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Nobody ever had a good idea sitting behind a desk. Or, for that matter, hunched around a boardroom table at midnight, frantically trying to make a crazy deadline. So why do so many of us in the creative industries spend so much of our lives sitting in front of computer screens and filling in timesheets to prove we’re being productive – when we’re being anything but?

Good ideas – those lightbulb moments that have the potential to change the world – seldom arrive on demand. They need to percolate before they creep up on us unexpectedly, usually when we’re doing something completely unrelated. It’s the old Archimedes Eureka moment while sitting in the bath. In fact, many discoveries that have changed lives were made while the people who made them were not thinking about anything in particular. Alternating electrical current, the discovery of penicillin, Post-its, ice-cream cones and Velcro all owe their existence to the sudden arrival of a brilliant moment of insight. For an industry that depends almost completely on good ideas, advertising involves a lot of time sitting at flat surfaces faced with blank pieces of paper. Granted, a lot of us can’t do our jobs unless we’re working 9 to 5, sitting in a particular office, answering a particular phone. Agencies would be in chaos if traffic or client service did not keep regular hours. But what about creative and strategy? 90% of my job is thinking – the rest Powerpoint, hunting down information and meetings – and thinking can happen anywhere. There isn’t a category on my timesheet called 'thinking'. In fact, my office is the one place where I definitely don’t think. It’s where I do my admin, read my mails, compile documents, file presentations – all activities that don’t require insight. No thinking though: I literally cannot think without moving.

I’ve got to be perambulating in a mall, going for a walk around the park, driving around. All my best ideas tend to come to me when it’s impossible for me to write them down: while driving, in the car, in the shower. My experience with what has been called daydreaming or the 'idle mind' is born out by solid scientific research. Several studies have concluded that the most productive way to generate creativity is to allow the mind to wander in a way that is not directed. Brainstorms are all very well, but they’re only effective in conjunction with daydreaming. 'Sleeping on it' really does work. So much of what we do involves a crisis, a crazy deadline, working all night.

No amount of Red Bull, or Berocca, or whatever your pick me up of choice might be can manifest good ideas, because eureka moments do not arrive on command. Brain scans – and who can argue with a brain scan – suggest that it’s when our minds are wandering, apparently unproductively, our brain is most actively engaged – and solving problems. When the brain solves a problem through insight, it uses fundamentally different mechanisms from the ones it would use when solving a problem analytically. "We often assume that if we don't notice our thoughts they don't exist," says a researcher based in Vancouver, "When we don't notice them is when we may be thinking most creatively."

There you have it: the idle mind is a productive mind. Y&R’s mantra is 'Resist the usual' and this is exactly what creative people do, a new study suggests. As BBC News reported in early June, brain scans have revealed that the thought patterns of highly creative people mimic those of people with schizophrenia. There’s a similar lack of filtering, which means that creative people are able to make connections that more conventional types won’t. It also means that creative people are at increased risk of depression, bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. "Creativity is uncomfortable. It is their dissatisfaction with the present that drives them on to make changes,” says UK psychologist Mark Millard.

“Creative people, like those with psychotic illnesses, tend to see the world differently to most. It's like looking at a shattered mirror. They see the world in a fractured way. "Or, as another psychologist argues, creativity is the ability to suspend disbelief." When you suspend disbelief you are prepared to believe anything and this opens up the scope for seeing more possibilities," he says. "Creativity is certainly about not being constrained by rules or accepting the restrictions that society places on us. Of course the more people break the rules, the more likely they are to be perceived as 'mentally ill'."

So there you go: if you’re creative, you’re probably slightly mad. One thing is for sure: if you think you can sit behind a desk and come up with good ideas, you’re definitely round the bend.

_Sarah Britten is Strategic Planning Director at YRB