The inability to focus helps ensure a richer mixture of thoughts in consciousness. Because these people struggled to filter the world, they ended up letting everything in. They couldn’t help but be open-minded.
Such lapses in attention turn out to be a crucial creative skill. When we’re faced with a difficult problem, the most obvious solution—that first idea we focus on—is probably wrong. At such moments, it often helps to consider far-fetched possibilities, to approach the task from an unconventional perspective. And this is why distraction is helpful: People unable to focus are more likely to consider information that might seem irrelevant but will later inspire the breakthrough. When we don’t know where to look, we need to look everywhere.
I believe it because, in my mind, the essence of creativity is ideas having sex. But I would not want to take this Rah Rah Distraction reasoning too far.
While adding randomish unexpected information to one person's brain will likely make him or her more creative, I am not sure it would be any better than having two people focus on the subject matters that interest them and having them combine their different perspectives to find solutions to a problem. My point is that the randomish unexpected information could just as easily come from someone else, and that is why the most creative solutions are typically collaborative rather than solo.
