I solve my hardest Wi-Fi design problems in the shower. Not at the desk. Not in the spreadsheet. In the shower, on a walk, or in that half-asleep minute before the alarm goes off. After 25 years of designing wireless networks, I trust that pattern more than I trust most of my whiteboard sessions.
There is a brain-science post going around right now that says I am not imagining it. It walks through the Default Mode Network, the part of your brain that lights up when you stop concentrating, and it argues that your best ideas come from stepping away. The core of that post is real. I have lived it for a quarter century. The problem is the post gets the science wrong in five specific ways, and the wrong parts are the parts people are quoting.
So here is the honest version. The science is real. The magic numbers are not.
What is actually true
In the late 1990s, a neurologist named Marcus Raichle at Washington University in St. Louis noticed something odd in brain scans. A specific set of regions, the medial prefrontal cortex and the posterior cingulate and precuneus, got quieter every time a person focused on an external task, and lit right back up the moment the task stopped. He named the pattern in a 2001 paper in PNAS called “A default mode of brain function.” It became one of the most-cited neuroscience papers of the century.
That is the spine of the viral post, and it holds up. The discovery is real. The man is real. The paper is real.
The energy fact is real too, and it is the genuinely surprising part. Your brain is about 2% of your body weight, and it burns about 20% of your body’s energy. That is a textbook fact, well established for decades.
Where the post breaks
Now the five things the post gets wrong. I am not pointing these out to be the smartest person in the room. I am pointing them out because I almost reposted the thing myself before I had it fact-checked, and a junior engineer reading it would walk away repeating numbers that fall apart on inspection.
One. “The DMN uses 20% of your body’s energy.” No. The whole brain uses about 20% of your body’s energy. The Default Mode Network is one network inside that brain, not the whole thing. Handing the brain’s entire energy budget to one network is a category error.
Two. “60 to 80% of your brain’s energy goes to the Default Mode Network.” Mislabeled. Raichle’s real finding is that roughly 60 to 80% of the brain’s energy supports constant internal signaling, the activity he nicknamed the brain’s “dark energy.” That intrinsic activity is not the same thing as the Default Mode Network. The honest punchline is the opposite end of the same fact: the extra energy a hard task demands on top of that baseline is tiny. Task-evoked changes run under 5%, sometimes as little as half a percent. Your brain is not mostly reacting to the world. It is mostly running its own internal model, all the time.
Three. “A break makes you 40% more creative.” The 40% is real, and it comes from a good study (Baird, Smallwood, Schooler and colleagues, 2012, in Psychological Science). People who took a break doing a simple, undemanding task did about 40% better on a creativity test afterward. The internet keeps dropping the one detail that matters most: that boost only showed up for problems the people had already been working on. Brand-new problems got zero benefit. Incubation is not general creativity magic. It is your brain continuing to chew on something you already loaded in. Note also that the lead author is Baird, not Schooler. Credit goes where credit is due.
Four. “A 2025 review proved insight problems need the network on and analytical problems need it off.” I could not find that review, and the clean on-off story it tells is not what the real literature says. The honest answer is that the science here is messier than the post wants it to be. When a tidy dichotomy gets attributed to a paper you cannot locate, leave it out.
Five. “Insights disappear within 90 seconds.” Invented. There is no study behind that number. Writing your ideas down before they slip is good advice. Dressing it up with a fake stopwatch is not.
The rule that actually matters
Strip away the bad numbers and you are left with something sharper and more useful than the viral version. Incubation only works on a problem you have already fully loaded in. The walk does not generate the idea out of nothing. It finishes the work your focused brain started.
So the rule is simple. Load the hard problem first, then walk.
This is exactly how the best Wi-Fi design happens, and it is why I have trusted my shower for 25 years. A real design problem is never one variable. You have the client device mix, the application requirements, the data rates each application needs, the construction materials, the ceiling heights, the survey data, the co-channel contention you are trying to avoid, and the budget that says you cannot just throw more Access Points at it. You cannot hold all of that loosely. You have to sit down and engage it hard, deliberately, until the whole tangled thing is loaded into your head and you can feel where it does not resolve.
Then you step away.
You take the walk. You stand in the shower. You let the focused part of your brain go quiet and let the constant background machinery keep working the problem you fed it. And more often than I can count, the answer that would not come at the desk arrives somewhere a notebook cannot follow. The right place for that fourth Access Point. The channel plan that finally stops fighting itself. The reason the validation survey kept coming back wrong.
That is not magic. It is incubation working the way the research actually describes it, on a problem that was already loaded. If I had not done the hard, boring, focused loading first, the walk would have given me nothing. A blank mind on a walk stays blank.
I cannot tell you my walk proves the 40% number. It does not. One person’s experience never proves a number. What I can tell you is that the practice the corrected science points to is the practice I already live, and it has shaped some of the trickiest designs of my career.
Load the hard problem first. Engage it until it is fully in your head. Then go do something boring without your phone, and keep a way to capture whatever surfaces. The science behind the shower is real. The magic numbers are not, and you do not need them.
What is the last hard problem you solved away from your desk, and had you done the focused loading first, or did it surprise you?