The week before we send an issue to the printer can be both exhilarating and exhausting. So, I was intrigued by an article on scientificamerican.com, “Overworking Your Brain Can Spark Ideas,” which reported on research that found people generate the most creative ideas when they’re mentally exhausted. It never occurred to me that this might be an especially fruitful time for coming up with good ideas. I wondered how that research might apply to me, and whether it might suggest new ways to push the CEP staff even harder. (More on that later.)
Rémi Radel, of the Univ. of Nice Sophia-Antipolis in France, asked undergraduates to perform a computerized task that required close attention: identify the direction of one central arrow by ignoring the direction of the arrows around it. In some trials, all of the arrows pointed in the same direction; in others (conflict trials), the center and surrounding arrows pointed in opposite directions, so identifying the direction of the center arrow required more focused attention and mental energy. After the students completed that attention task (2,000 times), Radel measured their creativity through verbal tests that required them to connect unrelated words and to find new uses for common objects, such as a paperclip and shoe. The participants who faced more conflict trials came up with more numerous and more innovative ideas for using the objects, and they were more likely to connect unrelated words in the word-association test, than those in the control group (who saw opposite-facing arrows just 10% of the time).
The attention task exhausted the participants’ inhibition, which is the brain’s ability to filter out unnecessary information from the conscious mind. Although inhibition is necessary for focusing on tasks and solving problems, it stifles creativity by blocking unconventional thoughts and ideas. Reduce inhibition, and creative juices start to flow.
Creativity is at the core of engineering. Engineers apply scientific principles in new, creative ways to solve problems ranging from developing products that make daily life easier to solving society’s grand challenges. To help us devise these solutions, we frequently use idea-generation techniques such as brainstorming, which can produce the most useful ideas when participants let go of their inhibitions and allow the creative juices to flow.
Many aspects of putting together CEP involve creativity, particularly the first thing you see every month, the cover. At our monthly cover meeting, each editor has an opportunity to present her or his own ideas, and usually does so by preparing a sample cover. We discuss the concepts as a group and refine them as needed, then select one or two and our art director takes it from there. Some of our better ideas have come when we got a little punchy and inhibition flew out the window. I can see how this type of work could benefit from mental exhaustion and lower inhibition.
On the other hand, our accuracy (and reputation) would surely suffer if we attempted to do some tasks when we are mentally exhausted. For example, editing an article with highly specialized terminology (such as “Selecting Sensors for Safety Instrumented Systems,” pp. 19–25) or equations (such as “Choose Impellers Based on Process Requirements,” pp. 27–33) requires a great deal of focused attention. Proofreading every page before uploading to the printer falls into the same category. That’s why I will be careful to not exhaust my editors’ minds — although I might move our cover meetings to late in the afternoon.
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