Welcome to the huberman live podcast where we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life. I'm Andrew huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford school of medicine.
Today we are discussing creativity, creativity, is a topic that too many people
is very abstract that is, we know
when something seems creative. Some of us, know
people who are creative or perhaps are
creative and yet the ability
T to be creative, resides in everybody. And we know that because the neural circuits that underlie creativity have been somewhat defined and the steps and processes within the brain and body that lead to
creativity are well known. That
said, most people don't know how to access creativity. And if they do know how to access creativity, they are only able to access creativity in a fairly limited,
number of domains of life, for instance, in the visual arts or in music or within science or engineering.
Or any number of different domains. Ranging, from
the kitchen to sport to Childhood interactions
that is childhood games. In other words, some adults are able to access their creative Spirit when engaging in childlike play with children or for that matter with adults.
But as it turns out all of creativity stems from just a small subset of
neural structures in the brain that need to be activated in a particular sequence or order today, we will talk about what those neural structures are. What?
Allure order. They need
to be activated in in order to come up with. For instance, new ideas that are creative and then how to
implement those creative strategies, we will
also talk about different ways to access creativity that include narrative and storytelling, as well as applying new rule sets or even entirely New World
Views. And we will
do this in a structured way
that will allow anyone. Whether or not, you consider yourself creative or
not to be able to apply these tools in different. Domains
of life work family.
Play. And on, and on,
by the end of today's episode, you will have a better understanding of what creativity is and how to access it. And if you like to bring others into your creative Endeavors, which as you'll soon, learn can massively expand the extent to which you
yourself, can express your creative. Talents as is the case, with all episodes of The huberman Lab podcast
today, we will discuss both scientific mechanisms and nomenclature and I promise to make all of that. Clear to you even if you
don't have a background in,
In biology or
psychology but will also of course discuss tools. That is specific steps that you can
take in order to be more
creative. One particular tool that I'm excited to share with you involves a meditation, but this is a very unusual meditation. This is not sitting with eyes closed
focusing on your breath. We're focusing on a chime or some other feature in your sensory environment or even in your body
later we will talk about open monitoring meditations. Open monitoring meditations are very distinct
from other forms of meditation.
And involve learning how to sit back and simply observe your thoughts while intentionally varying where your thoughts go. So, for those of you that find it a struggle
to focus or to refocus in more traditional forms of meditation or maybe even in your work. And even for those of you that may suffer from things like ADHD
or similar, open, monitoring meditation can be an extremely valuable tool for accessing your creative abilities, because of the ways that it allows you to tap into.
Affix circuits within the frontal networks of your brain. So these are networks of the brain that include the areas just behind your forehead. And that allow you to evaluate new and novel rule sets in a very unconstrained way, because if you think about it, creativity is really the ability to take existing elements from the
physical world or from the thought world. If you will.
Or from any domain of Life, mood thinking and information and to reorder those into novel combinations
that are useful for something.
We'll also find out later. Creativity has this incredible aspect to it which is that when we see or create or experience something that is truly creative it reveals to us something fundamental
about the way that the natural world and indeed the way that our brains
work, if that sounds very mysterious and Abstract to you. Now, I promise that, by the end of today's episode, You Will Not only understand what that means. But you will also understand how to use open monitoring meditations, as well as other forms of
tools. In order to
To access your creative ability before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is however, a part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to Consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public in keeping with that theme. I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast.
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huberman. Let's talk about creativity on the face of it. The word creativity and creative. Acts might seem somewhat abstract to us. That is
We know when we see something that we consider creative and we know when we see something that is
not creative, things that aren't creative are things that we see everyday car with four tires. For instance, a bicycle with two tires, not creative. However, we also see things that are novel, that are
different, and that we don't really think of as creative. In fact, they can be downright trivial for instance, if I were to take a
fish tank and put Wings on
it, that's a novel combination of things.
Things. Which is one of the key criteria for
an act or an object or a piece of music that is creative and
yet neither of us, I believe would find it very creative or very
interesting that a fish tank has wings on it. Why, or why not? I
should say, well it turns out that for something to be creative, it actually has to reveal to us something fundamental
about the world or about how we work. And I must say that often times the most
creative in the most interesting and the most
Did creative acts reveal to us something fundamental about the world or the way that we work in a way that Delights and thrills and surprises us, but that we aren't even aware what that fundamental rule is, I'll return to this in a few minutes, but the time being, let's just build up from first principles, what constitutes something, creative and what
does not constitute, something creative.
Creativity is a way of interacting with the world, or combining, or recombining things in the world in a way that appears novel to us and to others.
Other
people, my example of a fish tank with wings on it is novel. But
frankly, it's not very creative and it's not very interesting. It doesn't reveal anything new to us. Sure there are flying fish. Although, you know, they just kind of jump
far. They don't really fly. And as a
consequence putting Wings on a fish tank could be used as a metaphor for the fact that fish don't fly, but you already knew and I already knew
that fish don't fly and so, there's
nothing novel revealed to
us about the world except something we already knew now.
Native acts. On the other hand, of course, involved novel
combinations of existing rule
sets. That could be different combinations of music or colors, or shapes or technology Etc.
But it does. So in a way that tells us something
fundamental and different,
Let me Give an example of a few truly creative artistic acts and I'll do that in the domain of Visual Arts. But of course, there are many examples that could come from music or from other domains sport Etc.
Examples. I'll give rather than a fish tank with
wings. Are for
instance, the comparison between a
drawing or a very accurate painting of a
face
An Escher painting and a Banksy, okay?
If you don't know what those are, I'll explain.
First of all, let's talk about an accurate representation of a face. If I were to sit you down or if you were to send me a
photograph and then I were to paint or draw a picture of your face in a way that
Faithfully
represented, the position and shape of your
nose relative to the eyes,
may be a, you know, a curl of the lip, maybe a few, you know, hairs of your
eyebrows. And a particular way that really captured
You accurately, I
think most people would say, okay, it's accurate, it looks a lot like the photograph or the
person and on the one hand we have that could be interesting. It's not particularly creative because it Faithfully represents what's already
there.
In contrast,
a painting or a picture like an Escher. And for those of you that aren't familiar with
escher's
involves a lot of repeating patterns. So for instance a bird image that's repeated over and over and over and over again, sometimes in partially overlapping Manner and perhaps a building that's repeated over and over and over
again or Stones repeated over and over again or staircases over and over again. Asher's
capture elements from the
outside world
and Faithfully represent them but Faithfully represent them,
Over and over and over
again which is not typically seen in the natural world. In fact, most of what our visual system does is to eliminate repetitive patterns when we see them. In fact, most of what our visual system does is
try and make us blind to repetitive
patterns in our visual
environment and only allow us to see things that are unusual
in that visual environment.
Now, this is especially true at visual scales. What I mean by that is if you were to go to the beach and lie on your towel and look down at the sand, you would start to
notice that, the sand is a
Very, very repetitive
pattern. So at very small scales, and in
particular at molecular scales, when you get down to the level of atoms and
so forth, everything is repetitive. It's the same thing
as just reproduced in different combinations over and over again. But as
we move through our world, typically we're not looking down at
Pebbles on the ground or little grains of sand or the pattern of leaves and a particular Clover, or something of that sort. Most of the time we're looking out on landscapes are at people's faces Etc.
And very seldom. Do we see highly repetitive patterns at
Scale. So what escher's do is they essentially reveal to us? A
fundamental feature about the way that our visual system works which
is that repetitive patterns tend to become noise
in our visual system that is our brain
encodes
repetition as things not to be interested in
and the things that stand out against that
repetition as the things to be interested in so called signal-to-noise,
what escher's do is they invert the relationship between signal and noise and they make the repetitive patterns, the signal and the
Unusual patterns, the noise in fact, in every a sure there are unusual
patterns and those completely disappear to us.
Now when you look at an Escher, what you probably see, in what I see
are just a bunch of birds repeated over and over again or buildings or staircases repeated over and over again.
And you may like escher's and you may not that's not the point. Today we're not talking about taste in particular creative acts what we're trying to identify here are the rules and mechanisms of what constitutes
something creative and why it's
creative. And the key element here is that what's revealed by an Escher through. These were
Repetition patterns is
an inversion of the way that our brain, normally
encodes visual images and
therefore the rule that repetition is suppressed in our
visual system. And that unusual visual features are revealed to us. That
rule is what pops out to us.
When we look at an Escher. Now,
when I say pops out, I don't mean that you look at an Escher and go, oh,
normally, I don't see repetition. Normally I see the unusual stuff, etcetera, Etc. But there
seems to be something about truly creative acts that
That capture the attention and sometimes the
Delight of many, many people
is that they reveal a fundamental rule about how the brain or the world work. Let me give you a different example. Also from the visual art World. Let me give you. The example of Banksy Banksy is an artist that many of you are probably familiar with and probably some of you are not familiar with. So for those of
you that are not familiar with Banksy
Banksy, is an artist that most often does two-dimensional artwork. So these would be stencils or paintings
or drawings like many
Us and does them in an urban
landscape and actual City or Suburban landscape that is he draws or stencils or graffitis in a very cryptic way I should say no one really knows who Banks he is or when he does his art he just Reveals His art by putting it up
but he does this in the context of cities and on three dimensional objects. So a good example would be he will stencil next to a phone booth
a police officer or he will graffiti next to an actual fire
hydrant.
Dog lifting
its leg to urinate on that fire hydrant. Now,
what's interesting about banksy's is not simply the
fact that he puts two dimensional art onto three-dimensional surfaces in the urban and Suburban landscape. Because if you
think about it, that's been done many.
Many times before, all graffiti is that all City Art and murals is that so, what's unique about Banksy,
what's unique about Banksy?
Or I should say, banksy's the
actual art is that he combines two,
Art with a three-dimensional landscape in a way that the
concept pops out at you. What do I mean by that? Well, in the case of the dog lifting it's like to urinate on the fire
hydrant. That's a scene that most people and in fact, most children are familiar with from cartoons or from our basic understanding of The Stereotype of dogs and I must tell you
having owned a male dog, a bulldog Costello for many years,
hydrants were a
particular Target for Costello. Of course, everything was a particular Target for Costello urinating Outdoors. Nonetheless. He
I like to be on fire hydrants.
That itself is not interesting.
Seeing a photograph of a dog raising its leg to pee on a fire. Hydrant is not interesting seeing a painting of that isn't interesting seeing an actual dog urinating on a fire hydrant is an interesting,
in fact, seeing a painting in two dimensions of a dog raising its leg to,
of course, it can't actually urinate, but give you the
impression that it would urinate on that fire hydrant isn't particularly interesting except for the fact that
Reveals to us something fundamental, which is that we tend to pair visual relationships between different objects, that share a common theme and then the theme tends to pop out us. So, for instance, the dog raising its leg next to a fire hydrant. Even if the dog is drawn in two
dimensions in the fire hydrant is in three dimensions
allows the concept of dog and fire hydrant to emerge, or pop out at us, which reveals to us something fundamental about how our brain works, which is that our brain encodes Concepts and entire stories
as symbols of
of interaction between different objects.
Let me give you a different example just to make sure that this hits home. One of banks, he's more famous paintings is
a rather politically charged one, which is of
a girl holding a bouquet of balloons. And this two-dimensional drawing was put on to the
West Wall dividing territories in the Middle East, a very controversial issue, the controversies of that assure. Not what I want to get into, but I don't think anyone would doubt that is a controversial issue.
The two-dimensional drawing of the girl with the balloons on the actual wall, turns out to be quite
interesting as an art piece because what it reveals to us is the
entire controversy around the presence of
that wall and the desire for certain people to breach that wall and the desire for other people to insist that that will not be breached for whatever reason. Again, this is not about the particular controversy.
The point is that a two-dimensional image combined with a three-dimensional structure allows the
Purpose of that, three-dimensional structure and the controversy around that, three-dimensional structure
to pop out at us in a way that if for instance, we had just seen a
photograph of somebody next to that wall or with a ladder, or if we just seen a drawing of a girl holding a bouquet of balloons, on a drawing of that wall to not emerge. In other words, it captures
two fundamental features of the visual system. Our ability to encode things in two dimensions, and understand symbols and our ability to understand things in
Mentions and in particular, the wall is a
three dimensional object is really interesting because it's an actual physical barrier. So showing it as the
actual physical barrier that it is in real space. In three, dimensions turns out to allow the interaction between those two things. The concept, the
controversy to pop out at us and make us. Think about that particular controversy and perhaps where we each individually stand on that controversy. Now, there are
many examples of what I just gave in the visual
domain for instance.
Rothko's, which are just color on, canvas are particularly interesting source of information about the way that the brain encodes color later. I'll fill in. What exactly what that information is. You may like rothko's, you may not, but I'll tell you one thing. When you look at a rothko, you are seeing colors in a very different way than you would ever see colors. In any other context, the fact that they don't have a
frame typically and the fact that there's no white canvas allows the colors that
you see to be novel Hughes of those.
Others that you will not see in any other context and in doing so reveals to you, what your brain does, in order to understand and extract color. Now, in the context of
music, for instance, you will sometimes hear a street musician, play a song, maybe a Bob Dylan song or Led Zeppelin song or Pink, Floyd song, Pretty closely, pretty accurately to the way that song is played, but of
course, that's not creative. That's just like the photograph for the accurate portrait of somebody's
face or you may hear an acoustic version of what's normally
an electric guitar.
Our Song, where electrical
song or vice versa somewhat creative. Sometimes sounds even better than the original, but not particularly creative. However, each and every one of us has a particular taste in music. Maybe it's
classical, maybe it's rock, maybe it's Punk, maybe it's hip-hop
within each of those genres. I think all of us are familiar with hearing something for the first time and maybe even every time and there's something about the combination of the words and the
music, or
sometimes just the music or just the words that
Some feature of it to pop out at us as particularly exciting. And when we feel that excitement and we feel that it's really novel, it's different than what we've heard before I assure you, what it's revealing to you is the way that your auditory system and often
your auditory and your
emotional system, encodes
information that you here.
And again, the rule that it's revealing is not splayed out
for you. For instance is not told to you. Oh this is the way you normally hear and now you're hearing things differently.
Sometimes it's the change in for
Instance, in the way that words are
accented, or the way the sentences are constructed. This often, you'll
hear in hip-hop the way
that sentences are constructed, can be divided up, not as normal declarative sentences, the way that they're typically written. But the way that sentences are chopped up and and fractured
reveals to us new meaning. And, in fact, enhanced meaning about
particular words, that we wouldn't see if it was written out as a paragraph and then sung is a script that would be the same as the one we would read.
Again, the point is that what is exciting and novel to? You is just the way that you hear it, but it's
Exciting and novel to you because there are circuits within the brain
that when we
hear or see or feel or experience known elements in new
ways that are truly creative.
The way that those neural circuits function
is change and when
neural circuits change the way that they function, simply by way of what
comes into our eyes, our ears. And the way that we experience our feelings,
there is the release of chemicals including the release of the chemical dopamine
and
And other neuromodulators as well, that make us
feel both surprised delighted. And this is very key excited in anticipation that we might see it again. So, with the understanding in mind that true creativity involves the novel combination of some elements,
could be notes of Music could be numbers could be visual elements, like lines or colors. Could be physical, movements, Etc, but novel combinations of some things that reveal to us something fundamental.
About the way that our brain and or the world work. And, of course, as I mentioned before that
fundamental thing, may or may not be
consciously accessible to us. We may not know what exactly it is. That's novel to us but it
feels novel and it feels true. Well with that understanding in mind we therefore can ask what are the underlying principles and neural circuits that underlie the creative process and the word process here is
especially important. In fact
If
there's one thing I'd really like to impress on everybody is that when thinking about biology, it's almost always better to think about
verbs as opposed to nouns. So, rather than
think, of creativity as a noun, or somebody being creative as an adjective, think about the verb creativity, that is what are the
steps required? And therefore, what are the cells and circuits, and thoughts Etc, required in order to be creative this element of thinking about verbs. Then allows us to say, okay, what are the
Is steps in coming up with a creative
idea, in testing a creative idea and then implementing that creative idea
and in doing. So, we find based on the scientific literature that there are basically three major
networks within the brain, Each of, which is
responsible for
each of the three steps to arrive at something, truly
creative. The first neural circuit involved in. Creativity is the so-called executive
network is kind of a goofy name because
the neural circuits that I'm about to describe do a bunch of other things as well, but they certainly
Only control what are
called executive functions. Executive
functions are functions that you and I both have, which is our ability to govern our thinking
in our behavior in very, deliberate ways and that is largely accomplished through the use of the neural circuitry that sits right behind the forebrain, the so-called prefrontal cortex. Now the prefrontal cortex
involves many different sub-regions. It has a
bunch of different parts just like any country has different states etcetera and provinces
executive function involves the
The
cortex and some other neural structures. But
for sake of this discussion,
executive function and the prefrontal cortex are mainly responsible for suppressing action. That is for eliminating choices, among the infinite number of choices that exist for instance, of what colors to combine on a painting, or
what lines to draw, or what notes to play, or what movements to make in a sports Endeavor what numbers to include in a mathematics Endeavor, or what
words, and letters and syllables,
and
And it's has to include in writing a creative passage.
The second network is the so-called default mode Network. There's a lot of discussion nowadays about
the default mode Network as it relates to
Consciousness and meditation Etc. The default mode network does many different things. But in the context of our
discussion about creativity, the default mode
network is really the network that starts being engaged when you close your eyes and start paying attention to what's going on in terms of your thinking as opposed to the sensory out.
I'd world. And the default mode network is especially important for what's
called spontaneous imagination. Now, spontaneous imagination is something that you
can try at any moment. If you were to close your
eyes and to try not pay attention to the sounds around you, but even if you do to, just pay attention to whatever
thoughts or feelings emerge, when your eyes are closed, okay? By
closing your eyes and shutting yourself off to the outside sensory world, you start to engage much more of your brain,
machinery.
Dedicated towards what's going on inside you, so called
interoception. But also what you're thinking about, you're thinking whether or not, your thoughts are complete or incomplete, whether or not, they are fragmentary. In a way that
goes from one thought to another distantly in the past or present to Future, Etc,
Depending on time of day,
how well rested you are, how stressed you are, how happy you
are. The default mode network will take you through a journey of different
types of thoughts, different types of feelings Etc. The specific types of thoughts and
feelings are not as interesting as the fact that when you close your
Sighs, you're essentially engaging. This default mode Network, which is essentially the network associated with imagination and Imagination based on elements that exist only within your
head. That is within your brain. Okay. And therefore must rely on memory of previous experiences
as soon as you close your eyes you are shutting yourself off
from the sensory world. So by definition you can no longer be bringing in novel experiences. In that moment, you're relying on your library of existing experiences in your memory of those.
Those in order to imagine new things and you're doing this in a very, and a free associate of way, you're not trying to imagine new things, it's just whatever geysers to the surface. Okay? So we've got the executive Network, which is involved in suppressing, particular, thoughts or actions. We have the default mode Network, which is involved in imagination,
and the default mode Network, I should mention also involves a sub-region of the prefrontal cortex, is called the medial,
prefrontal cortex, but other brain regions as well,
and then the final element within the circuits, underlying
creativity is the so-called salience
The salience network is
a network of brain regions that involves areas such as the insula, which actually has a complete map of your body surface as well as some information map to their about what's going on in the outside world. And how those combined with what's going on in your
internal landscape that is within your body. Also a brain region
called the ACC or intended, excuse me, anterior, cingulate
cortex and the amygdala. So, a lot of information is mapped with, in the salience network
about how we feel and how we feel in relation to things that are happening around us. And
And within us. And the
salience network has one main job, which is to pay attention to what's
most interesting either in the world or inside Us in terms of feelings or experiences.
Okay? So we've got three networks executive Network,
which is there to suppress choices. In terms of actions, we could take but decide not to wear things we could think about, but choose not to or try not to the
default mode Network, which is basically the cataloger library of previous.
Says that we have
available to us, that
would act, as sort of the paints on a
pallet or the possible ingredients that could go into a recipe. All of that has to again, arise from previous experience, right? We can't close our
eyes and suddenly be able to
access all the Melodies that we've never heard before or Although our ideas and Concepts and knowledge about music. If we don't have musical understanding or visual understanding.
So we're really drawing
up the library and that Library tends to be rather disorganized. It kind of
Whirls around it's not very structured. Unless we're actively trying to think about something
and then we have the salience network which is the networks within the
brain that decide or make choices about, what's most interesting to pay attention to in a given moment, okay? So
those three networks work together to create things and when I say create things, we again have to really underscore our definition of creativity. Creativity is a rearrangement of existing elements, into novel combinations, that reveal something.
A
mental about how we or the world
works and this is very important, it tends to be things that are
useful. Now they can merely be useful
because they're entertaining or thrilling. They can also have a
particular utility or use in the world like a piece of technology that is actually useful like an app or a smartphone or computer actually has utility or a vehicle. You know, there are creative acts that led to the formation of vehicles and computers etc.
But the point is that
just merely coming up with novel combinations of things like wings on a fish tank, that's not creative or it's not creative in any kind of meaningful way because it's simply
not useful. It doesn't reveal anything fundamental new or
purposeful. It doesn't allow us to think
about or interact with the world or ourselves in novel
ways. Whereas things people, actions and ideas that are truly creative, really change, the way
that we are able to access the world. They act as portals
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So now you have some idea about the brain areas and
networks involved in creativity,
but I want to be very clear that any time we talk about mechanisms and brain areas, what's far more important than the names of those brain areas is an understanding of what they do. So if you couldn't remember,
The anterior cingulate cortex or the
fact that the prefrontal cortex is involved in executive function etcetera.
That's fine, it's less important that, you know, the names of things that
you understand, the action steps. That those things take, that is the verb actions. That those particular brain areas engage in order to arrive at a particular end point. And the end point we're talking about today is creativity.
I want to discuss creativity in
terms of what
actually goes into being creative and it turns out there are just two elements and those two elements are now well understood.
stood from the perspective of psychology and fortunately, the Neuroscience well supports what the
psychology says and vice versa
and those two elements that go into coming up with a creative idea and then
implementing or developing that creative idea into something real that you and the rest of the world can
experience or Divergent thinking and
convergent thinking
and Divergent thinking and convergent thinking
are very straightforward to understand
Divergent thinking is
Taking some
known object or event in the
world or sport or concept, it could be running, it could be a
musical note, it could be jumping, it could be a particular
color on a piece of paper and asking yourself how many different things could that thing actually be, you might say well running is running but let's use Divergent thinking as a way to illustrate what Divergent thinking is if I show you a picture.
If somebody running a say, what do you see? And you say, I
see somebody running and then I might give you a Divergent, thinking tasks, and these tasks are the same ones used in various experiments. And I said, how many different things can you think about based on this picture that you see of somebody running? Now, if you are able to engage
Divergent thinking, you could say running to the store running away from a lion running towards somebody, I love or maybe you have a more
elaborate imagination and you could say,
Say running in front of a bus to grab a kid. So the kid doesn't get hit by the bus or running toward a concert because I'm so excited about the particular concert and then it starts to spool into a story. In other words, Divergent thinking involves taking one simple,
what we would call a neuroscience or psychology
stimulus, one image or sound Etc and trying to radiate out from that as many different Divergent.
Situations properties characteristics events. Things from that one
specific element. So any Divergent thinking tasks would involve exactly that I'd show you pictures or play you sounds or words or notes or
describe to you events in history and try and see how many things can radiate out from that into diverse diverse even
distant types of Concepts and pictures. Okay, so that's Divergent thinking
diversion
Thinking is really the process that underlies idea generation and the basis of I do Divergent thinking is that more than one idea is correct? In fact, the more ideas that you
have about one thing, the better your Divergent thinking. So if I were to give you three
minutes to list off all the things you can think about related to this
pain that I'm holding up for those of you listening. I'm just holding up a pen in front of me, you
just write them out or say them out over the next three minutes that would be
an example of Divergent thinking. How
If you just said, black pen, red pen, White pen, green pain, Etc. That's not very Divergent thing. It's only Divergent in the context of color
space is a space. That's just a kind of nerd speak for one particular domain of thinking, whereas, if you said,
red pen, White pen sa pain in a door to hold the door open so that someone can return to a building and you started spooling off. A story related to that and why that was
important. Well, there you go.
Divergent thinking is essentially taking one
element and coming up with many, many answers. And in the context of Divergent thinking, any answer goes, but as will soon learn not. Every answer is interesting
and relevant, that is not every answer help solve something, or reveal something fundamental, and therefore, not, every Divergent answer is truly creative.
The other aspect of Divergent thinking, that's really important to
understand is that the selection criteria are extremely vague and vast that is there are no constraints
on what you come up with. So if I hold up this
N and you say, orangutan
that's a perfectly valid
Divergent idea from this pain because you thought of it and it's distantly related. However,
we have to remember our earlier, rule, if
black pen, and orangutan
are not linked up in
our brain, in The Observers
brain in any kind of meaningful way. It's only interesting to you because
you are the only one that understands the rule that underlies, the link between this pain and orangutan,
As
if you come up with something different, that somehow tells me and everybody else, something interesting about pens or orangutans. Now, that's a
truly creative idea. I don't have such an example in mind, but later, I'll give you some examples of how you can actually March down the path of Divergent thinking and use that executive Network to suppress certain options to cross off certain answers. Because again, any answers valid. But not all valid answers are interesting or useful. And you can
cross those off and arrive at the
most interesting and truly,
The answer a
couple more things about Divergent thinking, Divergent thinking largely Taps into the networks of the brain that are
involved in mental flexibility. So, this is a different aspect of our prefrontal cortexes, which is not based on Executive function, and our ability to
reduce options. But rather areas of the prefrontal cortex that are available to generate
multiple options and actually suppress context, right to forget that pens are just for writing, for instance, in that pens.
I can do other things like, hold the door open. It's really kind of an unusual use of a pen
again. None of these examples that I'm
giving are particularly interesting. They're just designed to get you to understand the underlying concept of Divergent thinking.
And then the last thing I'd like, you know about Divergent thinking is that Divergent thinking involves a sort of exploration. It's a Wandering through of ideas that you already had the, in your library, in your memory banks, about pens, and what pens could be related to and what
And ought not to be related to.
So again, what's really important about creativity is that there has to be the basic building blocks already existing within us? This is why it's so important to understand that. If you are somebody who really
seeks to be
creative, you really do need to be somebody who forages for information and
structured information. In particular, if you are to be creative, the architect,
simply can't come up with incredible drawings or plans for buildings without understanding how
things are put together in the various
rules that govern buildings. In other words, you can't break rules that you don't understand.
I think, in in movies, especially, we have this idea in mind that of this Limitless
concept that or that we have these hidden
Geniuses that somehow have
access to all the math knowledge without ever having done any formal math. Actually, I was flying back from Texas recently in Good, Will Hunting was on somebody's screen. I don't tend to watch movies on the plane very often sometimes, but not often,
and I was remembering that.
You've got this
math genius who is a janitor at MIT etcetera and apparently just has access to all this
knowledge. It's a Wonderful concept. A very, very I would say, even exceedingly rare thing to occur in the world. Sure. They're people who seem
to have a natural talent for mathematics or for something else.
But this idea that there are incredible Geniuses Among Us that just spontaneously have so much knowledge that's by far the exception rather than the rule.
Rule
of course and may not even actually exist. I'm sure someone put in the comments examples where this actually
exists more often than not what you find is that people who have extreme
virtuosity in a given area. Put many, many
years into developing the
basic substrates the basic building blocks of whatever it is, their craft happens to be where they demonstrate virtuosity. This is
very important. Understand nonetheless. Divergent thinking is the critical element for initiating the creative
process again thinking about creativity.
As a verb and Divergent thinking involves taking some
starting point in this case, a pen and
then radiating out from that in a fairly unconstrained. What
biology was called? A random walk? Just kind of
wandering through your thought space and memory space.
About what could be related to this pain.
Now, on the flip side of creativity is the implementation of specific combinations of things. And testing those to see
whether or not they are interesting relevant or Delight us or other people or scare us or
or people or thrill us or other people. In other words,
a testing of whether or not, there's some fundamental rule to emerge again, I am going to repeat this many many times throughout this episode and I'm not going to apologize for that because I think it's so important. Understand that creativity is not just
novel combinations that are novel combinations of things that reveal something fundamental and that often pop out to us.
If not, every time, certainly
most of the time that we see that thing, it almost never seems to be the case that something truly creative.
In its expression. And that's because what it's repeating to us over and over again. Is this fundamental rule that normally we can't see or hear or experience in the absence of this creative act.
So the second part of creativity where things are tested and we're truly creative. Elements are discovered is in
convergent thinking and convergent thinking as as the name suggest, just the opposite
of Divergent thinking. Convergent thinking would be for example, if I give you an image or I tell you the following things I say we
NG
water and engine
the concept that I happen to have in mind is
that of a plane that can land on water, right? Most planes don't
land on water or not intended to land on
water. When would hope that their plane doesn't land on
water unless it's a plane designed to land on water. But in this case, a plane that can land on water is
one of the very few answers that can combine
Wing
water and enjoy.
Right. I'm
sure there are other answers. There are other
convergent thinking modes that can take you to an answer. That would be valid. But there are not many
and here, what's really, most important is that I'm not
asking you to spool out or to radiate out from these three things. Rather I'm asking you to combine them in some way that makes
sense in the
real world. And indeed, there are planes that can land on water and Wing water.
And engine combined. With, in those things, they are fundamental features.
They are, in fact necessary.
But not sufficient for having a plane that can land on
water, okay? So that's just one example, of convergent thinking, a convergent thinking tasks, would involve you being given a list of two or three, or maybe even five different things. And then for each of those two or three or five different things, as quickly as you can to come up with a single answer that binds, all of those in a real-world
concept that obey, the laws of nature or physics in some way. For
instance, you can just come up with some,
you know, answer that said
a bird that swallowed and
Engine. And that happens to be a sea bird.
You could come up with that. But that actually is not something that happens or is that very typical at all. And so it seems like kind of a mishmash of things that are really just designed for you to try and accomplish an answer rather than something real such as a plane that lands on
water. Okay. The point here is that Divergent thinking is one aspect of our cognition of our thinking and convergent thinking is a very
distinct aspect of our cognition.
In fact, one of the
Critical
requirements for convergent thinking, is also to access our memory banks and our understanding about the outside world, just as it were with Divergent thinking
but it requires more focus and more persistence. In fact if we were to come up with a key rule for Divergent thinking, it would be you almost want to have just enough. Focus to remember
what the initial object or
thing that was mentioned was
to keep that in mind so that your
answers don't become completely random. But the more distant and
In between that you can generate answers. That is the things
that are very close to pens. You know, black pen, red pen versus, you know, pain and doorstop pain acting as a
doorstop. Those are one is very close.
Red pen is very close to Black pen. Doorstop is pretty far from black
pen. So, that's the idea is that you want to explore and undergo a range of exploration of different ideas. Whereas with conversion thinking, you're really trying to bind these things
together and so the key
element for convergence
thinking is the aspect of persistence and focus
and that's
why convergent thinking in many ways feels
harder than Divergent thinking. It feels like there's an answer and I want to get the answer right and I can't solve it. It's a puzzle and it's a puzzle that relies on very distinct, brain circuits from Divergent thinking which brain circuits. Well that's what we're going to describe next. And again this is not just going to be a list of different brain circuits with different names doing different things that wouldn't be useful to you or to me rather
What you're about to learn is truly incredible. What it is, is we're going to talk about one single molecule dopamine, which is a molecule, most typically associated with motivation, and
desire and drive, and feelings of pleasure in
some cases. But that actually resides within four different networks in the brain. Today, we're going to talk about two of those networks and dopamine acting in one network
directly underlies, Divergent thinking
whereas dopamine in
A brain
Network underlies convergent thinking
and if at this point in this episode, you think, okay, when am I going to get the tools to understand creativity and how to be creative? What I can assure you is that if you understand Divergent
thinking, which hopefully now you do
and you can understand what convergent thinking is and you can understand that dopamine is responsible for both Divergent thinking and convergent thinking but
through separate Pathways.
Well then if you can understand how those two separate Pathways work and how to engage them differentially
There in Li the tools that you can use both to explore
ideas, in other words, find what it is, that could be creative
and then systematically
test. Each of those ideas for what is truly creative that is,
what meets the criteria
for something that is novel and truly useful. And informs us about something that we've never seen, heard, or felt
before. Let's just take a moment to talk about the incredible molecule
that is dopamine.
Many people are familiar with dopamine from the concept of quote unquote.
Dopamine hits
Which is popular language. Describing the
feeling of pleasure that we get from pretty much anything
that we like or that we continue to engage in repeatedly. So some people talk about the dopamine hit that they get from somebody attractive that they like texting them back or the dopamine hit that they get from social media or the dopamine hit that they get from sugar or the dopamine hit that they get from this or from that. To
be honest, the concept of dopamine hits is not one that I favored because in general whenever
People talk about dopamine hits typically, they're talking about activities such as social media, which dopamine may be involved at some level. But often it's the case that the behavior associated with that thing, in this case, social media is more of the compulsive nature rather than
an active seeking of something with positive
anticipation. And that's really what dopamine
is about at least in the context of one of its major functions in the brain.
Dopamine is really about
motivation and desire and movement and it.
Sense. Why motivation desire
and movement would be linked up through a
common. In this case, a neuromodulator chemical like dopamine because
throughout Evolution, if we were excited for or
motivated to pursue something, we had to move in order to get it to obtain it
and in general we can frame dopamine
Under the Umbrella of
dopamine tends to be involved in neural. Circuits in the brain that are
involved in processes that are
taking us beyond the confines of our skin. That is that motivate us to go do.
Something in terms of action
in the world. Now that statement might seem distantly placed from a discussion about creativity,
but as will learn a little bit later, one of the most useful tools
for engaging creativity and becoming more
creative is to think about action elements within a narrative that is things that we and others can do in order to discover
new rules through actual movement. That's a little bit cryptic, forgive me but I promise I'll return to it later and I will make it
Crystal clear.
There are four major circuits in the
brain that use dopamine although I should mention there are additional circuits as well. In fact, your I even contains neurons that release dopamine that control the sensitivity of your eye at different times of day to light
etcetera, the four major circuits in the brain that utilize dopamine. However, are used for four
major purposes and I'll describe what those are.
First of all, is a neural circuit that uses dopamine among other things. But certainly relies on dopamine in a critical way to engage movement,
including
Movements and we will return to I've movement to why they're so important for understanding creativity and maybe even for generating creativity a little bit later,
the name of the circuit again, is less important than what it does. But the name of this circuit, for those that want to know, is this so-called nigrostriatal pathway, okay? The substantia nigra is a brain area. That is very dark that projects to an area
called the dorsal
striatum it contains a bunch of sub-region. So again for those of you that really geek out on this stuff, great, you
can learn these names and retain.
In your memory if you don't care about names, don't worry about it. Just discard the names but areas of the
brain, like, the caudate and putamen, mm, and the dorsal, striatum receive input from the substantia nigra in neuroanatomy. When we name something, we say the origin of that thing and where
it connects true. So
Nigro, striatal tells you that there is a connection between the substantia nigra because it
came first Nigro, striatal, and then striatal is where it ends
up. So, Nigro, striatal pathway is involved in generating bodily movements.
It's involved in
eye movement,
And it is actually a brain area that's engaged. When you think
about
movement, even just have a story in your
mind about walking or a story in your mind about running or storing your mind about driving. This area is engaged very interesting, brain area.
A so that's the first circuit very important understand. And I'll tell you right now, that is the brain circuit that is engaged.
When you undergo Divergent thinking,
now that itself should be interesting, right? Even if you don't remember any of the names of the things I just told you
The you have a brain circuit that even if you just
think about walking, it becomes more active in. The dopamine is involved in that brain activity. And if
you recall Divergent thinking involves taking a concept as boring as a pen and thinking about other Concepts that could link up with that pain, in some
sort of way logical or illogical, right? The bridge could be completely abstract and, and really
Fantastical with a bunch of different ideas in between like a pain acting as a
doorstop because of some
Relation where you need to run downstairs in a fire and get back upstairs quickly to rescue somebody very
divergent or is
Divergent as black pen to Red pen.
But what's amazing is that that same circuit is the one that's
involved in physical movement in generating and thinking about physical movement,
that turns out to be vitally
important for tapping into the creativity process. A really frame that up in your mind or commit it to memory. Now, the second dopamine circuit associate with creativity is the one associated with convergent thinking, which
again, is the kind of
Thing where there's a
specific correct answer requires, focus and it requires persistence and the
name of that circuit. Again, the name isn't as important as what it does, but the name of that circuit is the Miso
cortical pathway.
The music cortical pathway is involved in motivation, and it has an
emotional component to now, it
will become clear in a few minutes why that emotional component is vital, but this is a circuit that originates in a brain structure called the lateral. Ventral tegmental area. Again, a bunch of words,
You can remember it if you want lateral ventricle ventral tegmental area or you can not worry about the name. And it connects to the prefrontal cortex that area, just behind the forehead.
And this means a cortical area is involved in motivation and emotion and is critical for
focus and persistence. It is
distinct from a very nearby area just sitting right next door. This will called me. So
limbic area which is involved in desire and feelings of
reward and this is the area that is associated more typically with addictive.
Cures or compulsive behaviors.
We're going to leave out the discussion about the me's Olympic pathway for now because it's not critical to divergent or
convergent thinking and it's not critical to the process of creativity at least as far as we know. But I mention it because it is the third in the for dopaminergic circuits. And then the fourth
circuit, certainly one I've never talked about before in this
podcast, which is
doesn't mean anything except that we haven't gotten to it yet. Is that to burrow in front
tabular pathway? And that is the
Pathway associated with dopamine and your pituitary gland, and the release
of hormones in particular that travel to the ovary, if you have ovaries or to your testes, if you have
testes and Trigger the release of things, like estrogen and testosterone, Etc, dopamine is intimately involved in that circuitry again. Not the topic of today's discussion for today's
discussion, we want to remember that there's a dopamine circuit called the nigrostriatal circuit which is involved in movement and Divergent
thinking and that alone should set a
Flag up for you, like, wow,
just thinking about new ideas has something to do with movement with physical movement and the dopamine circuit that is the mesial cortical pathway which is the one that's associated with motivation and emotion. And that's the one required for
persistence and focus for convergent thinking. Why am I telling you all of this about dopamine?
Well, it turns out that dopamine creates a certain number of responses
in the brain and body.
When it is active in
one or the other of these circuits and just for sake of simplicity. So I don't have to keep saying,
Nigro, striatal and music
cortical.
Here going forward. I'm going to talk about the dopamine circuit that's associated with Divergent thinking or the dopamine
circuit associated with convergent thinking. And again Divergent thinking in conversion think are the two processes that have to occur. Usually first Divergent, then kind of convergent thinking then back and forth and back and forth in order to arrive at something. Creative Divergent thinking is about exploration, convergent
thinking is about testing things. And coming up
with things that are the right answer that feel right, and we will better Define, what? Right means a little bit later.
Derp. But you already sort of no right in this context is when you have some combination of elements or some idea or some written passage or some music or some physical action that you just know this is really novel and really cool or people see it or hear it or taste it and say this is really novel and really cool and they don't
necessarily know why. It's just different. In a way that feels true, I'd like to take a brief break.
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off. Now, I realize that for some of you listening to this episode, we are probably at the point along the pathway of concept and definition and mechanism.
That leaves you in a place of real wanting a
tool. And so I promise that
I'm going to get into more tools but to satisfy you and to make sure that you do indeed understand that there are tools that can emerge from the information
that you already. Now, have in mind, I
do want to share with you one particular tool from the literature that has been demonstrated over and over again, to support and build and enhance Divergent thinking. And I also want to share with you a tool that has been shown from the scientific
Literature to enhance, convergent thinking because both convergent and Divergent thinking are critical for the
creative process. Now, I should emphasize that some people
out there,
either by training or by genetics or by both
will be naturally better at divergent or convergent thinking.
And in fact, we now know in a kind of almost poetic kind of way that naturally, occurring
variations in genes which underlie naturally occurring, very
Asians in the
percentage of dopamine in
one set of brain circuits versus
another, do seem to
relate to whether or not people are naturally good at divergent thinking or convergent thinking. Now that's a very nature based explanation for why some people are better at divergent thinking. In other people are better convergent thinking
nature and nurture is something that can never
really be teased apart. Exactly. Because of course, if someone
has a natural proclivity
for something, based on their genes,
You can't often separate that from their parents because we inherit our genes from our parents.
Although, even in cases, where people are raised away from their
parents through adoption etcetera. It's very hard to separate nature and nurture because somebody with a natural proclivity for things might engage in those things, more etc,
etc. The point is that for those of you that are very very good at divergent thinking or very very good at convergent thinking some of that might have been inherited but more than likely some of that
Ended on the kinds of activities that you engaged in, in your early years, in particular, in the Years, between Age, 5 and 25. And for those of you that are aged between 5 and 25,
all I can say, is, please learn to engage both Divergent and convergent thinking as much as possible because you
will enhance your ability for both. For those of you 25 and older you can still enhance your ability to engage Divergent and convergent thinking and the fortunate news The Equalizer I should say is that
Regardless of whether
or not you are a naturally better at divergent and convergent thinking or you acquired it through
activities, you need
both in order to be creative.
So what we know is that in order to engage Divergent thinking, we need access to our memory banks, we need to come up with possibilities and those possibilities can only come from
what's contained within our memory systems of our brain areas, like the hippocampus etcetera, but the names again, don't matter. We just know that if we are going to come up with novel combinations of things, or novel uses of things or totally new ideas about how
Objects, are notes of music or foods are tastes or whatever. Can be combined. We have to do that with pre-existing knowledge. And yet what we need to do in order to engage Divergent thinking is
surpress what is called
autobiographical narratives? And in particular autobiographical narrative
we need to discard with judgments about how certain combinations of things impacted Us in the past. This is I think is what people mean when they encouraged the exploration of creativity.
Tivity by so-called
boundary, exploration hear about this a lot and kind of the self-help and
psychology literature and I'm not at all disparaging of that literature, although rarely, does it Define
exactly how and why to go about being more creative in the OR in this case to be more Divergent in our thinking so they'll say, you know, you have to take risks or you have to suppress judgment, but how do you actually do that?
Well there's a wonderful paper that talks about one way to do it. One way to do it is what's called
open monitoring meditation or even.
Open monitoring thinking,
and just to make what, could otherwise be a, some somewhat complex section here, very simple. But I'll also tell you is that, if you want to enhance convergent thinking, you can do that a number of ways, but you can do that in particular, by doing a different
type of meditation, or thought process, which is called focused, attention meditation. So, let's talk about open monitoring meditation. Why it's so useful for enhancing Divergent thinking this critical element of the creative process.
First of all, open,
In monitoring meditation and focused. Attention, meditation can be performed the exact same way. Physically,
you can sit their eyes closed, I
don't care if you're in a Lotus position, it doesn't
really matter, you're lying down, you're standing
up. You could, in theory, do open, monitoring meditation
with eyes open and that would be an
interesting variant on it, but for sake of the discussion right now, let's just focus on the study that talks about these specific tools
and the way that they were used in the study,
the title of the paper that
Essentially summarizing is called open monitoring meditation. Reduces the involvement of brain
regions related to memory function now right off
the bat that should qu2 something, interesting, something about Divergent thinking and open monitoring is
related to suppressing memory. But as you recall just
a few moments ago I said that in
order to engage in Divergent thinking you need to
kind of kill off
the narratives of what has to be related to what and come up with new narratives. You
still need to understand possibilities but
You need to forget, prior
understanding of what those possibilities have to be and start thinking about what those possibilities could be. And so that it turns out involves suppression of certain brain
areas. Open monitoring meditation is typically done for about 10 to 30 minutes, although it could be longer and unlike other forms of meditation where you sit and concentrate on your breathing
and try and redirect your thinking back to your breathing, or to your posture, or to a
chant, or a mantra open,
Honoring meditation is simply a matter of having. You sit there or lie down, close your eyes and to allow
whatever surfaces in your mind to surface. And what you practice is the practice of non judgement now,
non-judgment itself is a little bit of an
abstract theme because of course, the moment you say don't judge you and others start to judge, it's just the way that the brain works, you say don't think about an elephant, you think about an elephant, that's a Perfectly Natural. You go to an edge of a bridge or a
cliff and you think about jumping off, you know you don't
please don't jump off and that's because it's part of the circuitry that's keeping you
from jumping off as the thought about what would happen if you did. Okay? So open
monitoring meditation, involves dedicating a certain amount of time where you close your eyes and whatever, thoughts,
arise, whatever, emotions, arise, whatever, ideas, arise to watch
those and take an inventory of them. To just merely watch them show up and pass or maybe become
fixated on them for some period of time or maybe even just
one for a long period of time. All of that is fine. In other words, whatever.
Surfaces surfaces that's open, monitoring meditation and that we know from brain Imaging studies
and we know from measurements of dopamine in particular, brain
circuits and we know from people who train with open monitoring meditation
on a regular basis, improves Divergent thinking capability. So
in terms of tools practicing open monitoring meditation or what I would just call open monitoring thinking is going to be immensely useful and this is actually an opportunity to
Queue up something that I mentioned in our episode, on meditation, which goes deep into the different kinds of
meditation involving, Focus Inward and outward, Etc. You're welcome to check out that episode. It's a huberman
lab.com. But the point is that rather than think about the word
meditation which carries a bunch of ideas about what it is and what it isn't and how to do it, meditation is really just a perceptual exercise.
For instance, you could do a meditation where you look at a single point
on a wall for five minutes and redirect your focus to that single point on a wall.
Over and over again. Every time your mind drift says it no doubt would or to atone in the room. You can attend to that and redirect to that rather than thing about as a meditation. It's really just a perceptual exercise that's all
that meditation is so open. Monitoring meditation is really just a form of
perception where you're paying attention. You're perceiving your thoughts without laying judgment to those thoughts or trying not to lay judgment to those thoughts.
And what people find is that they very quickly within a few days, get better at doing open, monitoring meditation and fortunately, within just a few
A few days and certainly within about a week or more of practice and it doesn't even have to be daily practice.
So although of course, daily practice will accelerate the process further
people become
significantly better at divergent thinking and that's because of the dopamine circuits and in particular along the nigrostriatal pack pathway becoming more active. And the wonderful thing is that when you repeat a practice and a particular neural circuit is engaged over and over again, deliberately that neural circuit becomes easier to engage so called neuroplasticity. So
I would encourage any of you that want to explore the creative process, for whatever reason, or get better the creative process dedicate some amount of time, maybe even just
five minutes every other day to doing this open, monitoring
meditation. I've tried this meditation. It's actually quite fun to do because at least to me, it feels a lot easier than the meditation
associated with convergent thinking.
Now, the conversion thinking meditation is the so-called Focus attention meditation and that's also described
In the same study and other Studies have explored
which particular brain networks, it involves
and I can just tell you that focused attention meditation,
which you can think of. Or I'd prefer that you think of just as a
perceptual exercise involves sitting or lying down. Closing your eyes focusing
either on your breath or some element of your body could be, you know, the tops of your knees or the clasp of your hands. It could be
focusing on an auditory
tone. You could even do it eyes open and stare at a point on a wall, or a
Of light. What a whatever happens to be that allows you to redirect your focus to a particular location or idea or sound.
That is known to improve your ability to engage convergent thinking too quickly, parse through or analyze a bunch of different choices and to persist in Choice selection and
therefore, more rapidly arrive at the correct answer. This is well established. And in fact, in the episode that I did with a
A full guest dr. Wendy Suzuki from New York University. She talked about how a daily meditation of about 10 to 13 minutes performed for about eight weeks. That's what they explored in that study, greatly increases people's ability to focus. And in fact, their memory, and that's exactly the point,
which is that convergent thinking, as I mentioned, before it requires persistence focus and access
to specific memories. So
if you are somebody, who wants to get better at focusing, that is the
meditation for you.
However, because today we're talking about creativity. If you are somebody who wants
To get better at divergent thinking n
convergent thinking the two elements of creativity that is
I would encourage you to do a dual meditation. That is a meditation that starts with
open monitoring for maybe five to ten minutes and then
transitions to
focused attention for maybe five to ten minutes because the
positioning of Divergent thinking and then convergent thinking close together more closely resembles what
the creative process really is.
And what it typically
involves. Most of us would love to have a situation where we can
spend a
morning or a day, or a
week brainstorming, just kind of brainstorming whatever we think about is fine, that's Divergent
thinking, whatever elements, just throw them up on the Whiteboard. We sometimes see people and companies doing this
at Retreats, you
bring people into a novel environment. Say, let's just forget all the rules and let's just come up with new ideas
about some thing. New Uses of something new strategies, and you and nothing is too
crazy. Nothing is off limits and
sure.
That's
a useful exercise so called brainstorming,
but at some point, there's the requirement to cross off things and typically that's done
later in the retreat or later in the meeting or later in the weekend.
And that's a wonderful way to approach creativity and to try and be creative but not a lot of
people trained for that on a regular basis. So what I just
described to you our research tested tools for training for Divergent thinking and convergent thinking, and I would
encourage people who are interested in being more creative to try and do these
on a somewhat regular basis if not
Every day, then certainly a few times a week or more
certainly, the more you do it, the better. You're going
to get at that's well, demonstrated in the
literature and if you're somebody who's very consistent doing, maybe five minutes of open, monitoring meditation and five minutes immediately after of focused, attention, meditation, daily. You can expect that you will get very, very good at these
processes very, very quickly.
Now I'm not going to go into a lengthy description of the
different
lines of evidence that the corresponding areas of the brain are active in each
of these.
Different kinds of meditation.
But what I can tell you is that there have been some beautiful
what are called loss of function studies, where particular brain areas are either depleted of dopamine or where dopamine, in some cases, I guess what we call gain-of-function studies? Although not the kind of gain-of-function studies associate with Biology different gain-of-function studies where you enhance
the level of dopamine in the brain. What you find is that both Divergent and convergent thinking are enhanced when levels of dopamine are
elevated now,
We're not necessarily talking about pharmacology here. It turns out that there are other ways to elevate dopamine that make
us better at divergent and convergent thinking in particular,
by using mood. And now I'd like to talk about how, what mood you are in when you happen to
start a creative process, or
try and do a sort of training
such as open, monitoring meditation, or Focus meditation,
how your mood
relates to your level of dopamine at Baseline what we call your tonic as its called
Meaning consistent or ongoing level of dopamine, how that dictates whether or not you are going to be better
at one particular aspect of the creative process or another and how you can enhance your creativity in,
the very short term, very quickly, using tools that are known to trigger additional
release of dopamine which in some cases is good and in some cases is bad, I should mention.
And in other words, determine how you feel in one moment should dictate what sort of
Tool you should use in order to become more
creative, the relationship between mood and creativity is a fascinating one. That is bridged by one main feature, which is the
amount of dopamine present in this nigrostriatal pathway
and there's a really wonderful correlate or measure of the amount of dopamine that's active in that pathway that can be addressed non-invasively in the laboratory. As I mentioned, the nigrostriatal pathway is involved in movement and in I blinking,
which of
Of course, is a movement. It's not a movement of the sort that we typically think of when we think of movements but nonetheless it relies on dopamine levels in this pathway and in fact we can State very confidently that when dopamine levels are elevated. The blinking reflex is more active people just blink more when dopamine levels are lower or less active. In this pathway, people tend to Blink less so blink. Frequency is a common measure in studies of dopamine within this pathway.
That relate to creativity.
The work that I'm about to describe is largely the work of two authors who have done wonderful, work in across several papers. Unfortunately, for me, their names are difficult to pronounce. So I apologize to them in the relatives for
what is sure to be incorrect
pronunciation but that last names of these authors are chair mohini and Hummel there in the Netherlands. So chair mohini and Homo done a number of different papers or studies, rather of the relationship between blinking mood and creativity.
In particular Divergent thinking, what they found is that if people are blinking fairly often and they measure their mood through subjective test.
And if they were to do brain Imaging, which other Studies have done,
they find is that those people can engage in Divergent thinking
very easily. In other words, being in a good mood, facilitates Divergent thinking.
Now, some of you might immediately say, well duh, if you're in a good mood, you can kind of be more playful about the exploration about what could happen with these notes of music or these Foods Etc.
But it's not so obvious because it turns out that if your dopamine levels are very, very
high and this can be measured non-invasively through the frequency of blinks, or it can be measured more invasively through brain Imaging even through
blood draws or other methods to measure dopamine, if dopamine levels are very,
very high. What You observe is that Divergent thinking is actually very, very poor.
Now a naturally occurring, truly
pathological example. This would be something like manic, bipolar disorder where somebody is in the manic phase.
Phase or somebody who has taken
methamphetamine or cocaine. What tends to happen is that they have lots, and lots of ideas. All of those ideas seem really exciting to them, but if you were to talk to them for any given moment, they would be very fixated on one
particular tunnel of ideas
and by being fixated on one particular tunnel of ideas. Like the idea that they're going to run for president
tomorrow. This is unfortunately typical of people who have bipolar which is not to say that everybody runs for president is bipolar rather people who are bipolar often have these
Delusions of grandeur that there are some, how can we present? Simply because they decided to in that they were selected to do this etcetera, Etc, ideas about themselves and other
people that are very
constrained. In other words, not very
Divergent. So Divergent thinking is favored by having elevated levels of dopamine but not too high. Well that, of course, creates a conundrum. How do you
know how much dopamine you need and how to achieve those elevated levels of
dopamine? Well, leaving aside people who are suffering from a manic episode
What cheer mohini and Homo have discovered is that if people are in sort of a low mood, they're not feeling great. Maybe they're depressed, but they're just
not feeling that great. They feel you know, on a scale of 1 to 10 around a two or three, maybe a for the probability that they will be able to engage effectively in Divergent thinking is quite low.
However, the good news is they are typically very susceptible to elevations in mood through observing or hearing positive
Or he's listening to music that they like any kind of so-called inspirational stimuli. Now this is good news. What this means is that if you're somebody who's not feeling very motivated to engage in Divergent think you're not feeling very creative, you're feeling a little low, the thing to do in that case is actually to take external stimuli things that you know, that you like and start interacting with those stimuli to get your mood elevated and then to engage in Divergent thinking, however, what chair mohini
And Homo have also shown is that if people are already in a very good mood, elevating dopamine, further is not conducive. And in fact is detrimental to Divergent thinking, and in that case, they would be better off.
For example, not engaging in any activities or, you know, taking anything in the way of pharmacology that would further increase their dopamine, and
probably limiting the amount of external stimuli that are coming.
In through music and visual stimuli and really focusing on
Divergent thinking in the creative process immediately.
Now, this is important in an earlier episode both on bipolar and on other forms of depression. I talked about how rates of bipolar
manic episodes and dopamine
levels and creativity tend to be correlated. Now, unfortunately rates of suicide are 20 to 30
times higher in people who have bipolar disorder as well. And so there's a whole Dark Side too. But the bipolar disorder,
It makes it a very very dangerous and important disorder to treat. But
for sake of the discussion of creativity, what this means is that we all need to develop some sort of intuitive sense as to whether or not our mood
is suppose. We could been this into three categories is kind of. Yes, you know, happy excited, positive mood and of course they're going to be levels to that low and I like mmmm or kind of met kind of in the middle.
So if you're in a low mood or kind of mood by all
Means engage in something, probably for about, you know, five to thirty minutes that elevates
your mood before trying to engage in Divergent thinking. However, if you happen to be in a pretty positive mood, even if you're not
10/10 on mood, then bringing in additional stimuli to increase, your levels of dopamine, will not help you and in
fact can hurt the Divergent thinking process. So in that case, I would also encourage you to think about something that was discussed on a previous episode, which is the particular effects of caffeine.
I'll get into caffeine a little bit later.
But just very briefly, caffeine increases levels of dopamine receptors, so it's
not the caffeine as bad. In fact, caffeine can be neuroprotective. It can enhance focus and so forth. But
Divergent thinking is sort of anti focus, it requires just enough Focus to be able to come up with new ideas, but you actually don't want to be overly focused. Focus is more conducive to conversion thinking, in fact, that's exactly
what the literature shows is that
caffeine because its effects on epinephrine and related systems in the brain like adenosine. But mainly because
Because of its effects on persistence and focus is very conducive to convergent thinking. So if you're somebody who wants to explore
creativity and want to get better at
creativity, you now know that you need to engage in Divergent thinking and then afterwards convergent thinking I would recommend not using stimulants such
as caffeine prior to Divergent thinking, but
rather use stimulants if you do want to use stimulants such as
caffeine prior to convergent thinking and in fact in
for
Lady in the architecture of today's episode, which
took me many hours across many different days, I confess,
I actually decided to try this in trying to imagine the different configurations and ways that this information can be organized. I deliberately abstain from caffeine during those bouts of work and when structuring everything, according to the decisions I had already made, I purposefully ingest
caffeine prior to that. Now,
of course constructing a podcast episode is not really the ultimate example of a
Creative act because of course,
it's taking existing information. It's arranging it. A novel ways, but it doesn't necessarily allow key Concepts to pop
out in the way that for instance, Banksy or a rothko and Asher would pop out. Okay, I'm certainly not naive in thinking that it does,
but the principle of is what's important here. You need Divergent thinking in the convergent thinking, you need some level of elevated dopamine in order to engage in Divergent
thinking,
but not so high
that it starts to inhibit that process. Now, if
you were to come into the laboratory,
Worried. This could be measured by your frequency of blinking
for better for worse. We can't actually count the number of times that we
blank unless we're actively paying attention to it. So I don't recommend. You pay attention to your blinking because that will take you off course from all the other important things of your life. And how many times you're blinking is rarely an important thing for you to pay attention to.
You can however, learn to calibrate your mood that is to assess your mood
whether or not you're in low medium or high mood, no problem. Using those that broad binning, right? You could scale it
On 12 10 and then decide whether or not you're going to use some dopamine, elevating stimulus from the outside. Again, could be music. Could be exercise is an excellent way to elevate dopamine. I'll talk about
another well-established one
from the, from the research literature that is
known to elevate dopamine by
65% in the particular pathway, that's relevant for Divergent thinking. And to do that without any pharmacology, I'll share that with you in a moment, but
you need to decide for you in a given moment or in a given work attempt at creativity.
Petit what you need and
apply accordingly.
Because as Jeremy knee and Homo have shown, whether or not you are in a low Mood Media, mood or high mood really can determine whether or not, you'll be able
to access Divergent thinking or not. Now, if you're
somebody who already has an idea in mind, you're very
excited about a creative idea and you
want to own it, you want to shape it, you want to pressure test. It, we'll talk a little bit more about what that
means in a three-step process in
just a little bit.
I would strongly encourage you to look at that process is a very linear process in which there are right and wrong answers. And there the use of caffeine at appropriate dosages and dosages for
caffeine that are safe and in fact, performance-enhancing recovered in the episode on caffeine turns out. It's one, two, three milligrams per kilogram of body weight, by the way. And if
you want to leverage caffeine or maybe even other forms of healthy legal stimulants, those are covered in the caffeine up.
So Dan I'll talk about a few more a little bit later. So to summarize this segment and also just to make a more General point, I think it's very useful for people to start to pay attention to what their tonic level that is their Baseline level of dopamine, ought to be in this nigrostriatal circuit and in other circuits and to do that by learning to assess one's mood and pay attention to what kind of mood. They happen to be in and then to leverage tools, behavioral tools, maybe pharmacologic tools, provided they're safe and they're legal in order to either increase dopamine.
Or to elect not to increase dopamine in
order to access the creative
process. Now, I've mentioned pharmacology a few times. I'd like to talk about that just a little bit more in the context of
dopamine. First of all,
there is no supplement or drug that you or anyone else can take that will selectively Elevate. Dopamine in only one of
the four circuits that I described before.
Okay, this is just a state of the technology. Nowadays if you take a pill or even if you were to inject some substance,
Again, I hope this would be legal and safe etcetera. Whatever mode of delivery, there is no technology that exists at this
time that would allow you to selectively amplify. Dopamine for instance just in the nigrostriatal pathway
or just in the music cortical pathway again, the nigrostriatal pathway associated with Divergent thinking the music cortical pathway associated
with cognitive persistence and convergent
thinking
If you were to amplify dopamine levels for instance by taking the amino acid, precursor to
dopamine l-tyrosine something that I occasionally do to enhance dopamine levels for sake of work or energy 500 mg or 1000 mg even of l-tyrosine. Sometimes I'll combine that with other things like Alpha GPC,
it's going to enhance dopamine, Transmission in the nigrostriatal pathway, the music cortical pathway, but also in the me's Olympic pathway and also for that matter. In the
to Berlin from dibbler pathway associate with the pituitary. There
is no way to direct
I mean, activation to just one of those Pathways, that's just a reflection of the existing technology.
Now, this is also true if you rely
on illicit drugs, to increase dopamine. So it's cocaine or Methamphetamine, those
will greatly increase dopamine but
non selectively across all those different Pathways
and likewise with any drugs that inhibit or block or antagonize as it's called
dopamine. This is why people
who for instance, have schizophrenia and take drugs to suppress.
Three hallucinations some of those drugs
work because they block the so-called
D2 receptor of the dopamine. Pathway, D2 receptors are
present in all four of the dopaminergic Pathways in the brain
and oftentimes, those drugs will, in fact, suppress psychotic symptoms, auditory hallucinations, Etc, because they
reduce dopamine, but those people,
oftentimes will have problems with movement. They will Express what's called in the clinical literature. Tardive dyskinesia kind of rising of the face and the body from suppression of
mean within the nigrostriatal pathway which is associated with movement they will sometimes have
deficits in eye blinking. People with Parkinson's who actually have selective deficits of dopamine within the
substantia nigra Nigro. Striatal, remember substantia nigra
show deficits in
what? In movement in the smoothness of movement, often times they won't blink at all. They'll have kind of a blank stare and they have other issues as well.
So if you're somebody who's interested in increasing dopamine through the use of legal safe pharmacology,
as I
I would hope it would be the
case. There are ways to do that reasonably safely for most people. Again, people with bipolar disorder issues with the dopaminergic pathways should not do this. I know nowadays, there's a lot of use of drugs that increase dopamine such as Ritalin. Adderall modafinil are modafinil, often prescribed for
things like it, attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. We did an entire episode on ADHD and pharmacologic prescription supplement and behavioral nutritional tools for ADHD. You can find that
Episode huberman live.com. I know a number of people take those compounds in order to increase dopamine, and focus for sake of studying or other activities staying up long hours, Etc. And the fact that they increase Focus, they are effective, although they do have their side
effects. Sometimes severe. Sometimes habit-forming, sometimes even addicting
as well. But the fact that they increase focus should automatically tell you something that those drugs in particular increase dopamine in the so.
Called me, so, cortical
and Mees Olympic Pathways.
Why can I say that? How can I say that with any degree of confidence? Well, they're these four Pathways ones involved in movement but these other ones are involved in motivation
and desire and reward and I told you that these things can be habit-forming and
addicting in some cases and they are can greatly increase focus and focus is supported by enhanced levels of dopamine within
this means Olympic and music critical pathway.
So yes, those
Drugs increase dopamine across the board, but there does seem to be some
waiting of dopamine toward the systems involved in motivation and reward and sometimes even leading to Habit formation and addiction. That's why those drugs should only be taken with the close supervision of a very skilled psychiatrist or somebody else who's board-certified who can really govern that.
There are however,
ways to increase, dopamine more evenly across the board using non-prescription approaches, and one I already mentioned, which is l-tyrosine taken typically in dosages a 500 to 1000.
Mg l-tyrosine is not as potent and increasing dopamine
as are the prescriptions drugs that I referred to before tends to be
milder for some people. It can have a very Amplified effect, they feel
it right away. It's very intense. In elevating focus and motivation and the desire to move.
For other people, it's less potent. It really depends on a number of things I should mention that. Regular consumption of caffeine of a 1 2, 3 milligrams per kilogram of body weight per day. Also will increase dopamine receptor.
Efficacy and density
which will make any existing
dopamine more effective whether or not that dopamine is triggered by things like l-tyrosine or if you're not taking anything to elevate, dopamine, the
dopamine that you do make will be
more effective in. Elevating your mood motivation and desire to move.
And by extension Divergent thinking if you are consuming caffeine, but again, caffeine should be
taken prior to convergent thinking type tasks, probably more than it should be taken prior to Divergent thinking tasks.
And of course, there are other legal supplements that can Elevate dopamine as well. In particular phenol ethylamine is very effective in doing that 600 milligrams or
that has a brief affect lasting only
about 30 to 45 minutes but it is one that many people find beneficial for sake of studying or for creative thinking and so on, and so
forth. Now, that's pharmacology and
Fact, there's an extensive landscape of prescription and supplements pharmacology and indeed
nutrition. For instance, the consumption of foods that are high in l-tyrosine such as aged parmesan cheese, for instance, of all things, very, very high and l-tyrosine, the precursor to dopamine certain foods, you can look up online, which foods, contain high levels of l-tyrosine in, which ones are compatible with your nutrition but leaving
pharmacology aside, there's a very exciting
nonpharmacologic
tool, a purely behavioral tool
That the research literature has told us can selectively increase, dopamine within the nigrostriatal pathway the pathway that's involved in Divergent thinking and can do so very
dramatically as much as 65 percent above Baseline. And
so this is a behavioral tool that is useful for a number of things, but that I find particularly
interesting in leveraging towards the exploration and enhancement of creativity because first of all, it's purely behavioral. So it's zero cost. And
It involves gnomon
manipulation of brain neuromodulators or chemistry through pharmacology. So it's something that you can explore very safely and certainly not having to purchase anything and
what's really remarkable is the selectivity. Or I think it's fair to say the immense selectivity that this particular behavioral intervention seems to exert on dopamine within this
pathway associated with Divergent thinking
so the study that I'm about to describe as a study the dates back 20 years now that should
not concern you. In fact, the early arrival of this
study or what now seems to be early arrival. I mean, wasn't that long ago
is really exciting, because the first line of this study really illustrates how important, or how much of a landmark study, this really is. And so I'll just read you the first line of the study. Then I'll tell you the title. Then I'll tell you what they discovered in Fairly top contour and we will provide a
link to the study if you want to peruse it in more detail. The
first line of the study is this is the first in
Vivo,
So just meaning in the organism, in this case, this was a study on humans.
This is the first in Vivo demonstration of an association between an endogenous
neurotransmitter. Release endogenous means within us and conscious experience.
So what this sentence essentially says is this is the first study exploring. How a chemical that's naturally released in our body relates to a particular quality of conscious experience. This study was performed in Scandinavia in one of the hospitals in Denmark.
Again, we'll provide a link. The first author is care. I think I'm pronouncing it correctly, although probably not Kaja ER, at all.
And the title of the study is increased, dopamine tone, during meditation
induced change of Consciousness. And
I want to just highlight that the meditation used in this study isn't really a meditation at all. I don't know why they selected that for the title, the behavioral protocol used in this study was more. Akin to what is normally called Yoga Nidra or an SDR non sleep. Deep breath. Now, Yoga Nidra, and any
Str have been discussed many times before on this podcast, Yoga Nidra, for instance, is a practice that's been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years
in which people deliberately lie still. So they're forcing themselves to be mostly motionless. Small movements are fine and they're directing their attention to the surface of their body. They're doing long, exhale,
breathing, Sometimes some intentions, Sometimes some visualization but it's really self-directed relaxation. And the key component is that people stay awake and engage in very little movement.
And the key word, there is movement down on sleep. Deep.
Rest is a acronym, a term that I coined. It's not a term that I coined in order
to try and wipe away or discard with Yoga Nidra, I'm a person who has great respect
for Yoga Nidra and its Traditions. It's a term that I coined in order to Encompass a number of practices that don't include any mystical type language or
scientific language for that matter.
And that doesn't involve intentions involves deep relaxation.
Yet remaining wide awake and conscious sometimes, people
fall asleep. And that's okay. But this is really an atypical brain state of being deeply relaxed yet in general awake and
motionless.
Again, motionless, being the key. Very few brain
States involve us being mostly, if not completely motionless and yet awake. And it turns out that brain State whether or not you call it Yoga Nidra, you call a 10 scr whether or not you call it meditation, induced
shift in Consciousness as they did in this
study.
Although they do refer to Yoga Nidra, all refer to the same thing, which is being motionless, and yet aware and relaxed. I should mention. So, in this study, what they did was they brought subjects into the laboratory, they had them either undergo this self-directed deep relaxation while they are motionless or mostly motionless. Or they had them listen to an audio script while also just lying there with eyes closed. And then they used a number of chemical.
I don't want to get too deep into those now because they can be a little bit
distracting. For those of you that are interested, you can look at in the study. This is a
binding of a chemical in the brain that then they can image with brain Imaging. Which is what they did in the study to evaluate, how much dopamine
changed in the brain and where specifically in the brain dopamine changed its levels before during and after this particular behavioral practice in one or the other
group and what they discovered is that people who did this deep relaxation that
is self-directed
Deep relaxation, line, their eyes closed relatively motionless, although small movements of the body or movements of the head or absolutely
fine what they observed was a 65 percent increase in dopamine release now. Here, it's key dopamine release and they observed an increase in so-called Theta activity, Theta. Activity is a pattern of brain wave activity, that's commonly associated with creative States and Divergent thinking in particular, so that's important.
And they observe that across subjects
specifically in the nigrostriatal pathway this pathway associated with Divergent
thinking. So this is very exciting. This is a study that really points to a behavioral tool that can be used to selectively Elevate. Dopamine in the very path way. That one would want to. If they wanted to engage
Divergent thinking for sake of creative
exploration. There are also a number of key observations within this
study, first of all,
the reduction in bodily movement.
Was essential. In fact, when people rated or in, when
the
amount of Readiness for Action in
their system, their body
was evaluated. What people found was. That immediately after this practice, they felt very still. In other words, they felt as if
remaining still was natural now, it's not the case that they couldn't move. In fact, the elevation and dopamine that occurred during this practice this Yoga Nidra like non sleep or NSD are, like practice. Actually prepared them to be able
To move
in a much more, dedicated and robust
way afterwards. But during the practice their Readiness for Action went way. Way down, not surprising. They were pretty much motionless. But interestingly, as the
level of Readiness, for movement,
when down, down, down down, down
their degree of visual imagery that is their internal landscape and their ability to imagine new things increased and in fact, areas of the brain that are
associated with visual imagery such as the
visual or so-called occipital cortex in the parietal.
Cortex has been shown in other studies to ramp up when
people are motionless. So, there seems
to be this inverse relationship between movement and visual imagery, which makes sense. When we're moving, we can pay attention to things in the outside world, we tend to be aware of our sensory environment to varying degrees, but we don't tend to be very focused on visual
imagery within our head. Whereas,
when we lie down or sit down and close our eyes and we are
motionless, the degree of visual imagery really increases
hence, the increase in diversity,
I'm thinking because what essentially is happening, is the library
of options,
the library of possible
interactions with whatever it is that you're thinking about, I give the example, which is a trivial one on purpose of a pain but the bank of
options that becomes available when we are motionless and when we are limiting, our
visualization of the external
World increases exponentially. So this is important in what it points to is the fact that this very simple completely non pharmacologic behavioral practice of lying down,
unless for some period of time and I confess the amount of time that they use in the study was quite
long. It was longer than 60 minutes
but all the data that I'm aware of in terms of NSD are and Yoga Nidra. And there's a growing body of
literature on these practices, I should mention
show that even 10 minutes or even better would be 20 or 30 minutes of lying motionless with eyes closed and allowing the mind to
drift wherever it happens to go. But
Focusing on relaxing, by doing long, exhale breathing, perhaps, doing a body, scan of focusing, your attention
on particular body parts, but not keeping, it focused on any one particular body part for
that long, that general
practice of deep relaxation, while awake. And being relatively motionless, really favors the brain States associated with Divergent thinking and
actually represents an accessing of the various components that you would use during Divergent thinking and perhaps most excitingly its associated with this.
Massive, increase 65% increase in dopamine release within the very pathway that underlies Divergent thinking.
So my recommendation would be for those of you
that are trying to enhance Divergent thinking and creative ability
that you would do this practice at a minimum once per week. And I should say, if you were going to do it once per week, I'd recommend doing it for about 20 to 30 minutes. Some of you might be able to do it for as long as 60 Minutes. I myself do such a practice on a daily basis, anywhere from 10 minutes to 20 minutes, sometimes 30 minutes
There's an example of an SDR script completely
zero cost. I confess it does happen to be my voice. So forgive me in advance. There are other options of NS
ER you can go to YouTube,
put n SDR and my name again completely zero cost. You can get
a sample of what a 10-minute and Str script. Looks like that's
through virtuous and put that out there. So thank you for choosing for putting that out there at zero
cost. There are examples of 20 and 30 minute and Str scripts, and Yoga Nidra. Scripts, some that I
Like we will also provide a link to some of those again. Those are
completely zero cost for you to
explore but more important than you follow. Any one particular Yoga Nidra, NST R script is that you learn to take your body and brain into these states of limited motion elevated dopamine within this particular pathway and fairly deep relaxation. Again, if you happen to fall asleep, that's, you know, not necessarily a bad thing. Although the idea is that you stay in a shallow plane of Consciousness or sleep,
hence, the term non sleep deep breath.
Just so, in any event,
I think this is a very useful practice that many people could benefit from in
the fact that it's zero cost him, purely behavioral I think adds additional
benefit because it's certainly one that
people could explore depending on what amount of time. You're willing to commit and
the research data on this. Now, extend beyond this one individual paper and I think is really exciting because what it says is as the title. And the first line of the paper suggests is that we can increase, dopamine using
specific types of meditation induced consciousness.
And those increases in dopamine can be
used to increase our ability to be more creative
before moving forward. I want to make absolutely clear how it is that you would use an
SDR AKA Yoga Nidra or similar. The name doesn't really matter after all the practice is what
matters in order to enhance? Dopamine in this Nigro,
striatal pathway and enhance Divergent
thinking. The key thing to understand here is that the period of motionlessness and
deep relaxation, while awake.
Increases dopamine in the nigrostriatal, pathway it increases mental imagery that is, it increases access to the
bank or the library? If you will of possible
solutions or elements to
engage in the Divergent thinking process.
But Divergent thinking itself, does not
occur during an SDR AKA Yoga. Nidra,
the NS TR and Yoga Nidra, deep relaxation, meditation whatever it is you want to call it sets.
Dopaminergic tone and that's actually the appropriate use of the word dopaminergic tone. It raises the Baseline of dopamine Transmission
in that circuitry
that then positions you to engage in Divergent thinking more effectively. So the idea would be to do anywhere from 10 to 20, maybe 30 minutes, maybe even as
much as an hour depending on how much time you had to dedicate of such a meditation and Str practice and then not
necessarily immediately. But within the 5 to 15 minutes following,
then to go into a
practice of Divergent thinking and start doing creative exploration. That is to start
thinking about different ways to combine existing elements, in whatever domain it is
that you want to achieve creativity.
So, the point is that the Divergent thinking itself is not occurring
during the NSD are or Yoga. Nidra, practice, the
NSC are in Yoga Nidra, practice, prepares you for
Divergent thinking that you do in the hour or hours, that
follows. And just to contrast that with pharmacology, I am not aware of any specific.
Civic, dopamine related pharmacology,
that would allow us to
selectively increase. Dopamine in the
very pathway associated with Divergent, thinking and creativity. Now, there are forms of pharmacology that can shift, brain neurotransmitters and neuromodulators in ways that favor
creativity. And this is certainly a topic that we will go into in more depth in a future episode. But there is an exciting study, that was performed. Just this last year, looking at the role of Serotonin, another neuromodulator in Divergent and convergent thinking,
and it turns out that serotonin underlies, a lot of the brain activity, that's responsible for both Divergent end for convergent thinking, and there's one particular form of pharmacology, which can enhance activation of the serotonergic pathways associated with the so-called 5-ht that serotonin 5-ht. That's the abbreviation 5-ht to a
receptor
serotonin 2A. Receptor in particular, brain areas in ways that favor both Divergent and convergent,
And thinking and the pharmacologic agent, in that case, turns out to be very low dose,
or as some of you may have heard of it referred to as
micro dosing of
psilocybin. Now I do want to say because it would be entirely inappropriate for me to not say this that
in most areas of the world and in particular in the United States, psilocybin is
still illegal. It is not legal in some areas, it has been decriminalized.
And there are a number of different clinical trials occurring. Now at Johns
Hopkins at Stanford
At University of California, San Francisco, and elsewhere. Exploring
psilocybin for the treatment of depression for trauma for eating disorders. Most of those studies focus
on macro doses of psilocybin, not micro dosing. There are far fewer studies of micro dosing of psilocybin and I do have to point out that psilocybin use and possession and of course, sale is still illegal. So I would be remiss if I didn't state that. However, I will
provide a link to the study that shows that micro dosing of psilocybin for a series of
Weeks on a daily basis. So, these are dosages of psilocybin that do not induce hallucination and do not massively shift mood or internal States in any way that has people feeling like they
are acting or feeling that much different. Although some people do report a
subjective shift, does seem to increase
Divergent thinking ability.
But I do want to put a big asterisk, a highlight and an underlying pain beneath the statement I'm about to make which is that far
Um Ecology of the serotonin system just as pharmacology of the dopamine system is very Broadband. It's a shotgun approach. You're
going to hit all the circuits of the brain that involves serotonin
with micro dosing psilocybin, although it has some selectivity for the 5-ht to a receptor. It can
attach to other receptors as well and act there, this is the same reason. Why ssris, selective serotonin reuptake Inhibitors, can indeed shift mood and
appetite by can also shift libido and other things. It's because their
serotonin receptors.
Everywhere where I should say, many places, not just in the areas of the brain that are associated with mood, for
instance, and as I mentioned before agents, whether or not they are recreational or illicit drugs or prescription drugs or supplements, that increase dopamine will
also be broadband and hit a number of different circuits in parallel.
So this is why I always say behavioral tools, really should come first.
I don't say that to because I dislike
pharmacology. I said that because
In many cases, behavioral tools are not only
safer and easier to titrate to adjust the duration. Etcetera,
then is pharmacology, but also, because they can sometimes, as in the case of the study would just describe afford, you more
specificity, not less than pharmacology pharmacology. Has its place
can be wonderful provided safe and legal etcetera, but it can cause a lot of so-called off-target effects. So for those of you that are interested in increasing creativity through pharmacology, I would say, stay tuned.
For the data on psilocybin and micro dosing psilocybin. If you are absolutely obsessed with the idea of micro dosing psilocybin for enhancing creativity and you'd like to go straight to the study, I will tell you what that study
is and therefore you can access some of the specifics in terms of dosage and protocols Etc. So since I can't help myself, I'll
just very Briefly summarize that micro dosing, psychedelic study, the title of the study
which was published in 2018 is
exploring the effect of micro dosing psychedelics on
creativity in an open-label.
Abel natural setting interesting title.
This was a micro dosing event organized by the Dutch psychedelic Society. They examine the effects of psychedelic truffles, where they knew, what sorts of psychedelic compounds, were contained, their onto creativity, really
related problem, solving task the picture concept task, which I don't expect you to recognize or know, but it
assesses convergent thinking and the alternative uses task,
which I also don't expect you to know, but is a standard tasks for assessing Divergent thinking.
They tested once before taking a microdose. And while the effects
were expected to be manifested, they say, interesting, they use the word manifested in study of psychedelics science is changing indeed. In any case,
what they found was an enhancement of creative that is Divergent and convergent thinking not surprising. Given the fact that the
5-ht to a receptor
activity is increased by micro dosing of psilocybin.
Ivan and 5-ht
to a receptors are present both on the neural circuits that underlie Divergent and convergent thinking.
So again, this is not a plug for micro dosing psilocybin. This is really in response to what I know will be a number of different questions about what sorts of
pharmacologic Agents can be used to increase creativity. So more on that later and again will provide a link if you want to read that study in more depth,
I can imagine that a number of you are probably also wondering about the effects of alcohol on the
To cannabis on creativity. We did a long in-depth
episode all about alcohol and its effects on
health. The bottom line on alcohol, is that in excess of two drinks per week. You're starting to run into the cancer-promoting and
toxic effects of alcohol. I didn't choose for the answer to be that, but that's what the data tell
us. Not telling you, you can't drink more than two drinks per week, I'm just saying that if you're going to do that, you
should really consider offsetting that with some other behavioral measures all
just in the episode and alcohol.
And despite what people think there is absolutely
zero, zero evidence that alcohol increases creativity. However, by way
of reducing, activation of the prefrontal cortex, there is some evidence that alcohol and other substances that reduce what
it's called autobiographical scripting. That is
a narrative about ourselves as or
self-awareness, that it
can enhance
Divergent thinking at
very low doses. Now, this makes sense.
Divergent thinking involves remembering certain
things that we can use as elements in the creative process. But
suppressing, narratives about what the use of those would mean,
will people like it? Will they not like it will it lead to the
outcome we want? Will it won't all of that
autobiographical scripting involves the
forebrain being very,
very active and specific regions of the forebrain in
particular and that all needs to be
suppressed which alcohol in very low doses can accomplish, but again, that's not a plug for alcohol. I think behavioral tools would be a much better way.
Out but
therefore shouldn't be surprising why. Some people have used low-dose
alcohol in order to engage in the creative process because involves less inhibition or sense of self. That could be detrimental to the Divergent thinking process. Now, with respect to
cannabis, I went in depth into the biology and the various uses misuses dangers, and in some cases benefits of cannabis use in
certain key word, there is
certain populations and I also do of into whether or not cannabis
Used to increase Divergent and convergent thinking. So that's time-stamped in that episode. I'll refer you to that episode.
But the long and short of it is that many of the ideas that people come up with when under the influence of cannabis in particular high THC, containing cannabis does lead to enhanced Divergent thinking but so enhanced it turns out that often times those ideas can't be constrained by the convergent thinking process. In other words they have lots of ideas that make sense while under
under the influence of cannabis, but that later cannot be implemented into a coherent framework that leads to any
actual creative Endeavor or creative product. Or as is often the case with cannabis, they simply can't remember what they were thinking
about. Anytime. There's a discussion about dopamine, there seems to be a
discussion about motivation, desire and drive. And of course, that makes sense given the roles of dopamine. We did an entire episode on dopamine motivation and drive. It's one of our most popular episodes again you can
Is that with time stamps and all formats that huberman
lab.com. And anytime there's a discussion about dopamine and motivation,
we also seem to have a lot of questions about attention, and focus and ADHD, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in particular. So
just as a brief mention, there is a literature, although not terribly extensive a small, but strong literature on the relationship between ADHD and creativity. And the long and short of that literature is that people who have
Who have ADHD? Regardless of age, do seem to have an ability to focus. I've mentioned that in the episode on ADHD provided that they are interested in the thing that they are focusing on. So that runs counter to this
idea that people with ADHD simply can't focus, they
can but it tends to be a focus that selected for
things that they are very excited about or interested in as
opposed to a general ability to focus. What's also highly underappreciated?
Is that people who
have ADHD often times are very
Give at divergent thinking but are less effective. Convergent thinking
what this tells us is that people with ADHD can often have excellent novel and indeed creative ideas. But that the implementation of those creative ideas is sometimes Challenge. And that's one reason to explore rational, pharmacology nutrition, supplementation, etc. Those are all things to explore in concert with
or I should say in working closely with a board-certified physician or ideally psychiatrist expert in ADHD. You can also check out the episode
That we did on ADHD there, a lot
of tools there, a lot of science mentioned there to support those tools. Again you can find that huberman lab.com, but I did think it was important to point out even if briefly that having ADHD is not a barrier to creativity, in fact, may actually be an enhanced portal to creativity but that it doesn't allow people to access
the
convergent thinking that allows creative
ideas to be implemented into specific strategies pressure tested and eventually delivered in the form of a final product of
Music art Etc. That is not to say that people with ADHD cannot accomplish that but that it is going to require some additional steps and protocols in order to enhance convergent thinking and that episode and the episode that we did on focus and in particular tools to enhance, focus
is very much directed at ways to
enhance, convergent thinking. So if you have ADHD or know someone who does in, you're interested in the creative
process, we're focusing generally please
check out the episodes that I mentioned.
There's also a small but nonetheless very exciting.
Literature on the relationship between physical movement and Divergent thinking.
This should come as no
surprise to us as mentioned many times. Now, in this episode, The Nigro striatal pathway
involved in Divergent thinking involves dopamine is also responsible
for eye blinks and four movements of the
limbs of the body. In very deliberate ways.
This tells us that there's some direct or maybe in direct relationship between movement of
the body and Divergent
thinking. And despite the fact that it's only a few studies there have been
some studies of whether or not people are able to engage in Divergent, thinking more effectively when they are doing things like pacing or walking and this could be
on a treadmill or back and
forth across the room and in fact that is absolutely the case, if you're somebody like myself, who tends to have
their best ideas, not saying that my ideas are
always terrific, but the among the ideas I have some of the better ones arrive to me while on my long
Sunday run, I tend to a long run or hike on Sundays sometimes with
the light
Weight vest, or something of that sort. But when I'm in a state of
essentially not directing my attention to any one thing in my external environment, this is extremely key for reasons that now should be obvious. Any time, we are directing our attention to a visual Target
or an auditory Target.
We are not as able to engage in Divergent thinking. This is why
I will sometimes listen to podcasts, or to audio books while I go on these runs. But for portions of these runs or hikes, I tend to turn those off and just focus on the movement and focus on not focusing on anything in particular.
Oftentimes, I will stop and write down ideas that suddenly were seemingly suddenly
appeared to me or geyser to the surface. I'll have an idea sometimes those are good ideas, sometimes less good ideas.
The fact that that happens for me and that fact that many people are Pacers or runners or come up with their best ideas while in the shower or while engaging in activities that don't require a
lot of sensory attention to one specific location, either visual or auditory Etc.
That is because it engages these nigrostriatal pathway ways.
Through movement, which then opens up this library of ideas and allows the intersection of different ideas that normally would be constrained, to separate categories. One way to think about this by analogy would be, you know, when I was a kid, you'd go the library
nowadays, you just go online, but
the different pages of different books. On
different topics are kept distinct from one. Another that is bound by different book covers and bookends different shelves in the library.
It's as if different pages in elements from those books are now being
Find in a pseudo-random, not random but in a
pseudo-random way and in that
combination new possibilities about ways that
information could be combined and implemented start to arise. So the tool that emerges
from this is very simple and it won't necessarily
apply to everybody. But if
you are somebody who finds that just sitting in a chair and trying to be creative is very challenging, some of you might benefit from. For instance, if you are engaging in writing, or you want to write to talk into the voice recorder of your phone while walking,
Or simply walking and not attending to any one specific thing visually or through headphones. And then as ideas surface, seemingly out of nowhere, which is how it
happens that you
could either put them into your phone by voice dictation or you could type them out. If you like, the key thing is to not be
distracted by other things in your phone, not to start going on a social media, or doing phone calls, or looking at text messages
because that by definition is going to take you out of
this what biologists
call a pseudo random walk and the pseudo random element is
Extremely important. We know, for instance, that many circuits within the brain have what's called dedicated
point-to-point wiring. So for instance, the brain circuits that govern your breathing, the brain circuits that govern your heartbeat, the brain circuits that govern, your
specific movements. Once you were an adult and allow for smooth directed movement are very precise, very little
slop if any in the wiring
however there are aspects of your brain circuitry yours and everybody
else's, I should say that are maintained
into it.
Dolt hood that include a lot of extra wiring and this is, these are fine. Wires are not the major
highways between different areas if you will. So, sort of like
Google Maps has highways and streets and little little passages and alleys, but it's as if there's a little web of additional possible,
Pathways cast over that entire thing, the
human brain, maintains such webs of possible passage, and it's only during activities such as
walking running cycling swimming.
Hiking pacing Etc
that the activation of those pseudo-random Pathways starts to ramp up. So this is a purely behavioral approach to engaging different elements within neural networks that normally would not communicate with one another when we are completely still. So again the practices I talked about earlier of being completely, still to raise dopamine and enhance Divergent thinking those I just want to re-emphasize are designed to position you two ready.
You to
engage in the kinds of activities like walking and pacing etcetera, that best facilitate Divergent thinking.
So if you are somebody who wants to enhance Divergent thinking, I would encourage you to explore how different patterns of movement in particular, patterns of movement that don't require any conscious attention to any one specific thing.
Allow you to access new ideas and new ways of combining existing elements
in whatever domain it is. You want to be creative. Now, this is also an opportunity to underscore something. I said back at the beginning which is
You are not going to come up with great works of music if you don't
understand chords and Melodies and notes and music, those basic
elements have to be built up through some sort of
formal or at least rigorous or regular training the
same way that you're not going to take a walk and then suddenly be able to paint an incredible picture. If you have no painting
ability, that is not going to happen. What I'm talking about here are ways to enhance your capacity for Divergent thinking. Such as NSD
are and ways to engage in Divergent thinking such as through certain forms of movement.
That don't require a
lot of conscious attention to your surroundings or anyone specific
sensory Target and in doing. So, enhancing your ability to be more creative in a domain for which you already have some
degree of skill or even
Mastery. Now, in keeping with the theme of how to enhance our creativity. There's a very exciting. And yet, parallel literature to the literature that I've been describing thus far. Now, I promise you that I'm not going to open up an entire library of new information.
To neural circuits and so forth but I would be remiss if I didn't mention this parallel literature because it speaks very specifically to some important practices that we can all use in order to enhance creativity and to do. So the first time and every time and this is really because certain scientists out there have really gone through the trouble. I should even say the painstaking trouble of really trying to dissect what the creative process is both for individuals and
in groups or even in pairs.
And so what I'm about to tell you,
It is beautifully encapsulated in an article entitled, a new method for training, creativity narrative as an alternative to Divergent thinking. So
again, we've been talking about
Divergent thinking that's one pathway into the creative process. But there are others as well and as it turns out, they're not. So distinct in
terms of the underlying brain mechanisms nonetheless, let me
describe briefly how narrative can be used to train creativity and to become more
creative.
And in order to do that, I'd like to just briefly paraphrase or read from
the first paragraph.
Half of this paper. So what I'm about to read are the author's words, not mine
quote, here's a paradox, according to current research, young children are more
imaginatively, creative than adults. And indeed that is true, by the way
yet. Also, according to current research creativities main neural engine is Divergent thinking which relies on memory and logical Association. Two tasks at which young children
underperform adults, that is
children are
not as good at divergent thinking.
Ying as adults are. So how could it be? The authors are asking that children are more imaginative and thus more creative than adults. This
can only mean that there are alternate Pathways to creativity
and indeed that is the
case. And so what this paper really explores is other ways to access creativity and what they describe is, what's called narrative Theory and there's a number of different aspects to this narrative Theory, but they agree that the standard definition of creativity.
Every is the same one that we were talking about before. So we're not talking about a different form of creativity here, we're talking about a different way
to access creativity. They describe the standard definition of creativity as quote, the ability to generate novel ideas that are useful. So the commonly accepted
one and what they, cite as the basis for narrative theory is this breakthrough finding in the 1950s. This is the work of Guilford. Some people out there might be familiar with it. I
was not at the outset of researching this episode
what this theory is from Guilford. Essentially States. Is that there?
Are different intellectual
capacities that are not captured by standard IQ test. I think that's generally accepted nowadays. We know
there's a motional intelligence. We know is our standard IQ Etc. But the important element to understand is that these authors were able to trace back the idea of narrative training as a way to enhance creativity long before Guilford in the 1950s, all the way back to Aristotle this. So this is incredible. Narrative theory was actually burst in 335 be
Ee in his writing called Poetics. Which I think
is incredible. At least to me that people long before us were thinking about creativity, and what goes into
creativity.
And what Aristotle said, what Guilford, then elaborated on and what the authors of this paper further,
elaborate on and actually have developed
training protocols for is the idea that there are three elements that we
can use in order to enhance creativity and those three elements are what's called
world-building. I'll explain what these
Are in a moment perspective shifting and action generating and right off the bat, the word action should raise a flag for you. And by
that, I mean a positive
flag because once again, we are back into the world and therefore the neural circuits of
movement and motion.
Okay, so three elements of World building perspective shifting and active generating are what make up this Narrative Approach to creativity. And I should mention that these authors and others are using such approach with companies with groups with
So this is using a bunch of different contexts to approach and enhance
different forms of creativity.
So let's talk first about World, building techniques. This is going to be immediately familiar to you when you hear it, but one of the key elements of creativity is to, at the outset come up with some
idea that make sense or is attractive to you, about
how the world is different inside
of your creative Endeavor. So for those that write
science fiction, or think about
Science fiction. There's some obvious aspects
to this. But for those of you that
don't, maybe you come up with a narrative, for instance, in the context of Storytelling that in your world, we are the house cats and the cats are
actually the ones that are the curators of the earth.
Okay? So right there, there is a conceptual shift that the world in, which whatever creative idea is going to emerge is
entirely different than the one that we actually live in.
So, that sets a certain number of important constraints. It means certain things are
now possible. Other
Not possible that are very different from the world that we live in. You can see the parallels here to kind of childhood imagination where essentially anything can happen in the child's mind because they are
unconstrained. The second element is this perspective shifting techniques. And the idea here is that not only are we supposed to have the reader or The Listener, or the Observer or us, explore for
creativity, and develop a creative idea by thinking
differently, right? Which is kind of a generic term. How do we actually think?
Differently. But rather than just say, take the perspective of
somebody else in terms of what they would see, or do or say, or
think rather, we are supposed to think about their underlying motivation. So we could do the world
shift. That is the world structure shift from Step 1. And then in
Step 2, you would ask yourself, okay, rather than write about or think about, or move from the perspective of myself, let's say you're feeling
particularly happy that day, you'd say,
you know, I'm actually going to take the perspective of somebody who's
Angry. But rather than just act angry, I'm going to think about what their motivation
for being angry is maybe they had a breakup, maybe they were
jealous, maybe somebody had wronged them in some way.
Maybe they're just generally angry at the world for whatever reason and then operate from that motivational stance.
And this is a very interesting and Powerful step because what it really captures at least
as viewed by me the neuroscientist is
that captures a whole set of neural
circuits about what that motivational State
means, because motivational States dictate a
Huge number of possible different outcomes. But they really
constrain the number of different
actions and outcomes that any of us would engage in,
rather than saying, I'm going to view the world the way that someone else review the World by stating that we are going to be motivated by their set of motivations and not our own, it includes a lot more
possibilities and yet not an infinite number of possibilities. They are constrained in a logical way which is one of the key elements of creativity. And then
this third element which is action generating techniques is a really cool one.
That you will immediately notice implications for the workplace, which is forced collaboration. So, inside of this thing that we're building here, this kind of story, you create a novel rule for the world that your story is going to exist in or your music is going to exist in or your sport will exist. In, then you create this perspective shift where you take on the motivation of someone else, different than you and then you force collaboration between that person who has this, alternate
Innovation different from you and someone else who has an entirely different motivation and in doing so, you create these kind of what are called the creative collisions. And now their collisions because they're Crossing one another, and something new has to emerge from them.
They could be antagonistic like we arguments fighting physical
or verbal or otherwise, they could be synergistic. They could take on any number of different forms depending on
the motivations and the individuals that are involved.
But even though I just described this in Fairly top Contour, what I just described is actually the
Four elements of any story or any creative Endeavor. It's just that many stories are from the
perspective of what we already know and believe and think the world to be
and our own perspective and the actions that we would take given
that world in that perspective. Whereas, if we
want to be creative, we want to think outside of our usual framework and yet using elements that exist within us, right? No one has to tell us the
creative narrative, we're trying to come up with it on
our own. We want to essentially think in a childlike way.
Way. How do children think? Well, they have new different or entirely
novel Concepts about how the world works, but they lose are bounded and this is a key word, those are bounded. They're not
infinite, it's not that
anything can happen, right? Some kids will say we can fly and you can shoot
lasers out of your eyes. You can do all sorts of things. Are unicorns of candy falling from the sky. At some point, if you don't bound the change in the
world, it just becomes pure chaos. And even children, don't do that. So we need to bound the change and yet
create
Alternate universe, if you will, in which the story takes place or the creation of any kind, doesn't have to be a story
takes place. Then there has to be a perspective shift in. This is very useful. This is a actually a tool that we can all use of trying to take the perspective of others but not just asking what they would feel or think or do. But ask what is their motivation in life? Generally or
what kind of mood stance or goal stance? Are they taking, are they trying to extract from others? Are they trying to give to others? Are they very altruistic at
Better, Etc.
And then you take that individual and you do that. Also for another individual or group of individuals, and you start thinking about how those different individuals, because of their different motivational States would engage at the level of action.
What they would do, what they would say. Would they mate with a fight?
Would they etc? Etc. You think of any story, the story of Star Wars, the Greek myths? You think of any story that has been created, which we consider great and novel works and you start to find
These three elements world-building perspective shifting and action generating techniques. And so, while this is again just a broad Contour of what this Narrative Approach involves, I think it's a very important and very exciting one because it gives us a formula, right? We already know that Divergent thinking and convergent thinking, or both elements to the creative process. This is suggesting that whether or not involves Divergent thinking or not. These authors seem to think this is distinct from Divergent thinking that capturing some of the elements of
Creativity that are present in childhood, but that then tend to
disappear as we start to assume identity, build identity and understand rules about the actual world, we live
in all of those basic elements of Early Childhood creativity can be reawakened. And in fact, they have
data to support the fact that they can be reawakened in adults in meaningful ways that can lead to new product, design, new, workplace, interactions. And on, and on that, I
find very exciting. And as a consequence, I do intend to do an entire episode at some
point.
On narrative and storytelling and the role of narrative and storytelling, not just for sake of creativity, but also for accessing neuroplasticity
and for enhancing memory. And so on, there's an entire landscape of literature, and exciting tools and things to understand there. But in the meantime, we will provide a link to this paper. And for those of you that choose, not to access the paper, simply understanding these three aspects of narrative as an alternative to accessing creativity, that is
A dedicated and well understood or establish World shift that, you choose perspective, shifting and taking on the motivation of others and creating some sort of landscape of exploration for what sorts of interactions would occur between that
individual or groups of individuals and other individuals
that have other motivations. And yet are still living in this alternate World, those three elements. We now know can be combined into what you or I or anyone would
consider important creative works.
So
we discussed creativity. This absolutely fascinating
aspect to human brain function that has allowed us
as a species to develop. Everything from great. Works of art and music to technological innovations. That allow us to fly and allow us to access people all over the world through little screen devices that we carry around in our
pockets and on. And on,
as I mentioned, the beginning of today's episode, I find creativity to be one of the most fascinating
aspects of brain
function.
In particular because we don't actually know what the upper limits of creativity are. And yet we understand that there are certain bounds,
there are certain requirements and the
key requirement for creativity, is this
aspect of utility? Now
that doesn't necessarily mean that for something to be considered creative. It
has to be useful in the practical sense
but it does seem that for something to be considered truly creative or especially creative in some cases that it reveals to us something
fundamental about the
Way that we or the world works.
We discuss some of the neural circuits that underlie the different aspects of creativity in particular, Divergent and convergent thinking as well as narrative building and some of the tools and steps that can allow us to better access Divergent thinking and convergent thinking. And those tools include behavioral tools as well as pharmacology and we talked about narrative building as a way to reawaken or I should say re-access the childhood creativity that did indeed exist in all of us
at
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or joining me for today's discussion all about the science and tools for creativity and last but certainly not least thank you for your interest in
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