Don Draper (he’s the one currently falling off a cliff in BBC TV’s Mad Men) summed it up in his advice to Peggy, when she was struggling to come up with ideas for a campaign.
“You think about it deeply… and then you forget it… and an idea will jump up in your face.”
Maybe that doesn’t sound completely convincing – can it really be that simple?
Worse, it sounds stressful. Where’s the fall-back if nothing does ‘jump up in your face’? Well that bit at least is simple – there is no fall-back. Maybe that’s why they drink so much.
Don (yes, I know he’s not a real person) had obviously read James Webb Young’s A Technique for Producing Ideas, a Madison Avenue bible in the early 60s. It’s a book that continues to sell because its message continues to hold true. Incidentally, it’s also an example of how deeply Mad Men’s writers have researched US advertising in the early 60s.
When people like me are trying to come up with a way of presenting a message in a way that produces the right response in our target audience (that’s what our job is), we have to immerse ourselves in everything about it. Not just the product but the people who might want it too. We must, as they say, walk in their shoes.
Then, just as we’re really getting bored with it, we go and see a film, go to a museum, read a book, do anything but think about it and then, as if by magic, seemingly random associations and connections will take place in our mind which usually cause an idea to jump up in our face.
No, it doesn’t always work but it’s the best anyone’s come up with.
I find that even when writing something as straightforward as this blog, that from time to time, it just isn’t flowing. So I do a quick Sudoku (note, it’s a totally different type of mental process) and when I go back to my writing, it’s usually a great deal clearer.
Words' eye view 
” It is a fact that Freud himself took cocaine (in small doses) for about two years, and that he began his dream interpretation approximately ten years later. Scheidt believes that a long, unconscious conflict related to the cocaine-induced states of euphoria (ten years later) suddenly led to the beginnings of dream interpretation” (http://www.cocaine.org/history/sigmundfreud.html).
So that’s where Freud got his ideas from!
Thanks Paul for providing a respite from grading (or marking, as they say in the UK).
Interesting – I didn’t know that.
By the way, let me assure you that most of my ideas are induced by caffeine, not cocaine, maybe that’s my problem.
Let’s hope that two minutes away from marking/grading meant you returned to it inspired.
Yes, definitely. If pondering a problem, pop it into the unconscious toaster…do something else…then see what pops out of the toaster.
I find dancing a great way to forget about old things and give space for new things.
Even washing up can help shift things in my head.
So maybe it is doing physical things which gives the brain a rest.