What Are Your Thoughts on Daydreaming Mode vs. Productive Meditation?

00:00:04.640 | Our next question comes from Jim the CFO. Jim asks, "What are your thoughts on leveraging the

00:00:12.560 | mind's daydreaming mode for creativity and problem solving versus productive meditation?"

00:00:18.560 | Well, as longtime listeners know, productive meditation is a cognitive training exercise

00:00:25.840 | where you maintain your focus on a single professional problem while you walk. When

00:00:32.080 | your mind wanders, you bring it back to the problem. If you do this over time, you will

00:00:36.480 | greatly expand your ability to focus your mind's eye on a single topic. You'll expand your working

00:00:41.360 | memory capacity. You'll expand your ability to just in your brain itself manipulate variables

00:00:46.880 | and schemas and make cognitive progress. It's pull-ups for your brain, and it's something I

00:00:50.240 | recommend. Jim is asking about daydream mode. You know, what about just letting your mind wander

00:00:58.080 | as a way of finding a solution to a problem? Well, Jim, I'm also a believer in that. There's an

00:01:05.600 | actual school of study on this topic. It's called UTT Unconscious Thought Theory. They tried to

00:01:12.320 | actually study this in the lab. They found some results, but then UTT suffered from a replication

00:01:17.840 | crisis. Some people tried the same studies and couldn't replicate those results. But let's ignore

00:01:21.760 | the research for now. And I will just tell you, Jim, anyone who is a practicing academic

00:01:26.720 | theoretician, someone who does applied math or theoretical computer science like I do,

00:01:30.960 | will tell you in our experience that it works. You know, you want to work on something hard,

00:01:36.400 | but when you come back to it the next day or the next week, you're often surprised by the

00:01:40.320 | new angles you have on it. Some sort of unconscious processing seemed to unfold.

00:01:44.320 | I find the same thing happens to me when I do peer reviews. When I'm reviewing, for example,

00:01:48.400 | a journal paper, I'll read the paper, and I'll think to myself, despairingly,

00:01:53.600 | "I don't—this is too complicated. I don't know what's going on here." And then I'll come back

00:01:57.920 | to it and start writing up my review. And I'm looking at my summary of this paper and saying,

00:02:01.840 | "Wow, my brain understands this paper way better than I do. Like, I didn't understand these nuances,

00:02:07.440 | my brain was figuring out in the background." So I do think that happens. Do you need to do

00:02:11.840 | anything proactively to try to leverage this unconscious thought? Not really. When you're

00:02:17.360 | working on something, work on something. When you're done, be done and do other things.

00:02:20.880 | When you return to it, hopefully you've made some progress. I don't think there's something you have

00:02:25.120 | to plan here. I don't think there's a strategy you have to develop. Unless you're thinking about

00:02:28.880 | this problem every waking hour, day after day, you'll have plenty of downtime when your brain

00:02:33.360 | is not thinking about the problem. So just to see this as a gift, you know, if I come back to

00:02:38.720 | something, I might be smarter than I was the last time I tackled it. If I was to give any concrete

00:02:43.760 | advice here, it might be, don't do too much in one session. If you're trying to do something hard,

00:02:49.040 | maybe have three sessions spread out instead of one big session. So you can leverage this effect

00:02:52.640 | more, you can leverage higher cognitive intensity, you can stave off cognitive fatigue. But otherwise,

00:02:58.560 | I don't think there's much you have to plan here. I think we do get stuff done in our unconscious.

00:03:03.520 | And we should be glad that that is true. But I don't know there's much from a productivity

00:03:08.720 | system standpoint that we need to do to take advantage of that.