Remote association problems are word puzzles. Subjects are given three words—pine/crab/sauce—and one goal: find a fourth word that complements each. In this case, the answer is “apple,” as in: pineapple, crab apple, and applesauce. Some people solve this problem logically, by simply testing one word after another. Others come at it via insight, meaning that the right answer simply pops into their mind. A handful of folks blend both strategies.
What Beeman and Kounios uncovered was a noticeable shift in brain function. Right before people viewed a problem they would eventually solve with insight, there was heightened activity in the anterior cingulate cortex, or ACC. As we’ve already seen, the ACC plays a role in both salience and executive attention and is the part that handles error correction by detecting conflicting signals in the brain. “This includes alternative strategies for solving a problem,” explains Kounios. “The brain can’t use two different strategies at the same time. Some are strongly activated, because they’re the most obvious. And some are weak and only remotely associated to the problem—odd thoughts, long-shot ideas. These ideas are the creative ones. When the ACC is activated, it can detect these nonobvious, weakly activated ideas and signal the brain to switch attention to them. That’s an aha moment.”
What Beeman and Kounios discovered is that the ACC lights up when we are considering those off-the-wall ideas. This is the default mode network hunting for possibilities and the salience network monitoring default mode activity, always ready to light up should this network find anything interesting. However, the ACC also governs the final step. Should we find anything interesting, the ACC switches off the default mode network and switches on the executive attention network. It’s what allows us to begin that process of consideration.
Which raises a key question: What lights up the ACC?
The answer: a good mood.
When we’re in a good mood, the ACC is more sensitive to odd thoughts and strange hunches.2 Put differently, if an active ACC is the ready condition for insight, then a good mood is the ready condition for an active ACC. The opposite is also true. While a good mood increases creativity, a bad mood amplifies analytical thought.
When we’re scared, the brain limits our options to the tried and true. It’s the logical, the obvious, the sure thing we know will work.
When we’re in a good mood, it’s the opposite. We feel safe and secure. We’re able to give the ACC more time to pay attention to weak signals. We’re also more willing to take risks. This matters. Creativity is always a little dangerous. New ideas generate problems. They can be flat-out wrong, tricky to implement, and threatening to the establishment. But this also means we pay a double penalty for negativity. A bad mood not only limits the ACC’s ability to detect those weaker signals; it also limits our willingness to act on the signals we do detect.
And while a good mood is the starting point for heightened creativity, we’ve already started down that road. A daily gratitude practice, a daily mindfulness practice, regular exercise, and a good night’s rest—that is, four activities introduced in the motivation section—remain the best recipe anyone has yet found for increasing happiness.
As each of these practices plays an additional role in stimulating creativity—beyond the amplification you get from the good mood—they’re all great ways to solve multiple problems at once. This also matters. Peak performers are too busy to solve problems one at a time. They’re always looking for multi-tool solutions. All four of these practices are multi-tool creativity boosters that supercharge our abilities to turn the novel into the useful.
Gratitude trains the brain to focus on the positive, altering its normally negatively biased information filtering tendencies. This impacts mood, but it also increases novelty—since we’re used to the negative, the positive is often refreshingly different. Since novel information is the starting point for creativity’s recombinatory process, gratitude feeds the salience network more raw material; then the good mood that results gives the default mode network a better shot at using that material to make something startlingly new.3
Mindfulness teaches the brain to be calm, focused, and nonreactive, essentially amplifying executive attention. But it also puts a little space between thought and feeling, and thus gives the ACC more time to consider those alternative, far-flung possibilities. More important, what kind of mindfulness training you’re using matters here.
Focus-based practices, such as following your breath or repeating a mantra, are fantastic for convergent thinking. But divergent thinking, which often underpins those far-flung connections, requires an open-monitoring style of meditation.4 In open monitoring, instead of trying to ignore thoughts and feelings, allow them in, just without judgment. You’re teaching the salience network to monitor the ideas being generated by the default mode network, but without the normal negativity that often comes from monitoring that stream of consciousness.
Exercise, meanwhile, lowers stress levels, flushing cortisol from our system while increasing feel-good neurochemicals, including serotonin, norepinephrine, endorphins, and dopamine. This lowers anxiety, augments our good mood, and amps up the ACC’s ability to detect more remote possibilities. Plus, the time-out from normal life that exercise provides works as an incubation period, the second stage of Poincaré’s creative cycle.
Finally, a good night’s rest provides additional benefits. It increases energy levels, providing more resources to meet life’s challenges. The resulting feeling of safety lifts our mood and increases our willingness to take risks, and both amplify creativity. Moreover, sleep is the most critical incubation period of all. When we sleep, the brain has time to find all sorts of hidden connections between ideas.5 It’s why there are so many tales of middle-of-the-night “eureka” moments.
This is also why gratitude, mindfulness, exercise, and sleep are nonnegotiables for sustained peak performance. The nonnegotiable part is key. When life gets complicated, these four practices are typically what we remove from our schedule. But the research shows this is the last choice we should make. Instead, lean into these practices, as they’re how you get the creativity needed to untangle the complicated.
TWO: BROADEN YOUR HORIZONS
At the beginning of this chapter, we talked about the older idea of a right brain–left brain divide, with creativity living on the right and logic on the left. While we have since learned that you need both sides of your brain to be creative, we also know that there are real and critical differences between the hemispheres, and those differences matter for creativity.
One of the largest differences is parts versus wholes. The left side of the brain is detail oriented, while the right side wants to understand the bigger picture. The left side sees the trees; the right side notices the forest. And if our interest is in training up creativity, then we need to learn to use the right side of the brain to take in that bigger picture.6
This is another reason that mood matters. In times of crisis, we focus on the details. We want to know if there’s problem-solving data available, right here and right now. We get analytical and logical and would prefer a simple action plan with a high chance of success.
When we’re relaxed, the system moves in the other direction. Perspective expands. We’re more likely to start thinking about the broader context and more likely to engage the right side of the brain as a result.
But this doesn’t mean that a good mood is the only way to get the brain to start considering that bigger picture. It turns out, broad vistas also broaden attention. When you see into the distance literally, you see into the distance figuratively. That’s why time in nature is so tightly coupled to creative insights. That time acts as an incubation period, and nature tells the ACC to start considering farther-flung possibilities. And since nature also has significant mood-boosting effects, this further amplifies the ACC’s ability to find those far-flung connections and further enhances creativity.7
Along similar lines, being in small, cramped spaces has the opposite effect. It shrink
s attention, getting us to focus on the parts and not the whole. So, in practical terms: Crawl out from under your desk. Go outside. Look around. Repeat as needed.
THREE: THE IMPORTANCE OF NON-TIME AND NO ONE
“Non-time” is my term for it: that vast stretch of emptiness between 4:00 A.M., when I start my morning writing session, and 7:30 A.M., when the rest of the world wakes up. This is non-time, a pitch blackness that belongs to no one. It’s not close to morning, so the day’s pressing concerns have yet to press. There’s time for that ultimate luxury: patience. If a sentence takes two hours to get right, who cares: this is non-time. If I have to write five paragraphs, throw them out, and write five more—well, there are no clocks in non-time.
And creativity needs this non-time.
Deadlines can often be stressors.8 When we’re battling the clock crunch, the pressure forces the brain to focus on the details, activating the left hemisphere and blocking out that bigger picture. Worse, when pressed, we’re often stressed. We’re often unhappy about the hurry, which sours our mood and further tightens our focus. Being time-strapped, then, is frequently kryptonite for creativity.
Yet, peak performers don’t like downtime. It’s the reason “recovery” is considered a grit skill. It’s also the reason we need to build time for non-time into our schedules. Non-time is time for daydreaming and psychological distancing. Daydreaming switches on the default mode network. If the goal is to enable our subconscious to find remote associations between ideas, then we need this network engaged.
We also need a little distance from our problems, which is another reason non-time is so crucial. This distance allows us to see things from multiple perspectives, to consider another’s point of view. But if we don’t have the time to get that psychological distance, to get space from our emotions and take a break from the world, then we won’t have the luxury of patience or the uplift of alternative possibilities.
And it’s not just non-time; it’s also no one.
Solitude matters. Certainly, a great deal of creativity requires collaboration, but the incubation phase demands the opposite. Taking a break from the sensory bombardment of the world gives your brain even more reason to wander into far-flung corners. A 2012 study run by psychologists at the University of Utah, for example, found that after four days alone in nature, subjects scored 50 percent better on standard tests of creativity.9 This is another reason to wall away distraction and start your day with 90 to 120 minutes of uninterrupted concentration. It’s a high-flow bit of non-time, and one that pays significant long-term dividends.
FOUR: PATTERN RECOGNITION, SEARCH
PARAMETERS, AND THREE-MARTINI LUNCHES
It was a strange study. In January 2012, scientists from the University of Chicago showed forty volunteers an animated movie.10 Half of the group just watched the film. The other half watched it while drinking vodka-cranberry cocktails. Afterward, everyone was given a creative problem-solving task of an already familiar variety. Volunteers were shown three words like pine, crab, and sauce and asked to pick a fourth that can be paired with each (apple). Before the drinking started both groups performed just about equally on the task.
Afterward, not so much.
Turns out, the drunkards (an exaggeration, since the boozed-up volunteers drank to a blood-alcohol level of .075, just below the .08 legal limit) outperformed the sober in both speed and accuracy. On average, those inebriated solved puzzles in 11.5 seconds; the sober needed 15.2 seconds. Moreover, the drunkards got nine right answers in comparison to the teetotalers’ six. So, is there a moral to this story? Does creativity require a return to the days of three-martini lunches?
Perhaps.
Or perhaps there’s an easier way.
First, let’s consider why booze helps us solve remote-association puzzles. Our brain is a pattern recognition system. In sober people, when the system goes hunting for patterns, it tends to search familiar, local networks. Creativity requires a more exotic approach. Instead of searching familiar territory, we need to rummage around in the brain’s dusty corners, its backrooms and forgotten closets.
So why does booze help? It softens our focus and broadens our attention. Inebriation works in the same way that big vistas in nature work. It tells the ACC to start hunting farther-flung ideas. It expands our search parameters, widening the size of the database searched by the pattern recognition system.11
Boozed-up folks are also more playful than sober ones. When we are at play, fear of failure goes down, risk-taking goes up. It’s why people solve more word association problems after watching a funny film. Humor puts us in a good mood, which increases the brain’s ability to find more remote connections. So does any of this translate into everyday experience? Well, you don’t need three-martini lunches if a funny video will work just as well.
But there are other approaches to consider, like starting with the unfamiliar.12 When faced with a creative task, where you begin has a huge impact on where you end up. If you want more creativity in your life, then you need to start with an idea that does not immediately link to the stuff you already know. By starting with the unfamiliar, we’re forcing the brain to expand search parameters and fire up its remote association skills.13
For example, if charged with writing the company newsletter, start with the weird. Instead of: “Last month, we hit our quarterly numbers,” try: “Last month, employees found a baby elephant in the lunchroom.” The point is not that you’ll end up starting the newsletter with that sentence (most likely, you’ll edit it out later). Rather it’s that trying to come up with a sentence that follows the elephant line and is actually relevant to the company newsletter forces the brain to start to make unusual connections.
Even better, no hangover.
FIVE: THINK INSIDE THE BOX
“Think outside the box” is how the saying goes, but we might have it backward. Learn to think inside the box. Constraints drive creativity. As jazz great Charles Mingus once explained: “You can’t improvise on nothing, man; you’ve gotta improvise on something.”14
In studies run at Rider University on the relationship between limits and creativity, students were given eight nouns and asked to use them in a series of rhyming couplets, the kind that might show up on a greeting card. Another group was told to simply write rhyming couplets. The work was then judged for creativity by an independent panel of experts. Time and again, the participants who started with eight nouns—a predetermined limit—outperformed the others.15
University of North Carolina psychologist Keith Sawyer saw the same thing in his studies of improv theater ensembles.16 “Improv actors are taught to be specific,” Sawyer once said. “Rather than say, ‘Look out, it’s a gun!’ you should say, ‘Look out, it’s the new ZX-23 laser kill device!’ Instead of asking, ‘What’s your problem?’ say, ‘Don’t tell me you’re still pissed off about that time I dropped your necklace down the toilet.’”
The point is: Limits drive creativity. The blank page is too blank to be useful. This is why, in my work, one of my cardinal rules is: always know your starts and your endings. These are limits that liberate. If I have these twin cornerstones in place, whatever goes in between—a book, an article, a speech—is simply about connecting the dots. But without these dots to connect, I can get stuck or worse, waste time wandering into tangential territory, which helps explain why my first novel took eleven years to complete. If creativity is required, not knowing where you’re going is the fastest way to never get there.
Important caveat: many people believe that time constraints—that is, deadlines—are a limit that enables creativity. Maybe. Maybe not. Earlier, we learned that feeling unpressured for time was one of the keys to fostering creativity. This remains true. Yet, it’s also true that deadlines can save creative projects from dragging on indefinitely. Just set that deadline far enough into the future to build long periods of non-time into your schedule. In other words, creative deadlines should fit inside that challenge-skills sweet spot—hard enough to
make us stretch, not hard enough to make us snap.
SIX: LOAD THE PATTERN RECOGNITION SYSTEM
Creativity requires pattern recognition, but what does pattern recognition require? Ammunition. If you’re not feeding the pattern recognition system new information on a regular basis, then the brain lacks the ammunition it needs to make connections between ideas. This is why “chance favors the prepared mind,” though, by chance, what we really mean is dopamine.
So foundational is pattern recognition to our survival that the brain rewards the experience. As mentioned, whenever we link two ideas together—that is, whenever the brain recognizes a pattern—we get a little squirt of dopamine. This should be familiar to anyone who has ever done a crossword puzzle or played Sudoku. That little rush of pleasure we get when we fill in a correct answer—that’s dopamine.
But dopamine also tunes signal-to-noise ratios, helping us notice even more patterns. In our crossword example, after filling in that first right answer, we often fill in a second or third immediately afterward. The dopamine that showed up from that first instance of pattern recognition drives the next instance, and so forth. It’s why creative ideas tends to spiral.
But here, too, there are caveats.
If the information we’re feeding the pattern recognition system is closely related to information it connects to—a familiar pattern—then there just isn’t enough novelty to produce the desired reaction. And this can be a problem in today’s specialized world.
While specialization is the standard path toward expertise, it’s a lousy formula for pattern recognition. “Expertise is a double-edged sword,” explains Scott Barry Kaufman.17 “Some is good for creativity. But if you’re on the extreme edge of that curve—with too much expertise—it can block you from noticing those remote associations.”
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