A thought provoking article by Scott Adams, creator of Dilbert, in the Wall Street Journal:
If you have a smartphone in your pocket, a game console in the living room, a Kindle in your backpack and an iPad in the kitchen, you never need to suffer a minute without stimulation. Yay!
But wait—we might be in dangerous territory. Experts say our brains need boredom so we can process thoughts and be creative. I think they’re right. I’ve noticed that my best ideas always bubble up when the outside world fails in its primary job of frightening, wounding or entertaining me.
Basically, Adams argues that we’re too connected. With so much stimulation, we don’t allow ourselves the quiet time to process it all. Is he right? After all, most ideas come from other ideas. We hear stuff, it stumbles around in our brains, we think about it in different ways, we think about how to improve or tweak it, we combine it with some other idea we heard somewhere else, and out pops something new. So, if we stop hearing new ideas, are we really going to be as productive? Are we going to be able to come up with those new ideas as readily or as frequently?
Well, Adams’ thinking definitely comports with my own feelings. Hell, I even wrote about the importance of meditation, of all things. I think a structured reflection time is extraordinarily beneficial for just about every aspect of life. But, how much of this unstimulated time do we really need? An hour a day? An hour a week? Four weeks a year?
It’s hard to say. It seems like 30 minutes to an hour a day of low or no stimulation time is a good place to start. I would include low-stimulation things like shower time, or driving without the radio on, or even dinner with a significant other where you have a deeper-level dialogue. That’s my new target, anyway. This is going to supplement the hour or so reflection time I have scheduled per week. We’ll see what kind of benefits it brings…
.