What happens to your brain when you’re on vacation?

About a hundred years ago, people, including scientists, used to think that our brains became significantly busy only when we are doing things or focusing on tasks. Of course, they knew that some parts of it have to be constantly working to control our breathing and other reflex reactions. But generally, when our “to do” list is blank, we thought our minds were also blank. Extending this thought further to the larger life domain of work and we would realize that this is also how we have viewed work and vacations. We generally think of them as opposites.

But even in the mid 1920’s, Hans Berger, a psychiatrist, already suspected that the brain was constantly active and he wanted proof of this. This is how he was able to discover the electrical signals from the brain which he measured – thus giving birth to electroencephalograms or what we now refer to as EEGs. He measured EEGs of people and discovered that there were signals even if they were sleeping. Of course now, we have fMRIs – those kinds of brain scans that measure blood flow to the brain while you are doing or thinking of anything and indeed, our brains are always active whether we are resting or focusing. The question is, what parts of your brain connect (network) when you are engaged in certain activities, including resting, and what do these networks enable your MIND to do?

While hitchhiking inside your own mind, you follow no definite itinerary but you find yourself going through and meandering what you have tucked in the nooks and crannies of your memories, joined by new paths of your own speculative thoughts. Sometimes, you will even enter cabins, tour inside and even take out the garments from the bedside cabinet and examine them. Sometimes, you bike around, sometimes, you zoom here and there like a sports car, often, you take a walk – all that as you mentally scribble the story of yourself as you know yourself. And while doing that, you discover things that are connected in so many ways, even to your current laser-focused pursuits. You come back then to your working self and find the territory of your mind enlarged, even as you engage in precision and focus on your current work. Your mind is larger, you are friendlier, and you can work better.

This is what happens when you are on vacation – we remove ourselves from the constant environment and go somewhere where you will not be asked to accomplish a specific thing and therefore, your mind can wander. It will not actually check-out of your life. Scientists of course call it some boring acronym – DMN – which stands for Default Mode Network. It has been increasingly studied and scientists have discovered that it has a crucial role in the way our minds fundamentally work. We are not meant and built to focus on one thing all the time at what lies before us – like our computer screens, day in and day out. Most of the time, our mind wanders and this is what keeps us sane, and ironically, what keeps us focused.

Studies have also shown that having this network active is associated with creativity. It seems that the hitchhiking mind wanders around drawing an invisible string among the many things in your head and it creates the space in your head for meaningful and eureka connections. Indeed, they found that this kind of “divergent thinking” lies at the heart of what creativity is. What happens in the DMN is also being studied in so many brains of “superhumans” like athletes, artists and other creative humans as it becomes increasingly clear that in order to do one’s “job” not just well BUT very well, one has to be able to play hooky.

And by “good” or “great work,” I do not just mean a great sales turn-out, a completed construction project or some fantastic ad campaign. It would also seem that the DMN puts you in a friendly walk with your own inner psychologist, sculpting your emotional selves so that they can balance themselves to put you in a state that lends you to work better. DMN it seems, also makes you look back at your own mistakes in your own inter-personal dealings and realize how you can correct them.

Very few employers or bosses understand this or will accept this even if they do somehow understand that they should let their staff minds rest. If you do, it would mean, aside from vacations, you would let your staff have naps, play games, take walks, have coffee outside, all during office hours. Most employers or bosses have equated “office hours” with “work hours”. They do not count the experiences of the workers outside office hours which played crucial roles in getting the work done that was only revealed to the bosses during office hours. I suspect that most of the pivotal ideas that have made organizations work come from the minds that were at work outside “office hours.”

Most bosses view vacations as time off from what they pay their staff to do – which is work, work, work. But what is lost is the glaring fact that in order to do good or even great work, the mind has to experience variety, change and movement. These 3 things are all part of the hitchhiking mind – the character of the mind in DMN – when it is on a break – whether on a short or long vacation.

So a brain at rest, like most of yours are on now, is a mind at work. There will always be some kind of resistance to go back to work after a vacation. But when the inertia wears off, notice how your mind will work better after a break. If it doesn’t, maybe it is not your mind. Maybe you are in the wrong job. – Rappler.com

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