While technology-based tools such as email, SMS and surfing the web have long been considered a hindrance to productivity, such distractions' could also prove critical in effective problem solving, according to research.
Boffins have published their findings of a Remote-Association Test (RAT) study into the distraction/solving phenomenon in the Association for Psychological Science journal Psychological Science, which showed that subjects are much more likely to solve something complex after a period of distraction.
The research, led by Kellogg School of Management Professor Adam Galinsky and fellow psychologists Chen-Bo Zhong from the University of Toronto and Ap Dijkstererhuis of Radboud University Nijmegen, shows that the human brain's unconscious thought solves problems using a two-step methodology.
Distractions will help generate creative solutions to problems particularly the more complex ones - but only if they're followed by conscious thought.
"Conscious thought is better at making linear, analytic decisions, but unconscious thought is especially effective at solving complex problems," said Galinsky and his co-authors.
"Unconscious activation may provide inspirational sparks underlying the Aha!' moment that eventually leads to important discoveries."
The research continued to demonstrate its point with a technology-focused analogy.
"When a printer is not printing the calculations from a computer program properly, it is not always because the program is not working. Instead, the printer may be broken, or the connection between the computer and the printer may be severed. Oversimplified as it is, we
suggest that this metaphor may account for the lack of empirical support for the incubation effect," the research states.
"We conceptualise incubation as involving two relatively independent steps. In the first step, unconscious thought "boosts" the associative search for creative solutions. In the second step, solutions are transferred to consciousness. A failure of either step will lead to the absence of empirical support for incubation.
"Thus, previous research may have underestimated both the importance and the complexity of incubation in creative processes and therefore may have looked for the incubation effect in the wrong place."
