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Lost in the Shower: An Existential Cleansing

By Charley Wan

What is it about the rhythmic pitter-patter of water on the floor, the warm mist that envelopes the room, and the crisp, clean scent of shampoo that brings a slew of fleeting epiphanies? 

The concept of shower thoughts has rarely been a particular topic of interest in the scientific community because its long-standing presence on the internet has earned it the label of a mere meme. However, an overwhelming number of people have established the shower as a place where these “Aha!” and “Wait a second…” moments somehow find their way to the brain, and it is these moments that end up providing the critical answers to life’s nagging problems. Is there a relationship between the two phenomena? Why else would these coincidences occur so often? Let’s step into the shower. 

Psychology says it has something to do with boredom—but more specifically, mind-wandering. It seems that this oddity occurs when the mind is in an idle state, when engagement is low, but still present and the focus is broad. Thinking in this state has no direction but provides the space for imagination and permits the potential for insight. If you want to visualize mind-wandering in action, think of it like the DVD screensaver we’re all too familiar with. Let’s say your thoughts embody the logo randomly bouncing around the confines of the screen—or in this case your mental space. Every time your thoughts ricochet off the sides of your mental space, they change color, indicating a shift in your attention. 

Of course, shifting attention is an indicator of the bored mind searching for captivating stimuli, but in terms of mind-wandering, shifting attention is the basis of creativity. Support for this assertion surfaces from a 2022 paper from the American Psychological Association studying the relationship between engagement, mind-wandering, and the incubation of creative thought. Having participants test their creativity via the alternative uses task, where they are asked to provide uncommon uses for common objects, while also inserting videos that either boosted or reduced engagement in between the tests led to the conclusion that mildly engaging activities facilitated creativity. Showering might just be one of these mildly engaging activities. Upon consideration, cleaning oneself is so routine that we have become accustomed to the procedure, yet we are still aware of the heat of the water, the moisture on our skin, and the steam in the air. It appears that showering grounds our physical bodies in the real world while our thoughts roam free and our creativity runs wild. 

Further still, showering definitely has an element of solitude, where all external disturbances disappear and you begin to notice bits of your internal universe. Admittedly, today, it is hard to be alone with yourself, as businesses and social media have mastered the art of attention-grabbing. However, when you do tap into this “internal dialogue,” you can access what is known as “the fertile void”—a place where contemplating identity, existence, and worldview emerges. To be frank, the shower is quite the unique environment. Isolated in a small rectangular compartment by your own volition, covered in soap and shampoo from head to toe—that’s pretty weird compared to other daily activities we engage in. However, at the same time, on top of the soothing feeling of washing away all the dirt and grime after a long day, shedding off all that weight may provide room for more clarity and introspective questions. 

Shifting our focus a little bit, neuroscience has something to say about shower thoughts as well. A fascinating aspect of this discipline is that you can approach the brain from two perspectives: structurally through investigating brain anatomy and activity or functionally through the bulk operations of neural networks. Yet, regardless of your chosen focus, you’ll inevitably encounter elements of both in any analysis. Regarding shower thoughts, researchers have explored the mechanisms of mind-wandering and creativity in relation to the activity of the brain’s Default Mode Network, or DMN, and other related regions. Simply put, the DMN is an expansive neural network connecting the frontal, parietal, and temporal cortices, and demonstrates activity during advanced mental processes such as memory, abstract thinking, and internal mentation, or in other words, the “internal dialogue” mentioned above.  

Why call it “default” though? In experimentation, fMRI scans picked up no activity from this network in patients’ brains during tasks requiring focus. However, network activity was bustling during tasks requiring no focus, and consumed the most amount of energy. This pattern continued to surface when individuals disengaged from the external environment, thus leading to the DMN becoming the center of more intensive research on the mysterious functions of the brain. 

In a collective review of multiple articles on the structural nature of the DMN, neuroscientist Randy Buckner noticed a correlation between self-reported data of mind-wandering and activity in both the DMN and complementary regions outside of the network such as the locus coeruleus. This region was proposed to be a key contributor to the conditions facilitating spontaneous thought due to its control of arousal by norepinephrine. High tonic firing was associated with a passively engaged mental state in participants while low tonic firing in this region was associated with an uninterested, inattentive mental state. Tonic firing describes the steady background hum of neurons in your brain which maintain automatic bodily functions including muscle tone and certain types of thinking. As you can see, the DMN is certainly the hub for mind-wandering, but it receives plenty of input and feedback from various locations in the brain. In some instances, the DMN might be dependent on these locations to produce a larger effect. It is this powerful collaboration that initiates these internal modes of cognition. 

The DMN also plays a functional role in mind-wandering and spontaneous thought as well, evident from the numerous studies of its impact on creativity. Once again, using the alternative uses task, this time with the support of fMRI imaging, neurosurgeon Ben Shofty electrically stimulated parts of the DMN and other regions in participants to analyze its impact on their performance. Findings indicated that creative fluency—how easily new ideas arise—weakened when the DMN was directly stimulated. Again, similar to the structural evidence, other neural networks pitch in. Not only is the DMN active during spontaneous creative thought, it is also thought to be its rare moment of synchronization with the salience network (the filter for novel ideas) and the executive control network (goal-oriented idea implementation) that “manifests the ability to link seemingly unrelated elements,” It’s quite remarkable how much behind-the-scenes stuff makes up the showering experience isn’t it? 

That fresh feeling when you step out of the shower while the steam dissipates, your body clean and dry…it’s fantastic. But just know that within that twenty-minute session you had with yourself, your thoughts, your goals, and your imagination, you either solved some of the world’s most burning issues, or you might have just gathered some mind-bending jokes for your friends. Both are just as great as the actual shower, and both are surprisingly backed up by psychological and neuroscientific concepts!