Why Free Writing Is Better Than Meditation

You can cut the corpus callosum (the bridge between your brain hemispheres) and essentially have 2 minds that are both “you” living side by side in the same head.

Daniel Kahneman, in Thinking Fast and Slow, also highly recommended, also breaks things in two. System 1 he says is the fast, intuitive, automatic, emotional brain and System 2 is the rational, guiding, intentional brain.

(I personally have a weird theory that our brains are running a constant simulation of the universe, which includes models for our self, other people, other forces, in order to tell a story about the past and predict the future.)

Disabling that restless squirrel in your brain is the reason why activities like walking, showering, doing the dishes, gardening, etc., are all such great activities for stirring up creative thoughts.

Free writing has the added benefit of providing a tangible trail of thoughts as they rise up. You’re essentially hitching your subconscious directly to your typing fingers.

As you write, you also read what you’re writing. Sometimes, I suspect that certain parts of my brain are seeing the words for the first time.

Imagine a fountain of thoughts bubbling up from your subconscious. Our conscious brain receives these thoughts during meditation, and we often get caught up in one and float away in a thought bubble. Eventually it pops, and we’re back, but it’s a lot of work.

With free writing, we have a convenient method to step back from the fountain, observe the bubbles and let them float away on their own… because we are too busy recording them. The separation between thought and self becomes easier to discern and maintain, the same way that carrying a camera around a party creates a separation between party and party recorder.

typing has to be truly free. This means that the critical, editing, judging, vetoing, guiding, interpreting part of your brain — the neocortex—has to be almost entirely disabled.