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

Back in 1976, Avner Ziv, who's now a psychologist at Tel Aviv University, devised a series of experiments to ascertain the relationship that exists between laughter, creativity, and problem solving.

He took 282 year 10 pupils or 10th graders depending on which side of the pond that you're watching this from, and he had them perform a series of exercises in which they’d be required to respond to verbal stimuli using speech. And they had to do so in a way that required them to exercise 'divergent thinking', which is a key indicator for creative potential.

So they'd be asked to provide as many probable outcomes as possible to an improbable situation, in response to the introduction of a new variable. For example, a house is on fire; a homeless man arrives first on the scene. What happens next? Or a woman drops her purse, a child notices it on the street, what happens next? That kind of thing.

What's interesting is that Ziv discovered that those subjects who were asked to listen to a humorous recording directly before doing the exercise performed significantly better than those who didn't. Why? In short, when we're invited to find something funny, we're actually being asked to employ the same bisociative style of thinking that we use whenever we're trying to generate a new idea or solve a problem.

We're being required ultimately to bring two notions together in a way that is compelling or coherent or in the case of humour, amusing. We’re ultimately being asked, albeit somewhat sneakily, to create. And so humour then, an exercise in the same neural pathways that are deployed in creativity, actually primes us, conditions us to be creative, which is a conclusion that the science so far more than backs up.

Which means that humour or making fun a point of focus isn't just the way in which we can stimulate our own emotional or mental well being, it actually provides a platform for us to do more dynamic and innovative and creative work. Which means that humour and play, well, it may be time that we took these things a little bit more seriously.

Why you need to laugh more, part II

What Next?