Do you always have the radio on in the background?
From the moment I wake up in the morning until I get out of the car at the office, the radio spews its news out at me (I find news more stimulating than music).
That was true until recently, when my car radio stopped working. After a few quiet journeys with no radio blaring at me, I suddenly realized that solutions to a number of problems I had been mulling over had popped into my head while driving.
I can’t prove the science behind it, but I know intuitively that when the radio, TV or MP3 player is on, it continuously stimulates our sensory inputs with relatively useless information. This suppresses our own original and creative thoughts that would otherwise fill the void. (By constantly saturating our inputs with irrelevant chatter, could we be subconsciously “protecting” ourselves against having to deal with such things?)
So next time you have the urge to hose yourself down with a torrent of mind-numbing auditory input, try listening to your own mind for a while instead.