6 Stage Two: Incubation and Investigation

Have you ever had a difficult problem you were working on that you just couldn’t figure out no matter how hard you focused and concentrated? You sigh, or grunt, or maybe even yell, then walk away to clear your head, and a little while later the answer magically appears?

It’s a pretty common experience, whether you’re trying to figure out a recipe, make your budget work, paint a masterpiece, or find the right way to decorate your living room. After the Preparation stage, we can become too fixated on the creative problem before us. Despite our values on hard work and focus and dogged persistence as a culture, we really need some space to think in a different way.

We need to Incubate.

Incubation, the second phase of the creative process, is a strange stage in that it largely involves a subconscious process. It’s a passive stage, where we’re not directly addressing the creative issue at hand, but instead we’re allowing the gumbo of our Preparation and the early work we’ve done on the project to meld together in the back of our minds, adding in a few other key ingredients.

What’s going on back there, you ask? Our subconscious is like a giant library, full of all kinds of experiences, memories, images, and knowledge. And while our conscious mind can’t read all the books in a library at the same time, our subconscious has access to them, or at least to the parts that are pertinent to us. With the information actively gathered during Preparation in Stage 1, and any preliminary work we’ve done on our creative effort, our subconscious can take over and add in new elements to give fresh perspective and ideas.

In their chapter, “Creative Cognition,” from The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (2nd ed., 2019. Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology; Kaufman, J., & Sternberg, R.,Eds.), Thomas B. Ward and Yuliya Kolomyts write about the Forgetting Fixation Theory from Smith. This theory “states that activities that temporarily distract a problem solver can lead to forgetting of interfering information, which then leads to a greater likelihood of retrieving new, relevant information.” Fixation on the problem is a can’t-see-the-forest-for-the-trees situation in which we’re in so deep that we can’t see the creative problem clearly anymore. The Forgetting Fixation Theory reframes distraction as being a good thing when we’re in that mental state–we forget the very thing we’re fixated on, just for a little while, and that opens up our subconscious to add in missing pieces we need to move ahead on the creative work.

Small Tasks Give the Subconscious Space To Work

In their book chapter, “Creativity and Cognitive Control,” from The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity (2nd ed., 2019. Cambridge Handbooks in Psychology; Kaufman, J., & Sternberg, R.,Eds.), Mathias Benedek and Emanuel Jauk note that, “A major argument for the involvement of spontaneous processes in creative thought is the observation that we sometimes have unexpected insights relevant to unsolved problems while we are actually busy with something else.”

In other words, Incubation isn’t really like sitting still like…well, like an egg in an incubator. Rather, it’s a time that we are involving our minds in another task.

But what kind of task we choose for Incubation really matters. Ward and Kolomyts note that “a growing body of work has documented that improvements in problem-solving can occur following periods of temporary withdrawal from a problem, particularly when the interval is filled with a distracting activity.” Moving from our creative effort to another very complicated task or a highly involved experience doesn’t free the subconscious in the same way that more rote tasks do. Benedek and Jauk state that, “Incubation gains are especially pronounced when individuals are confronted with distraction tasks that are cognitively undemanding and involve a different stimulus modality.”

Think about it: how many times have you gotten a good idea while you’re mowing the grass, walking the dog, or taking a shower? Doing simple tasks or small things that you can more or less engage with on auto-pilot are very powerful ways of triggering Incubation. And the “different stimulus modality” is also key. The brain needs to change modes to get into deep Incubation. If you’re working on a language-based creative project, then doing a math puzzle like Sudoku would free the language part of your subconscious. Likewise, a mathematical creative problem would benefit from a break with reading or a word puzzle. Incubation is about giving the project-focused part of your brain some time off and being patient while it does its thing.

And what’s further interesting is that the length of Incubation isn’t all that important. “Notably, incubation gains are observed not only after short breaks but also after extended incubation periods such as following a nap (Cai et al., 2009) or a night’s sleep (Wagner et al., 2004).” Whether you play Solitaire for ten minutes or sleep on it for a night or two, either way can be a productive Incubation period.

The Magic of Mind Wandering

One reason many people might feel they aren’t creative is because this Incubation period feels like laziness or a lack of discipline. People disdain the artsy poets who sit around waiting for inspiration to strike; we feel like we need to continuously hammer away at the problem to make progress. And our work-focused culture teaches us

How often we hear teachers and parents tell children to stay focused, and to stop getting distracted! Yet we know that little kids are some of the most creative humans on the planet! We teach ourselves not to be creative through this value on visible and dogged effort.

Well, here in this class, we will un-teach that as best we can, and say that mind-wandering and distraction are incredibly valuable. They’re worthwhile moments to cultivate. Ward and Kolomyts write,

There are further ways of enhancing the Incubation period, once we understand how important it is and know to cultivate it. One is to remember the Mind-Body Connection.

As we all know, the human body isn’t meant to sit in a chair all day (and sitting is the new smoking). An emerging body of research is showing that our brains and bodies are intricately connected not just on the level of organs and bodily fuctions, but also in ways that a body’s movement and exercise affect mental outlook, mood, and temperament.

Remember the examples from earlier in this chapter: mowing the grass, walking the dog, or taking a shower? You’ll note that all of those are physical activities. Nothing major, of course, but there is something about movement that can trigger Incubation in a way that sitting still doesn’t always accomplish. And if you feel like a major physical activity to spur creative thought, that works great, too.

In fact, though it may be more of a tale that a truth, it’s widely stated that Einstein’s Theory of Relativity came to him through the Mind-Body Connection. “I thought of that while riding my bicycle,” Einstein is purported to have said.

Corporations have taken this to heart and incorporated “walking meetings” to get thoughts flowing in ways that don’t happen in cubicles or seminar rooms, too.

Making Connections and Inspiring Incubation

To conclude, Incubation is about making mental space for making new connections. In fact, that’s often what creativity is, at heart: a new connection between two previously unrelated things.

But what makes for great creativity is when the connection is unexpected or even a little wild. Remember that “openness to experience” in Preparation? That applies here in Incubation, too–being open to surprising or unsettling connections that arise.