The In-Between Time
Transitional spaces, smartphones, AI — and why the moments between things matter more than we realise.
Nietzsche wrote his best philosophy walking. Darwin solved problems on his 'thinking path.' Einstein arrived at the theory of relativity not at his desk but in the in-between spaces of a mind allowed to wander. Now, for the first time, those spaces come equipped with an intelligence that can think alongside us.
Human beings have always done some of their best thinking in the small spaces between more significant experiences. This article explores what happens when smartphones — and now AI — move into those spaces, what is gained, what is lost, and how we might inquire more consciously into our own habits.
The value of transitional space
Long before smartphones, human beings understood that some of their most valuable thinking happened not at their desks but in the spaces in between. The walk to work. The train journey. The queue. The slow drift toward sleep. These were not dead time — they were, for many people, the most cognitively alive moments of the day.
Psychologists call the underlying mechanism the default mode network (DMN): a set of brain regions that become more active when we are not focused on external tasks, associated with mind-wandering, autobiographical memory, and the non-linear thinking that underlies creative insight. The DMN is not idle when active — it is doing some of the most important cognitive work we ever do, and it flourishes precisely in transitional spaces.
Transitional spaces also serve emotional functions easy to overlook. The walk to a difficult meeting is the space in which we rehearse what to say, find the tone we want to strike. The journey home after a hard day is decompression, the gradual recovery of the self that existed before the working day began.
"Transitional spaces are not gaps in the day. They are some of the day's most important cognitive and emotional work — done quietly, without an agenda, in the margins."
A gap in the literature
Researchers have examined what transitional spaces make cognitively possible. Others have documented how smartphones have disrupted those possibilities. A growing body of work now explores what happens when AI takes over cognitive tasks entirely. But no one has yet asked the question at the intersection of all three: What happens when AI enters transitional spaces consciously and selectively — not as a distraction, not as a task-completer, but as a thinking partner chosen deliberately by someone who understands what those spaces are for? That is the question this inquiry is beginning to explore.
The first disruption: the smartphone
The smartphone arrived in transitional spaces and changed them utterly. Before it, the morning commute was a time of relative cognitive freedom: reading, sleeping, staring out of the window, thinking. After it, the same journey became, for most people, a time of continuous stimulation: scrolling feeds, checking messages, consuming video, playing games. The transitional space was filled — and the filling felt like enrichment.
The concept of affordance, developed by psychologist James Gibson and extended into design thinking by Donald Norman, refers to the possibilities for action that an object or environment makes available. The smartphone created a vast new affordance space — but in doing so occupied exactly the cognitive register that transitional space had previously left free for the wandering mind.
What smartphones gave us
Music, podcasts and audiobooks enriching millions of journeys.
Navigation making unfamiliar places less anxious, more expansive.
Cameras enabling us to record and curate our journeys through life.
Communication tools allowing genuine human connection across distance.
What smartphones cost us
The quiet, generative quality of in-between time, displaced by low-grade continuous stimulation.
The DMN's capacity to wander, incubate, and make unexpected connections.
The irregular gifts of unstructured time — brief waits, idle moments — now reflexively filled.
A life in which there are almost no unscheduled gaps, no moments of genuine idleness.
Research finding
Antti Oulasvirta's research showed that if your habitual response to boredom is to pick up the phone to find interesting stimuli, you are systematically distracted from more important things. Ward et al. (2017) demonstrated that the mere presence of a smartphone on a desk reduces available cognitive capacity — even when you successfully avoid checking it.
The second disruption: AI as a new kind of presence
AI represents a different kind of presence in transitional space — different in kind, not just degree, from what the smartphone brought. The smartphone brought content: information, entertainment, communication, navigation. AI brings something genuinely different: a responsive, generative interlocutor. Not content to consume, but a presence to think with.
Throughout history, the thinking that happened in transitional spaces was essentially solitary. You could think about your conversations, rehearse arguments, work through problems — but you could not actually have the conversation or test the argument with a responsive other, unless someone happened to be with you. AI changes this. For the first time, the in-between time can be genuinely dialogic.
Four spaces — and what AI makes possible in each
A sustained AI dialogue about a decision or argument — previously requiring another person to be present.
Voice-based AI as a walking interlocutor — with 81% creativity boost from movement retained.
Five-minute bursts of genuinely generative work — previously almost impossible without another person.
Half-formed insights on waking captured, developed, and returned in a usable form within minutes.
New affordances: what AI specifically makes possible
For the first time, transitional space can be genuinely conversational. The AI responds, pushes back, holds the thread of a complex exchange across time. Previously this required another person to be physically present.
Half-formed ideas spoken aloud are returned developed, not merely recorded. Voice memos and notebooks capture. AI develops.
Difficult conversations, decisions, presentations can be rehearsed with a responsive other — not just anticipated alone. The AI plays devil's advocate, simulates responses, stress-tests arguments.
Genuinely productive work is now possible in very short, irregular fragments. The AI maintains context, picks up where the conversation left off, makes five-minute windows usable.
At any point, ask for a contrary view, a historical parallel, a framework not yet considered. The range of AI's knowledge is available in the moment of need.
The processing of difficult experiences that transitional spaces have always hosted can now involve a responsive presence. This requires full awareness of what AI can and cannot genuinely offer.
The conditions for using these affordances well
None of this is automatic. The history of the smartphone in transitional spaces is a cautionary illustration: new affordances that could have enriched these spaces were used, for most people, in ways that simply colonised them with a different kind of noise. The same fate is available for AI.
Using AI well in transitional spaces requires three things. First, a clear sense of what a particular space is for. Is this walk for decompression and mind-wandering, or for working through a specific problem? Is this wait truly a moment for a five-minute burst of development, or would it be better left empty?
Second, an understanding of what AI cannot supply. The creative insight that emerges from genuine mind-wandering is not the same as the creative output that emerges from a well-directed conversation. The AI companion operates within the frame of the conversation. The wandering mind operates outside any frame at all. Both are valuable. They are not the same.
Third, honest self-observation: noticing what you are actually doing and why, and whether it is serving what you genuinely want. Are you using AI in this space because it is genuinely extending what you can think or do here? Or because it is available, feels productive, and fills the discomfort of genuine idleness?
"The question is not whether to bring AI into the in-between time. For many people, it is already there. The question is whether to bring it in consciously — knowing what it offers, knowing what it cannot replace, and choosing accordingly."
Questions worth sitting with
Reflecting on your own transitional spaces
A Mini Noticing Project
Over the course of a week, notice your own transitional spaces and the role smartphones and AI play in them. Four simple observations:
- What types of transitional space do you inhabit regularly — commute, walk, wait, sleep-edge, micro-moments? Map them across a typical day.
- In which of these spaces, if any, did you use your smartphone or other device — and how? Scrolling, messaging, listening, searching, creating?
- How did AI feature in these spaces — explicitly (ChatGPT, Claude, voice assistant) or invisibly (recommendation feed, suggested content, predictive text)?
- What have you gained or lost? Were there spaces that felt colonised — or spaces where AI genuinely extended what you could think or do?
An invitation to share
Your account of your own transitional ecology — however partial, however provisional — is a contribution to collective understanding. It helps build a picture of how real people are living with AI: not in the abstract, but in kitchens and commutes and late evenings. The Living and Learning with AI Inquiry welcomes your stories.
Key researchers cited
Marcus Raichle (2015) — foundational research on the brain's active resting state and its role in creative incubation.
Oppezzo & Schwartz (2014, Stanford) — walking increases creative output by an average of 81% compared to sitting.
Oulasvirta et al. (2012) — habits make smartphone use pervasive; checking behaviour is triggered by transitional contexts including boredom and commuting.
Conceptual framework
James Gibson (1977, 1979) — affordances are the possibilities for action that an environment makes available, relational between the person and the world.
Donald Norman (1988, 2013) — extended Gibson's concept to design: what matters is what the user perceives as possible, not just what is physically true.
Kosmyna et al., MIT (2025) — AI used without reflection reduces neural connectivity and memory ownership over time.
Sources
- Raichle, M.E. (2015). The Brain's Default Mode Network. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 38(1), 433–447. doi:10.1146/annurev-neuro-071013-014030
- Oppezzo, M. & Schwartz, D.L. (2014). Give your ideas some legs: The positive effect of walking on creative thinking. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 40(4), 1142–1152. doi:10.1037/a0036577
- Oulasvirta, A., Rattenbury, T., Ma, L. & Raita, E. (2012). Habits make smartphone use more pervasive. Personal and Ubiquitous Computing, 16(1), 105–114. doi:10.1007/s00779-011-0412-2
- Gibson, J.J. (1977). The theory of affordances. In R.E. Shaw & J. Bransford (Eds.), Perceiving, Acting, and Knowing (pp. 67–82). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
- Gibson, J.J. (1979). The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
- Norman, D.A. (1988). The Psychology of Everyday Things. New York: Basic Books.
- Norman, D.A. (2013). The Design of Everyday Things: Revised and Expanded Edition. New York: Basic Books.
