Pulling back (shower) curtain on creative thinking

Let me tell you a dirty secret. Actually, it’s a clean secret: I get my best column ideas in the shower, but by the time I get out, they’re gone, which means you only see the second- and third-best ideas.

Here’s how it works. The hot water is spraying on me. I’m washing my ears, my hair — or what’s left of it — and various unmentionable body parts, when suddenly a brilliant idea flashes across my consciousness like Halley’s Comet.

Sentence by sentence, the column keeps growing in my brain, but by the time I dry myself, it has evaporated.

Before you start writing letters to the editor or to Joe Biden’s recently inaugurated Disinformation Governance Board, complaining about the preposterous things I write about, let me assure you that I “follow the science,” just like Hillary Clinton. And the science says showering leads to cleanliness ... and creativity.

I may be tone deaf, but in the shower I can sing like Pavarotti. My performance of the aria “O mio babbino caro” from Puccini is better than Renee Fleming’s. I also love singing “American Pie,” which takes more than nine minutes and wastes a lot of hot water.

In the shower, I can write with the power and drama of Charles Dickens, Victor Hugo and Mark Twain. I’m even better than Donald Trump, the self-proclaimed Tolstoy of Twitter.

In the shower, I’m absolutely certain the column I conceived while scrubbing my bald head will get me a Pulitzer Prize or a Nobel Prize or prominent display on countless refrigerators.

Do showers bring out our inner genius? Cognitive scientist Scott Barry Kaufman, author of “Wired to Create,” conducted a survey in eight countries and concluded that 72 percent of us get our best ideas in the shower. Fourteen percent of the respondents routinely used the shower to stimulate new insights or inspire a fresh approach to old problems.

“The relaxing, solitary and non-judgmental shower environment may afford creative thinking by allowing the mind to wander freely, causing people to be more open to their inner stream of consciousness and daydreams,” Kaufman says.

Showering helps release the chemical neurotransmitter dopamine in our brains, promoting what psychologists call the “default mode network,” where ideas bounce around in free association in our unconscious.

Do you need to write a response to your negative performance evaluation or a customer complaint to Amazon or an essay for your college application or a nasty letter to the editor? Jump in the shower and take your laptop with you.

Back to my problem. Since I can’t type on my iPad while I’m washing, I decided to do the next best thing. When the ideas started to flow, I opened the curtains and ran naked and dripping wet down the hall to my room and began writing. That approach bombed, however, because the woman who always lectures me about cleaning the shower, aka my wife, was right behind me, and things got ugly.

Nevertheless, I managed to reconstruct my column on dry land. It may not be the best, but it’s better than the rest.

This creative process comes at a price. The juices keep flowing but so does the water, which means our propane bill, like everything else in America, has doubled.

The other problem is that everyone who showers after me comes out screaming, “THERE’S NO HOT WATER!” (I consider that poetic justice because when our four daughters were teenagers, they always seemed to go into an adolescent nirvana in the shower and forgot to come out.)

Everything I’ve told you is true — or almost true — so I don’t want the Disinformation Governance Board snooping around when I’m in the shower. As Americans, we have the constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of speech and freedom of showering.

So here’s my suggestion to make America even greater yet again. Since the shower helps people come up with new solutions to old problems, our esteemed political leaders of both parties need to jump in, turn on the water and get to work. Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Nancy Pelosi, Mitch McConnell, Ted Cruz, Pete Buttigieg, Janet Yellen and the rest of the Wild Ones have to get in the shower together. They have to decide whether they want to be in their business suits or their birthday suits, but if there’s press coverage, I suggest the latter.

Once they start to scrub themselves, the ideas and water will flow freely, and they’ll be able to solve the border crisis, climate change, Putin inflation, Biden inflation, the coronavirus pandemic, the crime pandemic and the disinformation pandemic.

Isn’t that a great idea? It came to me in the shower.