The Mind’s Detours |
A writer sits down at her desk. She knows where the scene is going. Or at least she thinks she does. Her character will leave the room, meet the man waiting in the corridor and, before the end of the chapter, reveal the secret she has kept for years. The route is clear. The sentence is ready. Yet before the first paragraph is finished, the writer’s mind has gone elsewhere.
First to an old song. Then to a yellow door she saw as a child and cannot explain why she still remembers. Then to the hurried walk of a woman who passed her in the street that morning. None of it has anything to do with the scene she is writing.
Five minutes later, one of her characters says something that was never in the outline.
And here is the curious part: perhaps the writer’s attention did not wander at all. Perhaps it widened.
We have spent years being told to concentrate. Look at one thing. Turn off the notifications. Keep the mind on the line. Focus has become more than a cognitive skill; it is treated almost as a moral virtue. A mind that drifts is undisciplined. A person who leaves the desk, looks out of the window or strays into an unrelated thought is failing to do the work.
But what if, at certain moments in creative thought, the opposite is required?
A Perspective published in iScience in March 2026 approaches the relationship between attention and creativity from just this direction. It is not the report of a new experiment. Rather, it brings together existing research on attention, creative thinking and ADHD to propose a framework. It does not offer a neat prescription. It does something more useful: it reminds us that attention does not operate in only one way during creativity.
In the early stages of a creative act, a looser, broader field of attention may be helpful. Details we would normally dismiss as irrelevant are allowed in.........