In this chapter, we explore the relationship between mind-wandering (broadly defined as task-unrelated thought) and creativity. We begin with an exploration of the evidence that mind-wandering may contribute to creative insights (Aha! experiences) and then explore its relationship to creativity more generally. Although assorted lines of evidence support a relationship between mind-wandering and creativity, this literature has proven to be somewhat mixed: an outcome that we speculate arises because only certain types of mind-wandering are helpful. We then consider the relationship between different types of mind-wandering and creativity, examining both differences between individuals in the frequency with which they engage in assorted types of mind-wandering and fluctuations within individuals across days. This review offers suggestive evidence that particular forms of mind-wandering may facilitate creativity and, in particular, that curious daydreaming (or “mind wondering”) may do so. However, we acknowledge the case remains equivocal as supportive research is limited. We close with a discussion of future directions that may help to more conclusively identify and potentially foster the kinds of mind-wandering that are most likely to promote creative insights and advances

Thinking encompasses a very wide range of phenomena. Chapter 6 first comes back to a study focused on the pleasure of thinking itself. Pleasure is then examined in three modes of thinking: sense-making, reasoning, and daydreaming. Second, as acts of thinking are always situated in specific activities and anchored in various domains of experience, the chapter distinguishes various domains of knowledge: all are complex semiotic systems, culturally mediated, which can be more or less culturally shared and formalised. Third, the chapter examines trajectories of thinking in many systems of knowledge, formal or informal; starting with daily modes of thinking and their pleasures, it examines the pleasures of thinking in professional thinkers before exploring a specific form of sense-making connected to personal experiences. Altogether, this chapter shows that trajectories of thinking are dynamic and that they intermesh elements from a diversity of knowledge systems, moving along various modalities of pleasure.

Listening to Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” may lead us to imagine a scene of an army charging ; seeing Margaret Thatcher on a silent TV screen may make us imagine the sound of her voice; seeing a feather moving on the surface of a hand might make us almost feel the stroke on our own hand. All these cases may be accounted for under the category of crossmodal imagery: the occurrence of a conscious mental image in a given sensory modality, caused by the presentation of an object in another modality. This chapter shows why crossmodal imagery should be distinguished from mere neural activation across the senses and internally generated imagery, and restricts its definition to cases in which the mental image in an unstimulated modality is caused by another sensory stimulus, and its contents constrained by this stimulus. This more precise category of crossmodal imagery challenges us to re-examine several accepted claims in the domain of imagination: The induction of mental imagery does not necessarily follow modal paths, daydreaming might not be internally but externally generated by what we hear or feel, and non-visual imagery, which is often considered less frequent, may prove easier to induce crossmodally through visual, rather than through nonvisual stimulus.