The Science of Creativity & How to Enhance Creative Innovation | Huberman Lab Podcast 103

ANDREW HUBERMAN: Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast, where

we discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

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 to 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 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 particular 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 worldviews.

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 biology

or psychology.

But we 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

or 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 specific 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.

And as 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 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 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.

Our first sponsor is ROKA.

ROKA makes eyeglasses and sunglasses

that are the absolute highest quality.

The company was founded by two All-American swimmers

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and sunglasses were designed with performance in mind.

I've spent a lifetime working on the biology

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And I can tell you that your visual system has

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Today's episode is also brought to us by Thesis.

Thesis makes custom nootropics.

And as you may have heard me say before,

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because it means smart drugs.

And frankly, there is no neural circuit

in the brain for being quote unquote "smart."

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Let's talk about creativity.

Now 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 every day, a 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, 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 oftentimes the most creative and the most

interesting and the most beloved creative acts

reveal to us something fundamental about the world

or the way that we work in a way that delights and thrills

and surprise prizes us but that we aren't even aware what

that fundamental rule is.

I'll return to this in a few minutes.

But for 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 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 they just 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, creative acts on the other hand, of course,

involve novel combinations of existing rule sets that

could be different combinations of music or colors or shapes

or technology, et cetera.

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, et cetera.

The 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.

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,

maybe a curl of the lip, maybe a few hairs

of your eyebrows in a particular way, that

really captured you accurately.

I think most people would say, OK, it's accurate.

It looks a lot like the photograph or the person.

And on the one hand why 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.

Escher'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, is 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

in a particular clover or something of that sort.

Most of the time we're looking out

on landscapes or at people's faces, et cetera.

And very seldom do we see highly repetitive patterns

at that 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 Escher there are unusual patterns

and those completely disappear to us.

Now, when you look at an Escher, what you probably see

and 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 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, et cetera, et cetera.

But there seems to be something about truly creative acts

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 works.

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 artists and does them in an urban landscape,

an actual city or suburban landscape.

That is, he draws or stencils or graffiti in a very cryptic way,

I should say.

No one really knows who Banksy 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

a 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 dimensional 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 its leg

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 liked to pee 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

isn't 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 it 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

and 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 interaction between different objects.

Let me give you a different example just

to make sure that this hits home.

One of Banksy'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 issue are

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 wall 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 three dimensions.

And in particular, the wall as 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 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 hues of those colors 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 a Led Zeppelin song or a 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 or the accurate portrait

of somebody's face.

Or you may hear an acoustic version

of what's normally an electric guitar song or electrical song

or vise 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 allows 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 hear.

And again, the rule that it's revealing

is not splayed out for you.

For instance, it's 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 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 as a script that would be the same as the one

that 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 changed.

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 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 l combination

of some elements could be notes of music, could be numbers,

could be visual elements like lines or colors,

could be physical movements, et cetera.

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,

et cetera required in order to be creative.

This element of thinking about verbs

then allows us to say, OK, what are the various 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.

This is a goofy name because the neural circuits that I'm

about to describe do a bunch of other things as well,

but they certainly control what are called executive functions.

Executive functions are functions

that you and I both have, which is our ability

to govern our thinking and 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 subregions.

It has a bunch of different parts

just like any country has different states, et cetera

and provinces.

Executive function involves the prefrontal cortex

and some other neural structures.

But for the 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 sentences 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,

et cetera.

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 outside 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 and 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.

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 your 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, et cetera.

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, et cetera.

The specific types of thoughts and feelings

are not as interesting as the fact

that when you close your eyes 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 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

and your memory of those in order to imagine new things.

And you're doing this in a very free associative way.

You're not trying to imagine new things.

It's just whatever geysers to the surface.

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 subregion of the prefrontal cortex.

It's 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 network.

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 mapped there

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 intengu--

excuse me, anterior cingulate cortex and the amygdala.

So a lot of information is mapped

within the salience network about how we feel

and how we feel in relation to things that are happening

around us 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.

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, or things

we could think about but choose not to or try not to,

the default mode network, which is basically the catalog

or library of previous experiences

that we have available to us that would act as the paints

on a palette or the possible ingredients

that could go into a recipe.

All of that has to, again, arise from previous experience.

We can't close our eyes and suddenly

be able to access all the melodies that we've never

heard before or all 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 swirls 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.

So those three networks work together to create things.

And when I say create things, we again

have to really definition of creativity.

Creativity is a rearrangement of existing elements into novel

combinations that reveal something fundamental 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 a computer actually has utility or a vehicle.

There are creative acts that led to the formation of vehicles

and computers, et cetera.

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 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 to the world and to ourselves.

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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, et cetera, that's fine.

It's less important that you know the names of things

than 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 endpoint.

And the endpoint 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 from the perspective of psychology

and fortunately, the neuroscience well

supports what the psychology says and vise 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.

And 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 of somebody running,

I say, what do you.

See and you say I see somebody running.

And then I might give you a divergent thinking task

and these tasks are the same ones

used in various experiments.

And I'd say, 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, 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, et cetera

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 task 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 in to diverse, diverse, even distant types

of concepts and pictures.

OK.

So that's divergent thinking.

Divergent thinking is really the process

that underlies idea generation.

And the basis of 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 pen

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 3 minutes that would be an example

of divergent thinking.

However, if you just said black pen, red pen, white pen,

green pen, et cetera, that's not very divergent thinking.

It's only divergent in the context of color space.

And when I say space that's just a nerd

speak for one particular domain of thinking.

Whereas if you said red pen, white pen,

essay pen 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 we'll 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 pen and you say,

orangutan, that's a perfectly valid divergent idea

from this pen 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 observer's brain in any meaningful way,

it's only interesting to you because you

are the only one that understands

the rule that underlies the link between this pen and orangutan.

Whereas 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, an answer is valid but not all

valid answers are interesting or useful.

And you can cross those off and arrive

at the most interesting and truly creative answer.

A couple of 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 cortex, 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 to forget that pens are just

for writing, for instance, and that pens

can do other things like hold a door open.

It's really 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

to know about divergent thinking is that divergent thinking

involves a exploration.

It's a wandering through of ideas that you already

had in your library, in your memory banks about pens

and what pens could be related to

and what pens 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 buildings 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 movies, especially, we

have this idea in mind of this limitless concept

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

and 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 in that movie,

you've got this math genius who is a janitor at MIT, et cetera

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 there are 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, of course, and may not even actually exist.

I'm sure someone will put it 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.

So this is very important to 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 biologists

call a random walk just wandering through your thought

space and memory space about what

could be related to this pen.

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 to us or other people

or scare us or other 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'm 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 to understand that creativity is not just

novel combinations.

They 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 dulls 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 where truly creative elements are discovered

is in convergent thinking.

And convergent thinking is, as the name

suggests, 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 wing, water, an engine.

The concept that I happen to have in mind

is that of a plane that can land on water.

Most planes don't land on water or not

intended to land on water.

One 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 engine.

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

within those things they are fundamental

features, they are in fact, necessary but not

sufficient for having a plane that can land on water.

OK.

So that's just one example of convergent thinking.

And a convergent thinking task 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 answer that said,

a bird that swallowed an 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 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.

OK.

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 everywhere in between that

you can generate answers that is,

the things that are very close to pens,

black pen, red pen versus pen and doorstop,

pen 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 convergent thinking,

you're really trying to bind these things together.

And so the key element for convergent 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 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 another brain network

underlies convergent thinking.

And if at this point in this episode

you're saying OK, 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,

therein lie 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 will 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 that they get from this

or from that.

To be honest, the concept of dopamine hits

is not one that I favor because in general, whenever people

talk about dopamine hits, typically

they are talking about activities

such as social media for 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 makes sense why motivation, desire,

and movement would be linked up through a common,

in this case neuromodulator or 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, they 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 we'll 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 eye even contains neurons

that release dopamine that control

the sensitivity of your eye at different times of day

to light, et cetera.

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

eye movements.

And we will return to eye 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 the so-called nigrostriatal pathway.

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 subregions.

So, again, for those of you that really geek out on this stuff

great, you can learn these names and retain them 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

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 through.

So nigrostriatal tells you that there

is a connection between the substantia nigra

because it came first, nigrostriatal,

and then striatal is where it ends up.

So nigrostriatal pathway is involved in generating bodily

movements.

It's involved in eye movements.

And it is actually a brain area that's

engaged when you think about movement.

You can just have a story in your mind about walking

or a story in your mind about running or story

in your mind about driving.

This area is engaged.

Very interesting brain area.

So that's the first circuit.

Very important to 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.

Even if you don't remember any of the names of the things

I just told you, that you have a brain circuit

that even if you just think about walking it

becomes more active.

And 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 pen in some way, logical or illogical.

The bridge could be completely abstract and really fantastical

with a bunch of different ideas in between.

A pen acting as a doorstop because of some situation

where you need to run down stairs in a fire

and get back upstairs quickly to rescue

somebody, very divergent.

Or as divergent as black pen to red pen.

But what's amazing is that that same circuit

is the one that's involved in generating and thinking

about physical movement.

That turns out to be vitally important for tapping

into the creativity process.

So really frame that up in your mind or commit it to memory.

Now, the second dopamine circuit associated with creativity

is the one associated with convergent thinking, which,

again, is the thinking where there's

a specific correct answer.

It 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 mesocortical pathway.

The mesocortical pathway is involved in motivation

and it has an emotional component too.

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 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 mesocortical 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 the so-called mesolimbic area,

which is involved in desire and feelings of reward.

And this is the area that is associated more typically

with addictive behaviors or compulsive behaviors.

We're going to leave out the discussion

about the mesolimbic 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 and the four

dopaminergic circuits.

And then the fourth circuit certainly

one I've never talked about before on this podcast, which

doesn't mean anything except that we

haven't gotten to it yet, is that tuberoinfundibular

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, et cetera.

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 physical movement.

And the dopamine circuit that is the mesocortical 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 nigrostriatal and mesocortical.

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 and convergent

think are the two processes that have to occur.

Usually first divergent then 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.

But you already know 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.

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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 almost poetic way

that naturally occurring variations

in genes which underlie naturally occurring variations

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

and other people are better at 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, et cetera.

It's very hard to separate nature and nurture

because somebody with a natural proclivity for things

might engage in those things more, et cetera, et cetera.

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 depended on the 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're a naturally better at divergent or 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, et cetera.

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 or notes of music or foods or 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 suppress

what is called autobiographical narratives

and in particular, autobiographical narratives.

We need to discard with judgments

about how certain combinations of things

impacted us in the past.

This here I think is what people mean

when they encourage the exploration of creativity

by so-called boundary exploration.

You hear about this a lot in the self-help,

in 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 or in this case

to be more divergent in our thinking.

So they'll say, 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 just open monitoring thinking.

And just to make what could otherwise

be a somewhat complex section here very simple.

What 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

and why it's so useful for enhancing

divergent thinking, this critical element

of the creative process.

First of all, open monitoring meditation

and focused attention meditation can be performed

the exact same way physically.

You can sit there, 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 I'm essentially summarizing

is called open monitoring meditation reduces

the involvement of brain regions related to memory function.

Now, right off the bat that will cue you

to 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 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 trying to redirect your thinking back to your breathing

or to your posture or to a chant or a mantra,

open monitoring meditation is simply

a matter of having sit there or lie down and close your eyes

and to allow whatever surfaces in your mind to surface.

And what you practice is the practice of nonjudgment.

Now, nonjudgment 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 even though 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.

Is the thought about what would happen if you did.

OK?

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 meditation

involving focus inward and outward, et cetera.

You're welcome to check out that episode.

It's at hubermanlab.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

drifts as it no doubt would.

Or to a tone in the room.

You could attend to that and redirect to that.

Rather than think about it 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 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 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 convergent 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 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 flame of light.

Whatever it 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, to 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

I did with a wonderful 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 explore.

And 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 and 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 5 to 10 minutes

and then transitions to focused attention for maybe

5 to 10 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 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.

You say, let's just forget all the rules

and let's just come up with new ideas about something.

New uses of something, new strategies.

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 train for that on a regular basis.

So what I just described to you are

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 it.

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 focus 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 .

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 would call gain of function studies

although not the gain of function studies

associated with virology 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 what mood you

are in when you happen to start a creative process,

or try and do a training such as open monitoring meditation

or focused meditation.

How your mood relates to your level of dopamine at baseline.

What we call your tonic as it's 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 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 noninvasively in the laboratory.

As I mentioned, the nigrostriatal pathway

is involved in movement and in eye blinking which,

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 across several papers.

Unfortunately, for me their names

are difficult to pronounce.

So I apologize to them and their relatives

for what is sure to be incorrect pronunciation.

But the last names of these authors

are Chermahini and Hommel.

They're in the Netherlands.

So Chermahini and Hommel 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 tests 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 be

more playful about the exploration about what

could happen with these notes of music

or these foods, et cetera.

But it's not so obvious.

Because it turns out that if your dopamine levels are very,

very high, and this can be measured noninvasively

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 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 who

runs for president is bipolar rather people who are bipolar

often have these delusions of grandeur

that they're somehow going to be president simply

because they decided to and that they were selected to do this,

et cetera, et cetera.

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 Chermahini and Hommel have

discovered is that if people are in a low mood,

they're not feeling great, maybe they're depressed

but they're just not feeling that great.

They feel on a scale of 1 to 10, around a 2, or a 3, maybe a 4.

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 stories,

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 thinking, 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 like and start interacting with those stimuli

to get your mood elevated and then to engage

in divergent thinking.

However, what Chermahini and Hommel 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 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

and 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 to the bipolar disorder

that 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 intuitive sense as to

whether or not our mood is--

suppose we could spin this into three categories is kind of--

yes, happy, excited, positive mood, and, of course,

there are going to be levels to that.

Low like, mmmh, or meh in the middle.

So if you're in a low mood or meh mood,

by all means engage in something probably

for about 5 to 30 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 out of 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 is bad.

In fact, caffeine can be neuroprotective,

it can enhance focus and so forth.

But divergent thinking is 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 convergent 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 of its effects

on persistence and focus is very conducive

to convergent thinking.

So if you're somebody who wants to explore creativity

and wants 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 formulating 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 abstained from caffeine

during those bouts of work.

And when structuring everything according

to the decisions I had already made,

I purposely ingested 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 in a novel ways.

But it doesn't necessarily allow key concepts

to pop out in the way that, for instance,

Banksy or a Rothko or an Escher would pop out.

I'm certainly not naive in thinking that it does.

But the principle of is what's important here.

You need divergent thinking.

You need 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,

this could be measured by your frequency of blinking.

For better or for worse, we can't actually

count the number of times that we blink unless we're actively

paying attention to it.

So I don't recommend that 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 that broad binning.

You could scale it on 1 to 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 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 what you need

and apply accordingly.

Because as Chermahini and Hommel have shown, whether or not

you are in a low mood, medium 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 hone 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

were covered in the episode on caffeine turns

out it's 1 to 3 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 episode.

And 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 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.

And 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.

This is just the 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, et cetera.

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 means of mesocortical pathway.

Again, the nigrostriatal pathway associated

with diversion thinking, the music mesocortical 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 milligrams or 1,000 milligrams 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 mesocortical pathway,

but also in the mesolimbic pathway,

and also, for that matter in the tuberoinfundibular pathway

associated with the pituitary.

There is no way to direct dopamine 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 if it's cocaine or methamphetamine,

those will greatly increase dopamine but nonselectively

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 auditory 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,

et cetera, 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.

Writhing of the face and the body

from suppression of dopamine 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.

Nigrostriatal, remember, it's substantia nigra

show deficits in what?

In movement.

In the smoothness of movement.

Oftentimes they won't blink at all.

They'll have a blank stare.

And they have other issues as well.

So if you're somebody who is interested in increasing

dopamine through the use of legal safe pharmacology

as 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 pathway should not do this.

I know nowadays there's a lot of use of drugs

that increase dopamine such as Ritalin, Adderall, modafinil,

armodafinil, often prescribed for things like 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 at hubermanlab.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, et cetera.

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 mesocortical

and mesolimbic pathways.

Why can I say that?

How can I say that with any degree of confidence?

Well, there are 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 mesolimbic and mesocortical pathway.

So yes, those drugs increase dopamine across the board,

but there does seem to be some weighting 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 nonprescription

approaches.

And one I already mentioned, which

is L-Tyrosine taken typically in dosages

of 500 to 1,000 milligrams.

L-Tyrosine is not as potent in increasing dopamine

as are the prescription 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 1 to 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 task

probably more than it should be taken prior

to divergent thinking task.

And, of course, there are other legal supplements

that can elevate dopamine as well

and particular phenethylamine is very effective in doing that.

600 milligrams of that has a brief effect 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 in fact, there's an extensive landscape

of prescription and supplement based 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 in L-Tyrosine.

The precursor to dopamine.

Certain foods.

You can look up online which foods

contain high levels of L-Tyrosine

and which ones are compatible with your nutrition.

But leaving pharmacology aside, there's

a very exciting nonpharmacological 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% 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 0 cost.

And it involves no 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

is a study that 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, it 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,

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 Kjaer.

I think I'm pronouncing it correctly although probably not

K-J-A-E-R et al.

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 the study

was more akin to what is normally called yoga nidra

or NSDR nonsleep depressed.

Now yoga nidra and NSDR 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.

Now, nonsleep depressed 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.

It involves deep relaxation yet remaining wide awake

and conscious.

Sometimes people fall asleep and that's OK.

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 it NSDR,

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 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 tricks.

And 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 it 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 lying their eyes

closed, relatively motionless although small movements

of the body or movements of the head are absolutely fine.

What they observed was a 65% increase in dopamine release.

Now, here its 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 pathway 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 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 in dopamine

that occurred during this practice, this yoga

nidra-like nonsleep or NSDR-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

went 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 and 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 divergent 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 gave the example, which is a trivial one on purpose

of a pen.

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.

And what it points to is the fact

that this very simple completely nonpharmacologic behavioral

practice of lying down motionless

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 NSDR 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 or 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, it's

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 would 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 NSDR script, completely zero cost.

I confess it does happen to be my voice.

So forgive me in advance.

There are other options of NSDR.

You can go to YouTube, put NSDR and my name.

Again, completely zero cost.

You can get a sample of what a 10 minute NSDR

script looks like.

That's through Virtusan, put that out there.

So thank you Virtusan for putting that out there

at zero cost.

There are examples of 20 and 30 minute NSDR scripts and yoga

nidra scripts.

Some that I particularly 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 NSDR 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 not necessarily a bad thing,

although the idea is that you stay

in a shallow plane of consciousness

or sleep hence the term nonsleep deep rest.

So in any event, I think this is a very useful practice

that many people could benefit from.

And the fact that it's zero cost and 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 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 NSDR a.k.a.

yoga nidra or similar, the name doesn't really

matter after all, the practice is what matters,

in order to enhance dopamine in this nigrostriatal 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 NSDR a.k.a.

yoga nidra.

The NSDR and yoga nidra, a deep relaxation meditation,

whatever it is you want to call it, sets a 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 NSDR 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 NSDR or yoga nidra practice.

The NSDR and 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 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 modulators in ways that favor creativity.

And this is certainly a topic that we

we'll go into in more depth in a future episode.

But there's 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

and 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's serotonin.

5-HT, that's the abbreviation.

5-HT2A receptor.

Serotonin 2A receptor in particular brain areas

in ways that favor both divergent and convergent

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 microdosing 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 particularly 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 macrodoses of psilocybin

not microdosing.

There are far fewer studies of microdosing 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 microdosing 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 asterisks, a highlight

in an underlying beneath the statement I'm about to make,

which is that pharmacology 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 involve serotonin

with microdosing psilocybin.

Although it has some selectivity for the 5-HT2A receptor

it can attach to other receptors as well and act there.

This is the same reason why SSRI, Selective Serotonin

Reuptake Inhibitors can indeed shift mood and appetite

but it can also shift libido and other things.

It's because there are serotonin receptors everywhere,

or 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 into 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 because I dislike pharmacology,

I say that because in many cases behavioral tools are not

only safer and easier to titrate to adjust

the duration, et cetera than is pharmacology,

but also because they can sometimes

as in the case of the study we just

described for you more specificity not less than

pharmacology.

Pharmacology has its place can be wonderful,

provided safe and legal, et cetera.

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 microdosing psilocybin.

If you are absolutely obsessed with the idea of microdosing

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 dosages

and protocols, et cetera.

So since I can't help myself, I'll

just very briefly summarize that microdosing psychedelic study.

The title of the study, which was published in 2018

is Exploring the Effect of Microdosing Psychedelics

on Creativity in an Open Label Natural Setting.

Interesting title.

This was a microdosing event organized

by the Dutch psychedelic society.

They examined the effects of psychedelic truffles

where they knew what psychedelic compounds were contained there

on two creativity 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 task 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 a 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-HT2A receptor

activity is increased by microdosing of psilocybin

and 5-HT2A receptors are present both on the neural circuits

that underlie divergent and convergent thinking.

So, again, this is not a plug for microdosing psilocybin.

This is really in response to what

I know will be a number of different questions about what

pharmacologic agents can be used to increase creativity.

So more on that later and, again, we'll

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

and the effects of 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.

I'm 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 discussed in the episode on alcohol.

And despite what people think, there

is absolutely 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's called autobiographical scripting,

that is, a narrative about ourselves,

so self awareness, that it can enhance divergent thinking

at very low doses.

And 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.