While reading an article on “The Wonder of Insight”  by John Kounios and Yvette Koumios in the March 2025 issue of Scientific American, I came across the following passage:

In the 2010s Brian Erickson, then a doctoral student in John’s laboratory at Drexel University, and his colleagues demonstrated that people’s tendency toward insightful or analytical thinking is evident during “resting-state” brain activity–while a person relaxes with no task to perform or expectation about what is to come.

I recognized this “resting state” brain activity at once. I call it “shower brain” because it happens most frequently to me when I am in the shower. There is something a little depressing that the only time I relax with no task or expectation is when I am in the shower. But that’s how it is. I knew that I had good ideas more frequently in the shower than in other places. But until I read that passage, I didn’t realize it was because my brain was in a rare idle state.

Years ago, the elliptical must have served a similar purpose. I’d start my workout, and my brain would go into an idle state. One time, I had started writing a story called “Take One for the Road” and became stuck on point. On the elliptical machine, while my brain was idle, I had the solution all at once. I went from elliptical to word processor, skipping the shower, so that I could get my solution written before I forgot it. “Take One for the Road” became my third professional story sale, and the first one I made to Analog.

Stories abound in the history of science of these eureka moments. Leo Szilard was crossing a street in London in the early 1930s when he suddenly saw that a nuclear chain reaction was possible. Many of the founders of modern quantum theory had similar moments. I’ve heard writers speaking of stories forming completely in their heads so that all they had to do was take dictation from their muse.

I don’t take advantage of the shower enough in this regard, which is surprising given how effective it frequently is. On one software project for my day job, I had a fairly complex construction, and one morning, unbidden in the shower, came up with a much simpler (and more elegant) solution. Story ideas come unstuck in the shower. New ideas for blog posts grow better there than anywhere else. One would think that all I need do when I hit a tough problem is to stop what I’m doing and head to the shower. But I don’t.

In decades past, going to the movies served a similar purpose. In the late 1990s, when I was stuck on something, I’d head to the movies to see some action film that didn’t require a lot of thought, and that I could easily get lost in. I usually emerged from the movie theaters entertained and enlightened, the problem solved in the background as the film unspooled on the screen.

The Scientific American article pointed to the parts of the brain where insights take place, and experiments had revealed some of the circumstances leading up to these light bulb moments. An occasional idle brain seems to be a partial pre-requisite. It’s amazing to me how rare an idle brain—“shower brain”—is for me. My mind is constantly racing, constantly processing input. I joke that my default “idle” is reading. But the article seems to argue for idle time for its own sake, for its potential insights.

The problem is, the moment I am not doing anything, I feel lazy. Thus, my penchant for very fast showers.