in the studio as well. Right where he's been creating the music on his guitar.

Only that process doesn’t work. And no lyrics are forthcoming from his brain.

So we talked about that for a bit. We talked about when it's time to work on lyrics, hang up the guitar, leave the studio and go to what's gonna be his writing place... and begin the process of writing. See what happens. Create both a mental and physical space that separates music writing from lyric writing. I told him to record a rough track of the music for playback in the writing space. All of which I thought was great advice, if I do say so myself.

Only...

Yeah. It didn’t work. As in following my advice produced no better results than if he remained in his studio strumming his guitar trying to force lyrics out of his head.

So yeah.

No bueno.

Later, we were off on a random conversation about meditation and how my friend had taken it up. 

BAM. 

The idea hits me.

So I tell my friend that when it comes time to write lyrics, hang up the guitar and go to wherever it is he does meditation. And meditate.

See what happens.

And you know what?

Words began to flow in that mental space of meditation. Seriously flow.

It was a helluva thing.

And a reminder that the key that unlocks productive creativity is different by degrees for all of us. The trick is to know where you are in the creative process and engage the kind of experience necessary to that process.

So if diffuse thinking is required and you’re not allowing for that in your creative space... then that is sufficient explanation for why whatever it is you need to flow doesn’t flow.

So first things first.

Healthy Creativity is a set of practices that fosters our best creative work. Even under time constraints. Even under pressure.

And so far all I’ve got for a name’s Healthy Creativity. Not super sex... but it is on the nose. Think of athletes training and it gets even more on the nose.

Here are the practices of Healthy Creativity so far…

1. Be strategic in how you use the time you have… rather than allow your creativity to be bullied by a clock that’s ticking down.

2. Exercise your creative muscles both inside and outside paid projects.

3. Come to your work prepared.

4. Bring your mental and physical best.

5. No multitasking.

Which lands us on number six today which is:

Some creativity doesn’t look or feel like creativity... but it is creativity.

What I’m talking about is Diffuse Thinking.

What I’m actually talking about is this:

Taking a shower, going for a walk or a run,  mowing the lawn, vacuuming the rugs...

That kind of thing.

That kind of thing?

Sure.

Basically anything that's a physical process that doesn't take up bandwidth. They are all... part of the creative process. Because when those conditions are met, our brains slip in what's called Diffuse Thinking. We mentally process and make connections in a way we don't when we're focused. The stereotypical experience being finding inspiration in the shower. It's not the shower that's magical, it's the type of thinking that, if not magical, certainly offers more discovery.

So.

When the creative process comes to a standstill or when it's seriously challenged, if you're at work... take a break.

Go for a walk.

But if you're at home, you know...

Go ahead and fire up the shower.

Diffuse mode thinking happens when you relax your attention and let your mind wander, as when taking a walk or daydreaming, synthesising knowledge and forming new connections. Tackling a problem in the focused mode gives us an understanding of its parameters, allowing the diffuse mode to work on different combinations within those boundaries when we relax. 

Once again, this morning the shower did its thing.

To be clear. I don’t have an agenda when I take a shower other than to take.

A shower.

Lately, though, my brain seems to wanna jump into whatever I’ve been spending time thinking about. In this case, I’d been thinking a lot about what it is that conceptually should govern the expression of an upcoming shoot. There’s a bit of branding in place… branding that, more than anything else, raises interesting possibilities.

By the time yesterday rolled around, and based on a conversation with the client, I found myself deep-diving into impressionism. I also picked up an app that removes backgrounds with a single click. It makes green-screening a not-so-crucial part of the process and turns everything I see in the world into an element of a larger, though as yet unrealized, image.

I immediately took it for a test drive, pulling the client out of an image they posted online. Then I chose a ground-level wide shot of an Instagrammed castle in which to place the client who I’d just liberated.

Since the sky in the castle painting was pretty subdued, I decided to fill it in with the sky from Van Gogh’s famous “Starry Night” painting, setting the blending mode to Screen. Now, I fully intended to mask out the bottom of the painting, but the juxtaposition of the water from “Starry Night” aligned perfectly with the field in front of the castle and the royalty painted there in the midst of afternoon strolling. So I just let everything be after a bit of tweaking.

That’s pretty much as far as I took it.

So then the next morning I’m in the shower and, with no conscious intention to do so, I start thinking about the Why of my test composition. Obviously there would be no problem capturing elements from the real world and compositing them. My main challenge at this point was Which elements to capture and What to do with them. How should those elements be arranged? Why did they belong together? And Where in any of it would there, should there, be a theme or a message or... something?

What would be the raison d’etre for the finished image? What would its reason to be…

Be?

Which is the point at which my mind starting playing around with the idea of dreams. In recent years, I’ve taken a greater interest in dreams. It’s an interest culminating in a wonderfully fun experience writing, directing, and editing the latest in the BrainWorks series appropriately titled “Sleep and the Brain”.

So three things:

1. Neuroscience literature describes dreams as a byproduct of the memory consolidation that occurs while we sleep.

2. As a practical matter, we can prime our brains to travel down specific paths and maybe even do a little work on our behalf while we’re asleep. And

3. Trauma and distressful experience endlessly unfold on their own in our dreams. Sometimes across days and weeks, even months.

Okay.

Now because the title of the project actually does, fortuitously, lean into our dream lives, naturally any given image for this client on this project could use that dream filter to express something about the content, the theme, or the inspiration behind the client’s efforts. The final image could be a lens through which lived experience is distorted in any number of ways. My personal, un-scientific explanation is that our dream state re-creates our experiences by pulling from our mental shelves anything that’ll do by way of relating the core of those experiences. It’s a very loose, interpretive mental dance. It’s diabolically metaphorical and sometimes downright incomprehensible. The final image for my client, though, would follow suit. Not to the point of incomprehensibility, but surely into the realm of metaphor and allegory. Definitely evoking Freud’s and Jung’s view of our dream states where nothing is what it is. Where one thing can mean something that it’s physically not. This final image would either re-express a story and/or lay bare the foundations and inspirations of the work it represents.

A collage is what came to my mind just then. At which point I saw in my mind a collage of images ripped from different magazines and newspapers, their ragged edges fully visible. Or maybe they wouldn’t be visible. Maybe it would be strips of individual elements set together by a shiny glaze. Either way, I was down for this. Because we live in a time of perpetual Easter egg hunting. A relentless pursuit of clues buried in a film or tv series. Sometimes buried deep. Sometimes right there in plain sight. Once found, the search for meaning begins. And then the aggressive contemplation of what’s to come next.

Rinse.

Repeat.

Seriously. Good ideas have this kind of shelf life. Call it what you will… but I call that a fully engaged audience. And I dig that.

Finally—in the last minute of my shower, by the way—I received the understanding that the image comes first. Once that’s complete, then comes the element of the client themselves by way of a discerning process. What's their relation to the composite image? What's their experience in that dreamscape trapped in amber? What are they feeling? What are they doing? Are they close to us or far away? Are we looking over their shoulder, catching the side of their face? Are we standing behind them? Are they in the middle of some physical action? If so, Why? If not, Why not?

And so on.

From dreams to collages to metaphors to meaning and What Comes Next. All of it. In the shower.

Dang.

Any more of this, I’m gonna have to start claiming the shower as part of my official office space.

So yesterday I woke up with a particular solution to a creative problem. It was an absolute gift of a thought that I toyed with at the start of my day and, eventually, an experience about which I briefly wrote.

So there it is: my waking brain handed the ball to me and I consciously ran with it.

This being the morning, of course, required the traditional shower... during which my brain actually handed a different ball to me about another project that’s months ahead of me. Not only that, this one wasn’t about editing and design, it was about music. It was about how to turn what will essentially be a stinger cut of music for a show’s 10-12 second open... into something more substantial based on what happens editorially between that open and the first host on-camera. Which, because that would be a standard part of each show, gave me an idea about the construction of each show’s ending.

NOTE TO SELF: talk to the producer about this.

Later, I wondered about how this all actually works and, with a little bit of image Googling and Bing-ing, I came up with the following explanations of what’s going on...

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