Is a wandering mind a novelty-seeking mind? The curious case of incubation

Abstract

The Novelty-Seeking Model can explain incubation's effect on creativity by assuming an adaptive decision threshold. During an impasse, the threshold for novelty becomes too high and biased to previous neural activity, hindering progress. Incubation “resets” this threshold through attentional decoupling, allowing for spontaneous ideas to emerge from subsequent mind wandering or other activities that attract attention, facilitating progress.

Ivancovsky et al. propose that curiosity and creativity “are manifestations of a unified process that underlies novelty-seeking” (p. 45). They suggest that curiosity and creativity reinforce each other such that the more curious and creative a person is, the more attuned they become to novel stimuli. This heightened sensitivity to novelty, the authors argue, is a result of being in a novelty-seeking mode, which raises neural activity associated with (spontaneous) mental events above a certain decision threshold. This process might explain “how certain stimulation can attract our attention and be perceived as novel and interesting” (p. 45). We propose how this idea can be expanded to the state of incubation, in which people tend to refrain from deliberate thoughts about a task or problem and instead do something else and/or let their minds wander.

Incubation is an interesting state in terms of the Novelty-Seeking Model. Creative thinking requires people to flexibly shift along a continuum of exploitation (which is linked to goal-directed, convergent thinking, specific curiosity, and deprivation) to exploration (which is linked to open-ended, divergent thinking, diverse curiosity, and interest) to arrive at outcomes that are useful and original. When attention shifts from being focused to becoming defocused, irrelevant information is allowed to “leak in” (Ivancovsky, Baror, & Bar). Incubation, however, appears to be even further along this continuum: attention becomes decoupled from the task at hand, and often refocused on something else (Ritter & Dijksterhuis, 2014), such as self-generated cognition (e.g., mind wandering; Faber, Krasich, Bixler, Brockmole, & D'Mello, 2020). We argue that in addition to focused and defocused attention, decoupled or refocused attention might play an important role in novelty-seeking that could explain the often-reported positive relationship between decoupled processes such as incubation and mind wandering on the one hand, and creativity on the other.

Indeed, many famous anecdotes support this strategy's effectiveness for overcoming impasse (Wallas, 1926). Mathematician Poincaré, for example, had one of his most important theoretical breakthroughs during a geological excursion, because, as he claimed, “the changes of travel made me forget my mathematical work” (Poincaré, 2022, p. 387). When an impasse occurs, the threshold for what is novel and interesting has become too high and too biased to previous neural activity to make progress (Beda & Smith, 2022; Gauselmann, Frings, Schmidt, & Tempel, 2023). In line with the Novelty-Seeking Model, during incubation, this threshold might be lowered adaptively, allowing for ideas that arise spontaneously to attract attention. Lowering the threshold might enhance the salience of spontaneous ideas. This increases the probability that one can make progress after an impasse, but also comes at the cost of accuracy. In turn, when progress is being made the threshold is raised to restore accuracy accordingly, through more deliberate modes of creative thought.

The idea of such an adaptive threshold finds its origins in adaptive gain theory, which may offer further insight into how incubation supports creativity. This theory postulates that the dynamic shift between focus and defocus in response to changing environmental demands is regulated by the locus coeruleus norepinephrine system (Aston-Jones & Cohen, 2005). Increases in tonic norepinephrine (NE) – the slow release of NE – boosts overall signal strength in neural circuitry, enabling sensitivity to novel and task-irrelevant information. Phasic NE – fast bursts of NE release – enhances responses to salient events (Mittner, Hawkins, Boekel, & Forstmann, 2016). In view of the Novelty-Seeking Model, moderately heightened tonic NE may help facilitate creativity through defocusing while maintaining a suitable level of alertness (de Rooij, Vromans, & Dekker, 2018), whereas phasic responses facilitate focus in response to salience (Salvi, Simoncini, Grafman, & Beeman, 2020), which can help to select an idea as a basis for further creative thinking (de Rooij, 2023; Simonton, 2023).

Attentional decoupling is facilitated by an upshift in tonic NE, which enhances neural gain and functional connectivity within and between networks, allowing for the brain to go into a more exploratory mode. In addition, when tonic NE levels become high, it reduces phasic responses to the extent that attentional decoupling occurs (Mittner et al., 2016). The upshift in tonic NE in response to an impasse might therefore facilitate the “reset” needed to reduce the bias to previous neural activity that has led to the impasse. We suggest that this upshift in tonic NE also effectively lowers the threshold for what is novel and interesting. The behaviors that a person subsequently engages in during incubation, whether it is letting the mind wander or refocusing on something else, then may promote the attentional shift toward spontaneous ideas, which are more likely to become salient due to the lowered threshold.

Behaviorally, this resonates with our own work, in which we have recently observed that there is indeed a bias such that ideas that arise spontaneously are perceived as more novel than those that are deliberate, even if objectively, there is no difference (de Rooij, Atef, & Faber, 2023). We would therefore like to argue that the activation threshold might be dynamic: when one is stuck on a problem and searching for a specific idea, the threshold might be higher, allowing for selectivity. Incubation might provide a “reset” of the threshold, allowing for (potentially not particularly novel or interesting) ideas to attract attention such that progress can be made. With this proposed theoretical expansion of the Novelty-Seeking Model, we aim to capture an important feature of creative idea generation, namely how the dynamic regulation of attention to spontaneous and deliberate thoughts together enables creativity.