Maybe I’m discovering the obvious, but I began using THC for sleep in my 30s and as a side effect, I kinda get a little bit high for about 20 mins before bed.
I’ll be having a shower that usually turns into a bath for safety and I just close my eyes and think. And it’s truly miraculous… My brain just wanders so freely among the ideas of the day. But what interests me most are these “eureka!” moments. They’re so fast and fleeting and my brain struggles to focus that I rush to orate them to my phone before they fade. It’s an interesting sensation to have where I’m confident that the idea was brilliant but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was seconds later.
Upon review the next day, 75% of the time the ideas are gibberish and I have a laugh at my own expense. The other 25% aren’t brilliant but are colourable and sometimes actually pan out. Usually about software design or parenting.
Weed is the secret behind my ability to debug really gnarly problems that others get stuck on. I'm not the best coder, and I'm incapable of finishing projects, but most workplaces I've been at I've quickly become the "hey could you look at this heisenbug" guy.
I never smoke in a professional setting of course. I read the code, set breakpoints, debug prints, yadda yadda. Then when I get home I smoke some hashish and suddenly it's like I can execute and debug the code in my brain and just see the bug in plain sight like I'm Gregory House if he was a programmer. Then I pull out my laptop and throw together a fix in the dumbest, simplest way possible, test it, PR it and let code review turn it into production ready code. Because I have no idea what that looks like, and hopefully the company has other people that do(wishful thinking, i know).
Caveats:
Yes, this is very hit or miss, maybe a one out of ten per try, but you can try multiple times of course.
I'm not recommending anyone mess with psychoactive drugs unless they know it's something they can handle, and more importantly that they know how to do it safely.
I'm not saying I have my shit together wrt drugs, I definitely do not.
Weed is double edged; it has negative effects that greatly limit its functional potential most importantly on working memory and focus. I like to say weed can temporarily turn you into a brain damaged genius.
There are many other ways to get this effect without drugs: Taking a walk, meditation, sleep, sex, and basically anything other than staring at the problem can do the trick through random associations.
I was high when I wrote all this so maybe none of it makes sense, but be nice.
I experience EXACTLY the same thing moments before falling asleep (no thc). It's truly amazing. If I manage to jolt myself awake I will write them down, otherwise they will be surely forgotten. And the ratio is similar to yours, good idea/gibberish(or not feasible).
I've had the same experience, and often(when I'm not too lazy from smoking), I'll write down the ideas to read when I'm sober.
Usually they are correct and kind of insightful(by this I simply mean, insightful relative to the level of my normal "sober thoughts") but not as ground breaking as I thought - in fact it's usually something very obviously true and "known" but not "realized", as in the unique aspect wasn't having the thought, but recognizing the significance of the thought.
The easiest parallel I can think of during sobriety, is when you take something you know like "the ocean is filling with plastics", you're always aware that it's true and really messed up, but sometimes you'll think of it and see the thought from a specific angle that really makes you internalize how serious it is and how crazy it is that this is something happening in the world. You didn't realize anything you didn't already know, but it's still a new and useful insight
I started reading _The_Electric_Kool-Aid_Acid_Test_ by Tom Wolfe a few months ago. He relates how Ken Kesey would write while high as a kite, to help the flow of ideas, and then edit sober.
I didn't end up finishing the book, because it was all just too foreign a subject for me to get into.
I’m so glad I have this experience before I get out of bed. Each day I have a morning “what do I remember from before getting out of bed” review, right after I greet my pup for the morning. It’s mostly lost, but a lot of times during the day something will come back to me.
This is my ADHD super power. When I have a problem I take a shower, a walk, play a video game, just to let it stew in the background, sometimes for days. Get intoxicated. You'll eventually get that eureka! effect. It has never failed me.
It's often suggested that one needs to work hard to crack a hairy problem. Nonsense. You've got a subconscious system always processing some idea, integrating external unrelated stimuli while you're doing something else: what is commonly called thinking outside the box. The hairier the problem, the least effective pointed focus is to crack it. You can't think outside the box if you're putting all your effort on the box. Go do something else.
Conscious thought and focus is but a very small part of our intelligence. Learn to delegate some tasks to your background process.
>It's often suggested that one needs to work hard to crack a hairy problem. Nonsense. You've got a subconscious system always processing some idea, integrating external unrelated stimuli while you're doing something else: what is commonly called thinking outside the box. The hairier the problem, the least effective pointed focus is to crack it. You can't think outside the box if you're putting all your effort on the box. Go do something else.
Doing both is quite possible, and helps ...
>Conscious thought and focus is but a very small part of our intelligence. Learn to delegate some tasks to your background process.
I'll just leave these here:
Tech Video: Rich Hickey: Hammock-Driven Development
This is why I’ll never work in an office again. Why would I want to get stuck on a problem and be actively working against solving it because I’m stuck at work with nothing else to do?
Same, the legwork of "working hard" on a problem for me these days is just making sure I have all the information I need to stew over. I write up a factfinding doc of points in the codebase that I think are relevant, any context that's relevant, and symptoms of the bug. I never used to write it down but I work across a bunch of projects now so I can sometimes have the bug de-prioritised in my brain.
I have used this to solve leetcode problems. Initially, I read and understand the problem; and then I try to solve it for ten minutes. If fail to find a solution, I move on to the next problem; I do that for 3–4 problems on a single go. When I visit those problems the next day, I find myself hitting the solution way more than I would be if I had sat there for hours with hard focus to solve those problems.
However, I feel that I cheated because you are expected to solve those problems in limited time.
It's also something quite difficult to talk about in practice because claiming that a problem was solved via dreamily staring at clouds, or some similar activity very far from normal perceptions of 'work', sounds like boasting.
Its my working theory that artists (The Beatles or John Carmack) are always operating in this type of mental 'shower' environment. Makes me wonder if maybe there is a 'myaquaguitar.com' alternative haha
Is there more research on how boredom relates to creativity in general? I've been wondering recently about how my default in most cases is to look at my phone (reddit, social media, texting).
That must detract from my net new ideas. I know many a child driven to weird ideas, fun games, and general creativity from lack of anything else to do.
It's probably a spectrum (reading reddit/HN/etc. is likely to introduce new ideas), but I'd venture to guess that most people could stand to trade a lot of their daily phone time for some intentional boredom.
The key seems to be to tend to your inputs, make sure they’re decent quality and on topics you care about, then create time away from inputs to ruminate and ponder. Reading outrage-of-the-day content won’t give you better software engineering insights in the shower. But reading hyped-tech-trend-of-the-month content might.
Conversely, if your mind is constantly engaged in other people’s thoughts, it won’t have time to create its own. For me personally that means avoiding external stimuli for the first 2 to 3 hours of the day (doesn’t always work).
Anecdotally it absolutely seems to go hand in hand for me. To the point where I've started considering social networks, booze, THC, etc as dopamine sugar.
I'm allowed them now and then as a treat for hitting a goal* or something but not constantly, and definitely no cake for breakfast.
* for instance I'm enjoying a nice HN binge right now as I've already covered my rent this month with freelance work :)
While I've not had any direct results of any ideas yet I have filled 8 pages of my scratch diary with ideas and notes on my main side project since I've started reintroducing boredom into my life. Previously it was bad enough that I'd forget the diary existed for days and sometimes weeks at a time.
Rather than go insane if the boredom doesn't turn into creativity I'm allowed to read a book at any time rather than slip back to the sugary dopamine sources.
Could just be honeymoon period, I'm only a week or so into it, I might get bored of being bored soon.
I'm not sure "boredom" is the right way to characterize the state. Deliberately cultivating this quiet time for creativity is one possible aspect of a meditation practice. David Lynch has an interesting book about that, called Catching the Big Fish.
I'm extremely easily bored so creative state of mind is my every day normal I guess.
Only tricky part is that it's a gradual process over a short time of basic information gathering that has to be captured in the right contexts back and forth for me.
All these comments here also bring new insights, overlapping feelings and an idea we are all in this mess together. To boredom!
I have long held that a good night's rest, a long shower or a walk in nature are some of the best debugging and software architecture design tools that developers have at their disposal. We've all been pulling those late nights and long hours banging our head on the desk just to figure it, only to step away and figure out what we want in that Zen like moment of the morning shower. You absolutely need to put hands on keyboard to get your work done, but generally the amount of code pounded out is (usually) inversely proportional to the amount of thought I've given to the solution.
I think that’s why it’s sometimes important to just leave from work, if you’re doing something hard and get stuck. If you keep working hard, you may not find any solution. It happened really often to me, that on the next day the solution for the problem was „just there“.
It just doesn’t fit our working culture, if our leave two hours early and if the boss asks you say: „I have to do a lot of complicated work, that’s why I’m leaving early“.
I personally believe that the concept of shower thoughts is a bit detrimental. They are often talked about as being nice little quirks of our lives, when in fact they could be so much more. I have written a little blog post about it [1]
It's just the coloquial term for activation of the Default Mode Network (DMN). And yes, it happens everywhere, all throughout the day and to varying degrees.
Also, it's not necessarily always a desirable thing. For example, the practice of mindfulness is literally cultivating the ability to switch off the DMN. The thing that people don't so often click to is whilst it does sometimes lead to those insightful "shower thoughts", it's also what's behind long night torturing yourself ruminating about an upcoming confrontation you're anticipating having with someone etc.
I spent quite a bit of time reading and understanding about the brain and after understanding that the Central Executive Network and the Default Mode Network operate like a see-saw that's mediated by the Salience Network, a great deal more things made sense to me. It helps to know too that for anyone who has experience trauma where they have an elevated HPA-Axis, that the connections between the Salience Network and the Default Mode Network get stronger and hence slipping into rumination becomes the path of least resistance and thus happens more frequently. Actively practicing mindfulness meditation helps counteract this and instead strengthens the connections between the Salience Network and the Central Executive Network.
After learning about the above I discovered Zen Buddhism and realized they've known this intuitively for thousands of years.
Ehh, I have the eureka moments in the bed and ideas during walking/listening to something or reading something offtopic. After all memory retrieval is avalanche based.
I turn off the PC, get in the bed, 5 minutes later I have the answer for that hard problem. I have noticed that sitting before the monitor sucks your brain down and hard problem solving or planning need some horizontal positioning, without any electronic device.
For starters there's less [performance] anxiety while taking a shower of doing mundane tasks.
In a way it's the "monday night quarterback" meets the "you missed a spot over there" syndrome; the farther away we are from the point where the rubber meets the road, the more we can observe objectively and have higher level of thinking.
The problem at hand is how to juncture the thinking/intention with proper action.
This article is teaching me that I misunderstood what the default mode network (DMN) is. I was introduced to the term while reading how psychedelics affect the brain. As I understood it, the DMN is a mediator among the many thoughts that normally compete for your brain's attention. By temporarily suppressing the DMN, psychedelics give the weirder thoughts a better chance at center stage. Thus the black dot on the wall looks more like a spider, and a normally tenuous connection between Concept X and Concept Y might lead someone to discover a mechanism for cold fusion while tripping.
This article's explanation, on the other hand, fits the DMN moniker better: it's what your brain does when it isn't doing anything. If psychedelics replace a default value with an uninitialized variable, then the resulting behavior is undefined.
This would explain why so-called "set and setting" are so important while experiencing psychedelics. A preoccupied mind doesn't use the DMN. So it would follow that a preoccupied mind wouldn't benefit as much from a suppressed DMN, because it wouldn't have any reason to try activating it.
Having done LSD, I can’t imagine doing anything resembling coherent productivity while tripping. The best I could do was try to process all the crazy shit happening. There was certainly no room for note taking.
It makes sense why people get all their ideas in the shower. That's about the only time the modern human has where you aren't distracting yourself with some other external stimuli. I've even seen people use a public urinal with a phone in one hand.
Yup. I've been saying for years, the first things that humans did when we started inventing things, is we got rid of all the "boring tasks" that were letting our brains organize themselves.
Chopping firewood? Got machines for that now. Knitting? Mechanized. Walking to the next town over? Now it's a high-concentration game of GTA with a radio for extra distraction.
All of these things also had a mechanical element to them. Hands busy, mind wanders.
We've _so_ deprived our brains of this organizing time, that we had to _reinvent boredom_, and now we call it meditation.
One thing I noticed is that while I had good ideas in the shower, I couldn't remember them! (no pen/paper, phone, etc.)
So, I started using mnemonics to remember my thoughts[0]. Now I take showers without feeling the anxiety of forgetting all the thing I thought about (e.g. chores, talk to someone, respond to email, write down an idea, etc.).
Left/right brain isn't an accurate summary of the brain, but a useful distinction:
• Left brain is thoughts, analysis, pattern following, etc.
• Right brain is awareness without analysis, flow state, performance awareness
To "listen" to your right brain awareness, you need to shut down the left brain at least a little bit. You need at least a little bit of space (or flow state) to hear the right brain. The left brain pushes itself on you. The right brain needs to be listened to be heard.
One of the best parts of remote work is when I have a tough problem I can just walk into the bathroom and take a shower to solve it - I just need to make sure my hair is dry before the next meeting. I never could have done that pre-Covid since everyone would have wanted to know where I was if not sitting at my desk, and the few places I worked with gyms came with a long list of co-workers I’d rather not be showering with!
My breakthrough idea come mostly when I'm exercising (read: running). It's one of the reasons I don't run with music / audio. Instead, it's just me and the road.
Initially, I thought it was a personal quirk. Then I read the book "Your Brain at Work" by David Rock. At this point, I'm due for a re-read.
I still have not read anything on this topic (models of human thought, creativity and emotional affect) so clear and interesting as David Gelernter’s “The Muse in the Machine” (1994).
[+] [-] Waterluvian|3 years ago|reply
I’ll be having a shower that usually turns into a bath for safety and I just close my eyes and think. And it’s truly miraculous… My brain just wanders so freely among the ideas of the day. But what interests me most are these “eureka!” moments. They’re so fast and fleeting and my brain struggles to focus that I rush to orate them to my phone before they fade. It’s an interesting sensation to have where I’m confident that the idea was brilliant but I can’t for the life of me remember what it was seconds later.
Upon review the next day, 75% of the time the ideas are gibberish and I have a laugh at my own expense. The other 25% aren’t brilliant but are colourable and sometimes actually pan out. Usually about software design or parenting.
[+] [-] mtlmtlmtlmtl|3 years ago|reply
I never smoke in a professional setting of course. I read the code, set breakpoints, debug prints, yadda yadda. Then when I get home I smoke some hashish and suddenly it's like I can execute and debug the code in my brain and just see the bug in plain sight like I'm Gregory House if he was a programmer. Then I pull out my laptop and throw together a fix in the dumbest, simplest way possible, test it, PR it and let code review turn it into production ready code. Because I have no idea what that looks like, and hopefully the company has other people that do(wishful thinking, i know).
Caveats:
Yes, this is very hit or miss, maybe a one out of ten per try, but you can try multiple times of course.
I'm not recommending anyone mess with psychoactive drugs unless they know it's something they can handle, and more importantly that they know how to do it safely.
I'm not saying I have my shit together wrt drugs, I definitely do not.
Weed is double edged; it has negative effects that greatly limit its functional potential most importantly on working memory and focus. I like to say weed can temporarily turn you into a brain damaged genius.
There are many other ways to get this effect without drugs: Taking a walk, meditation, sleep, sex, and basically anything other than staring at the problem can do the trick through random associations.
I was high when I wrote all this so maybe none of it makes sense, but be nice.
[+] [-] thewizardofaus|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] moe091|3 years ago|reply
Usually they are correct and kind of insightful(by this I simply mean, insightful relative to the level of my normal "sober thoughts") but not as ground breaking as I thought - in fact it's usually something very obviously true and "known" but not "realized", as in the unique aspect wasn't having the thought, but recognizing the significance of the thought.
The easiest parallel I can think of during sobriety, is when you take something you know like "the ocean is filling with plastics", you're always aware that it's true and really messed up, but sometimes you'll think of it and see the thought from a specific angle that really makes you internalize how serious it is and how crazy it is that this is something happening in the world. You didn't realize anything you didn't already know, but it's still a new and useful insight
[+] [-] e40|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] linsomniac|3 years ago|reply
I didn't end up finishing the book, because it was all just too foreign a subject for me to get into.
[+] [-] eyelidlessness|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sph|3 years ago|reply
It's often suggested that one needs to work hard to crack a hairy problem. Nonsense. You've got a subconscious system always processing some idea, integrating external unrelated stimuli while you're doing something else: what is commonly called thinking outside the box. The hairier the problem, the least effective pointed focus is to crack it. You can't think outside the box if you're putting all your effort on the box. Go do something else.
Conscious thought and focus is but a very small part of our intelligence. Learn to delegate some tasks to your background process.
[+] [-] vram22|3 years ago|reply
Doing both is quite possible, and helps ...
>Conscious thought and focus is but a very small part of our intelligence. Learn to delegate some tasks to your background process.
I'll just leave these here:
Tech Video: Rich Hickey: Hammock-Driven Development
https://jugad2.blogspot.com/2016/03/tech-video-rich-hickey-h...
Lateral thinking:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lateral_thinking
[+] [-] idontwantthis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ehnto|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sboomer|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelZuo|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gazby|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mentos|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dotancohen|3 years ago|reply
This is an example, just the first one I found:
https://m.aliexpress.com/item/1005004626987148.html
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] klyrs|3 years ago|reply
https://shop.crayola.com/toys-and-activities/bathtub-crayons...
[+] [-] inplubius|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mmaunder|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dQw4w9WgXcQ|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huffmsa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ford|3 years ago|reply
That must detract from my net new ideas. I know many a child driven to weird ideas, fun games, and general creativity from lack of anything else to do.
It's probably a spectrum (reading reddit/HN/etc. is likely to introduce new ideas), but I'd venture to guess that most people could stand to trade a lot of their daily phone time for some intentional boredom.
[+] [-] Swizec|3 years ago|reply
A favorite quote on the topic whose source I never remember: The news doesn’t tell you what to think, it tells you what to think about.
Hamming talks about this effect as The Open Door Policy in his wonderful you and your research talk – https://www.cs.virginia.edu/~robins/YouAndYourResearch.html
The key seems to be to tend to your inputs, make sure they’re decent quality and on topics you care about, then create time away from inputs to ruminate and ponder. Reading outrage-of-the-day content won’t give you better software engineering insights in the shower. But reading hyped-tech-trend-of-the-month content might.
Conversely, if your mind is constantly engaged in other people’s thoughts, it won’t have time to create its own. For me personally that means avoiding external stimuli for the first 2 to 3 hours of the day (doesn’t always work).
[+] [-] corobo|3 years ago|reply
I'm allowed them now and then as a treat for hitting a goal* or something but not constantly, and definitely no cake for breakfast.
* for instance I'm enjoying a nice HN binge right now as I've already covered my rent this month with freelance work :)
While I've not had any direct results of any ideas yet I have filled 8 pages of my scratch diary with ideas and notes on my main side project since I've started reintroducing boredom into my life. Previously it was bad enough that I'd forget the diary existed for days and sometimes weeks at a time.
Rather than go insane if the boredom doesn't turn into creativity I'm allowed to read a book at any time rather than slip back to the sugary dopamine sources.
Could just be honeymoon period, I'm only a week or so into it, I might get bored of being bored soon.
[+] [-] b3morales|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ArjenM|3 years ago|reply
Only tricky part is that it's a gradual process over a short time of basic information gathering that has to be captured in the right contexts back and forth for me.
All these comments here also bring new insights, overlapping feelings and an idea we are all in this mess together. To boredom!
[+] [-] binkHN|3 years ago|reply
Unfortunately children are negatively affected by their electronic devices as well.
[+] [-] AstixAndBelix|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] justinlloyd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] andix|3 years ago|reply
It just doesn’t fit our working culture, if our leave two hours early and if the boss asks you say: „I have to do a lot of complicated work, that’s why I’m leaving early“.
[+] [-] AstixAndBelix|3 years ago|reply
[1] : https://but-her-flies.bearblog.dev/shower-thoughts-arent-rea...
[+] [-] nullsense|3 years ago|reply
Also, it's not necessarily always a desirable thing. For example, the practice of mindfulness is literally cultivating the ability to switch off the DMN. The thing that people don't so often click to is whilst it does sometimes lead to those insightful "shower thoughts", it's also what's behind long night torturing yourself ruminating about an upcoming confrontation you're anticipating having with someone etc.
I spent quite a bit of time reading and understanding about the brain and after understanding that the Central Executive Network and the Default Mode Network operate like a see-saw that's mediated by the Salience Network, a great deal more things made sense to me. It helps to know too that for anyone who has experience trauma where they have an elevated HPA-Axis, that the connections between the Salience Network and the Default Mode Network get stronger and hence slipping into rumination becomes the path of least resistance and thus happens more frequently. Actively practicing mindfulness meditation helps counteract this and instead strengthens the connections between the Salience Network and the Central Executive Network.
After learning about the above I discovered Zen Buddhism and realized they've known this intuitively for thousands of years.
[+] [-] binkHN|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dr_dshiv|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lofaszvanitt|3 years ago|reply
I turn off the PC, get in the bed, 5 minutes later I have the answer for that hard problem. I have noticed that sitting before the monitor sucks your brain down and hard problem solving or planning need some horizontal positioning, without any electronic device.
[+] [-] 99failures|3 years ago|reply
In a way it's the "monday night quarterback" meets the "you missed a spot over there" syndrome; the farther away we are from the point where the rubber meets the road, the more we can observe objectively and have higher level of thinking.
The problem at hand is how to juncture the thinking/intention with proper action.
[+] [-] sowbug|3 years ago|reply
This article's explanation, on the other hand, fits the DMN moniker better: it's what your brain does when it isn't doing anything. If psychedelics replace a default value with an uninitialized variable, then the resulting behavior is undefined.
This would explain why so-called "set and setting" are so important while experiencing psychedelics. A preoccupied mind doesn't use the DMN. So it would follow that a preoccupied mind wouldn't benefit as much from a suppressed DMN, because it wouldn't have any reason to try activating it.
[+] [-] beams_of_light|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdff|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] myself248|3 years ago|reply
Chopping firewood? Got machines for that now. Knitting? Mechanized. Walking to the next town over? Now it's a high-concentration game of GTA with a radio for extra distraction.
All of these things also had a mechanical element to them. Hands busy, mind wanders.
We've _so_ deprived our brains of this organizing time, that we had to _reinvent boredom_, and now we call it meditation.
[+] [-] alexpetralia|3 years ago|reply
So, I started using mnemonics to remember my thoughts[0]. Now I take showers without feeling the anxiety of forgetting all the thing I thought about (e.g. chores, talk to someone, respond to email, write down an idea, etc.).
[0] https://alexpetralia.com/2017/12/31/shower-recall/
[+] [-] QuantumGood|3 years ago|reply
• Left brain is thoughts, analysis, pattern following, etc.
• Right brain is awareness without analysis, flow state, performance awareness
To "listen" to your right brain awareness, you need to shut down the left brain at least a little bit. You need at least a little bit of space (or flow state) to hear the right brain. The left brain pushes itself on you. The right brain needs to be listened to be heard.
[+] [-] zxcvbn4038|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ilyt|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] math_dandy|3 years ago|reply
I suspect a major cause of the shower gap is energy price gap, leading one to conclude that cheap energy increases innovation!
[+] [-] chiefalchemist|3 years ago|reply
Initially, I thought it was a personal quirk. Then I read the book "Your Brain at Work" by David Rock. At this point, I'm due for a re-read.
https://www.amazon.com/Your-Brain-Work-Revised-Updated/dp/00...
[+] [-] velcrovan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] duncancarroll|3 years ago|reply