Why Shower Thoughts Are Actually Deep
Everyone loves shower thoughts. It's the most successful format on this channel. There's an entire subreddit dedicated to shower thoughts and thousands of TikToks daily talking about profound ideas, paradoxes, and concepts; things that you need to think about when you're in the shower. A couple of days ago, I got stuck when I was trying to come up with ideas for the next episode in this series, and so I took a shower break hoping that would clear my head.
As you would expect, I was hit with a shower thought. This one was different than the rest. As the water poured over me, I thought, "Why do we have so many brilliant ideas in the shower?" You can spend hours thinking about things like whether or not you should stay with your partner, the error in the code you've been trying to debug for a week, or how to start a story. But it's only when you stop and do something mundane, like showering or going for a walk, that the answer suddenly refines you.
How is it that I can be so relaxed, not thinking about anything in particular, just standing in the soothing warm rain, and the answer to a problem that has baffled me for ages suddenly just pops into my head? This is the science behind shower thoughts, the secret to our most brilliant ideas. These ideas often come during a creative impasse. You're stuck on a problem and focusing so hard on a solution that doesn't seem to get you anywhere. That's when you go take a shower or go for a walk, and the solution pops into your brain—the aha moment.
These are moments of realization where we suddenly think of the solution to a problem, get a joke, or finally have a personal realization. Have you ever been out for a walk and realized that your relationship is doomed? Or maybe you've been in the shower and the idea of quitting your university program has started to feel like the right thing to do? When these thoughts occur, it feels like they've been launched into our awareness from deep inside us. We weren't actively thinking of them, yet they came to us.
A group of Belgian psychologists suggested that these moments of insight spring up from the unconscious mind rather than our active reasoning mind. There's a give and take between conscious and subconscious processes during these aha moments. These same psychologists used a word association puzzle in a study to learn more about these moments. They wanted to see if participants were more likely to find an answer in a shower thought or a conscious thought.
The study asked participants to think of a word that could be combined with pie, crab, or sauce to make a new word. Psychologists believe that the puzzle would be difficult while working on it actively because the conscious mind is only good at recognizing strong associations. The answer to the puzzle is a weak association, meaning it's more likely that the unconscious mind will push the answer forward in an aha moment. It's like walking home from an exam when the correct answer to a question suddenly hits you, and you curse yourself for not getting it right during the test. Your subconscious mind pushed the answer forward, just not at the right time.
Cognitive neuroscientist Mark Beeman has an excellent analogy for the process of solving creative problems. Instead, it's like trying to see a dim star at night; you have to look out of the corner of your mind. These thoughts likely arise from our brain's default mode network, or DMN. Our constellation of brain regions is active when our thoughts turn inward, such as when our mind wanders. When you get one of these moments, the answer or realization you get tends to feel right. It's the answer you've been looking for, and you found it without even trying.
But are the insights you get in the shower better than those you get from the conscious mind? Actually, yeah. In the same word association study, shower thought solutions were correct 94% of the time compared to just 78% for conscious solutions. Now, one limitation of the study is that these are solutions to problems with clearly defined answers. Most problems don't have clear answers; they have many possibilities that work better or worse.
I've had a lot of aha moments…