Innovation and the resting brain
I have been feeling hunched over and compressed recently with too much computer work and too much time on the couch.
Here's what I'm doing to help: I'm alternating between a series called "reaching like a skeleton" and a series called "hip joints by way of lengthening." One is about connecting through the arms, the other is about connecting through the legs. Both connect through the spine and ribs.
You could say I'm "working with" my hips and shoulders, or you could say I'm re-imagining my frame of reference, changing how I perceive myself by testing my ability to sense my legs and arms in relation to the ribs and spine.
Re-imagining sensory-motor relationships is one of the best things you can do to foster insight and connection.
Letting the brain make relational connections instead of linear ones is how we make leaps into new ideas and new paradigms. We can't do this from the busy, analytical mind. The mind has to be spacious and allowed to take winding paths toward unknown destinations.
The associative brain and the insight mindset
Our executive brain gives our thought a narrow, task-oriented focus. The associative brain comes up with non-linear, non-logical solutions to problems. The "insight mindset" comes from letting go and wandering. It's how Mary Shelley came up with Frankenstein after waking up one morning and deciding this was the story she would share with her friends.
It "appeared" to Shelley, just as John Milton used "divine inspiration" to write the 11,000 lines of Paradise Lost that he said came to him in the middle of the night. You could say that, although he was blind and had to memorize the lines until his assistant could write them down for him in the morning, he was seeing deeply inward with his relational brain.
By thinking less, we are connecting more
Insight, innovation, and paradigm shifts do not just happen in literature. They also happen in business, science, music, art, and life.
Thomas Edison famously said, "I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work."
Once you start delving into the history of innovation and insight (so much fun!), there's no end of interesting anecdotes. Consider nitrogen. People put manure on crops for thousands of years, but they had no idea why it worked. It wasn't until 1772 that nitrogen was discovered as an element, and it wasn't synthesized into a bio-available product until 1909.
With the invention of chemical fertilizer, we get industrial agriculture on a massive scale and, of course, homemade bombs. Now, nitrogen is in everything from Kevlar to superglue.
We know intuitively that innovation occurred throughout history, but when it comes to our own minds, the idea of letting go of the logical, top-down control we exert over our lives can be profoundly disturbing.
When we pause, we allow another type of thought process to emerge, one called "elastic thinking" by author Leonard Mlodinow. It turns out that resting brain activity, called the "default network," is not just quiet, it's a whole symphony of connections between different areas of the brain that were thought to have little to do with one another. These non-adjacent structures light up and connect when we are at rest.
As with Feldenkrais, some puzzles are best solved by letting go of active thought, assumptions, logic, and the brute force of our linear mind. I like the example Mlodinow gives where analytical thinking might be the best way to figure out the most efficient route from home to work, but it’s elastic thinking that gave us the invention of the car.
Here are the lessons I am doing right now:
These lessons create wonderful ease and swivel in the shoulders and hips. It’s just amazing for walking! In a Feldenkrais training, these two series are taught together, one lesson from each series every day.
In the Treasury, you can find them here (requires subscription):
Not a subscriber? Don't worry. You can download all seven lessons here: