The art of thinking · Thinking in practice
Incubation (problem solving)
Also known as: Incubation effect, Incubation (creative thinking)
German: Inkubation
In the psychology of thinking, incubation is the phase in which a problem is set aside after initial work before it is taken up again; Graham Wallas named it in The Art of Thought (1926) as the second of four stages of creative thought — preparation, incubation, illumination and verification.
- Thinking models
- Problem solving
In one sentence
Incubation: setting a problem aside after initial work before returning to it — the second of Graham Wallas’s four stages of creative thought (1926).
Example
A writer who cannot find the structure for a long topic stops, works on something else and returns the next morning with a clearer view of what belongs together.
How it applies
- Wallas’s stages: Graham Wallas described creative thought in four stages in The Art of Thought (1926): preparation (working on the problem), incubation (not working on it consciously), illumination (the idea appears) and verification (checking it). He drew on reports by Hermann von Helmholtz and Henri Poincaré.
- The research: Ut Na Sio and Thomas C. Ormerod (2009) reviewed the experimental studies in a meta-analysis and found an overall positive incubation effect; its size depended on the kind of problem and on what people did during the break.
- Working method: A pause after real preparation is part of many writing and design practices. The research supports a pause after preparation, not a pause instead of it.
Incubation vs. procrastination
Incubation follows preparation and ends with a return to the problem. Putting a problem off without having worked on it is not incubation, and the research gives it no support.
External references
- Wallas, G. (1926). The Art of Thought. London: Jonathan Cape.
- Sio, U. N., & Ormerod, T. C. (2009). Does incubation enhance problem solving? A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 135(1), 94–120. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0014212
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