Cal Newport

You're going to lift much heavier weights than you're going to sort of come across in your everyday life.

Immersive thinking is about trying to leverage novel environments to push your brain to a new level of thinking that you want to normally do in everyday life and therefore get both comfort with thinking and growth of thinking ability.

Now, there's three elements for an immersive speaking thinking rather mini excursion to actually work.

Element one, you need an environment that's novel and thought-provoking, so a place that you associate with contemplation and that you don't associate with other things in your life.

That's why your kitchen doesn't work or the conference room at your office doesn't work.

You have too many other associations with that that will be distracting.

The second element of making this idea work, have a warm-up routine.

Now, just like at the gym, you need to do a warmup routine before you start lifting those heavy weights.

I'm gonna argue when you're doing immersive thinking, you need some sort of cognitive warmup routine that should be based on the consumption of information that just sort of gets those brain circuits fired up.

Your brain activity is going.

Now you're in a mode of, I wanna, my brain is connected in different ways.

I'm ready to start using it.

And then finally, the third element of immersive thinking will be some sort of exercise routine in which you use this warmed up brain to produce new information, information that is a stretch for you or otherwise demanding and interesting.

This is now the cognitive equivalent of actually lifting that heavy weight, trying to push things towards failure.

Environment, warmup, exercise.

That is what you need for the immersive thinking strategy to work.

Now, what I want to do here is give you a case study from my own life.

This is something I've actually done on multiple occasions here in my hometown of Washington, D.C.

I'm going to sort of describe the three elements of an immersive thinking mini excursion that I've done before.

All right, so for my example immersive thinking excursion, the environment I used was the National Gallery of Art.