The Facts on Shower Thoughts
We’ve all had those moments where we’re doing something mundane and a random thought-provoking idea pops up into our heads that makes us stop and think. Famously they usually happen in the shower, hence the title of this article, but they can happen anywhere especially if you’re mindlessly doing a task.
“I just don’t understand, if it’s popped why isn’t it just called corn?”
What are Shower Thoughts?
Shower thoughts are random questions or thought-provoking statements that sometimes solve a problem you’ve been having. If you’ve ever stepped away from a problem you’ve been stuck on and later had an epiphany while doing something else, that’s technically a ‘shower thought’. But for the most part, when people refer to shower thoughts, they’re talking about the random ideas or questions.
Here are a few examples that don’t solve any problems:
At how many minutes does a shower just become a really inefficient bath?
Your entire life might be someone else’s really long dream and you’d never know it.
Did the first person to name their son Aaron just want them to be picked first at something?
There are plenty of other examples of these online, there’s even a whole subreddit on Reddit called r/Showerthoughts. Some websites just straight up steal them from there and “write” a whole page of content and call it a day. Cough cough BuzzFeed cough.
These shower thoughts happen to almost everyone and you what know that means; researchers and scientists, who can’t leave well enough alone, are going to have to try to find a reason for it.
What Causes Shower Thoughts?
Interestingly there have been a few studies trying to target the cause of shower thoughts, annoyingly the most recent study was published in October of this year. It’s annoying because it’s more reading for me but mostly it’s annoying because that study sort of contradicts what a widely accepted study found a decade ago.
Nah, it’s really because I don’t like reading research papers
While both studies found that letting your mind wander instead of rest is what induces a “shower thought”, what you do while your mind wanders, or how engaged your mind is while it wanders, is the piece that both studies don’t agree on.
Way back in 2012, Dr. Benjamin Baird at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, along with others, published a research paper entitled Inspired by Distraction: Mind Wandering Facilitates Creative Incubation.
Dr. Baird and others ran a study that involved participants having to list unusual uses for common objects, like a brick, in two minutes. After two rounds of this, the participants were broken up into 4 groups and assigned a task for 12 minutes.
Group one performed a demanding task, group two performed an undemanding task, group three rested (AKA sat there bored out of their minds), and group four did not get a task; instead they went right back to two rounds of naming unusual uses for the objects.
The demanding task performed by Group One involved participants looking at a series of passing numbers on a computer screen, randomly one number would be a question mark. They then had to determine if the number that appeared before that question mark was either odd or even. The undemanding task performed by Group Two was just determining if a number shown was odd or even.
The groups did this for 12 minutes and then went right back to trying to think of unusual uses for a brick.
“How about smashing it against my head until I don’t understand numbers anymore”
In the end, those that performed undemanding tasks reported that they were able to let their minds wander more often (no way…). Researchers also found this group was significantly more creative than the other groups.
After a few more rounds of this, the researchers determined “shower thoughts” were caused by letting your mind wander while performing an undemanding task.
The Latest Findings
Earlier this year assistant professor of Philosophy, Zac Irving, at the University of Virginia read what the task was that Dr. Baird put his participants through and audibly said “that’s dumb”. Well, he most likely didn’t say that but, he did think it wasn’t a good measure for determining what causes shower thoughts.
See, Irving realized that shower thoughts happen while you’re doing everyday tasks, and determining if a number is odd or even, hasn’t been an everyday task for anyone since the second grade. He also knew that there were a few studies that couldn’t exactly replicate Dr. Baird’s findings in the decade since so he decided to run a new experiment.
Irving, along with University of Minnesota psychology professor Caitlin Mills, published a new paper entitled The shower effect: Mind wandering facilitates creative incubation during moderately engaging activities. Apparently, professors don’t have a character limit for research paper titles.
In their paper, they write that the everyday task they had their participants do was watching a video, and that makes sense, I’m literally watching YouTube right now.
In Irving’s study, one group watched a boring video of two men folding laundry and the other group watched a scene from the 1989 film “When Harry Met Sally” that was determined to be moderately engaging.
Specifically, Irving and Mills chose the scene where Meg Ryan fakes an orgasm.
I mean, I am “moderately engaged” right now
In the end, Irving and Mills confirmed that mind wandering does indeed help create “shower thoughts” but found that the thoughts were more creative when moderately engaging in a task. While you might get more ideas by doing a boring or “undemanding” task, they weren’t as productive or useful.
Irving and Mills plan on continuing their research in shower thoughts since their findings don’t give conclusive results in other everyday tasks.
Will I write about those findings when they come out? If it’s not earth-shattering, probably not because what I gathered from these two studies, is that everyone is different and what may cause shower thoughts for you, might not work for someone else. Also, no one is willing to study shower thoughts by putting people in showers.
Quick Facts
Another study from 2012 Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of Freestyle Rap suggested dopamine may play a piece in rappers entering a “flow state” when freestyle rapping which seems to be the same parts of the brain that trigger during “shower thoughts”
