Letting it go: The interplay between mind wandering, mindfulness, and creativity

A creative idea is always appreciated. However, it is still unclear as to what helps people in coming up with creative ideas. The current chapter explores how mind wandering, mindfulness and meditation influence creative ideation. Most specifically, we explore the cognition behind each of these faculties and how they interact to enable us in navigating across our internal and external environments constantly. In this chapter, we also discuss an empirical study that examines mind-wandering tendencies in two types of creativity tasks-convergent and divergent, by manipulating task difficulty. The findings of our study provide evidence in support of the process theories that indicate mind wandering is based on the nature of creative tasks being performed and mind wandering tendencies are higher in the divergent compared to the convergent task. Finally, the chapter concludes with a discussion on how understanding the cognition of meditators provides insights to creative thought process and explores avenues of study for such complex and subjective cognitive faculties.