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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.
And I find that this time of year is a perfect time to do just that.
Cover photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash
I've only been to Berlin once. It was for a long weekend in 2007; one where my friend Alex Feldman and I grossly underestimated the required travel and ended up not sleeping very much. But it was awesome. I loved the city. So much in fact that the two of us ended up enrolling in a basic German class once we got back to Philadelphia. I, of course, remember almost nothing from this class, but I can say apfelstrudel with a surprising degree of convincingness, provided there are no follow-up questions.
One of the ingredients that, I think, made Berlin what it is today is that, at one point, it had a lot of empty buildings. As many of you know, these under-utilized assets ended up becoming a breeding ground for creativity and, more specifically, techno music. It's a perfect example of Jane Jacobs' mantra that new ideas required old buildings. This overall creative energy is also what gave Berlin the slogan, "poor but sexy." What the city lacked in wealth, it made up for in spades with coolness and creativity.
But that was then. Eventually the buildings filled up, the city got richer, the secret got out, and things started getting more expensive. In the span of a decade, Berlin saw its average apartment rents double. Which is why in 2020, the city approved a five-year rent freeze for the 1.5 million or so flats that were constructed before 2014. Eventually this freeze was deemed unconstitutional, but it didn't change the fact that the city was clearly becoming less poor and -- arguably -- less sexy.
Or maybe not. Guy Chazan -- who is FT's departing correspondent in Berlin, just wrote this in a
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
One of the ways you can counteract this last finding is to create shared spaces; startups with overlapping common areas, such as a kitchen, saw greater distances of influence
In short: proximity matters.
If you'd like to download a full copy of the study, click here.
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.
And I find that this time of year is a perfect time to do just that.
Cover photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash
I've only been to Berlin once. It was for a long weekend in 2007; one where my friend Alex Feldman and I grossly underestimated the required travel and ended up not sleeping very much. But it was awesome. I loved the city. So much in fact that the two of us ended up enrolling in a basic German class once we got back to Philadelphia. I, of course, remember almost nothing from this class, but I can say apfelstrudel with a surprising degree of convincingness, provided there are no follow-up questions.
One of the ingredients that, I think, made Berlin what it is today is that, at one point, it had a lot of empty buildings. As many of you know, these under-utilized assets ended up becoming a breeding ground for creativity and, more specifically, techno music. It's a perfect example of Jane Jacobs' mantra that new ideas required old buildings. This overall creative energy is also what gave Berlin the slogan, "poor but sexy." What the city lacked in wealth, it made up for in spades with coolness and creativity.
But that was then. Eventually the buildings filled up, the city got richer, the secret got out, and things started getting more expensive. In the span of a decade, Berlin saw its average apartment rents double. Which is why in 2020, the city approved a five-year rent freeze for the 1.5 million or so flats that were constructed before 2014. Eventually this freeze was deemed unconstitutional, but it didn't change the fact that the city was clearly becoming less poor and -- arguably -- less sexy.
Or maybe not. Guy Chazan -- who is FT's departing correspondent in Berlin, just wrote this in a
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
One of the ways you can counteract this last finding is to create shared spaces; startups with overlapping common areas, such as a kitchen, saw greater distances of influence
In short: proximity matters.
If you'd like to download a full copy of the study, click here.
Despite everything it is still, in the words of one Irish friend of mine who has lived here for more than two decades, the world’s “largest collection of black sheep”. It is a sanctuary for renegades and misfits of all persuasions, who benignly coexist with their more bourgeois Bürger neighbours. Despite the rising cost of living here, it still seems to be full of creative people doing God knows what but always looking like they’re having the time of their lives.
And as anyone navigating its countless construction sites knows, it’s also a place of sheer, unbounded potentiality. As the art critic Karl Scheffler famously wrote in 1910: it is a city that is “damned to keep becoming, and never to be”. When I finally board the plane out of here after nearly a decade in this city, it will be that “becoming-ness” I’ll miss most.
This to me is an incredible compliment for a city that I barely know, but that he presumably knows quite well. What makes cities truly great is that they're constantly in a state of becoming. In fact, it's exactly how I would describe Toronto. To be, means you've arrived somewhere. It also implies a certain stasis. And that's not what you want when you're a city. You want a constant flow of news ideas and new energy changing things. It makes me happy to know that Berlin, seemingly, hasn't lost this.
Cover photo by Stephan Widua on Unsplash
Despite everything it is still, in the words of one Irish friend of mine who has lived here for more than two decades, the world’s “largest collection of black sheep”. It is a sanctuary for renegades and misfits of all persuasions, who benignly coexist with their more bourgeois Bürger neighbours. Despite the rising cost of living here, it still seems to be full of creative people doing God knows what but always looking like they’re having the time of their lives.
And as anyone navigating its countless construction sites knows, it’s also a place of sheer, unbounded potentiality. As the art critic Karl Scheffler famously wrote in 1910: it is a city that is “damned to keep becoming, and never to be”. When I finally board the plane out of here after nearly a decade in this city, it will be that “becoming-ness” I’ll miss most.
This to me is an incredible compliment for a city that I barely know, but that he presumably knows quite well. What makes cities truly great is that they're constantly in a state of becoming. In fact, it's exactly how I would describe Toronto. To be, means you've arrived somewhere. It also implies a certain stasis. And that's not what you want when you're a city. You want a constant flow of news ideas and new energy changing things. It makes me happy to know that Berlin, seemingly, hasn't lost this.
Cover photo by Stephan Widua on Unsplash
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