I'm a big fan of the period between Christmas and when most of the world gets back to work in the New Year. It's the only time of year that I know of where the email firehose shuts off, the social permission to do "nothing" turns on, and the world generally quiets down.
I know that not everyone gets this time off. We all have different jobs. Earlier in my career, I used to always work these days between Christmas and the New Year because I couldn't spare the vacation days. But if you are fortunate enough to have it off, it's a unique time of the year.
It's a time for family and friends, and a good time for vacations that aren't riddled with email and work anxiety. But it's also a time that creates space for the mind to wander, and for me, it gives me a creative burst of energy.
I've been trying to think of the best way to describe this feeling, and it truly feels like "mental space." When work is "on," it simply crowds out everything else. But a more accurate neuroscientific definition would be that we're simply engaging different parts of our brains.
Supposedly, when the mind is given "space" to wander — which is also referred to as wakeful rest — we engage a system in our brain known as the Default Mode Network. This network is thought to serve several different functions, including forming the basis for the self, thinking about others, remembering past events, and imagining possible future events. Generally, this makes it very good at connecting the dots, so to speak.
The counterpart network is our Executive Control Network. This part of our brain is most active during focused, demanding, and goal-oriented tasks — so work.
These two networks are also thought to be inversely correlated, meaning when one activates, the other often shuts down. But not always and not entirely. A 2018 research article by Roger E. Beaty et al. found that highly creative people have a unique brain "wiring" that allows these different neural networks to work together, rather than in opposition.
What this suggests to me, as a cognitive neuroscience layperson, is that engaging our different brain networks is good for us. Sometimes it's good to turn down executive control and give some space to default mode.
I am at my most creative when I'm in the same room with other people and we are bouncing ideas around. There's a compounding effect that takes place. One person says something and that then triggers a new idea. I find the whole experience very rewarding and, for me, it's a reminder that creativity can be a process. It is also a reminder that proximity is important for those of us who have jobs that deal in creativity.
We have spoken a lot about this on the blog, but here is an interesting and recent study that looked at knowledge transfers across different tech startups within one of the largest co-working spaces in the US. For context, the co-working space itself consisted of five floors, about 100,000 square feet, and housed 251 different startups. To measure knowledge transfer, the researchers looked at instances of a startup adopting a component of a peer's technology stack.
What they found was the following:
Knowledge exchange is greater amongst startups that are dissimilar
Close physical proximity greatly influences the chance of knowledge spillovers; however, this effect quickly falls off
After 20 meters or so, there's almost no difference between being down the hall or being on a separate floor within the building