The shower is so fertile a place for contemplation and creative thinking for so many of us that we have the name shower thoughts for the novel ideas that we produce while we’re there. It’s one of the most ordinary of activities, but it is exceptional as an “ecology of attention.” Like many other routine activities, it occupies you for a small window of time every day. But, unlike other routine tasks like driving, it frees you from having to respond to external information. Unlike household tasks, it renders you in uncontested privacy. All these things are also true for baths, but do they provoke thoughts in the same way? Showers, unlike baths, do not allow you to stay idle nor do they let you entertain yourself with a book or a TV show.

I suspect this last bit is crucial. Keeping your mind busy on a menial task seems to have extraordinary powers for unlocking a certain kind of thinking. There is a reason for the psychoanalytical practice of hypnosis, represented in pop culture in the form of a dangling pocket watch. There is a reason, similarly, for Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) Therapy. It’s not magic. There are mysterious ways of programming our attention and psychological capacities through interactions with our external environment.