Thank you! I think this started out with just the question with a little of what I thought about it and then evolved to be much longer. And knowing that this would make a good post is good information. I tend to have a too-strong filter for what quality is post-able on the internet and what isn't, which usually manifests as perfectionism. My behavior is (hopefully) updated accordingly :)

On a side not, it's really interesting how, despite reading posts here for quite awhile without an account, that actually creating an account and posting / commenting changes your perspective, casting the various features of the site in a new light, and reveals things you never would have noticed

Hi!

I'm a lurker on LW but I've had a question I've been thinking about for awhile. I'm an extremely neurotic person and have great trouble interacting with people online, so I've always struggled (and never succeeded) with finding a venue for talking with people about things I've thought of, or have questions about. But LW seems like the kind of crowd who would have a thoughtful answer to this question; and this seems like the / a place for it. At least, I hope this is an acceptable place to ask it

Anyway, my question is whether anybody has had success emulating showering, or otherwise found some method, to induce shower thoughts / diffuse-mode thinking patterns / default mode network activity?

Some things I've heard people say online and in person related to this:

Sleeping, dreaming, and the hypnagogic state just before sleep. This could look like just keeping a notebook beside your bed and writing anything that comes to mind down when you wake up, or just before you fall asleep. I've read some people have even went so far as to hold something heavy so that when they fall asleep it falls and wakes them up and they presumably have access to whatever they were thinking just before falling asleep. I've found that this is a lucrative time for ideas and thoughts, but if you have sleeping problems like I do it can be extremely disruptive, and counterproductive

Meditation. There are some forms of meditation that involve specifically waiting for thoughts to occur so you can contemplate them. Which seems like the most direct route to spontaneous thoughts like shower thoughts. Anybody whose ever meditated knows that thoughts interject themselves during meditation regardless whether you want them to or not. However, I've never had much success with this method

Walking and pacing. This is a big one for certain people I know, and used to be much more important for me. Basically, you just walk around, either in a tight circuit inside, or over a longer distance outside. Some people say this is the most effective method for them

Some other assorted ideas related to this:

Talking to people seems to be a way of shaking your thoughts up, and getting you into a different way of thinking about things. And others can be used to generate ideas, and evolve ideas: they come up with things, they tell you and you come up with a variant of it, or manipulate it in a way they wouldn't have done otherwise. But this is an unreliable method because other people aren't always available to talk with, and aren't necessarily receptive to helping someone deliberately work through a problem. In an institutional setting where the whole point for everyone involved is solving a particular problem, I imagine this is one of the most important methods available Related: I have had this idea (plus partially written source code) for awhile for a hybrid chat / forum / collaborative note taking system where individuals write in separate note logs but can arbitrarily combine individual logs to collaborate, and can spawn child logs based off of any given note to tackle it as a subproblem. I imagine sort of like a micro-microblogging platform for idea generation, and recording problem-solving notes, specifically structured in a way that encourages breaking problems into subproblems, babbling, bouncing ideas off others, etc. I also have considered a sort of collaborative zettelkasten-like system. And some sort of wiki for ideas as well. If this is something somebody is interested in participating in developing, or even just discussing platforms like this, or the potential for such a platform and its effect on society, then hmu

It seems to be possible to use different representational tools (tools for representation) to assist in getting your thoughts in the right place. Like writing, for instance, seems to act like a form of memory augmentation, allowing you to effectively increase the size of your working memory. This seems to enable you to produce more ideas related to your problem because they don't have to be stored in brain memory, they can be dumped into physical memory and essentially forgotten about for the time. Drawing and graphical note-taking is another one: sort of like augmenting your visual imagination in the same way that writing augments your memory, and apparently enables you to evolve an idea by way of manipulating your drawing. Interestingly, it almost seems like your brain considers the representations formed by these tools as equivalent to the representations it generates internally; ie: internal, mental representations and physical representations you create in external reality are treated the same internally. I don't know if that's true or not

Frequently even taking a shower, or any of the usually-lucrative techniques, isn't effective because you have ideas and thoughts about things which just generally aren't about the things you want. For example, you think about something someone said, or what you have to do after showering. It's not to say that these kinds of thoughts can't be useful, but if you intend to use your shower thoughts to aid in solving a particular problem then those other thoughts are interfering. So getting your head in the right place is obviously important

In general, getting your thinking (conscious and/or unconscious) to stick to a particular line of thought is its own challenge that I don't have much traction in finding a solution for. It seems like if you think about something for long enough, there is a momentum to your thinking and that persists without deliberate, conscious effort. However, if your mind isn't already sticking to the target line of thought, and especially if you aren't immediately interested in it, or if other things are on your mind as well, then it can be extraordinarily difficult to get your mind to stick to your target thoughts

I've actually considered making some kind of "game" or task that involves certain arbitrary tasks in a particular order for a particular amount of time, in hopes that it will encourage thinking in the background while doing it. I've considered some previously-solved puzzles, for this, like: going through the motions of solving towers of hanoi, or a sliding block puzzle. The point isn't that you achieve anything by doing the thing, its that you have done it so many times that it becomes automatic and you essentially free your mind up for free thinking until you are done with the task

Incidentally, while searching for posts here related to this topic here I found a years-old post here which ended up with a discussion about cutting shower time down. Also, this morning I read a hacker news post and associated comments about what happens to you when you lose slack (see this tag) by trying to increase efficiency. I kept thinking while I read these (contextualized also by thoughts about shower thoughts) that your unconscious thinking is doing something while you're apparently not actively engaged. It isn't completely useless. And its probably not generally useless at all. Like, while you're training an ANN model, or running a search algorithm: that isn't wasted time: you really are moving toward something; its effective. This seems related because showering, or whatever appears to be useless time, may really be very useful. Cutting time and rushing for efficiency / productivity reasons seems like errant and misinformed optimizing in some cases. However, I won't make the mistake of saying that all such optimizing (such as cutting down shower time) should be avoided universally. That is up to every individual to decide for themselves, and depends on their current circumstances specifically. Sometimes people really don't get anything extra out of doing something, and they really should streamline doing it so they don't have to do it for very long. Sometimes cutting down your shower time is the best thing for someone personally, even if they are remarkably productive while doing it

Generally, I think that having shower thoughts, and spontaneous ideas and insight about some problem, is an extremely important part of solving big primarily-mental problems. I think that in order to trek through a problem-solution space, you are dependent on the quality and quantity of your ideas. If you want to solve a problem faster then that (abstractly) means having more, higher quality ideas about the current subproblem you're working on. It seems like the quantity and quality of ideas are monotonically related somehow, and the larger the quantity of ideas you have the higher quality they are as well. Probabilistically speaking, if you sample more from a particular distribution you will likely sample more from any partitions of that distribution; so the higher the quantity of ideas you have, the more likely some will be of higher quality I imagine this sort of like gradient descent: you sample solutions (via ideas) in problem-solution space immediately around your current subproblem, when you find one that works you go there and then choose a different subproblem, and slowly you wander toward your goal. Alternatively, you can imagine it like: you have a well-understood part of problem-solution space, and a not-well-understood section, and your ideas slowly eat away at the not understood section to incorporate it into the well understood section, and you slowly slime-mold your way to your objective state In either of these representational models the quantity (number of problem-solution space samples) and quality (step size / bite size) are both responsible for the rate which you move toward your goal Also, along the lines of problem-solution space trekking and representations thereof, you can talk about the direction of your steps. For example, you can be moving in a direction completely opposite your intended goalstate, or you can be moving directly towards it. In principle it isn't possible to know which direction (which subproblem to solve, for example) is the preferred one unless you have some interpretation of the space which does have a direction attached. Taking this idea to the ridiculous extreme: if you establish an analogical mapping between your current problem-solution space, and an already-solved one, then you could potentially map your current state in your space to a state in the analogical space and establish a direction that way. It seems plausible this may actually be related to how people usually establish such directions

Sorry I sort of went off track there. Thank you for any comments in advance. No comments is alright too, just posting this somewhere feels good