After noticing a similar habit among highly creative people (Einstein, Mozart, da Vinci, etc), the neuroscientist Dr. Nancy Andreasen designed a brain-imaging study to explore the neural basis of this habit. Essentially, these creative people all carved out time each day for... “Free-floating periods of thought,” Dr. Andreasen writes in her book, “The Creating Brain: The Neuroscience of Genius.” The specifics of the habit differ from person to person. Leonardo da Vinci, for example, would often sit in front of a painting “and simply think, sometimes for as long as a half day.” Mozart liked to go to billiard/pool halls—he'd bring bundles of music paper and compose while waiting his turn. And Einstein loved to aimlessly drift at sea on a little wooden boat he called the “Tinef” (Yiddish for “piece of junk”). He had to be rescued the Coast Guard so frequently that a friend eventually bought him an outboard motor for emergency use, but Einstein refused to use it. “To the average person, being becalmed for hours might be a terrible trial,” the friend said. “To Einstein, this could simply provide more time to think.” In any case, Dr. Andreasen conducted the first brain-imaging study, looking at brain activity during “free-floating periods of thought,” when the body is in a “resting state” and the mind is free to wander. “We found activations in multiple regions of the association cortex,” Dr. Andreasen wrote. “We were not [seeing] a passive silent brain during the ‘resting state,’ but rather a brain that was actively connecting thoughts and experiences.” Essentially, Dr. Andreasen found that the brain defaults to creativity. When the body is still and the mind is allowed to float freely, the brain engages in what she termed REST (“random episodic silent thinking”). And during REST, Dr. Andreasen writes, the brain “uses its most human and complex parts...areas known to gather information and link it all together—in potentially novel ways.” Separate from those that led to Dr. Andreasen's study, I’ve collected many examples of creative people describing their own REST-ful habits: The legendary designer Paula Scher: “I think I figured out every identity program I’ve ever done in a taxicab…Taxicabs, for me, are very special because you sit in the back, you don’t have to talk to anybody, you can look out the window and you can sort of let your mind wander.” One of the great songwriters of all time, Paul Simon: “I used to go off in the bathroom...I’d turn on the faucet so that water would run—I like that sound, it’s very soothing to me—and I’d play, in the dark, letting my imagination wander.” (During one of these REST sessions in his dark bathroom, these words came to him: “Hello darkness, my old friend / I’ve come to talk with you again”—which became the opening verse of “The Sound of Silence”). The filmmaker Quentin Tarantino: “I have a pool, and I keep it heated, so it’s nice. And I hop in my pool and just kind of float around in the warm water…and then a lot of shit will come to me. Literally, a lot of ideas will come to me. Then I get out and make little notes on that. But not do it. That will be my work for tomorrow.” So whether it’s sitting in front of painting, drifting in a boat, riding in a taxi, playing the guitar in a dark bathroom, or floating in a pool, if you want to be more creative, carve out time each day for “free-floating periods of thought,” for “random episodic silent thinking.” - - - “Men of genius are sometimes producing most when they seem least to labor, for their minds are then occupied in the shaping of those conceptions to which they afterward give form.” — Leonardo da Vinci Follow @bpoppenheimer for more content like this!