Instant Genius - Mindwandering, with Moshe Bar

Episode Date: February 7, 2022

Cognitive neuroscientist Moshe Bar explains what the brain does when it goes wandering and how you can use the act of mindwandering – or daydreaming as some might call it – to give your mood and creativity a boost. Once you’ve mastered the basics with Instant Genius, dive deeper with Instant Genius Extra, where you’ll find longer, richer discussions about the most exciting ideas in the world of science and technology. Only available on Apple Podcasts. Produced by the team behind BBC Science Focus Magazine. Visit our website: sciencefocus.com Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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I'm Daniel Bennett, the magazine's editor, and today we're talking about mind-wondering, the thing your brain seems to love to do when it's not occupied. I'm joined by Moshe Bar, a former director of the Cognitive Neuroscience Lab at a Harvard Medical School, who now heads up the Brain Research Centre

at Bar-Alan University. in Tel Aviv. His new book, Mind Wandering, How to Improve Your Mood and Boost Your Creativity, goes on Sale This Week, and essentially examines where your mind goes when it decides to wander. When I first saw the term mind-wondering, the first thing I thought of was daydreaming. But actually, you're referring to a more fundamental, bigger, broader process and that. So I just wonder if you could, so define what you mean by my mind. mind-wondering. Right. So daydreaming is a subset or a one category of mind-wondering. So mind-wondering could be just you planning your upcoming trip, planning your dinner or planning what you're going to

tell your friend, right? So this is a sort of mind-wondering because you're doing it when maybe you're doing something else. Yeah, so daydreaming is type of mind-wandering, but mind-wondering is a host of operations that include also planning, fantasizing, worrying, preparing, regretting, mental simulations, that's a big part. And I talk a lot about this extensively in the book. I think it serves a great critical function that we usually fail to appreciate just because we don't study. But once you, like it often happens in science, once you study a phenomenon, you realize how complex and how critical it is. So is it fair to say it's essentially, it's almost what we're doing. when we're not focused,

it's sort of like we're not purposefully using our brain towards something. Our mind is wondering. Is that a kind of accurate or fair description? Yeah, it's a very fair description. I just don't want it to imply because I'm a big fan of lying on my sofa and just wondering. And it was a lot of process for me to stop feeling guilty about this

because you realize you realize that you really nourish something and you culture some type of thing. thinking, you know, creative thinking, problem solving it's only possible when you're not distracted. So even though we have very little control over the direction that mind wandering takes, hence the wandering, yes, we can cultivate it. Why do we all seem to do this? What do you think is the kind of functional purpose? Why is the brain seem to be always wondering when we're not, you know, focused on something? It's a great question and I really appreciate the way you phrase it because it implies that we think similarly about evolution maybe and about nature, that things have

purpose, that the brain spent so much metabolic energy, so much energy in our body goes to our brain, and so much of the energy that goes to the brain goes to mind wandering. You would think if it has no purpose, then why not shutting off in between tasks and in between our attempts to achieve certain goals? And yet, the nature already decided for us that about 50% of the time for our waking hours will be spent mind-wondering. I think it's staggering, and I think it's only logical to assume, like you've implied in your question, that it serves a purpose.

So, of course, and this might have been the trigger for writing the book, of course that most of us are bothered about the negative aspect of mind-wondering. We feel, as I said before, we can feel guilty that we're not doing what we're supposed to do, and instead we're wondering. We feel like it's a waste of time, that we cannot focus, and what's going on with us. And are wandering also, beyond invoking some guilt also, take us away from the moment. So thinking about all this Buddhist teaching and the whole mindfulness. And I don't want to say trend because I think it's here to stay.

But still, the idea that you want to be in the present as often as possible when your kids or when your significant other, or when your father or mother talk to you, you want to be listening and you want to be in it. When you're eating a mango, you want to feel all the flavors and not be somewhere else with your mind. So definitely it takes us away from the moment. And for some reason, I'm starting with the negative aspects of my moderning because I'm a big fan of the positive aspects. I live the best for later. And the others are kind of destructive type of thinking styles,

such as ruminations and intrusive thoughts, things that when they happen chronically enough, often enough, then they can give rise to some clinical conditions such as depression, anxiety, etc. And I think the big reason for having written this book and for people being excited about publishing it is because it provides an angle of the positive aspects of mind wandering. So in the book, I describe at length how it can affect our creativity and how it affects our problem solving. And one thing that people don't really realize, and I don't blame the people, is just that, again, we don't pause to think about it that much. But what I want to say is that one way in which our mind is amazing is it can create all these mental simulations of scenarios,

either of something that you plan or something that you fantasize. You don't really need to experience it in order to do this. So when I give examples of complicated simulations of what would happen if the emergency door of the airplane will open and we all have to jump, that's one thing. But we also simulate the most mundane things. What would happen if I push this laptop that I'm speaking with more and more turrets? me and I can see in my mind's eye how it would fall. And it's hard to believe, but at the basis of each of our decisions,

and we make thousands, if not tens of thousands of decisions a day. And I'm talking about the most mundane decisions about, you know, cheesecake versus chocolate cake or what can I have for a dinner or should I call now or should I call later, the most mundane little things. We always want a little simulation that run on this three, decision tree, of what would happen if I go in this path or I go on this, at that path. And the philosopher, Carl Popper, he said once that we let our hypothesis die in our stead. In a more modern language, the idea here is that we run all these simulations instead of

experiencing them ourselves and we choose the one that has the most beneficial outcome. Rather than trying to see how it would it feel to come out of this building through the window, you can simulate and realize this is not a preferable path. So it's very powerful means of simulations. It's part of the mind wandering. It's sort of, you know, chunking through all that prediction work of, so that when you come to a moment, you can make a decision or you can act quickly and in a way that sees you.

And it's not just the examples you gave were kind of outward things that we can probably all recognize. We've all had those leaps of imagination. but you also make the point that it's it's also inward as well it's also about ourselves and ourselves a lot of the mind wandering yes you're right it's it's about the self and when people try to identify what's the content of mind wandering because as you rightly pointed out from the beginning what is mind wondering it's it's an issue that requires a finer definition so when we as scientists psychologists and neuroscientists alike and also some philosophers or psychiatrists notice how much of the brain

is dedicated for just wondering, it ought to play some kind of a function. And we try to identify the main function or the main purposes of mind wandering. So the first one was actually the self, just as you said, that thinking about the self. And people that don't study this, again, this term might sound odd. Like, are you selfish? Why do you think about the self all the time? But the idea here is really that this is our identity. This is the agent or the entity that grows with us since we're born in a very curious way,

actually maintain its image in our eyes. I mean, our self hardly changes our image of ourselves. But this requires some representations, some mental gymnastics that, you know, how would I react to a certain event or something like this? So, you know, if your boss, if you have one, it tells you, we need to talk and you come by to more morning and that's it. That's what you hear. You may be thinking you're getting a promotion and getting a raise and yada yada yada. So you kind of prepare your thank you a little speech, but then you might be fired or whatever and then you prepare. So you come ready with three possible scenarios that

you've already pre-stimulated with your mind wandering, with your default mode. We haven't talked about it. But can elaborate this network in the brand that is the platform for mind-modering. Yeah, I often find myself doing that and then telling myself off for being so silly for seeing all this noise. So, yeah, I definitely, I'm going to get to the default network in a moment. Although, I suppose, to be fair, it's going to come up in this question as well. I wanted to pick up on something you said there, so that we spend an awful lot of energy and resource. In the book, it was something like 45% or 50% of our, time doing this kind of mind wandering, which is a huge amount.

As somebody, because I studied at psychology at undergrad level, you spend most of your time learning about really purposeful cognitive thought. How do you make a decision? How do you perceive the world? How do you direct your attention? So it made me wonder, how did you come to study this? Because in a way, it's quite easy to test cognitive thought. attention and this is such a shapeless, wide, big process. How did you come to direct your attention here? The, I think, precursor, or one of the earlier signs or the earlier beginnings of my own research program and this. And in some curious way, I noticed this a couple of times in my career that a few laboratories and a few researchers come up with a similar big idea or universal idea or

theory or framework or we can give it any adjective that we want. But the time is right for some certain ideas and they are developed independently. I'm not claiming by what I'm saying that people copy from each other. Of course, there's inspiration involved, et cetera. But even in remote places, you see that the time is right and several people have this aha moment at the same time. And so there are these issues. So you make connections with others and with your own work and with your future ideas to achieve this. So the earlier beginning was actually I was studying visual perception and just looking at objects and how people recognize objects. And very quickly you realize that people in real world do not see objects in isolations like we study them in the lab. We put a hammer or an elephant,

a pencil on the screen one after the other and subjects have to recognize. And you realize that the world is organized in arrangements, in some typical arrangements, context, you expect certain things in kitchens, you expect certain things on the beach or in a museum. And we store this, we call this statistical regularities, because this is kind of statistics in your environment that keeps repeating. So you know that a bedroom would contain a bed 100% and a pillow maybe 90%, a lamp maybe 70%, but samurai sword very close to 0%. Right? So you have some probabilities is attached and we maintain this associative connection for multiple purposes. But our entire memory, everything we know about ourselves, about life, about others, is connected in a massive net.

And you can get to anything from anything, just a limited number of, or a certain number of steps. Presenting information in associative manner confers at least two good or two benefits. One is that it's easy to store and retrieve. So if I learn about a new fruit and I store it, next to other fruits. Sometimes fruits are similar to it in taste or in appearance. This helps me both store it and then when I need to retrieve it, I know, I say no, but actually, you know, it's not a conscious process. But my mind knows where to look for it because it knows it's under fruits.

And you can use these associations for efficient storing and retrieval. But it also helps you create predictions. And we are creatures that really need certainty. even the explorers among us still need some kind of certainty. You need to know that when you turn your chair into the back, the wall is still there, the window is still there. There is a floor. You know where your car is if you drive on.

You know where your coffee maker is. So you know all these things. We have certainty. And it doesn't mean, I'm not talking about extreme situations. This is everyday life. We just don't realize to what extent we rely on these certainties. Just maybe as a side quick story, I would say that maybe the early, earliest sign or trigger for the Swissish program was when we just moved. My wife and I were just

dating back then, moved from Israel to Los Angeles to do my PhD. And after a couple of months, she had birthday, and I was ambitious and decided to throw a surprise party at her. So it was really hard for me to get her out of the house, but, you know, she just went out for 20 minutes and she came back to a house filled with people, from her work, from my university, from the neighborhood, singing, happy birthday in Hebrew because I put all the letters, a lot of decorations, food, et cetera. And I was sure that she'll be thrilled. I was waiting with a camera back back.

I was still film, waiting for her to open the door. And I just saw horror in her face. Just scared horror, like what is going on, but in the deepest, and indeed in experiments, you see that people have hard time distinguishing between deep surprise and fear, because we rely so much on those predictions. The everyday predictions,

what happens if I drop dispensers, or what happens if I tell you something inappropriate or all these things. So it really provides stability in our life and it provides certainty. So associations help you expect, you know, when you know that there is a table, you know, there'll be a chair most likely, right? And when you take the car, you know that, you know, you need certain levels of gas and you know how to obey the law and the signs and all these things.

So associations help us anticipate what's happening that, you know, I could prepare for the conversation with you because I've had, conversations, not necessarily about this topic and not necessarily in a podcast and not necessarily in this day, but I can draw from my memory with associations and project it to new situations. And this is how we can lean on our memory and our experience. So we take our memory and use it to generate more certainty in our environment. And the lack of uncertainty can then increase the chances of anxiety and depression, etc. So the idea is really that we rely on this certainty and to get to this certainty,

We take our memory and association what comes with what and what is right and what is wrong, and we can prepare for the future. And you just ask me about my own. Yes, how did you go from there to realizing that we perhaps have this, you know, time when our brain is essentially testing out these associations and rehearsing them and playing with them? So then the more I thought about predictions that I had this big aha moment that, as I said, was shared by mother. multiple researchers across the world, that wait a minute, the brain really creates predictions. It always is engaged in foresight, trying to understand what's coming in the future just because of the certainty issue. And start to think about the brain as a prediction machine, as people

sometimes like to say. And when we played with this with predictions and we put people in fMRI, in MRI magnets and look at the activity, we notice that there's a massive network that's active when people think about the future and when people simulate possible scenarios. And when you look to the literature, we realize that it's actually the same network that people in other domains of neuroscience have dubbed as the default mode network.

That is the network that is active when you're not doing anything, when you're not busy with a certain task. So when you're not flying an F-15 or operating on somebody's brain or doing something that's fully, fully demanding of your memory, our resources, you can actually activate and simulate and wonder at the same time.

And this network actually overlapped with our network. So we realized that we can explain what happens in mind wondering through our research on predictions and future, but then it expanded to other domains. Yeah. So this default mode network, just to elaborate on that, so at the same, well, so at the same time people were just starting to, and this is something. that you explained in the book, we're starting to discover fMRI functional magnetic resonance imaging.

So they were able to look at the brain active. And they noticed that, in fact, the brain was never not active. It seemed to always be doing something. And so you were able to line up this area that seemed to always be active, and that was the same area that you were finding in your studies when you gave them these kind of associative tasks. Is that right? Exactly, yeah.

this overlap implies that this is the process that's taking place there it's not the only process as you said before the first and foremost is the self representing your self as an entity and and with different characteristics and complexities and that that made me wonder is it is it always a thing that we are aware of or is it something that we can sometimes be aware of like when you talked about you you sit on the plane and you look at you stare at that door that is perhaps because it's such an unusual thing to see it demands your attention

and so you're very conscious of that kind of projection that you do is the idea here that we're also doing it and sometimes we're just unaware of these simulations I suppose our brain is running by in large this is right that we're not aware of our mind

wandering usually you're getting you're being caught wandering either by yourself or by others and you're being caught because you're not, you just catch yourself, wonder, oh my God, wonder, let's go back to what I was doing here.

And one of my little intentions and hopes in the book is to make people more comfortable about letting themselves wander without, you know, just actually it can be a productive process. So unless you're ruminating or doing something destructive there, it can actually be a bless. Just on that,

so you talk about, we catch ourselves doing it. Is it something that is spontaneous? So by that, you know, does it, because all the examples that we kind of talk about, perhaps sound like they need triggers, but actually you're sort of, you're kind of saying it's more pervasive than that, is that right?

So, yes, you're right, it is spontaneous, but at the same time, you know, following Freud and others, you imagine that it's not really detached from absolutely, anything that happened before. So, you know, maybe some subconscious thoughts or incubations on some ideas that you wanted to solve before and forgot about them, been pushed back to your subconscious, so to speak, which is a contentious term, but still we can work with it. And then when you're doing something mundane, your mind would

wander to a specific place. And what I'm saying is that you're right, it's spontaneous, but this specific place you wandered to had some origin, either something that caught your attention in the environment or some word that your friend just said in their sentence through you to some other chain of associations and you kind of lost track with what he's saying and you follow your you're wondering but but yes it's it's spontaneous and we have very little control over when to start and want to stop it okay so so let's let's get into the i guess one of the the main the main points is so you've got good and you've got bad that comes out of this this habit that we have. Let's start with the good, since we mentioned a little bit about,

so let's start with the goods I'd say. So you're saying that mind-wondering can be a force for good. How is that? There are a few examples or a few domains. Let me just jump to one that's less intuitive, and that's our ability to learn from imagined experiences. Let me take you back to childhood. So you're as a child, learn that if you touch the stove with your hand, it makes, you know, it burns you. And now you know not to touch the stoves anymore, right? And then you carry this knowledge. You experienced it. You maybe cried. Maybe you know, suffered to some extent, but it doesn't have to be bad experiences. Also good experiences. You know, you remember that something feels a certain way. You store it, your experiences. This is the best

way to learn. So a lot of our memory of things, how to do things, how things happen, where how things look, is from actual experience. that as, you know, going back to the Carl Popper quote, actually some of this experience could kill you, could injure you, could make it, but this is real experience and real knowledge. But with our ability to simulate on our default network, default mode network with mind-wobaring, actually allows us to experience things but not really experience them.

So you can close your eyes and imagine the taste of a sandwich with sardines and jam, and strawberry jam. So even though you don't, didn't taste something like this in your life, you can envision how it would taste and that you're not interested in trying it, right? So you can actually imagine, or this example with the door, emergency door on the plane, or with my daughter's dress being stuck in a carousel, the luggage carousel. And I have this whole scenario running in my mind. And at the end of it, and after I'm done with these simulations, you know, I have a simulation of a script ready for

to be executed should the occasion arise. So I can store this and call it memory in quotation marks because this is not real memory of real experience. It's memory of a simulation, but it is as realistic as real experience. So our brain with its ability to simulate saves us the need to experience everything physically in order to learn it. You can actually learn a simulator. And now I'm trying to, if I tell you something now that you haven't thought about,

but you kind of have in two minutes, you think about the scenario of how you perform it, then you're ready to do it anytime, and you're more advanced than before. So learning from imagined experience, I think, is an amazing thing, but it is the basis of each of our decisions, as I said, when you're facing more than one option,

which happens to us many times a day, even with a little less of other decisions, then you can run a quick simulation. The thing you do to choose A versus B, even if it's, I feel not privy to it, you run a quick simulation. I feel better if I go here versus I feel better if I go there. And sometimes it's so, we're so unconscious that we think it's an intuition,

but the truth is that we actually simulate the possible. So simulations is a big thing, reminiscing, preparing for, okay, for a job interview or a certain tough conversation. You kind of rehearse it in your mind and choose the best path. And to do this, you actually not only have to think about yourself. You're talking with somebody else and you know this other person. So how would this specific person react? Some people are more bold.

Some people are more introverts. Some people are more easily offended. So you take the specific person in mind and we call this theory of mind, your thoughts about the inner intentions and thoughts and responses of that person in front of you. We tend to think that we are much better than we really are. but nevertheless our brain is constantly aiming and trying to understand the other just as much as we try to understand ourselves. You just suddenly reminded me I once wrote a piece about visualization and the power of it. And I interviewed Johnny Wilkinson, a very famous English rugby player who was fantastically good at kicking the ball between the posts from very far away.

and he said in the time between him putting the ball on the ground and him taking his run up, his step back, he would have visualised himself kicking that ball between the posts eight or nine times so that when he came to do it, it just felt like the most easiest natural thing ever. And so it just suddenly reminded me of that. So it's there for simulation, but you also talk about how you can kind of harness

it and I don't know, maybe not harness it, but revel in it for your own creativity and to boost your own kind of mood. Can you just sort of tell us about that? Mind wandering is related both to mood and to creativity. I'll maybe just talk about them in isolation and connect them because I think also the connection between mood and creativity is not necessarily as common knowledge as it should be and it is relevant to each of us. When we talk about mind wandering, even though we just listed the few processes that take place within the realm of our mind wandering, the positive and the negative, but these are the processes. We can think also about the way we think, the way we wonder. So a certain mind-wondering episode could be just you thinking about a recipe for some. You want to make up a new

recipe, or you're ruminating on something specific, or you keep replaying a conversation that you had yesterday and annoyed you or made you happy. But in all this case, we're very narrow on a topic and we try and sometimes we try to solve a problem we also very narrow on the topic but so this is narrow mind wandering in a sense or narrow thinking in terms of the semantic semantic i think is a word that easily understood right so it's like semantic content you you remain within the same vicinity of you know a recipe for a lemon cake or or a conversation of yesterday. But the thinking and wondering could actually be also much more expensive, right? It can be more, it can be broader and go to different crazy solutions. So you're trying to fix the window

and you don't have the right material and you try to improvise with all these other things that you might have at home. So you really think about how, you know, maybe flour and water will help you hold this window until you get the right glue. But maybe not such a great example. But maybe not such a great example, but the idea is really that you jump from one thought to another, and I gave a few in the book that you can start with the moon and end up thinking about Tibet. And, you know, there's a whole chain of associations. We often see that the more creative people provide associations that are way more original and less ordinary. So many people, when you ask them about the means of transportation, would you say a car immediately, but a more

creative person might say a camel or an elevator, right? So these are things that are legit. They're, you know, they're correct answers, not as common, but, you know, the more creative of us would provide them just as quickly. So creativity and broad associative thinking go hand in hand. And science, not only ours, has established this a while ago already. The second thing that we're seeing in the lab, and this started as a different branch of research in my lab, but then converges. to the default network, is that because people in depression, and I wasn't always interested in depression, I said being interested in clinical issues,

specifically in mood disorders, when I realized how related it is to my interested associations or predictions, people in depression ruminate, and they have hard time taking the big context into account. So when they ruminate, they're really stuck on the same topic over and over, and we do in the lab, do a show that we can expand your way of thinking, merely by showing you words that are chains of associations that expand and go beyond a certain topic versus chains of words that remain in the same topic.

Yeah, so just to give a quick example, you had the moon, so like you could go from moon to dark to side, to pink Floyd, to the elephant in the video, to the wall, and then I think you had the China and then Tibet. So in your lab, you're showing people that kind of associative list as a kind of stimulus, right? Right. Compare this with we start again with the moon, but continue to remain with the same. Moon, crater, Latt, and Knight, Neil Armstrong. So it stays on, so it's the same number of associations.

They're also in the same place, but one of them emulates rumination. The other one goes expensively. And you see that those that, and it sounds ridiculous, it's almost like a toy, experiment, just showing people words. But you can actually significantly improve their mood. I mean, significantly in terms of the statistics. It's not that they come in, depressed, and leave giddy, but they do show improved mood with our standard questionnaires and measurements.

So expensive thinking seems to be at the basis both of better mood and of creative thinking. And both of them are actually affected by mind wandering and by the default network. So when you're wondering is expensive, you'll be both more creative and in better mood. And I just want to qualify, if we can just for another second here, that when I talk about creativity, I think people should realize if they haven't already that creativity is not like a destiny. And each run of us can be more or less creative, depending on many aspects. So we already identified many of the parameters or the factors that go into making you more creative or less creative. So we can, in the lab, make you more creative than you came in or less

creative by, for example, loading you cognitively with maybe long strings of numbers to remember or some stress. All these things can take away. So the same person, I'm not saying all of us can be Leonardo da Vinci, but we can be more creative or less creative depending on contextual and environmental factors. So and mind-winter can be a great manipulator of this ability of ours to be creative. So that was one exercise that you did, the expansive associative words. Are there other exercises that people can try? Because it was particularly interesting to see that in your studies, that not only, like you said there, not only did they feel or, you know, were they able to solve problems more creatively, they were also experienced and improved mood. So are there other

kind of exercises that maybe you do in your day-to-day life or that kind of when you've got a problem you need to solve or you know there's something in the background you need to deal with that you you do to try and get your creative juices play running is one great tip I could give but beyond effortful attempts I would say that what I just in you ended before but maybe is worth elaborating now is the issue of cognitive load right so it's harder for you to be creative if you are bombarded with phone calls from your kids that want all kinds of things or just emails and things you need to remember and all kinds of sensitivities in the room. This load so you can think about our brain as having 100% resources and now everything

just like computers back then and also now need to allocate and distribute their capacity to different demands. So if I need to be reading, I can't be thinking that much, right? I'm thinking in between the words, but if you're busy with one thing, then it takes away from your ability to the others. And this, by the way, also is correct. And I think this is stunning, and I keep thinking about this, is that with cognitive load, we also are less able to enjoy aesthetics of art, for example. I think this is, for me, it's fascinating, that you can actually have less capacity to enjoy beauty, even. This is less survival-related, just because your mind is busy with other things. So here we talk about quality of experience. So eating the same mango would feel the same

for you and for me, assuming everything else is possible, everything else is equivalent, then it really depends on our state of mind and how busy we are with other things. If our mind is preoccupied, then, you know, how often have I eaten ice cream mindlessly after the fact that have I had this ice cream already or not? Just because, you know, you don't really pause. So, So when you're busy with one thing, then it takes away from the others. So, yeah. Yeah. It's why if you, you know, if you buy, I don't know, maybe you buy a bottle of wine on holiday.

And it's in, you sit there in a beautiful place. You drink and it tastes so good. And then you bring it home and you're having a busy day. Maybe that's why it doesn't taste as good as when you're sat on the sunshine. Is that perhaps also why we have this very, I mean, certainly I do. but I often have my best ideas or my best, you know, eureka moments when I'm in the shower. And perhaps, like you say, in a way, it's, there's not very,

there's no, there's nothing else going on, but also it's the morning. So the day hasn't put a big cognitive load on me yet. You know, there's not a lot. I haven't got to my to do list. I haven't got to worry about anything else other than just, you know, getting clean. Is that why the shower is such a place for ideas? Exactly. And, you know, there are other ways of, you know, being immersed. I talk a lot about immersion in the book. And being immersed kind of, I see it sometimes as a, not only at the top level of enjoying

an experience, but also best way to restart your, you know, the chain of thought, so to speak. Is it sort of sometimes as, as simple as that? You need to remove yourself from whatever it is. You probably experience it yourself as well that really complete silence, so a complete lack of stimulation is also not good for creativity. So just being alone in a white room with nobody else, no windows, no stimulation, this is hardly the best environment for creating. So you do need stimulation. You do need some things to trigger, to ignite ideas. But if I had to phrase it in one or two sentences, I would say that it has to be the right stimulation, so to speak. So you need to be surrounded by the thing, and not to be loaded. I really

like this word because it is a tax that processes take on our ability to be creative and also to feel better. Yeah. That was Mosheba there, explaining what your brain's doing when it goes a wandering. If you'd like to hear Moshe and I dig a little deeper into the darker side of mind Wondering and meditation, check out Instant Genius Extra, a bonus podcast available via subscription on Apple's podcast app. Of course, if you'd like to know more, Mosher's book Mind Wondering is out now. And for those who want to try and give their mood and creativity a little nudge in the right direction, there's a great little appendix at the back where Mosher provides some real-world exercises that might help. Thank you for listening. The Instant Genius podcast is brought to you

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