Imagine you’ve been working on a problem for days, maybe even
weeks, but you can’t seem to figure it out. Your brain is
working over solutions constantly but you feel stumped. So, you
take a break. You walk down the street to the nearest coffee
shop but as you’re walking home, sipping your drink and watching
cars drive by, the solution rushes into your brain. That’s it!
In the above scenario, you aren’t thinking of the problem.
You’re thinking of the coffee in your hand, the cars driving by,
or the directions back to your house. That problem, that
horribly frustrating problem, is solved almost out of thin air.
What you’ve experienced is known as spontaneous and cognitive
creativity. Your basal ganglia, a part of the brain involved in
unconscious functions, took over your conscious brain’s efforts
to solve the problem. Even while you were walking to the coffee
shop and consciously paying attention to other stimuli (the
coffee, the cars), your basal ganglia was working through the
problem until it arriving at a