Sep 15, 2026 · 47 min · 12 segments
Kerri went away and did the reading, and it turns out she'd been calling three different things by one name. Distraction, mind wandering, incubation — one of them comes from outside you, two of them…
Um, so one of the things that I found really interesting was distinguishing between the terms which I had, by my own admission, just lumped together into all some sort of distraction.
And you had said that, "I don't know if that's distraction if you do that to yourself."
I just remember that I argued that distraction or what distraction reminds me of when it comes to etymology.
Mm.
You said, um, for you, distraction means that you still kind of stay in the orbit of a topic, uh, but your, your view widens.
Um, and then we came up with this whole comparison of, um, still staying in the orbit and having, like, g- the gravity of the topic and circling around it, um, or being fully distracted from, like, having the, the, the band still tied to the topic, but it's elastic and you swing back and forth, or if somebody cuts through the band, the rope, the lifeline between your brain and the topic at hand.
Yeah.
So what I found quite useful is across a number of different bits of research, I could perhaps be a lot more precise, which I think might help us.
So largely, distraction would be defined as that external interruption.
Mm-hmm.
So probably not what I'm describing.
What I'm describing, this kind of internally generated drifting or changing of scenery or whatever, is probably called mind wandering, which makes a lot of sense.
Yes.
Um, and then there's a third term which I think is useful, which I also think I just lumped in all together, [laughs] called incubation, which is deliberately stepping away from a task to try to see things differently, to look at it differently, to generate more ideas, to think about something creatively.
Which instantly confuses me again as a non-English native speaker, 'cause an incubator doesn't sound like stepping away from something, but actually zoning into something.
Like ... babies in an incubator or an incubator where you go to build your startup, stuff like that.
It's all like creating that box that nourishes you, and now you're telling me it's deliberately-
Okay
... stepping away from something.
Yeah.
I guess, I wonder if any kind of incubator is like you giving an idea what it needs, you're feeding an idea-
Yeah
... what it needs.
Maybe that's the, the sense of it.
Makes sense.
Um, so one of the things that I found really interesting was distinguishing between the terms which I had, by my own admission, just lumped together into all some sort of distraction.
And you had said that, "I don't know if that's distraction if you do that to yourself."
I just remember that I argued that distraction or what distraction reminds me of when it comes to etymology.
Mm.
You said, um, for you, distraction means that you still kind of stay in the orbit of a topic, uh, but your, your view widens.
Um, and then we came up with this whole comparison of, um, still staying in the orbit and having, like, g- the gravity of the topic and circling around it, um, or being fully distracted from, like, having the, the, the band still tied to the topic, but it's elastic and you swing back and forth, or if somebody cuts through the band, the rope, the lifeline between your brain and the topic at hand.
Yeah.
So what I found quite useful is across a number of different bits of research, I could perhaps be a lot more precise, which I think might help us.
So largely, distraction would be defined as that external interruption.
Mm-hmm.
So probably not what I'm describing.
What I'm describing, this kind of internally generated drifting or changing of scenery or whatever, is probably called mind wandering, which makes a lot of sense.
Yes.
Um, and then there's a third term which I think is useful, which I also think I just lumped in all together, [laughs] called incubation, which is deliberately stepping away from a task to try to see things differently, to look at it differently, to generate more ideas, to think about something creatively.
Which instantly confuses me again as a non-English native speaker, 'cause an incubator doesn't sound like stepping away from something, but actually zoning into something.
Like ... babies in an incubator or an incubator where you go to build your startup, stuff like that.
It's all like creating that box that nourishes you, and now you're telling me it's deliberately-
Okay
... stepping away from something.
Yeah.
I guess, I wonder if any kind of incubator is like you giving an idea what it needs, you're feeding an idea-
Yeah
... what it needs.
Maybe that's the, the sense of it.
Makes sense.
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