What is deep work?

Why deep work matters

The three laws of deep work

Deep work isn’t just about work

The underrated skill of daydreaming

The hidden value of exploration, part I

The hidden value of exploration, part II

Why you need to laugh more, part I

Why you need to laugh more, part II

Why you need to take play more seriously

What is deep work

Here's one that I bet you've never heard of: cognitive disinhibition.

See, way back in 1952, back when we still had trains that run on time and doors that you could leave unlocked (in some parts of the world anyway) and back when the Wizard of Oz, just a mere decade on from its release, still represented to us the height of the cinematic experience (to some of us, it still does).

Back then that Ernst Kris, an Austrian psychoanalyst and art historian as well, first suggested that especially creative people manifested what he termed "an ability toward regression in service of the ego".

Which was basically just an elaborate way of saying they know how to get in touch with their inner child.

Now, this is an idea that Colin Martindale, the professor of psychology at the University of Maine at the time, later developed an interest in. He wanted to isolate what the brain was doing when people engaged in problem solving or creative behaviours, so he began a series of experiments in the 1970s in order to monitor the brainwaves of creative people in order to prove Kris's theory.

In the end, he wasn't able to do this, but what he did discover allowed him to develop a theory of his own: 'cognitive disinhibition' – A key trait and attribute of creative people.

Your brain has a series of mental filters for blocking things out in order to keep your consciousness from being overrun. See, wherever you are, whatever you're doing – walking down the street, driving a car, listening to music, watching engaging and insightful video content – your brain is being bombarded by stimuli, sights, sounds, memories, experiences, motor functions, language. It's a lot to fit in. If your brain was to offer all of that up to your conscious awareness, it'd be like trying to fill a boat with a lake – you'd sink.

So your brain doesn't do that. Instead, it screens everything for relevance and then pushes whatever it deems unimportant out into your subconscious, leaving you to have very weird dreams about it later.

So this is part of why you can sometimes fail to hear somebody who's sitting right next to you if you're concentrating on something else. It's why you can sometimes forget that your glasses are resting on your forehead. Your brain is limiting things, trying to make things manageable, filtering. This is what academics refer to as 'latent inhibition' – the latent inhibiting of internal and external stimuli.

Now, cognitive disinhibition is basically the opposite of that. It lowers the threshold for how relevance is determined. It broadens your attention and lets more in. So you think of it like a mechanic who has a tendency for hoarding even seemingly irrelevant tools. It makes for a far messier toolbox, but also for an infinitely better equipped one.

This is why Dr Scott Barry Kaufman, our friend, says that imaginative people have messier minds. In short, those who are creative are more prone to allowing their attention to digress towards seemingly irrelevant things. They daydream more, which it turns out, is actually a superpower. But as for how and why, well, that’s down to a little word called 'bissociation'. 

The hidden value of exploration, part I

What Next?