by Andrew Smart
Newton wasn’t holed up in his study tearing his hair out trying to figure out why objects move toward earth and the planets orbit the Sun, stressing about a looming deadline. Nor was a productivity expert looking over Newton’s shoulder to make sure he was working efficiently. We can imagine that as he relaxed on a warm evening in his garden, the soothing noises of birds singing and leaves blowing in the breeze surrounding him, he either closed his eyes or looked at nothing in particular.
He would have had a feeling of well-being and sensations of positive emotions might have washed over him. All this would put him in a nice “contemplative mood.” His default mode network would have started to increase its activity. Blood would have started flowing to his precuneous, his lateral parietal cortex, his medial prefrontal cortex, and his anterior cingulate cortex as these regions began to consume oxygen and glucose at an increased rate.
This is the default mode network getting warmed up. The neurons in these regions are increasing their activity. His anterior cingulate would have signaled to his parasympathetic nervous system that all was well and his blood pressure would drop. His heart rate would slow and time between beats would start to become slightly more variable.
This physiological reaction would start to feed back to his brain and his relaxation might deepen. In this idle state and in the absence of some externally induced task, Newton’s brain starts to get to work. His mind begins to wander; his thoughts turn inward and become reflective.
The nodes in his default mode network are now ready to communicate. The millions of neurons in these regions begin to partially synchronize their oscillatory electrical activity at different frequencies so that neuronal messages from the default mode network can travel throughout his brain. Since the nodes in the default mode network are hubs they can get information from almost any brain region. Memories and associations, along with mathematical and spatial concepts, which are stored in regions connected to the parietal cortex, can also be accessed by his default mode network. These concepts now begin to bubble up into Newton’s consciousness as the medial prefrontal cortex reports to the rest of the active default network what is happening in the far reaches of his subconscious.
These reports from Newton’s vast knowledge of physics in his long-term memory, which are normally not part of his conscious awareness, can now enter his mind because his brain does not have to worry about talking, scheduling meetings, planning his day, or managing his time.
The motions of the planets, the inverse square law, attraction, mass, and acceleration: all of these concepts that Newton has learned might have begun circulating in Newton’s awareness. Prior to sitting in his garden this particular evening, Newton might not have found relationships among these concepts because they would not have the chance to enter his awareness during his everyday life. Likewise, there is also evidence that the default mode network works unconsciously so that in an idle state, the brain finds connections among concepts without awareness.
Then for reasons we do not yet understand, sometimes these thoughts reach awareness. The important thing is that during rest, the default mode network can open connections between brain regions that are normally too busy trying to keep up with your activity-filled life to talk to each other. This is when true creativity and insight can happen. At this point, Newton’s anterior cingulate cortex, normally hard at work detecting errors and monitoring the outcome of behavior, is now freed to detect weak and strange relationships between numbers, forces, objects, and space.
In such a relaxed state, Newton might have only barely noticed the apple falling from the tree. However, his brain would have recorded the event. A seemingly trivial event in the world, an apple falling from a tree, might have triggered a cascade of neural activity which allowed the concepts Newton was contemplating to synthesize into a completely new idea. All the clocks struck at the same time because the clocks were not being wound.
In fact, Newtonian mechanics is still used as the basis for modern engineering. Bridges, buildings, airplanes, and cars still rely on engineers being able to calculate using Newton’s laws. A “Newton” is an indispensible unit of measurement that tells you how much force you need to move a mass of one kilogram at a rate of one meter per second squared.
Sitting around in contemplative moods is not exactly tolerated in the modern school or workplace. We have to wonder how many young potential Isaac Newtons we are stifling just so we can control them in school and at home. How much does the need to have focused and organized children arise from our obsessively organized adult lives? And why do our adult lives need to be obsessively organized?
We categorize adults who sit in contemplative moods as flakey, spacey, or lazy. But for your brain to do its best work, you need to be idle. If you want to have great ideas or if you just want to get know yourself, you must stop managing your time. At the very least, modern neuroscience is rapidly amassing more and more evidence that the resting state of the brain is vital to its health.
4
RILKE AND THE IDLE EXAMINED LIFE
“The only journey is the one within.”
—Rainer M. Rilke
Rilke was a sensitive person ill-suited to his times. The years following the turn of the 20th century in Europe saw the brutal birth of the modern industrial economy and the horrors of World War I. This period also saw the increasing obsession on the part of the capitalist class with measuring time and maximizing worker efficiency. And there are the first hints of the nascent time management industry beginning to wrap its tentacles around the culture. Clocks in offices, factories, and homes were becoming widespread for the first time. Human workers began to be thought of as machines in a system designed to produce profit for the owners of the economy. Against this backdrop, the sensitive and introspective Rilke sacrificed romantic love, his family, and material comforts in order to pursue his art.
Rilke knew that spending time doing nothing was extremely important for his creative process. He aspired to be idle with joy—which to our over-worked and over-scheduled 21st-century ears sounds shocking. Enjoying idleness is anathema to our cultural belief that without unrelenting activity we are somehow not living up to our potential, a belief which we are taught implicitly from infancy.
Modern neuroscience may show us that in fact the opposite is true—our true potential can only be realized through periods of doing nothing. As Oscar Wilde writes in the Soul of Man Under Socialism: “Humanity amusing itself, or enjoying cultivated leisure—which, and not labor, is the aim of man—or making beautiful things, or reading beautiful things, or simply contemplating the world with admiration and delight.”
Recent research is revealing that some forms of self-knowledge may only appear to us in idle states. The default mode network activates not only when we are at rest, but also when we turn our attention to ourselves and “spect intro.” Our mind begins to wander and the contents of our unconsciousness can percolate up into awareness. The default mode network allows us to process information that is related to social relationships, our place in the wider world, fantasies we have about the future, and of course: emotions.
Rilke spent much of his adult life actually wandering Europe in search of the ideal place—both physically and spiritually—in which to write poetry. He traveled to Russia and met Tolstoy, he spent time in Sweden, Italy, France, and finally ended up in Switzerland. His work was so important to some patrons that these wealthy people often paid for Rilke to live at their villas or castles while he worked—or, rather, did not work.
In fact, Rilke waited fifteen years between major volumes of poetry—from New Poems published in 1907 to what many consider his life’s crowning achievements: The Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus, both in 1922. He wrote some poetry during those years; however he considered these “occasional” poems. The Elegies took over ten years to complete. Rilke’s great poems came to him suddenly, and he regarded them as gifts from outside himself, perhaps from angels. Rilke described the experience of writing a
poem as simply having to take dictation. One of his great translators, the American poet Robert Bly, writes how Rilke would occasionally miss a rhyme when trying to capture a poem because he could not write fast enough.
From a neuroscience perspective, Rilke was learning to let brain regions like the medial prefrontal cortex report images and associations from brain regions like the hippocampus and neocortex, whose deepest contents do not always enter awareness. In our constant struggle to achieve success or even just keep our jobs, we use the parts of our brain that process immediate external events. This externally focused network toggles off the default mode network and prevents us from accessing what may be going on in the rest of our brains. Yet our brains are perpetually generating and responding to emotions—and all this emotional energy must be dissipated somewhere.
Rilke also struggled with bouts of depression, possibly because he did not spare himself in his relentless self-examination. He allowed every ugly side of his internal world to surface to his consciousness so that he could scrutinize it. And here we can see the razor thin line between the peak of genius and the abyss of depression and madness: Rilke lived much of his whole adult life very close to that line.
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“The lazy man does not stand in the way of progress. When he sees progress roaring down upon him he steps nimbly out of the way.”
—Christopher Morley, “On Laziness”
Rilke’s amazing ability to explore his unconscious and dredge up perhaps long forgotten scenes and emotions from his youth was likely the result of his brain’s default mode network being allowed to be active while he was being idle.
For many people this can be a horrifying experience. There is probably a lot of stuff in your unconsciousness that you’d much rather leave there. Could it be that these uncomfortable things you are suppressing by scheduling your day to oblivion are knocking on the door to your consciousness for a reason? The common sense notion about “workaholics” is that they find idleness and inactivity to be unbearable because they are escaping emotional pain through constant work.
When children enter school, and increasingly even before they enter school, parents fill up their lives with a stream of activities: sports, early exposure music classes, Chinese immersion school, summer camps, volunteer soup kitchen duties, dressage lessons, theater coaching, mathletics, and science workshops. There seems to be a pervasive and deep-seated anxiety among a certain class of parents that their children might actually have time to hang around and be children. Parents are forced to work longer and longer hours, sometimes just to keep the same pay. To replace ourselves we force our children to endure an endless barrage of activities that serve as proxy parents. We do this in order to convince ourselves that we still participate in some meaningful way in our children’s lives.
We can get reports from teachers or coaches on our child’s successes—all without actually ever seeing the child do the activity we signed them up for. After all, we have more important things to do, like work! It should come as no surprise that as “play dates” overtake simply hanging around with friends and actually playing outside, childhood anxiety and depression rates are soaring, in tandem with childhood obesity.
The current generation of children may be the first ever to have shorter life-expectancy than the previous generation. Whatever mountains of epidemiological and clinical evidence you need to convince yourself that this is real, the underlying cause is quite straightforward: children who do not spend several hours every day outside running around, hanging out with friends, not doing anything in particular, and instead spend every moment of every day doing parent-induced tasks and lessons, seeing friends on a schedule, eating massively processed food, and playing video games in order to virtually explore their worlds, become fat and depressed.
There are hundreds of books and magazine articles on time management for children with titles like Organization; Time Management & Study Skills for Children; Late, Lost and Unprepared: A Parents’ Guide to Helping Children with Executive Functioning, and Get That Kid Organized!
For those achievement-obsessed parents and students for whom unnecessary pharmacological manipulation with amphetamine-derived ADHD medication is not financially or morally problematic, there are apparently plenty of academic-doping doctors who will prescribe ADHD medicine to undiagnosed students so they can attain artificial laser-like focus and crush their competition on the SATs.
These doctors are no different ethically from the shady underworld-doping doctors one finds in professional sports. And I would argue it is the same “win-at-all-costs” culture that breeds the desire to use any means necessary to attain what are essentially meaningless test results.
Forcing a child to become a pharmaceutically-enhanced and hyper-organized mini-adult at an early age removes the child’s sense of control over her world. Depression and anxiety are highly correlated with people’s sense of control over their own lives.
Psychologists have long used a questionnaire to assess the degree to which people feel control over their lives called the Rotter Internal-External Locus of Control Scale. If you score toward the internal end of the scale you feel that you are source of control over your life, and if you score toward the external end of the scale you feel that your life is controlled by someone or something other than you.
Several studies have shown that the more toward the internal end of the scale you are, the less likely you are to become depressed and anxious. When researchers analyzed data from the Rotter scale over a forty-two year period from 1960 to 2002, they found that scores have shifted from the internal end of the scale to the external. These scores had shifted so much that an average young person in 2002 was more external (felt that external forces controlled her life) than eighty percent of young people in the 1960s.
In 2010, Newsweek magazine ran a story devoted to what it called “The Creativity Crisis,” which received moderate attention. Newsweek reported that scores on psychological tests that are designed to assess a child’s creativity have been steadily declining since 1990.
This, despite the fact that IQs have been rising. After analyzing the data from around three hundred thousand children and adults, Kyng Hee Kim, a researcher at William & Mary, found that this decline in creativity is most pronounced in exactly the age group from which you’d expect the most creativity, kindergarten through sixth grade. As children become more scheduled, more measured, more managed to achieve, and more hijacked by digital media, they become less and less creative.
Rilke described entering school as entering captivity. Modern parents have become preoccupied with developmental activities that supposedly enhance their children’s chances of success even before school begins, success as defined by grades, future salaries, and awards.
In Rilke’s poem “Imaginary Biography,” he describes the horror of starting school, which for me involved sobbing as my mother left me standing in the line of other seemingly happy kids at the kindergarten door:
First childhood, no limits, no renunciations, no goals.
Such unthinking joy.
Then abruptly terror, schoolrooms, boundaries, captivity, and a plunge into temptation and deep loss.
Ironically for a culture obsessed with optimizing child development, increasing evidence about the brain shows that not having externally directed goals is crucial for the brain’s development.
Through the constant external demands and activities in which they are forced to partake, plus countless hours spent using digital devices, children have less and less time to introspect, process social and emotional experiences, and self-reflect.
What’s more, children may develop an uncomfortable relationship with their idle selves, like many adults. When this happens, becoming idle will initially induce a feeling very similar to what a smoker craving a cigarette experiences: restless desperation. The child will seek out external stimulation in digital devices, approval from teachers, or from other adults.
In a recent paper called “Rest
is Not Idleness: Implications of the Brain’s Default Mode for Human Development and Education,” psychologists Mary Helen Immordino-Yang, Joanna Christodoulu, and Vanessa Singh hypothesize that allowing children to engage in free-form daydreaming and other types of inattentive states is essential to the development of social skills.
They review the last decade of evidence about the default mode network and discuss its implications for human development early in life and education. If the child’s life is filled with “systematically high environmental attention demands,” they posit that the process of developing the ability to reflect, create meaning from experience, and reconcile memories with current experience will be disrupted. A child’s brain needs time to sift through everything that happens in a given day, consolidate these experiences, and integrate them into the larger self which is being formed through childhood.
The only way to allow this process to happen is to be idle. Turning off the outside world for a significant amount of time each day without demands or expectations is necessary for children. It could turn out that most of childhood should be free-form daydreaming, playing without purpose, and the experience of unthinking joy in order for later mental health.
In one of his Letters to a Young Poet, Rilke writes, “The quieter we are, the more patient and open we are in our sadnesses, the more deeply and unerringly a new revelation can enter us, and the more we can make it our own. Later on when it ‘happens’—when it manifests in our response to another person—we will feel it as belonging to our innermost being.”