#I used to alphabetise nametags at work if I was stuck on a problem for this very reason

[rhettlevin]

Oh no, oh no, you've done it now. I don't know much science (not my realm of expertise or interest, usually) but THIS is one piece I happen to carry with me like it's an emotional support factoid.

I can't recall which broadcaster showed this particular documentary but it was all about the science behind inspiration: where did it come from, was it purely random and could it be induced? Turns out, it can totally be induced.

They showed an experiment where three groups of people were set an identically difficult problem. They were then sent off to try and see what circumstances caused inspiration to happen. Two of the groups were given Lego or similar, while the third was told to just go away and think really hard. One Lego group was told to build something elaborate out of the blocks, while the other was told to [YAWN] sort the blocks by colour/size etc. It was that last group which reported the most eureka moments.

Why? Because the first two groups' conscious brains were working really hard on the problem, but unfortunately a huge amount of problem solving happens in the sub-conscious brain. The last group weren't using their conscious brain so much, which meant the brain was able to divert resources to the problem-solving parts of the sub-conscious, giving it a little power (well blood) boost. They could even watch this happening real time using a cMRI scan: the brain would divert a significant amount of its bloodflow to the sub-conscious which would then get to work in the background, while the patient is wholly unaware of what's happening. And then it gets even better. When the sub-conscious is on the brink of an answer, it will draw even more blood away from the rest of the brain, so much so that your senses shut down. You can't see/hear/taste etc. You don't notice though because this process takes less than a second, during which time all that extra blood flow is super-charging the sub-conscious, ramping it up like a PC suddenly roaring at 100% CPU, and EUREKA: inspiration strikes.

In summary: for inspiration to strike, you need to allow your conscious mind to chill and give some resources to your sub-conscious, and one pretty reliable way to do that is to do something really mundane/tedious/boring like washing the dishes.

“The best time for planning a book is while you're doing the dishes. ” ― Agatha Christie