7
Blue Unified: Connection and Water
Empty your mind, be formless, shapeless—like water. Be water, my friend.
—BRUCE LEE
On December 31, 1999, the last day of the twentieth century, in the U.S. Virgin Islands, actor Michael J. Fox had an encounter with a sea turtle that changed the direction of his life.
As the turtle and I swam together in disjointed tandem, the turtle trying to ignore me and me trying to pose no threat, I thought of all those documentaries I had watched as a kid: thousands of hatchling baby sea turtles making their way toward the safety of the ocean while seabirds dive-bomb, picking them off one by one. Only a handful will survive. And that’s just the beginning of a turtle’s ordeal. I noticed that this one was missing a sizable chunk of the rear flipper on his left side. How old was this guy? I wondered. An adult, obviously. What wars had he been through?1
Fox had revealed to the world in 1999 that he suffers from Parkinson’s disease, and after he left Spin City in May 2000, he launched the Michael J. Fox Foundation for Parkinson’s Research. Since then Fox has been a tireless fundraiser and advocate in the search for a cure for Parkinson’s. And when he returned to television, he did so with a different sense of why—not as a career, but as an experiment that fit into a more holistic sense of self: “[Your challenge] doesn’t have to be life-shattering or life-ending.… It can just be a new thing that pushes you to a new place. And so like when I thought about doing this show, it’s like, why not? Why can’t I? Why can’t I?… You don’t have to shut it down. You don’t have to withdraw. You don’t have to pull in.”2 In other words: you don’t have to stay on the shore once you know you’re standing on a shore.
I believe I know how Michael J. Fox felt on that beach. Having spent my life around water and its creatures, I can testify that something mystical can happen to the mind and heart when we intersect with nature. Humans are surrounded by man-made buildings, objects, and environments, and it can become harder and harder to remember our intimate relationship with this beautiful blue planet. But magic can happen in the fleeting moments in which we notice the natural world—the sunset that causes us to catch our breath, the murmur of wind rustling through trees, the sharp, clean smell of rain on grass or the tang of salty air near a shore, the feel of sand or dirt underfoot. These moments reconnect us not only to nature, but also to our own nature; they carry with them the recognition that we are part of something bigger than ourselves. As psychologist William James wrote, “We are like islands in the sea, separate on the surface but connected in the deep.”
Humans have always sought to understand our relationship with what lies beyond us. At times, that “beyond” has been the natural world. At other times, “beyond” has been what we believe created the world and us, or a sense of the interconnectedness of everything. The feeling of connection is called by many names: empathy, compassion, awe, transcendence, ecstasy, love, wonder, enlightenment, flow, unity, mindfulness. It is felt during prayer, meditation, and worship; in tasks that take us out of ourselves, and in the moments when we care for others; on days and evenings when we marvel at the rising sun or the stars. We feel connection in settings from the humblest of temples to the most beautiful synagogues, mosques, and cathedrals; in forests or mountains or lakeshores; when we stand next to sleeping children or gaze into the eyes of loved ones, or when we see or touch the creatures of this world and marvel at the magnificent diversity of life. James called this connection mystical consciousness, a form of awareness entirely different from our typical waking state. “No account of the universe in its totality can be final which leaves these other forms of consciousness quite disregarded,” he said.3
Many, if not most, people greet the terms “meditation” and “mindfulness” with an eye roll or the profession that “I don’t do that stuff.” This isn’t surprising: modern culture puts a premium on motion, on multitasking, and on increasing urbanity. We’ve so glamorized “science” and what’s seen as the “Western” mindset that the idea of sitting still in hope of transcendence seems comical, its practitioners worth mocking. But in recent decades, the scientific perspective on meditation has drastically evolved. For comparison, it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that just as over the past half-century we have realized that quitting smoking has enormous health benefits and chronic stress plays a key role in many diseases and disorders, so too have we begun to conclusively realize that meditation offers tremendous advantages—and we’ve realized this by using those “Western” filters. What science is also revealing is that there’s an additional simple, watery means to mindfulness. Indeed, think of it as Blue Mindfulness.
Skip This Chapter (and Get Back to Work)
It’s amazing how many companies these days promote some kind of meditation program—and not just in Silicon Valley. Target, Procter & Gamble, General Mills, Comcast, BASF, Bose, and New Balance are among an increasing number of corporations to offer mindfulness training and encourage its use at work.4 They’re doing this not only because they care about their employees but—let’s be honest—because they care about profits. “Mindfulness is an idea whose time has come,” says Google’s Chade-Meng Tan. “For a long time practitioners knew, but the science wasn’t there. Now the science has caught up.”5
Play Misty for Me6
“Mindfulness is the process of actively noticing new things,” explains Harvard University psychologist Ellen Langer. “When you do that, it puts you in the present. It makes you more sensitive to context and perspective. It’s the essence of engagement.”7 Alex Pang echoes this belief: “The popular image of meditation is that it’s a kind of blissed-out blank-mindedness,” he says. “Nothing could be further from the truth.”8 In fact, studies show that our mind wanders and blanks out not during meditation but during stress and switch-tasking. Daniel Goleman offers a striking example of such blank-minded meandering:
A reader’s mind typically wanders anywhere from 20 to 40 percent of the time while perusing a text. The cost for students, not surprisingly, is that the more wandering, the worse their comprehension.
Even when our minds are not wandering, if the text turns to gibberish—like We must make some circus for the money, instead of We must make some money for the circus—about 30 percent of the time readers continue reading along for a significant stretch (an average of seventeen words) before catching it.9
Replace “perusing a text” with “driving” and “gibberish” with “a deer running in front of the car” and you’re looking at a hard slap in the face by an exploding airbag, if not worse. But while less violent than a collision, imagine the productivity impact of having to constantly reverse course because you belatedly realize things aren’t adding up correctly. Two steps forward, one step back still makes for progress—but wouldn’t you prefer three steps forward?
Think about such stuttering, inefficient advancement in relation to a 2011 study done by researchers at the Princeton University Neuroscience Institute using fMRI and other measurement tools to evaluate the brain’s response to a disorganized environment. They found that physical clutter distracts the brain, creates greater stress, overloads the senses, and makes it more difficult to process information. Other studies confirm that our brains are not built to function optimally in such a distracting and cluttered mental (or physical10) environment. But in our distracted, overwhelmed world, we’re not only encountering environmental clutter via our own distraction, but making it. So, to take Goleman’s example further, we receive hasty e-mails that (given the sender’s distraction) have mistakes, and (due to our own distraction) skip over the errors when we read them, compounding the problems. (I wish for you to be the recipient of the first e-mail I send after getting out of the water—it is undoubtedly the most clear and concise one I’ll send all day.)
Of course, distraction is not new to the twenty-first century. Indeed, one of the first major studies of its effects was after the Second World War, when researchers were interested in why the targeting accuracy of radio operators declined as their shifts went on.11 And we’ve known forever that the more tired we are, the more mistakes we make. But how many of us have a job (running a grocery store, raising kids, teaching high school students, tuning skis, overseeing mergers and acquisitions) that allows us to tell the boss and our colleagues we’re going to head home for a good nap and then return to finish up? How many companies are willing to establish “z-mail” policies that shut off access to employees’ e-mail accounts over the weekend?12 (That would be next to none.) And yet without cognitive refreshment, can anyone expect the work that we do to be as good as it should be?
In the previous chapter we saw how water can help drug addicts kick their habit. But just as a little Red Mind can be like a little red wine—perfectly wonderful at the right time and in the right quantity—too much Red Mind leaves us in a near-permanent state of guilty dependence and digital delirium tremens when we try to step back even for a moment. In Fast Company magazine, Mark Wilson sympathetically describes our addiction, in this case focusing on our phones, but the argument extends much more broadly to our distance from the natural world.
Claiming that it’s our fault when we can’t disconnect is like saying it’s our fault that we can’t eat just one Lay’s potato chip, smoke just one cigarette, take just one hit of heroin, or have just one orgasm. Addictions are irresistible by nature—by our core physiology, psychology, and everything else that makes us fleshy, fallible humans. And since when do we, as reasonable members of society, blame the addict who’s been hooked on a substance engineered by a giant, publicly traded corporation? Maybe it’s time we look beyond branding and become a bit more honest about what the iPhone has become: An enticingly useful, often unsatisfying, instinctually craveable drug. At the very least, maybe it’s time we all stop blaming the victim.13
But just as those drug addicts found a form of salvation in the waves, we can find it right in front of us if we make just a bit of effort.
The Creative Advantage
Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world.
—ALBERT EINSTEIN
Creativity is a big subject, important in everything—from art to business to science—and in everyone—from young children to nonagenarians. So it’s not surprising that scientists have been trying to discover the neurological “maps” of creativity, to see if it’s possible for humans to train ourselves to access that creative state more often. “Creativity is a renewable resource, one that’s universally, if not evenly, distributed,” wrote Time science and technology editor Jeffrey Kluge. “We don’t decide how much we get, but it’s up to each of us… to tap what’s there.”14
Creativity on command can be a challenge for many of us, but it’s the bread and butter of jazz musicians and improv comics, among others. In 2012, when researchers at the National Institutes of Health wanted to examine the brains of people in “creative flow” (which we’ll talk about later in this chapter), they found twelve experienced freestyle rappers, put them in fMRI scanners, and asked them to (1) improvise lyrics to an eight-bar musical track and then (2) perform a memorized set of lyrics to the same track. The scans revealed that the areas of the brain associated with emotion, motivation and initiative, language, and motor skills were all more active in freestyle rap than with the rehearsed lyrics. At the beginning of improvisation, the left hemisphere was more active, but as the riff ended, the right hemisphere was the more engaged. Freestyle rap, which is an amalgamation of language and music, seems to activate areas involved with both. During the rap, activity in parts of the frontal lobe (notably the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) associated with executive function (processes involved in planning, organizing, strategizing, paying attention, remembering details, and managing) decreased—perhaps indicating a shift from directed attention to looser, more “uncensored” activity. This was “consistent with the notion that a state of defocused attention enables the generation of novel, unexpected associations that underlie spontaneous creative activity,” the study authors wrote.15 In a complex world where almost everyone has access to the same wealth of information creators may not be aware of where their inspiration comes from, since the “top-down” attention of the conscious mind goes quiet during bursts of improvisational creativity. However, that doesn’t mean the conscious mind has no role to play in creativity. Just as focused attention is needed when we experience flow while surfing or kayaking, when the brain moves to the second phase of creation—refining and revising—executive functions have a significant role to play.16
As a scientist and an author, I’ve experienced both the rush of creative inspiration and improvisation as well as the detailed focus of revision, and it’s pretty clear that water can help with both.
Back in 1951 psychologist D. W. Winnicott talked about creativity occurring in “the space between the inner and outer worlds.”17 If, as novelist Alexandra Enders wrote, creativity “incorporates memory, imagination, intention, and curiosity, but also exists in the real world,”18 finding the space and conditions that help an artist to access that creative state is vital. In Santa Cruz, not far from where I live, there is a small inn called Ocean Echo right on the beach. It’s simple, nothing to write home about; certainly the rooms are utilitarian at best, except for the presence of the ocean immediately outside, steps away. The gentleman who owns it tells me that he has customers, musicians and writers, who regularly come down from San Francisco or up from Los Angeles to stay on the beach for a week. For them, the chance to be away from their usual surroundings and by the water—water they can hear, see, and smell—clears the cobwebs out of their brains and gets them back into the creative state. “Most of us… have a special place or two that brings out special dimensions of ourselves,” writes Winifred Gallagher. “Profiles of artists invariably include a paragraph about the settings and rituals they depend on to help summon up and sustain their creative states.”19 Such places provide a framework, an anchor, an entry point into creativity. And perhaps because water is all about flow, many artists find these places by oceans, lakes, rivers, streams, and (famously, in Thoreau’s case) ponds.
Thus I don’t think it’s an accident that so many artists’ colonies grew up in places with water nearby—Provincetown on Cape Cod; in Montauk, New York, in Giverny, France, and Cornwall, United Kingdom. Benjamin Franklin, Edmund Rostand, and Vladimir Nabokov did much of their writing while in bathtubs.20 Author and Booker Prize–winner Hilary Mantel reports that she takes showers when she gets stuck in her writing.21 Oliver Sacks reportedly got over his writer’s block with long swims every day in Long Island Sound:22 “There is something about being in water and swimming which alters my mood, gets my thoughts going, as nothing else can,” he writes. “Theories and stories would construct themselves in my mind as I swam to and fro, or round and round Lake Jeff. Sentences and paragraphs would write themselves in my mind, and at such times I would have to come to shore every so often to discharge them.”23 Robinson Jeffers built his own home, Tor House, stone by stone, in Carmel, California. Pablo Neruda lived by the ocean in Chile on and off for thirty-three years, and wrote that in Isla Negra he attended “the university of the waves.” In 2014 artist and filmmaker Julian Schnabel told the BBC’s Philip Dodd on the radio program Free Thinking that “the freedom of surfing… an otherness… the reason people are drawn to surfing, the reason they really do it is because they can get to a place they can’t get to any other way. There’s great liberation in that. If you look at different surfers over the years… they have a style the same way painters have a style and actors have a style or poets have a style.… It’s not really a sport… it’s a way of life.”24
It is the layers of rhythmic, structured symphony performed by waves and wavelets, stones and pebbles. It is the known shallows that taper into the mysterious abyss. Water is both lover and mother, murderer and life-giver, source and sink. It is the endless mutability, the surprise and unexpectedness of its ever-changing colors and moods that stir artists, musicians, writers, filmmakers, and thinkers alike. Water unleashes the uninhibited child in all of us, unlocking our creativity and curiosity.
The Watery Muse
The ocean stirs the heart, inspires the imagination and brings eternal joy to the soul.
—WYLAND
A year or so ago I was visiting my cousin Julia in my native New York City with my daughter Grayce, and we went out to Red Hook, a heavily industrial area of Brooklyn next to the “other” bridge to the borough, the Manhattan Bridge. We walked the shoreline back toward the Brooklyn Bridge to visit Ran Ortner’s studio to see his huge ocean canvases, some of them eight feet tall and thirty-two feet wide. All you see in Ran’s paintings is ocean. There are no bridges, landmarks, boats, people, animals; just ocean waves rendered with such detail and richness that at first you could think you were seeing a photograph instead of an oil painting. I thought it a little ironic that Ran’s studio had no views of any kind, and certainly not of creativity-inspiring water. But when Grayce, Julia, and I walked in the door, it felt as if Ran had re-created the ocean in all its majesty. His paintings have the same impact as the ocean itself. Some people spontaneously well up and cry. A feeling of awe is common, as is the desire to spend some time with his work. No wonder there’s a big comfy couch right there where you need it in the center of the room!
When you ask Ran what his art is about, he’ll tell you, “I paint the ocean. Period. Why? Because I love it. Period.” If you can get him to talk about it a little more, he’ll say things like, “What you see is exactly how I experience the ocean. Out of that ancient body comes this pulsing energy, like a metronome constantly marking the Now.” Or, “I thought how powerful it would be if I could bring to painting even a fraction of the immediacy I feel when engaging with the ocean.” He says that he wants his paintings to have an impact so immediate that they become “what Kafka called an ‘ax for the frozen sea inside us.’ ”25 You may begin to understand why kicking back on that couch at Ran’s place might be so emotionally and intellectually appealing.
Many of the other artists whose works I have seen or read about have in common their desire to use water as a means of communicating a vision and connecting with others in a visceral way. In the past several years neuroscientists have started to study the neurological basis of our response to art and to beauty—a field called neuroaesthetics. Researchers have discovered that the neurological processes that occur when we perceive something aesthetically involve brain structures responsible for perception, reward, decision making, and emotion.26 If you survey the world of art, however, it’s pretty clear that “beauty” and “art” are subjective experiences encoded by culture and personal history. “A need to experience beauty may be universal, but the manifestation of what constitutes beauty certainly is not,” write Bevil Conway and Alexander Rehding in their 2013 survey of neuroaesthetics. “Beauty… varies in complex ways with exposure, context, attention, and rest—as do most perceptual responses.”27
While the scientists who study neuroaesthetics are still unclear about what exactly creates the experience of beauty and art in the brain, most of them will agree that there are three components: perceptual, cognitive, and affective (or emotional). The perceptual processes are the same as when we take in any stimulus (visual, auditory, and so on). The cognitive processes involve making sense of the stimuli and giving them meaning. But whenever I speak with artists, it’s clear that what matters most to them is the emotional effect of their art.28
My friend Halsey Burgund assembles audio collages of music and voices speaking about the ocean. Choreographer Jodi Lomask creates a multimedia performance, Okeanos, at the Aquarium of the Bay in San Francisco, combining live dance, aerial performers, video projections of underwater dance and ocean elements, and interactive talks with experts to demonstrate “the spectacular vitality found in the sea.” Writers from Homer to Melville to Twain to Conrad, poets from Coleridge to Mary Oliver to Lisa Starr use water as background and matrix for their stories and poems, pulling readers deep into the experience of ocean and river. Sculptors like Theo Jansen create kinetic Strandbeests, which move along the beaches of Holland, propelled by wind and weather. Photographers like Karen Glaser, Brian Skerry, and Neil Ever Osborne capture an instant of time and light in their images of water and the animals and people in and on it. All of them are trying to communicate even the smallest portion of the essence of their experience of water.
Of course, artists are inspired by different things. Some go to Santa Fe for the sky, some go to New York for the energy, some go to Algiers for the sensory overload, some go to Paris for the mood. But water’s infinite variety and (sometimes terrifying) depth has an unrivaled inspirational force when it comes to the physical world. Its potential is metaphysical to the nth degree, and here, too, creativity and problem solving are naturally compatible. After all, what is creativity but a form of optimism that there is more that can be done?
Artsy-Fartsy and Touchy-Feely 29
The creative act is a letting down of the net of human imagination into the ocean of chaos on which we are suspended, and the attempt to bring out of it ideas.
—TERENCE MCKENNA, AUTHOR AND PHILOSOPHER
My sister Jill Hoy and her late husband, Harvard art professor Jon Imber, spent half of the year by the sea on Deer Isle, Maine. They painted together by the water for a long time, side by side for countless thousands of hours. They met on the island more than twenty years ago. Jill grew up visiting Deer Isle and painting the colors of the sea (our father owned a ship captain’s house in the village), and Jon visited the island in summer to paint. Jill and Jon experienced water through different eyes. They saw lines and colors, shapes and patterns, on its surface and in its depths that we didn’t know were there until they opened our eyes.
People fall in love with the light, the coast, and the ocean in the same way Jon and Jill did each time they painted. People sometimes want to remember that feeling. Sometimes they buy a painting so they can take some of that feeling back with them to put on a wall, to look again and again at the colors and the light held by the paint Jon or Jill placed on the canvas at the sea. Somehow, each deliberate stroke of a brush loosely held by a hand at the end of an arm, wired to a brain responding to the light reflecting off the water and passing through two eyes, is able to hold within it the magic of the ocean and the passion of the painter, and touch the heart of a viewer many miles away and many years from now.30
Perhaps because water is used in the creation stories of dozens of religions, or perhaps because water is so malleable, changeable, shimmering, yet with invisible depths, it is used frequently as a metaphor for the creative process. As University of Vermont professor of environmental studies Patricia Stokowski points out, bodies of water—oceans, streams, rivers, pools, fountains—are used both realistically and symbolically, as “a dominant feature in all forms of artistry and artistic expression.”31 Water can represent death, birth, destruction, play, a bottomless tomb or a familiar and beloved haven. In psychology, water is used as a metaphor for the unconscious and for emotion. (Psychologists may not discuss water in their pages, but take a look at the number of psychology books that feature it on their covers.) A passage on water can symbolize a heroic quest, the movement of time, a journey to the underworld, the education of the young, and the voyage home to the old. “Water has a nearly unlimited ability to carry metaphors,” is “the fluid that drenches the inner and outer spaces of the imagination,” writes Austrian philosopher Ivan Illich. “What it says reflects the fashions of the age; what it seems to reveal and betray hides the stuff that lies beneath.”32
Metaphors and analogies are crucial for our understanding of the world and how we should interact with it. Douglas Hofstadter, a professor of cognitive and computer science at Indiana University, and Emmanuel Sander, a psychologist at the University of Paris, have written that analogies,
far from being unusual cognitive gems, are mundane events, being generated several times every second, and it is through them that we manage to orient ourselves in the world. Analogical thought involves the perception of important but often hidden commonalities between two mental structures, one already existing in our brain, representing some aspect of our past experience stored in an organized fashion, and the other one freshly constructed, representing a new circumstance in our lives. In essence, an apt analogy allows a person to treat something new as if it were familiar. If one is willing to let go of surface attributes and to focus on shared properties, one can take advantage of past knowledge to deal with things never seen before.33
Language, we know, has its limits, and metaphor and analogy help us understand one another despite some of these constraints. This is especially true when we face new situations, since putting a label on anything necessarily involves ignoring some details in favor of an abstract analogue.34 David A. Havas, director of the Laboratory for Language and Emotion at the University of Wisconsin-Whitewater, and James Matheson of the School of Cognitive Sciences at Hampshire College have noted that “Language can impact emotion, even when it makes no reference to emotion states. For example, reading sentences with positive meanings (‘The water park is refreshing on the hot summer day’) induces patterns of facial feedback congruent with the sentence emotionality (smiling), whereas sentences with negative meanings induce a frown.”35
Abstraction can have a powerful cognitive effect well beyond communication. A few years ago, researchers explored how impressions and decisions might be influenced by “incidental haptic sensations”—that is, when we hold certain objects. The impact of our metaphorical foundation was unmistakable:
In six experiments, holding heavy or light clipboards, solving rough or smooth puzzles, and touching hard or soft objects nonconsciously influenced impressions and decisions formed about unrelated people and situations. Among other effects, heavy objects made job candidates appear more important, rough objects made social interactions appear more difficult, and hard objects increased rigidity in negotiations.36
The opposite of rough and hard? Liquid H2O.
Think about it: simply touching a hard object increased mental and psychological inflexibility. What might that mean when it comes to thinking creatively and finding new solutions? In some cases, getting to yes requires getting to wet.
But wait, I know what you might be thinking: Yeah, I’m going to be trying to sell something to a customer, and when things get ugly I’m going to invite him to go hot tubbing? (I’d say, “Sure!,” but of course I live in Northern California, so I would, right?) Probably not. But how often are you in a position where you’re interacting with another person and if you don’t solve the problem right then, right there, all is lost? Emergency medicine, military engagement—not many where lives are on the line. There are many instances where immediate cooperation is essential: a restaurant kitchen, for example. But to some extent those interactions are very different from, say, trying to explain to your daughter why she can’t spend her allowance on an Xbox. The problem is that we treat all such exchanges as Red Mind defined, just as we do with our e-mail, our voice mail, our spreadsheet all-nighters, Black Friday sales, and so forth. The greater the presumed stakes, the more important it is to be at our best. Think about one of your greatest negotiation disappointments. Was it as urgent as it seemed at the time? Would the result have been any worse had you told the other party you wanted to pause the conversation and resume later? Would the result have been any better if during that break you had sat in the tub, or swum some laps, or sat on a bridge listening to the sounds of the river below? I bet the odds of progress would have improved—“progress” meaning not just that a deal would be negotiated, but also that if an agreement was not to be reached (and sometimes that is the best outcome), you would be at greater peace.
I probably don’t need to point out that an Xbox can be the least of it. Arms control agreements, buying another company, settling labor disputes—the way in which your creativity is encouraged and your rigidity decreased can make an enormous difference. So what is the marginal benefit of that trip to the swimming pool? Or the cost of avoiding it?
I Agree (with Myself)
Human beings are incredibly good at finding evidence to support whatever they believe and discounting any fact or theory that goes against that belief. Facts and figures do little to change our minds, because whenever we are shown facts that are contradictory to our opinions, the emotional circuits of the brain light up, not the reasoning ones.37 Such rigidity is guaranteed to lead to bad decisions and to greatly diminish creativity. Daniel Goleman argues that “new value arises from the original synthesis, from putting ideas together in novel ways, and from smart questions that open up untapped potential.”38 Confirmation bias obstructs such inquiry, because it discards input that contradicts already settled conclusions.
But what if we could apply the power of analogy and metaphor to push back, to spark our creativity by peeling away confirmation bias’s strict filter? One of the metaphors most associated with creative thinking is “fluid.” “Such language reflects a metaphor for thinking about creative thought,” write Michael Slepian of Tufts University and Nalini Ambady of Stanford University. “For instance, creative thought is often contrasted with analytical thought, which is more rigid and precise; a fluid can move in multiple directions with ease, and the ability to fluently and flexibly generate multiple thoughts is essential for creativity.”39 In a mesmerizing experiment, Slepian and Ambady had a group of volunteers trace two similar images, the difference being that one was made up of curves and flowing lines, designed to induce fluid arm movements, while the other was made up of straight lines requiring a more inflexible technique. (Imagine drawing a circle and then a hexagon—such was the test, albeit with more complicated images.) After completing their respective tracings—the participants had been told only that the experiment was to study hand–eye coordination—the volunteers were asked to come up with as many creative uses for a newspaper as possible within sixty seconds. Those who had done the fluid tracings came up with substantially more uses for the paper during that minute. Slepian and Ambady then went further, replicating the experiment with different tests, such as asking participants to complete math problems; those who had done the fluid tracings scored significantly higher than those who had gone the straight-line route on all of these.40
In their book Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought, cognitive psychologists Keith Holyoak and Paul Thagard demonstrate the powerful applications of analogy to problem solving, decision making, explanation, and communication. Not surprisingly, waves are a recurring theme. “The concept of wave has developed from a specific analog tied to a particular kind of example, water waves, to an abstract category that can be applied to a vast range of situations involving the rhythmic propagation of patterns,” the authors write.41 The curved lines we make with our pencil bring to mind (literally) some of the deep reactions offered by actual waves. It seems incredible, but it’s really just amazing, Blue Mind at work.
Hard and rough leads to psychological inflexibility and a decline in creativity. Straight and firm diminishes creativity and intellectual performance. Propagating ripples permeate art and science alike. These are glimmers of a greater illumination, one mapped into our brains over thousands of generations. Indeed, it shows just how finely tuned our neurochemicals are when even these faintly analogous properties and actions have such pronounced impact. These reifications, their prompts tactile, graphic, or semantic, are raindrops in the desert of unoriginality.
Channeling
As we’ve discussed, being on, in, around, or near water can calm our overactive minds while it imbues our senses. It does this by tapping into ancient neural maps and their associated neurochemical reactions. It can also help us access the state not coincidentally called by another watery word, “flow,” allowing us to access the default-mode network/daydreaming parts of our brains while restoring our ability to focus and perform cognitive and creative tasks with greater ease. All the while it inspires some of the greatest art of the past as well as many of the cutting-edge artworks of the modern age.
And much of this optimum brain activity can start with a simple glance out the window or a walk by the shore.
The Fishbowl Effect (Outside Looking In)
We’ve talked before about various studies that have shown how even indirect exposure to water has recuperative power. Views of nature—whether through windows or in artworks—have been shown to help hospital patients feel better and recover faster.42 Several studies of the effect of hospital gardens have shown that patients who take advantage of those spaces, be it by visiting them or even having a window view from their room, experience significantly less emotional distress and physical pain.43 In one fascinating survey, people recovering from heart surgery looked at one of three scenes shown on panels at the foot of their beds. One scene showed an enclosed forest, another a view of open water, and a third an abstract design or blank white panel. As is consistent with other findings, patients looking at nature scenes needed less pain medication; what is especially interesting, however, is that the anxiety levels of patients viewing the open-water scene were significantly lower than for those looking at the enclosed forest.44,45
Viewing water and fish in aquariums also has been shown to help lower stress and promote a better mood. A study done at the National Marine Aquarium in Plymouth, England, monitored the blood pressure, heart rate, and self-reported relaxation levels and moods of 112 people who spent a minimum of ten minutes observing an aquarium tank with three different levels of biodiversity (no fish or crustaceans; a few specimens; and a healthy variety of marine life). In all three conditions, blood pressure dropped substantially during the first five minutes in front of the tank, while the most positive changes in heart rate, relaxation, and mood occurred with the greatest amount of biodiversity. 46 Thirty years ago, in 1984, researchers from the Schools of Dental Medicine and Veterinary Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania performed a study of different treatments to reduce anxiety in patients prior to elective oral surgery: viewing an aquarium or viewing a poster, with or without a hypnotic induction. Viewing the aquarium, with or without hypnosis, proved significantly more relaxing; in fact, further analysis of data showed that hypnosis added nothing to the high level of relaxation experienced when people viewed the aquarium.47
Of all the things we’ve discussed so far, these results are among the most important. Yet despite all the positive data embracing a new lifestyle can be difficult. Asking someone to sit by the shore when they might be fired for doing so is asking a lot. But unlike all the other means of reaching mindful clarity, water can do the work for you. Not all of it, but some of it. To explain this further, we need to finally get to that one sense we didn’t discuss earlier: sound.
The Hush and the Roar
The rain I am in is not like the rain of cities. It fills the wood with an immense and confused sound. It covers the flat roof of the cabin and its porch with insistent and controlled rhythms.… It will talk as long as it wants, the rain. As long as it talks I am going to listen.
—THOMAS MERTON, RAIDS ON THE UNSPEAKABLE
For years architects and urban planners have known that using water elements in city environments creates a better quality of urban life. “Urban landscapes are saturated with signals that carry little or no intentional information and are regarded as unwanted noise by many people. These signals emanate from vehicles (e.g., motors and road noise) and stationary machines (e.g., air conditioners),” write the authors of “Soundscape Ecology: The Science of Sound in the Landscape.”48 Sound pressure is measured on a logarithmic scale with 0 decibels being the lower range of what we can hear and the threshold for pain usually given at 140 dB, lower in children. An increase of 10 dB doubles perceived loudness and represents a tenfold increase in sound level. Thus 20 dBA would be perceived as twice as loud as 10 dBA, 30 dBA would be perceived as four times louder than 10 dBA, 40 dBA would be perceived as eight times louder than 10 dBA, and so on. Levels greater than 165 dB experienced for even a moment can cause permanent damage to the inner ear. In New York City maximum noise levels on subway platforms measured 106 dB and 112 dB inside subway cars.49 To put that in perspective, the human voice in conversational speech is around 60 dB, and rustling leaves, a babbling brook, or water sliding along the hull of a kayak comes in at 20 dB.
You can see why our sound processing systems, built for millions of years to be sensitive to the smallest noises in the environment, are overwhelmed, exhausted, and sick. People who live in places with continuously high levels of traffic noise have a greater risk of high blood pressure, heart attack, and suppressed immune systems.50 All of this noise isn’t just annoying—it’s lethal.
As a Harvard Medical School Senior Research Fellow specializing in the effects of sound, Shelley Batts is supremely qualified to speak about sound and water. “We spend our first nine months underwater, hearing sound through water in the womb,” she comments. “We hear the whooshing of our mother’s heart, her breath going in and out, the gurgle of her digestion.… These fluid, rhythmic sounds are very much like the ocean. Perhaps that’s why the ocean often brings up feelings of relaxation and tranquility.” From the womb onward, sounds have a profound effect on us physically, cognitively, and emotionally. And while prolonged exposure to loud noise causes the release of stress hormones and can lead to long-term damage, not just to our hearing but also to our general health,51 pleasant sounds at comfortable levels have been shown to improve mood, induce relaxation, and enhance concentration.52 According to Batts, sounds like that of water are inherently pleasant to our ears because they are not high frequency or harsh and feature a regular wave pattern, harmonic pitch, and low volume.53
“From a psychological perspective,” Michael Stocker, an acoustician and author of Hear Where We Are: Sound, Ecology, and Sense of Place, told me, “the sound of water means life.” And sound is nearly always present. “If we occlude sound from our thoughts, it’s only meaning we lose—the sounds that convey the message still strike our ears, resonate in our chests, and glance off our faces.”
Petr Janata, from the Center for Mind and Brain at the University of California, Davis, is a cognitive neuroscientist and expert on music and the brain. He theorizes that the low frequency of the sound of water, coupled with its rhythmic nature, is similar to the frequency and rhythm of human breath. Sound, Janata contends, “affects our brain and influences our emotions. If I ask you to close your eyes and turn on a recording of the ocean, I can change your mood immediately.” The sound of water evokes some of the same sensations as meditation, and studies by Japanese researchers show that the sound of a creek in the forest produces changes in blood flow in the brain that indicate relaxation.54 Water sounds have been used by millions of people to help them sleep,55 and ocean sounds can be remarkably effective in calming fearful patients. In 2012 a group of dentists in Malaysia played the sounds of water fountains for patients between the ages of twelve and sixteen prior to dental care. They found that the natural water sounds reduced the teenagers’ worry and anxiety about treatment by nine percentage points compared to the control group.56
“In the brain, the medial prefrontal cortex is associated with linking sensory input (like sound) to subjective cognitive experience, emotional response, and self-reflection,” Batts explains. “It’s the same brain region responsible for feelings of compassion and connection. So it’s very possible that pleasant sounds become linked easily to feelings of positive emotion and connection to other humans and our environment.”
Other studies have elaborated on this association. Technically, “waves breaking on a beach and vehicles moving on a freeway can produce similar auditory spectral and temporal characteristics, perceived as a constant roar.” As subjects were being scanned by fMRI machines, they were shown movies of freeway traffic (which researchers considered “non-tranquil”) and waves crashing onto the sand. The results:
Compared with scenes experienced as non-tranquil, we found that subjectively tranquil scenes were associated with significantly greater effective connectivity between the auditory cortex and medial prefrontal cortex, a region implicated in the evaluation of mental states. Similarly enhanced connectivity was also observed between the auditory cortex and posterior cingulate gyrus, temporoparietal cortex and thalamus.57
So under conditions of identical auditory input, ocean imagery resulted in significantly improved brain connectivity. Same sound, profoundly different results.
In 1997, a California researcher in psychoneuroimmunology (the study of the interactions between our nervous and immune systems and their relationships to mental health) showed ten cancer patients who were experiencing chronic pain a nature video that included fifteen minutes of the sounds of ocean waves, waterfalls, and splashing creeks. After viewing the video, patients experienced a 20 to 30 percent reduction in stress hormones such as epinephrine and cortisol.58
This is the huge advantage of water: you don’t need to meditate to take advantage of its healing effects because it meditates you. And the listening doesn’t need to involve sitting by sand castles or in a bobbing canoe, just as getting a visual Blue Mind boost doesn’t require a visit to the shore or stroking between lane lines. Recall those hospital ward studies we mentioned earlier: just being able to see nature had incredible benefits, and we know by now that the best sort of nature to see has water in it.
Nobody’s going to tell you a fountain in the middle of a shopping mall can do as much for you, Blue Mind-wise, as standing in a rushing current, fishing pole in hand, or body surfing the waves on a sunny afternoon. (Though such fountains have been shown to have remarkable effects.)59 But what studies like these show us is that even something as modest as a fishbowl on your desk or a tiny fountain or the right kind of sound machine can work some real magic.60,61 On my daughter Julia’s desk is a medium-sized tank that is home to a snail and two small freshwater fish. Occasionally a visitor from the creek in our backyard is introduced for a brief visit (before being returned to its natural habitat). They have more than enough places to hide and an attentive keeper who feeds them religiously and eyeballs them endlessly, studying each move of the fins. I watch Julia watching the fish watch each other. Yes, keeping fish in a tank is not ideal for the fish, but I’m reminded of my own childhood explorations of water and the wonderful animals living in it. I can see Julia’s curiosity and empathy grow with her technical knowledge. And I know that that watery glow with its trio of denizens is a far better math homework buddy than a TV or an iPad. I haven’t quantified it, but my sense is that she is happier and more relaxed working there at her desk and therefore likely to spend more focused time studying. (How many pediatricians’ offices have you visited that include a fish tank? Even if they can’t articulate it, there’s a Blue Mind reason.) And as we’ve seen, Julia isn’t switch-tasking back and forth between the tank and her algebra; this is a perfect neurological/environmental symbiosis. That’s an important thing to keep in mind: Blue Mind isn’t a matter of exclusivity but compatibility. When we swim we are doing many things at once: kicking our legs, pulling with our arms, timing our breathing, looking ahead. That’s why a little fountain on our desk at work can perform its wonders: it’s not distracting us, it’s helping us focus. (If Julia had an open fire hydrant on her desk, we’d be in Red Mind territory!)
Water, Nature, and the Optimum Brain
There were profound reasons for his attachment to the sea: he loved it because as a hardworking artist he needed rest, needed to escape from the demanding complexity of phenomena and lie hidden on the bosom of the simple and tremendous…
—THOMAS MANN, DEATH IN VENICE AND OTHER TALES
“Brain training” is a big deal these days, with websites and apps offering extensive, research-backed programs that use exercises based on neuroscience to help you improve cognitive function, memory, visual attention, processing speed, flexibility, and executive function.62 “Think faster, focus better, and remember more,” they promise,63 and advocates of brain training tell us, “You exercise your body to keep it fit and young; you need to do the same with your brain!” Whether digital circuit training (no pun intended) works or not, “use it or lose it” is as true for the brain as it is for the body: exercising your brain can keep existing connections strong and vital while building fresh connections as you learn new things. The brain is truly like the rest of your body in another way, too: while it gets “flabby” with too little stimulation, it also is stressed by too much activity; it needs different kinds of “exercise” to increase its different functions, and requires “rest and recovery” time to consolidate its gains.
Earlier we talked about the phenomenon of directed attention and cognitive fatigue. Such overstimulation causes the brain to get stuck in a kind of mental overdrive, continually revving at high speed and making us feel wired and tired at the same time. This wired and tired state describes a majority of college students. These (mostly) young adults are in an age group whose cognitive abilities are maturing and consolidating. However, they also are in the midst of intense and very stressful learning environments that require a lot of directed attention (and, of course, a lot of technology usage to boot)—attention that actually puts a greater demand on their maturing brains and creates more stress than is experienced by the over-twenty-five crowd. (And the digital avalanche is no longer confined to high school students; children of nearly all ages are increasingly occupied with cell phones and tablets more than they are with jump ropes, action figures, and soccer balls.)64
Several years ago researchers did a study of seventy-two undergraduate students living in dormitories at a large midwestern university. The dorm rooms were grouped by the views from their windows: trees and a lake, lawns and buildings, and brick walls and slate rooftops. Researchers visited the students in their rooms and administered standard cognitive tests, including the Symbol Digit Modalities test, which measures attention, visual scanning, and motor speed, and the Necker Cube Pattern Control test, which assesses the capacity to direct attention and inhibit competing stimuli. Students whose rooms overlooked trees and the lake not only performed better on the cognitive tests but also rated their “attentional functioning” as more effective than that of all of the other groups combined.65
University of Utah psychology professor David Strayer is an expert in the wired and tired world of adolescents: he has done extensive research on distracted driving and the effects of technology usage on the human brain. In 2012 Strayer helped conduct a study to see whether time in nature (and time away from media and technology) would improve higher-level brain function. Ruth Ann Atchley and Paul Atchley worked with him to observe fifty-six people who participated in four-to six-day Outward Bound hiking trips, during which they had no access to electronic technology while in the wilderness. Half of the people were given the Remote Associates Test (which evaluates creative thinking, insight, and problem-solving skills) the morning before they set out on their trips; the other half were tested on the morning of their fourth day in the wilderness. The people who took the test during the hike scored 50 percent higher on the test than those who took it before they left. “The current study is unique in that participants were exposed to nature over a sustained period and they were still in that natural setting during testing,” the researchers wrote. “Despite the challenging testing environment, the current research indicates that there is a real, measurable cognitive advantage to be realized if we spend time truly immersed in a natural setting.”66 And it would seem that improved performance from spending time in natural surroundings is not just a short-term phenomenon: Researchers from the University of California, Irvine, discovered that people who had been on a backpacking vacation in the wilderness performed better on a proofreading test (used as a measure of cognitive performance) for several weeks afterward. In contrast, performance on the same test by two other groups—one of which took a nonwilderness vacation and the other continued their usual routine—declined over time.67
“Nature serves as a source that renews our attention, reinstating cognitive functioning with natural elements that invoke affective responses,” write the authors of The Economics of Biophilia. Attentional fatigue, they added, “caus[es] stress to slow the heart rate and breathing while simultaneously arousing digestion to raise energy levels.… The combination induces lowered concentration and decreased effectiveness.”68 Certainly it seems that resting our overworked directed attention circuits and utilizing the “involuntary attention” circuitry that seems to engage when we are in natural settings can help soothe the hyperfocusing parts of the brain. At the same time, however, natural environments engage our senses in ways that our regular, urban, enclosed environments cannot. When all of our senses are engaged with the sights, sounds, smells, feels, and even tastes of nature, our minds are caught up in what Stephen Kaplan calls “soft fascination”:69 the effortless, involuntary occupation of the mind. “Nature, which is filled with intriguing stimuli, modestly grabs attention in a bottom-up fashion, allowing top-down directed-attention abilities a chance to replenish,” writes Kaplan along with his fellow University of Michigan psychologists Marc Berman and John Jonides.70 And by now the evidence is strong that there are no interior or urban environments that come close to having this sort of enhancing effect.71
With this sort of disparity in mind, Catherine Franssen conducted a laboratory experiment with rats that investigated the effects of a natural environment on cognitive performance. Most lab rats are kept in cages made of clear plastic and mesh, with about 140 square inches of floor space per cage. The floor of the cage is usually covered with some kind of wood shavings; there’s normally some kind of feeding and watering device. But Franssen and her team of researchers added natural elements—twigs, rocks, green leaves—to the cages of some of the rats, and plastic toys to the cages of others. Lo and behold, the rats whose cages contained the natural elements exhibited improved cognition, better problem solving, increased neuroplasticity, and more boldness and exploration of their environment.72 Fascinatingly, these were lab rats that had been bred in cages and had never been in a “natural” environment. Were the improvements due simply to a more enriched environment, or did the natural elements added to the cages appeal to some deeper hardwiring? Like a great deal of psychological research, correlation is much more common than definitive proof of causation, but the correlation in this case tracks perfectly with studies of our own brains.
What’s most interesting about time in nature, however, is what happens to the brain when it’s not actively focusing or engaged. Think back to the last time you got your Blue Mind on: in the shower or bathtub, or sitting or walking by the water. You probably weren’t thinking about anything in particular; you let your mind wander to wherever it wanted to go in your relaxed state. Perhaps you caught yourself daydreaming as you gazed out over the sparkling waves or ripples on the creek, and you reluctantly pulled yourself back to the present moment. For a long time scientists thought there was nothing going on in the brain when we allowed ourselves to daydream or “space out.” But now we know that in those moments the brain’s default-mode network is incredibly active. In other words, the brain at rest is not really at rest at all.
M. A. Greenstein is a powerhouse of a woman and educator, with short, dark hair and bright blue eyes. Her institute, GGI, specializes in advocacy and design and is dedicated to advancing access to brain health and knowledge. At Blue Mind 2 she spoke extensively about the default-mode network. “Drift is the freedom to wander in consciousness, and it’s quite possibly one of the most important keys to the actual functioning of our nervous system,” she said. (Note the terminology: though its Middle English origins related to herding, nearly every modern definition of “drift” is nautical.) “Drifting takes us into the default-mode network: the network that’s active unless we are paying attention to something. In other words, it’s basically ‘online’ until we call on other areas of attention. And the default-mode network devours huge amounts of glucose and a disproportionate amount of oxygen.”
That last point seems odd: why would a network be so active when we’re not paying attention? Scientists now theorize that the default-mode network allows the brain to consolidate experiences and thus prepare to react to environmental stimuli. This default-mode functioning has also been shown to constantly “chatter” with the hippocampus, the part of the brain that is key to neuroplastic development and helps create new memories and new learning. “We’re starting to see a picture of ourselves as nervous systems that need to drift, that need to wander so that the brain can process at a very efficient level the amount of information that’s coming in, translating it into neurochemistry and experience,” Greenstein concluded.
All of this makes the notion of daydreaming more complicated—in a good way, because it means that the default network is key to creativity and problem solving. Chen-Bo Zhong of the University of Toronto, Ap Dijksterhuis from Radboud University in Nijmegen, and Adam Galinsky from Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management have noted that “conscious thought can subvert the search for creative solutions—novel connections or ideas often insinuate themselves into the conscious mind when attention is directed elsewhere.”73 Indeed, a 2012 study showed scientifically what most people know intuitively: letting the mind wander off the topic of a problem will lead to more creative solutions than focusing exclusively on the problem itself.74 By processing chunks of data it has gathered, and beginning to make connections and to store new pieces of information away (our memories are distributed, not stored at a single node), the brain is beginning to fuse together information from different areas, forming new connections.
How many times have you had an insight, new idea, or solution to a problem pop into your head, seemingly from nowhere? That’s the default-mode network kicking in, allowing your brain to make connections between different elements to create something entirely new. And being around water provides a sensory-rich environment with enough “soft fascination” to let our focused attention rest and the default-mode network to kick in. It’s no coincidence that Archimedes was in the bathtub when he deduced a method for measuring the volume of an object with an irregular shape: the Archimedes Principle). Eureka! (Greek for “I have found it”) indeed.
“Along the shore’s edge are things you won’t find anywhere else,” says Michael Merzenich. “The feel of the water, the smell of the ocean, the birds you see there, the curiosities you see there, the boats on the surface—these are things that are special to that environment. And all of them are inherently personally calming, rewarding, and intriguing.” The little changes in a natural environment—the sound of waves or waterfalls, the negative ions in the air, breezes blowing by—engage the brain’s reticular formation, which calculates the amount of alertness needed to deal with the new stimulation. Most of these small changes produce just enough alertness to keep us curious and aware, but not so much that we can’t relax our focus and let the default-mode network hum along quietly in the background. As naturalist Konrad Lorenz wrote, “A man can sit for hours before an aquarium and stare into it as into the flames of an open fire or the rushing waters of a torrent. All conscious thought is happily lost in this state of apparent vacancy, and yet, in these hours of idleness, one learns essential truths about the macrocosm and the microcosm.”75 Albert Einstein once commented, “Creativity is the residue of wasted time.” But if time spent daydreaming helps us be creative, is it truly time wasted?
Of course, there are times where focus/directed attention merges with the open awareness of “soft fascination” and positive emotion to produce a state of effortless concentration and enjoyment. At these moments, we become lost in what we are doing: we are “in the flow.”
Finding “Flow” in Water
It is the full involvement of flow… that makes for excellence in life.
—MIHALY CSIKSZENTMIHALYI
Almost every surfer I’ve ever known can tell you the precise instant when they got hooked on the sport, that moment when they first experienced the state of flow on the water. They had learned enough to stand on a board and feel the power of a wave propelling them toward shore; skill and exhilaration and an exceptionally beautiful environment came together to create a dopamine rush they would seek again and again. “Moments such as these provide flashes of intense living,” writes Csikszentmihalyi;76 they are moments when we lose track of time, nothing else seems to matter, and we feel we are truly alive and at our best. Writer and leader of the Flow Genome Project Steven Kotler beautifully described this feeling in his book West of Jesus:
I paddled fast to my left, angling toward the next wave, stroked and stood and felt the board accelerate and pumped once and into my bottom turn, and then the world vanished. There was no self, no other. For an instant, I didn’t know where I ended and the wave began.77
Surfers, whitewater rafters, kayakers, swimmers—pretty much anyone who participates in active water sports—along with rock climbers, tennis players, artists, musicians, and creative people of all types can experience flow when a few specific conditions are met. First, flow involves an activity you enjoy on some level; otherwise you would not put in the effort to achieve the second condition of flow, which is to have achieved a level of competence at which you no longer have to think about your performance and can simply enjoy the activity. The initial time you get into a kayak, for example, you have to learn how to get in without tipping over, how to use the paddle, how to steer, and so on; you have to invest a certain amount of directed attention to learn the mechanics of kayaking. Once you master the basics, however, you can start to enjoy the sport, and your focus now shifts to refining your skills, possibly adding more techniques to your repertoire, pursuing greater challenges or new places to kayak.
This is a crucial element of flow: you need to feel that you are being challenged when you undertake the activity. While some surfers will go out whatever the conditions, it’s when the waves are just tough enough that they really feel in the zone. The challenge causes them to merge awareness with action and bring all of their skills to bear. This stretching of one’s abilities combined with a pleasurable activity produces the fourth element of flow: the loss of a sense of the passage of time. When we’re doing something we’re good at and that we enjoy, and yet we’re being stretched by the demands of this particular instance of the activity, we become completely focused on the present moment of doing this thing at this time in this way. We are so engrossed in our sport or project or art or activity that nothing else seems to matter, and we lose all track of time.
Given his interest in sound and the brain, Petr Janata is unsurprisingly an expert on flow in a very specific context: how the neural systems of perception, attention, memory, action, and emotion interact when we play or listen to music.78 Janata points out that when we perform music, we are actively involved in an experience that can easily lead to flow; that is, we are usually doing something we have some experience with, and usually it is a pleasurable endeavor.79 At the Blue Mind 2 conference, he posited that the medial prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain associated closely with emotions, self-image, creativity, and insight) is particularly activated by water. The comparisons between the brain on music and the brain on water poured out easily and steadily. Indeed, Janata remarked, “The same aesthetic emotions associated with music—for example, joy, sadness, tension, wonder, peacefulness, power, nostalgia, transcendence—all come up when people talk about being near water.”
Recall that being challenged is a big part of what focuses the mind into a flow state. If each wave were exactly the same, the novelty that helps us reach Blue Mind won’t be there; we’ll habituate. Luckily, each wave is different (thank you, water). But not every task balances the raw and the cooked, so part of what we need to do when getting our Blue Mind on is to make sure that the routine doesn’t become too routine. Recalls Ellen Langer,
We did a study with symphony musicians, who, it turns out, are bored to death. They’re playing the same pieces over and over again, and yet it’s a high-status job that they can’t easily walk away from. So we had groups of them perform. Some were told to replicate a previous performance they’d liked—that is, to play pretty mindlessly. Others were told to make their individual performance new in subtle ways—to play mindfully. Remember: This wasn’t jazz, so the changes were very subtle indeed. But when we played recordings of the symphonies for people who knew nothing about the study, they overwhelmingly preferred the mindfully played pieces. So here we had a group performance where everybody was doing their own thing, and it was better.80
This Must Be the Place
While Csikszentmihalyi and others have shown that humans can access the state of flow in different places and with different activities, for many of us there seem to be particular locations and conditions where it is easier to perform at our best, and in particular to access the “flow” state of creativity. When we immerse ourselves fully in sensory-rich surroundings, paying mindful attention to where we are and what we are doing, even something as simple as a walk through a park or a float along a river can engage both our directed attention and default-mode networks, giving us the experience of mindful yet restful focus. A few years ago David Strayer took five neuroscientists, a guide, a photographer, and Matt Richtel, a reporter for the New York Times, on a seven-day trip on the San Juan River in southern Utah. For five days there would be no cell phone reception or Internet access; the travelers would be without technology of any kind. The scientists were interested in seeing what would happen to their cognition with the only stimulation available coming from the river, its environs, and each other.
Over those next five days the constant interruptions of modern life receded as the travelers paddled through rapids (intense focus), hiked trails along the canyon walls (physical stress), and floated along calm stretches of water where they could admire the natural beauty around them. And, as Richtel observed, ideas started to flow freely. The scientists agreed that “something” was happening cognitively that seemed to clear their heads and open them up to fruitful discussions on a wide range of topics.81 Was it due to a lack of distractions? Their brains finally getting the rest they desperately needed? Immersion in nature and time on the water? The nighttime darkness revealing a staggeringly dense assembly of stars? A change of scenery, or simply getting away from their regular routine? All of these factors may have contributed; but regardless of the reason, it is clear that getting away, and getting away in nature, can help us be better at what we do.
But a long river trip with a group of scientists is not in itself science, and the significance of the changes experienced was a matter of debate for the group. The more skeptical among them weren’t convinced anything lasting—personally or scientifically—would come of the excursion. Yet by the time they emerged, Art Kramer, an ambitious, accomplished, and extremely driven University of Illinois neuroscientist, noted that “time was slowing down” (for the first time since he’d been fifteen years old) and commented that he wanted to look at whether clearer thoughts and other benefits to the brain came from being in nature, the physical exertion of paddling and hiking, or a mixture. Todd Braver, a psychology professor at Washington University in St. Louis, was making plans to study the brain at rest and in nature, using imaging technology. Paul Atchley, the professor at the University of Kansas who told us about the challenges of driving and texting at the same time, had further insights into the addictiveness of digital stimulation. Steven Yantis, chairman of the psychological and brain sciences department at Johns Hopkins and a brain imaging expert, pointed to a late-night conversation “beneath stars and circling bats” as the backdrop to thinking about new ways to understand his investigations of cognitive control during task switching. All of the scientists recommended a little downtime as treatment for a cluttered mind. As the river flowed, so did the ideas, noted Richtel.
Putting the dots together, it’s clear that while an extended river trip is great, even a little time outdoors can do wonderful things. Sculptor David Eisenhour described it this way: “Being in nature quiets my mind, and out of that quietness is where the real art happens.”82 Ralph Waldo Emerson said of Henry David Thoreau, “The length of his walk uniformly made the length of his writing. If shut up in the house he did not write at all.”83 That’s been true for countless numbers of people, and with good neurological reason. The list of intellectual and artistic breakthroughs sparked by a wander or a swim is long indeed. Sometimes to get somewhere, you have to go somewhere.
David Pu’u is part native Hawaiian and all world-class waterman. He’s a federally certified first responder and rescue boat operator—in other words, he’s the water-safety guy who will get you out of trouble in pretty much any kind of marine environment. But David’s often the one who got you into trouble in the first place, because in addition to all the above he’s an internationally renowned photographer and cinematographer known for getting the “big pictures” of surfers at Mavericks, sharks off the coast of Hawaii, and whitewater rafters on the American River. David’s photos appear in such magazines as Sports Illustrated, National Geographic, and Time. He knows wave hydrology and meteorology; he can figure out what the weather’s going to do and how the waves will break around a reef or shoal. And no wonder: he’s been around the ocean all his life, and spends about 250 days a year in the water. He shoots in, on, underneath, and near water; and you’ll find him using almost every kind of moving vehicle—from jet skis, helicopters, and airplanes to boats and surfboards—to get into perfect position for the shot that, he freely admits, his intuition guides him to take.
But David’s creativity reaches far beyond his ability to capture the perfect image. His background includes competitive surfing, cycling, swimming, and auto racing, as well as literature and art. He’s a provocative thinker who’s not afraid to ask probing questions of anyone, whether it’s an audience of the top people at NOAA and the Department of Defense or a group of handpicked invitees to the 2012 Sea-Space Initiative (a conference that brings together some of the most innovative thinkers who study “inner and outer space”).
Ultimately, as David points out, art is not about beauty or cognition but about communication, connection, and impact. “Beauty is just finding and connecting to someone’s spirit,” he says. “You try to communicate not what you saw, but what went on inside in your soul. You use a visual thing to inform the soul and educate the spirit. And that’s what creates community, that’s what creates communication, that’s how we connect. And that’s the goal of anything in art.”
David’s extreme in his relationship with water, but one of the most encouraging findings of neuroaesthetics is that artistic representations can inspire brain activity similar to what it would be like if you encountered the real thing. This is especially important when it comes to water. While nothing can compare to sitting by a river or swimming in a pool or wading along the seashore, simply looking at pictures of such watery places causes our brain to shift into Blue Mind mode. This transitive potency is profound—just ask Michael J. Fox—and we’ll turn to it, and other ways you can bring the blue into your dry life, next.