Ap Dijksterhuis

Yeah, those moments are indeed the best.

I studied the working habits of artists and scientists and what occurred to me is that most of them, especially work in the morning, some of them work more often than just in the morning, but the morning is usually the most productive time.

We know that people are, the cognitive abilities are usually at their best between about one and a half and five hours after you wake up.

Although that's not true for everybody, but it's true for most people.

And then in the afternoon, what you see is that many of them walk.

and walking is is just one example of what you may call a lightly meditative state uh the same as the train ride jk rowling's train ride there's a few more of those and yeah those are indeed the most productive activities when it comes to unconscious thought and i think there's two reasons one of them is that unconscious thought itself is working best under those conditions if you if you compare it with uh times square or

to a situation where you are working very hard on something like a complex problem your unconscious thought is not working too well because too too much capacity is taken by other processes and the second reason is that of course there has to be room

There has to be space in consciousness for a good idea to land.

So if you're watching a very good movie, you're engrossed in the movie.

So you're not going to get any good ideas, at least not at that time.

And when you walk in nature, yeah, there's plenty of room in consciousness to, let's say, receive ideas from the unconscious, from your hidden brain.

Well, intrinsic motivation basically means that you're doing something that comes out of you, comes from the deeper regions of your brain or maybe metaphorically from your heart.

It's something you really like to do as opposed to extrinsic motivation.

These are goals that you achieve.

you want to achieve because of money or fame or some kind of external awards that you can win, for instance.

A little bit of extrinsic motivation isn't necessarily bad, but if you want to last, if you want to persevere for a long time, you need intrinsic motivation.

Extrinsic motivation dries up usually quite quickly.

So Marco quit school when he was 16.

And his father, who also was a kook, said, well, you know, okay, if you want to quit school, you can quit school, but you have to go to work.

And then he said, you know, why don't you go work in the kitchen?