The Science of Creativity & How to Enhance Creative Innovation
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Welcome to the huberman lab podcast, where we discuss science and science space tools for everyday life. I am Andrew huberman and i'm a professor neurobiology and opposite logy 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 or 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 leads 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 child like play with children, or 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'll 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 world views. And we will do this in a structured way that will allow anyone, whether 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 day'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 in lab podcast today, we will discuss both scientific mechanisms and no man glatch.

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, clothes, focusing on your breath or focusing on a time or some other feature in your sensory environment, or even in your body. Later, we will talk about open monitoring meditation. 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 mooring meditation can be an extremely valuable to te for accessing your creative abilities because of the ways that 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 an 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, meditation 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 researchers at stanford.

IT is, however, part of my desired 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 sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is athletic Greens. Athletic Greens is in all in one of vitamin, mineral, probiotic drink. I've been taking athletic Greens since two thousand and twelve.

So i'm delighted that their sponsor in the podcast, the reason I started taking athletic Greens on, the reason I still take athletic Greens once or twice a day, is that IT helps me cover all of my basic nutritional need to make up for any deficiencies that I might have. In addition, IT has probiotics, which are vital for microbiology health. I've done a couple of episodes now on the so called gut microbiome and the ways in which the microbiome interact with your immune system, with your brain, to regulate mood, and essentially with every biological system relevant to health throughout your brain and body.

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K two. Today's episode is also brought to us by element. Element is an electoral like drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't that means the exact ratios of electrolier ts are an element and those are sodium, magnesium and plastic um but IT has no sugar.

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They're all delicious. So again, if you want to try element, you can go to element elementary dot com slash huberman. Today's episode is also brought to us by waking up, waking up as a meditation APP that includes hundreds of meditation programs, mindfulness trainings, yoga eja, recessions and nsd r non sleep depressed protocols.

I started using the waking up up a few years ago because even though i've been doing regular meditation since my teens and I start doing yoga edra about a decade ago, my dad mentioned to me that he had found an APP, turned out to be the waking up APP, which could teach you meditations of different durations. And they had a lot of different types of meditations to place, to bring your body into different states, and that he liked IT very much. So I gave the waking up up a try, and I too found IT to be extremely useful, because sometimes I only have a few minutes to meditate, other times have longer to meditate.

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Let's talk about creativity on the face of IT. The word creativity and creative acts might seem somewhat abstract to us, that 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, our things that we see every day car with four tires, for instance, a bicci 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 tech 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 often times 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 surprises us, but that we aren't even aware what that fundamental rule is, a return to this in a few minutes.

But the time being, let's just build up from first principles, what constitutes something creative and what does not constitute something creative. Creativity is a way of interacting with the world, or combining or recombining things in the world in a way that appears novel to us into 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 they're flying fish, although know they just kind of jump far, they don't really fly. And as a consequence, putting wings on a fish tank could be used as a metaphor for the fact that fish don't fly.

But you already knew, and I already knew, that fish don't fly. And so there's nothing novel revealed to us about the world except something we already knew. Now creative acts, on the other hand, of course, involved novel combinations of existing rule sets that could be different combinations of music or colors or shapes or technology eeta.

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 another domain, sport at sea. The examples i'll give, rather than a fish tank with wings, or, for instance, the comparison between a drawing or a very accurate painting of a face, an asia painting and a bank sea. Okay, if you don't know what those are all 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, you know, a cool of the lip, maybe a few, you know, hairs of your eyebrows, in a particularly way that really captured you accurately. I think most people would say, okay, it's accurate. IT looks a lot like the photograph for the person, and no 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 assure. And for those who that aren't familiar with, ashes involves a lot of repeating pattern.

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 repeat IT over and over and over again, or stones repeated over and over again, or staircases over and over again. Ashes capture elements from the outside world, and faithful ly represent them, but faithful ly 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 trying make us a 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 town 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 particularly at molecular scales, we can get down to the level of atoms and so forth. Everything is repetitive. It's the same thing, 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 at that sort. Most of time, we're looking out on landscapes or at people's faces at sea. And very seldom do we see highly repetitive patterns of that scale.

So what ashes 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 and codes repetition as things not to be interested in, and the things that stand out against that repetition as the things to be interested. And so called signal to noise. What issues 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 assure, there are unusual patterns, and those completely disappear to us. Now, when you look at in that, what you probably see in what I see are just a bunch of birds repeated over and over again, or buildings, or staircases repeated over and over again. And you may like ashes and you may not.

That's not the point. Today, we're not talking about taste, in particular, creative acts where 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 asia through these repetition patterns is an inversion of the way that are brain Normally encode 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 asia. Now when I say pops out, I don't mean that you look at an asia and go, oh, Normally I don't see repetition. Normally I see the unusual stuff at, 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 work. Let me give you a different example also from the visual art world. Let me give you the example of banca bank sea 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 banks I, bank I is an artist that most often does two dimensional artwork. So these would be tens s or paintings, or drawings, like many artists, and does them in an urban landscape, an actual city or suburban landscape, that is, he draws our sensors or graffiti in a very cyp tic way. I should say, no one really knows who banks he is, or when he does his art.

He just reveals his art by putting IT up. But he does this in the context of cities in on three dimensional objects. So a good example would be, he will sense lm next to a phone booth, a police officer, or he will graft iti next to an actual fire hydrant, a dog lifting, its like to urinate.

E, on that fire hydroid. Now what's interesting about bank is 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 graffam is that all city art and murals is that. So what's unique about bank sea, what's unique about bank sea, or I should say bank sees the actual art, is that he combines two dimensional 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 is like to urate on the fire hydrant.

That's a scene that most people in. In fact, most children are familiar with from cartoons, are from our basic understanding of the steroid pe of dogs. And I must tell you, having owned a male dog, a bulldog, costolo, for many years, hydrants were a particular target for costolo.

Of course, everything was a particular target for costolo. Urinating outdoors none's. He liked to be on fire hydrants.

That itself is not interesting. Seeing a photograph of a dog raising its like to p on a fire hydrant is not interesting. Seeing a painting of that isn't interesting. Seeing an actual dog orating on a fire hundred isn't interesting. In fact, seeing a painting in two dimensions of a dog raising its leg to, of course I can to actually in IT, but give you the impression that I would urinate on that fire hydrant isn't particularly interesting, except for the fact that IT revealed 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 hydroid, even if the dog is drawn in two dimensions and the fire hydrogen is in dimensions, allows the concept of dog and fire hybrid to emerge pop out of 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 hit home one of banks's more famous paintings is a rather politically charged one, which is of a girl holding a mukee. Balloons in this two dimensional drawing was put onto the west wall, dividing territories in the midst east.

A very controversial issue. The controversies is that issue, not what I wanted get into, but I don't think anyone without bt that is a controversial issue. The two dimensional drawing of the girl with the balloons on the actual wall turns out to be quite interesting as an art piece, because what IT reveals to us is the entire controversy around the presence of that wall, and the desire for certain people to breach that wall, and the desire for other people to insist that that will not be reached 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 the three dimensional structure to pop out of us in a way that if, for instance, we had just seen a photograph of somebody next to that waller with a latter, or if we just seen a drawing of a girl holding a bucket of balloons on a drawing of that wall to not emerge. In other words, IT captures two fundamental features of a visual system, our ability to encode things in two dimensions and understand mumbles, and our ability to understand things in three dimensions, and particularly the wall is a three dimensional object, is really interesting because it's an actual physical barrier.

So showing IT as the actual physical barrier that IT is in real space in three dimensions, turns out to allow the interaction between those two things, the concept, the controversy, to pop out of us. And they just 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, a rough goes, which are just color on canvas, are particularly interesting source of information about the way that the brain and codes color later, all filling what exactly what that information is. You may like roth goes, you may not. But i'll tell you one thing.

When you look at a rock go, 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 is 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 op, dillon song, or let zelin song, ploid song, pretty closely, pretty accurately, to the way that one is played. But of course, that's not creative.

That's just like the photograph for the accurate portrait, somebody who's face, or you may hear an acoustic version of what's Normally an electric guitar song or electrical song or vice vera, somewhat creative, sometimes sounds even Better than the original, but not particularly creative. However, each and every one of us has a particular taste music. Maybe it's classical, may be its rock, maybe it's punk, maybe 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 of 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, assure you what is 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 is revealing is not splayed out for you, for instance, is not told to you, oh, this is the way you Normally hear. And now you're hearing things differently sometimes. Is this the change in, for instance, in the way that words are accented, or the way the sentences are constructed? This often you hear in hip p, the way that sentences are constructed can be divided up, not as Normal declaration sentences, the way that are typically written, but the way that sentences are chopped up and and fractured, revealed to us new meaning, and in fact, enhanced meaning about particular words that we wouldn't see if IT was written as a paragraph.

And then song is a script that would be the same as the one that we would read again. The point is that what is exciting, a novel to you is just the way that you hear IT. But it's exciting and novel to you because there are circuits within the brain that when we hear or see or feel or experience known elements in new ways that are truly creative, the way that those neural circuits function is change.

And when neural circuits changed the way that they functioned simply by way of what comes into our eyes, our ears, in the way that we experience our feelings, there is the release of chemicals, including the release of the chemical doping and other neuromodulators as well, that make us feel both surprised, delighted. And this is very key, excited in the anticipation that we might see you again. So with the understanding in mind that true creativity involves the novel combination of some elements, could be notes of music, could be numbers, could be visual elements like lines or colors, could be physical movement at sea, but novel combinations of some things that revealed to us something fundamental about the way that our brain and or the world work.

And of course, as I mention before, that fundamental thing, mayor, may not be consciously accessible to us. We may not know what exactly IT is that 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 known, where somebody being creative as an added, think about the verb creativity, that is, what are the steps required, and therefore, what are the cells and circuits and thoughts that that are required in order to be creative? This element of thinking about verbs then allows us to say, okay ay, what are the various steps in coming up with a creative, 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 kind of a goofy name, because the neural circuits that are 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 in our behavior in very deliberate ways. And that is largely accomplished through the use of the neural circuitry that sits right behind the forebrain, this so called prefrontal cortex. Now, the prefrontal cortex involves many different subjects. IT has a bunch of different parts, just like any country has different states at that are and provinces.

Executive function involves the prefrontal cortex and some other neural structures, but for sake of this discussion, executive function and the prefrontal cortex are mainly responsible for suppressing action, that is, for eliminating choices among the infinite number of choices that exist, for instance, of what colors to combine on a painting, or what lines to draw, or what notes to play, or what movements to make in a sports endeavor, what numbers to include in a mathematics endeavor, or what words and letters and symbols and sentences to include in writing a creative passage. The second network is this so called default mode network. There's a lot of discussion out days about the default mode network as IT relates to consciousness and meditation is that a the default mode network does many different things, but in the context of our discussion of our 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 this 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 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 close. Okay, by closing your eyes and shutting yourself after the outside sensory world, you start to engage much more of your brain machinery dedicated towards what's going on inside you, so called the interaction tion. But also what you're thinking about, your thinking, whether not your thoughts are complete or incomplete, whether or not they are fragmentary, an away that goes from one thought to another, distantly in the past or present to future.

Etta, depending on time of day, how well arrested you are, how stressed you are, how happy you are, the default on network will take you through a journey of different types of thoughts, different types of feelings that set a this, this types of thoughts and feelings are not as interesting as the fact that when you close your eyes, you are essentially aging. This default de network, which is essentially the network associate with imagination, and imagination based on elements that exists only within your head, that is, within your brain a, and therefore must rely on memory of previous experiences. As soon as you close your eyes, you are shutting yourself off from the sensory world.

So by definition, you can no longer be bringing in novel experiences in that moment. You're relying on your library of existing experiences in your memory of those in order to imagine new things. And you're doing this in a very and a free associated way.

You're not trying to imagine new things is just whatever guiza to the surface. okay. So we ve got the executive network, which is involved in suppressing particular thoughts or actions.

We have the default de network, which is involved in imagination. And the default mode network, I should mention, also involves a sub region of the prefrontal cortex that got the medial prefrontal cortex, but other brain regions as well. And then the final element within the circuits underlying creativity is this so called salients 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 map there about what's going on in the outside world and how those combine with what's going on in your internal landscape that is within your body. Also a brain region called the A C C R. And ten, excuse me, and interior singular cortex.

And the amiga, us. So a lot of information is mapped with in the silence network about how we feel and how we feel in relation to things that are happening around us and within. And the sAiling network has one main job, which is to pay attention to what's most interesting, either in the world or inside us, in terms of feelings or experiences.

Okay, so we ve got three networks, executive network, which is there to suppress choices in terms of actions we could take, but decide not to, or things we could think about, but choose not to or try not to. The defauts mode network, which is basically the catalogue library of previous experiences that we have available to us that would act a sort of the paints on a pallet or the possible ingredients that could go into a recipe. All of that has to, again, arise from previous experience.

We can close our eyes and suddenly be able to access all the million that we've never heard before or all of 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, a kind of swords around.

It's not very structured unless we're actively trying to think about something. And then we have the same 点 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 of those three networks work together to create things. And when I say create things, we gan have to really underscore our definition, creativity.

Creativity is a rearrangement of existing elements into novel combinations that reveal something fundamental about how we are the world, world. 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 that they can also have a particular utility or use in the world like a piece of technology that is actually useful, like an upper a smart phone or computer actually has utility or a vehicle. You know, there are creative acts that LED to the formation of vehicles and computers. That said, A.

But the point is that just merely coming up with novel combinations of things like wings on a fish tank, that's not creative or it's not creative in any kind of meaningful way because it's simply not useful. IT doesn't reveal anything fundamental, new or purposeful. IT doesn't allow us to think about or interact with the world or ourselves in novel ways, whether things, people, actions and ideas that are truly creative really change the way that we are able to access the world.

They act as portal les to the world, into ourselves. So now you have some about the brain areas and networks involved in creativity. But I want to be very clear that any time we talk about mechanisms in 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 interior single late core tex or the fact that the prefrontal cortex is involved in executive function, it's that that's fine. It's less important that you know the names of things that you understand, the action steps that those things take, that is the verb actions that those particular brain areas engage in order to arrive at a particular end point. In the end point we're talking about today is creativity.

I want to discuss creativity in terms of what actually goes into being creative and IT. Turns out there are just two elements, and those two elements are now well understood from the perspective of psychology. And fortunately, the neuroscience well supports what the psychology says, advice first up. 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, in the rest of that your world can experience, are divergent thinking and convergent thinking. And divergent thinking and convergent thinking are very straight forward to understand.

Divergent thinking is taking some known object or event in the world, or sport, or concept that could be running, that could be a musical note IT could be jumping IT could be a particular color on a piece of paper and asking yourself, how many different things could that thing actually be? You might say, well, running is running. But let's use divergent thinking as a way to illustrate what divergent thinking is.

If I show you a picture of somebody running, I say, what do you see? And you see, 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 said, how many different things can you think about based on this picture that you see of somebody running? Now, if you are able to engage divergent thinking, you can say, running to the store, running away from a lion, running towards somebody I love, or maybe you have a moral aborted imagination. And you could say, running in front of a bus to grab a kid so the kid doesn't get hit by a bus, or running toward concert because i'm so excited about the particular concert.

And then IT starts to spoon into a story. In other words, divergent thinking involves taking one simple, what we will call in neuroscience, or psychologies stimulus. One image were sound is set, 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 could involve exactly that. I'd show you pictures, or play you sounds or words or notes or described to you events in history, and try and see how many things can out from that into diverse, diverse, even distant types of concepts and pictures. Okay, so let'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 idea is that you have about one thing, the Better your diversion 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 you listen, i'm just holding up a pen in front of me. You just write them out or say them out over the next three minutes. That would be an example of divergent thinking.

However, if you just said black pen, red pen, White pen, Green pen is a that's not very divergent thing, is only divergent in the context of color space. And I say space, that's just a kind of nerd speak for one particular domain of thinking, whether if you said red pen, White pen, S A 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. While there you go, divergent thinking is SHE taking one element and coming up with many, many answers.

And in the context of divergent thinking, any answer goes, but as well 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 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, arana atan, 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 a anton are not linked up in our brain and the observers brain in any kind of meaningful way, it's only interesting to you because you are the only one that understands the rule that underlies the link between this pen and around the ten. Whereas if you come up with something different, that somehow tells me and everybody else something interesting about pens or range tans. Now that's a truly creative idea.

I don't have such an example in mind, but later, or give you some examples of how you can actually march down the path of divergent thinking and use that executive network to suppress certain options, to cross off certain answers because again, any answers valid, but not all valid answers are interesting or useful, and you can cross those off and arrive at the most interesting and truly creative answer. A couple more things about divergent thinking. Divergent thinking largely taps into the network of the brain involved in mental flexibility.

So this is a different aspect of our preferences cortexes, which is not based on executive function in our ability to reduce options, but rather areas of the preference to court that are available to generate multiple options and actually suppress context, right? To forget the pens are just for writing, for instance, and that pens can do other things like hold the door open. It's really kind of an unusual use of open.

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 that, like you know, about divergent thinking is that divergent thinking involves a sort of exploration. It's a wandering through of ideas that you already had 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 forges 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 in movies especially, we have this idea in mind, that of this limitless concept, that or that we have these hidden genius that somehow have access to all the math knowledge without ever having done any formal math.

Actually, I was flying back from texas recently in goodwill. Hunting was on somebody's screen. I don't want to watch movies on the plane very often, sometimes, but not often. And I was remembering in that movie, you know, you've got this math genius who is a janitor MIT at set and apparently just has access to all this. Knowledge is 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 or something else, but this idea that there are um incredible genius among us that just spontaneously have so much knowledge that by far the exception, rather than the rule, of course, and may not even actually exist. I'm sure someone put in the comments examples where this actually exists. More often than not, what you find is that people who have extreme virtuosity in a given area put many, many years into developing the basic substrates, the basic building blocks of whatever IT is their craft happens to be where they demonstrate virtuosity.

This is a very important understand. Nonetheless, divergent thinking is the critical element for initiating the creative process. Again, thinking about creativity as a verb. And divergent thinking involves taking some starting point, in this case of pen, and then radiating out from that in a fairly unconstrained, what biog was called a random walk, just kind of 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 combination of things and testing those to see whether not they are interesting, relevant or delights or other people, or scare us, or other people, or three us or other people. In other words, a testing of whether or not there are some fundamental rule to emerge again. I am repeat this many, many times throughout this episode, and i'm not going to apologize for that because I think it's so important.

Understand that creativity is not just novel. There are novel combinations of things that reveal something fundamental, and they're 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 of something truly creative doll in its expression. And that's because what is repeating to us over and over again is this fundamental rule that Normally we can't see or here 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 and thinking is, as the name suggests, just the opposite of divergent thinking. Convergent thinking would be, for example, if I give you an image, I tell you the following things.

I say we water and engine. The concept that I happened have in mind is that of a plane that can land on water, right? Most planes don't land on water or not intended to land on water.

One would hope that their plane doesn't land on water unless it's a plane design 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, right? I'm sure there are other answers.

There are other convergent thinking modes that can take you to an answer that would be valid. But there are not many. And here, what's really most important that i'm not asking you to pull 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, they're are planes that can land on water and wing water and engine combined within those things. They are fundamental features are in fact necessary, but not sufficient for having a plane that can land on water.

Okay, that's just one example of convergent thinking. 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 buds all of those in a real world concept that obey the laws of nature or physics in some way.

For insist you can just come up with some, uh, you know, answer that said, A A bird that swallowed in engine and that happens to be a sea bird. You could come up with that, but that actually not something that happens or very look at all. And so IT seems like kind of A A mission march of things that are really just designed for you to try and accomplish and 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 converging and thinking is also to access our memory banks and our understanding about the outside world. Just as IT, we're 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, that 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, you know, black pen, red pen versus pen. And door stop pen acting as a doors p those 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 where, as with conversion thinking, you're really trying to bind these things together.

And so the key element for conversion 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 would would be useful to you or to me.

Rather, what you're about to learn is truly incredible. What IT is, is we're going to talk about one single molecule doping, 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, where as dopamine in another brain network underlies convergent thinking. And if at this point in this episode, you think, okay, when am I going to get the tools to understand creativity and how to be creative?

What I can assure you is that if you understand divergent thinking or hopeful ly, now you do. And you can understand what convergent thinking is. And you can understand that dopamine is responsible for both divergent thinking and convergent thinking, but through separate pathways.

Well then, if you can understand how those two separate pathways work and how to engage them differentially there in live 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 dopamine hits, which is popular language, describing the feeling of pleasure that we get from pretty much anything that we like her, that we continue to engage in repeatedly. So some people talk about the dopa mean hit that they get from somebody attractive, that they like texting them back, or the dolph in hit that they get from social media, the dolph in hit that they get from sugar, or the do they get from this or from that. To be honest, the concept of dobin hits is not one that I favour.

Because in general, whenever people talk about dobbin hits, typically they're talking about activities such as social media, which depine may be involved at some level, but often it's the case that the behavior associate 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 that makes sense why motivation, desire, movement would be linked up through a common, in this case, in a modulator chemical like doping. 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 intensive involved in neural circuits in the brain, that are involved in processes that are taking us beyond the confines of our skin. That is, that motivate us to go do something in terms of action in the world.

Now, that state might seem distantly placed from a discussion about creativity, but as we will learn a little bit later, one of the most useful tools for engaging creativity and becoming more creative is to think about action elements with an 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 cypher um forgive me, but I promise I return to IT later and I will make IT Crystal clear. There are four major circuits s in the brain that use dopamine, although I should mention there are additional circuits as well.

In fact, your eye even contains neurons that released open in that control, the sensitivity of your ride, different times of day to light at sea. The four major circuits in the brain that realized dopa mean, however, are used for four major purposes. And i'll described 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 ive movements. And we will return to ive movements to why there are so important for understanding creativity, and maybe even for generating creativity a little bit later. The name of this 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 nicaro stride al pathway. okay? The substantial negras, a brain area that is very dark, that projects to an area called the dorsal stride that contains a match of subversion. So again, for those 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 cotti and puta um in the doral straight and receiving put from the substantial igra in neuron atomy when we name something we say the origin of that thing and where IT connected so negros ride or tells you that there is a connection between the substantial ni grc because IT came first negros erith and then straight is where IT ends up so negros iao pathway is involved in generating bodily movements. It's involved in eye movements. And IT is actually a brain area that engaged when you think about movement even just have a story in your mind about walking, or a story in your mind about running, where a story in your mind about driving this area is engaged.

Very interesting brain area. So that's the first circuit, very important understand. And I tell you right now, that is the brain circuit that is engaged when you undergo divergent thinking. Now that itself should be interesting, right? Even if you don't remember any of the names of the things I just told you, that you have a brain circle that even if you just think about walking, IT becomes more active. And the dopamine e is involved in that brain activity.

And if you recalled a virgin, thinking involves taking a concept as boring as a pen, and thinking about other concepts that could link up with that pen in some sort of way, logical or eo, logical, right? The bridge could be completely abstract and really fantastical, with a bunch of different ideas in between, like a pen acting as a doorstop, because of some situation, where do you need to run down stairs in a fire and get back up stairs quickly to rescue somebody vy divergent, or as divergent as black pen to red pen. But what amazing is that that same circuit is the one that involved in physical movement, in generating and thinking about physical movement, that turns out to be vitally important for tapping into the creativity process, a really frame that up in your mind or committed to memory.

Now the second dopamine circuit, asic with creativity, is the one associated with convergent thinking, which, again, is the kind of 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 mission critical pathway.

The mesa critical pathway is involved in motivation, and IT has an emotional component too. Now IT will become clear in a few months 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 if you want latter venture al 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 mesac ticals area is involved in motivation and emotion, and is critical for focus and persistence.

IT is distinct from a very nearby area just sitting right next door. This is called me olympic 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 mess olympic pathway for now because it's not critical to divergent or convergent thinking and it's not critical to the process of creativity, at least as far as we know.

But I mentioned IT because this is the third in the four total energies circuit s and then the fourth circuit, certainly one i've never talked about before in this podcast, which is doesn't mean anything except that we haven't gotten into IT yet, is that tubarao in front debuted pathway. And that is the pathway associated with dopamine and your petite tory gland in the release of hormones in particular, that travel to the over if you have over reader to your tests, if you have testes, and trigger the release of things like estrogen and testosterone at sara. 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 negotiator circuit, which is involved in movement and divergent thinking. And that alone should set a flag up for you.

Like, wow, just thinking about new ideas has something to do with movement, with physical movement and the topmen circuit. That is the message tico 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 doping? 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 the circuits. And just for sake of simplicity, so I don't have to keep saying meats and missile tico here going forward, i'm going to talk about the dopamine circuit that's associated with divergent thinking or the dopamine circuit associated convergent thinking.

And again, divergent thinking are the two processes that have to occur. usually. First, divergent and convergent thinking them 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 to find what right means a little bit later. But you already sort of 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.

Now I realized 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 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 nature to enhance convergent thinking, because both convergent and divergent thinking are critical for the creative process. Now I should emphasize that some people out there, either by training or by genetics, or by both, will be naturally Better at divergent or convergent thinking. And in fact, we now know in a kind of almost poetic kind of way, that naturally occurring variations in genes, which underlying naturally occurring variations in the percentage of doped in one set of brain circuits of versus another, do seem to relate to whether 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 divergent thinking and other people are Better convergent thinking. Nature and nurture is something that can never really be tease apart exactly because, of course, if someone has a natural proclivity for something based on their genes, you can 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 is set a, it's a very hard to separate nature and nurture, because somebody with a natural proclivity for things might engage in those things more at set.

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 kinds of activities that you engaged in, in your earlier years, in particular in the years between age five and twenty five. And for those you that are aged between five and twenty five, 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 twenty five 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 not you are a naturally Better diversion or conversion thinking, or you require 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 to hip a campus at that. 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, are totally new ideas about how objects or notes of music, or foods, or taste, or whatever can be combined, we have to do that with preexisting knowledge.

And yet, what we need to do in order to engage divergent thinking is suppressed 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 is, I think, is what people mean when they encourage the exploration of creativity by so called boundary exploration. Hear about this a lot, and kind of the self help and the psychology, and i'm not at all disparaging of the 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 we'll say, you know, you have to take risks or you have to suppress judgment, but how do you actually do that? 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.

Why is 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 for you in the lowest position, IT doesn't really matter. You're lying down. You're standing up. You could, in theory, to open monitary meditation with eyes open. And that would be an interesting variant on IT.

But for sake of the discussion right now, this is focused 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 after that, that should kill 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 kind of kill off the narratives of what has to be related to what, and come up with new narratives.

You still need to understand possibilities, but you need to forget prior understanding of what those possibilities have to be and start talking about what those possibilities could be. And so that IT turns out, involve suppression. A certain brain areas. Open mooring meditation is typically done for about ten to thirty 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 mooring meditation is simply a matter of having you sit there or lie down, close your eyes and to allow whatever surfaces in your mind to surface. And what you practice is the practice of non judgment. Now, non judgment itself is a little bit of an abstract theme, because, of course, the moment you say don't judge, you and others start to judge is just the way that the brain works.

You say, don't think about elephant. And you think about elephant as a private, natural. You go to an edge of A A bridge or a Cliff, and you think about jumping off, and 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 as the thought about what would happen if you did OK.

So open mooring meditation evolves, dedicating a certain amount of time where you close your eyes, and whatever thoughts are, rise, whatever emotions are, rise, whatever ideas, as 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 just one for a long period of time, all of that is fine. In other words, whatever surfaces, surfaces that's open mooring meditation, and that we know from brain imaging studies, and we know from measurements of doping, in particular brain circuit s, and we know from people who train with open monitor meditation on a regular basis, improves diversion thinking capability. So in terms of tools, practicing open mooring meditation, or what I would just call open mooring thinking, is going to be immensely useful.

And this is actually an opportunity cue up, something that I mentioned in our episode on meditation, which goes deep into the different kinds of meditation involving focus in word, in outward. IT said, you're welcome to check out that episode. It's a huberman lab dot 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 redirection, or 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 can attend to that and redirect to that rather than think about as a meditation, 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, an circuits in particularly along the negotiator, the 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 dedicates 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, that feels a lot easier than the meditation associated with convergent thinking. Now the conversion thinking meditation is the local 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, i'd prefer that you think of just as a perceptual exercise, involves sitting or lying down, closing your eyes, focusing either on your breath or some element of your body could be, you know, the tops of your knees or the clasp of your hands. IT could be focusing on an auditory tone. You could even do that, eyes open and stare, point on a wall or a flame of light, what IT, whatever IT happens to me, 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 pass through or analyze a bunch of different choices, and to persist in choice selection, and therefore, more rapidly arrived at the correct answer.

This is well established. And in fact, in the episode I did with a wonderful guest, doctor wanne, a zuko from new york university, SHE talked about how a daily meditation of about ten to thirteen minutes performed for about eight weeks, that with the exporter, that study greatly increases people's ability to focus, and in fact, their memory. And that's exactly the point, which is that conversion thinking, as eventually before IT, requires persistence, focus and access to specific memories.

So if you are somebody who wanted to get Better focusing, that is the meditation for you. However, because today we're talking about creativity. If you are somebody who wants to get Better, 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 five to ten minutes and then transitions to focus attention for maybe five to ten minutes. Because the positioning of divergent thinking and then convergent thinking close together more closely resembles what the creative process really is and what IT typically involves. Most of us would love to have a situation where we can spend a morning or a day or a week brainstorming, just kind of brainstorm.

Whatever we think about is fine. That's divergent thinking. Whatever elements just throw them up on the White board. We sometimes see people and companies doing this at retreat, britain, people into a novel environment.

So let just forget all the rules and let just come up with new ideas about some thing, new new uses of something, new strategies. And you and nothing is too crazy. Nothing is off limits.

And sure, that's A A useful action, I so called brain storming. But at some point, there's the requirement to cross off things. And typically, that's done later in the retreat or later in the meeting or later in the weekend.

And that's a wonderful way to approach creativity and to try and be creative. But not a lot of people trained for that on a regular basis. So what I just described to you, our research tested tools for training for divergent thinking and convergent thinking.

And I went encourage people who are interested in being more creative to try and do this 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 is very consistent doing maybe five minutes of open monitor meditation and five minutes immediately after a 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 A lengthy description of the different lines of evidence that the corresponding areas of the brain are active in each of these different kinds of meditation.

But what I can tell you is that there have been some beautiful called loss of function studies where particular brain areas are either depleted of doped, or where dopamine, in some cases, I guess, what we call gain of functional studies, although not the kind of gain of functional studies, association of violation ing, different gain of function studies where you enhance the level of dopamine in the brain. And 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 for ecology here.

IT turns out that there are other ways to elevate dopamine that make us Better, a divergent and convergent thinking, in particular by using mood. And now i'd like to talk about how, what mood you are in when you happen to start a creative process or try and do a sort of training, such as open mooring meditation or focus meditation, how your mood relates to your level of dopamine at baseline, where we call your tonic, as it's called, meaning consistent or ongoing level of dopamine. How that dictate tes, 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 delph mine, which in some cases is good and in some cases is bad, I should mention.

And in other words, determine how you feel in one moment should dictate what sort of tool you should use in order to become more creative. The relationship between mood and creativity is a fascinating one that is bridged by one main feature, which is the amount of dopamine e present in this negotiator pathway. And there's a really wonderful correct or measure of the amount of dopamine that's active in that pathway that can be addressed noninvasively in the laboratory.

As I mention, the negotiator 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 unless IT relies on dopamine levels in this pathway, and in fact, we can state very confidently that when dobin 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 worth than among about to describe as largely the work of two authors who've done wonderful workings across several papers. Unfortunately for me, their names are difficult to pronounce.

I apologize to them and their relatives for um what is sure to be correct pronunciation. But the last names of these authors are chair mahoni and homo in the netherlands. So Cherry, mahinda and homo done a number of different papers or studies, rather of the relationship with doing 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 elective test, and if they were, did your 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, do, if you're in a good mood, you can kind of be more playful about the exploration about what could happen with these notes of music or these foods that set a.

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 blame, so I can be measured more invasively through brain imaging, even through blood draws or other methods to measured to p if dopamine levels are very, very high, when 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 y's in the manic phase, or somebody who has taken Matthews tie 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 fixed on one particular tunnel of ideas, like the idea that they're onna run for president tomorrow, this is unfortunately typical of people who are bipolar, which is not to say that everybody who runs for president is by polar.

Rather, people who are bipolar often have these delusions of grander. There somehow can be present simply because they decided to, and that they were selected to do this at settat. Ta ideas about themselves and other people that are very constrained, in other words, not very divergent. So divergent thinking is favoured by having elevated levels of dopamine, but not too high. Well, that, of course, creates a knni.

M, how do you know how much doping you need and how to achieve those elevate levels of doping while leaving aside people who are suffering from a manic episode? What cheer mahin ian homo have discovered is that if people are in sort of a low mood, they're not feeling great. Maybe they're depressed, but they're just not feeling that great.

They feel, you know, on a scale of one to turn around a two or three, maybe a four, the probability that they will be able to engage effectively and divergent thinking is quite low. However, the good news is they are typically very acceptable table to elevations in mood through observing or hearing positive stories, listening to music that they like any kind of so called inspirational stimulus. Now this is good news.

What this means is that if you're somebody is not feeling very motivated. To engage in divergent, think you're not feeling very creative, you're feeling a little low. But the thing to do in that case is actually to take external stimuli, things that you know that you like, and start interacting with those stimulus, get your mood elevated, and then to engage in divergent thinking.

However, what chairman hini and homo have also shown is that if people are already in a very good mood, elevating dopamine further is not conducive and in fact is detrimental to divergent thinking. And in that case, they would be Better off, for example, not engaging in any activities or, you know, taking anything in the way of forever logy that would further increase their dopamine and probably limiting the amount of external stimuli that are coming in through music and visual stimuli, really focusing on divergent thinking in the creative process immediately. Now this is important.

In an earlier episode, both on bipolar and on other forms of depression, I talked about how rates of bipolar, manic episodes and dopamine levels and creativity tend to be correlated. Now, unfortunately, rates of suicide are twenty to thirty times higher in people who have bipolar disorder as well. And so there's a whole dark side, two with 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 sort of intuitive senses to whether or not our mood is. Suppose we could bin this in the three categories is kind of um yes, you know happy, excited, positive mood. And of course, they're going to be levels to that low and like we're kind of man kind of in the middle.

So if you're in a low mood or of my mood, by all means engage in something probably for about you know five or thirty minutes that elevates your mood before trying to engage in divergent and thinking. However, if you happen to be in a pretty positive mood, even if you're not turn out of ten on mood, then bringing in additional stimuli, 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 is very briefly, caffeine increases levels of doping receptions. So it's not the caffeine is bad. In fact, caffeine can be neuroprotective.

IT can enhance so forth. But divergent thinking is sort of anti focus. IT requires just enough focus to be able to come up with new ideas, but you actually don't want to be overly focused. Focus is more conducive to conversion thinking.

In fact, that's exactly what the literature shows, is that caffeine, because its effects on apple eine and related systems in the brain, like a denot's ine, 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 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 the 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 in ways that this information can be organized. I deliberately abstained from caffeine during those abouts of work and when structuring everything according to the decisions I had already made, I purpose sly in just a caffeine prior to that. Now of course, constructing a podcast episode is not uh, really the ultimate example of a creative act because of course, it's taking existing information.

It's arranging in novel ways, but IT doesn't necessarily allow key concepts to pop out in the way that, for instance, banki or a off go and asia would pop out. Okay, i'm certainly not naive and 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 coming to the laboratory, this could be measured by your frequency of blinking. For Better, 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 paid 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 not you're in low, medium or high mood. No problem using that broad binning, right? You could scale in on one to ten and then decide whether not you're going to use some dopamine elevating stimulus from the outside again, could be music, could be exercise.

As an excEllent way to elevate me, i'll talk about another well established one from from the research leader that is known to elevate dopamine by sixty five percent 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 to creativity what you need and apply accordingly. Because as cheremis and homo have shown, whether or not you are in a low mood, media mood or high mood really can determine whether 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 that, you want to pressure test IT. We'll talk a little bit more about what that means in a three step process.

And just a little bit, I would strongly encourage you to look at that process is a very linear process in which they are all right and wrong answers. And there are the use of caffeine and appropriate dosages and dosages for caffeine that are safe and in fact, performance enhancing were covered in the epsom. And caffeine turns out it's one to three milligrams per kilogram of body weight, by the way. And if you want to leverage caffeine or maybe in other forms of healthy legal stimulants, those are covered in the caffeine. Epsom, 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 doping, ought to be in this negotiator circuit and other circuits and to do that by learning to assess one's mood and pay attention to what kind of move they happen to be in and then to leverage tools. Behavioral tools may be pharmacology cools, provided they're safe and their legal in order to either increase to pine or to elect not to increase doping in order to access the creative process. Now i've mentioned for maccoll gy a few times.

I'd like to talk about that just a little bit more in the context of dopamine. First of all, there is no supplement or drug that you or anyone else can take that will selectively elevate dopamine e in only one of the four circuits that I described before. Okay, 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 is illegal um and safe and said a whatever motive delivery, there is no technology that exists at this time that would allow you to selectively amplified dopamine.

For instance, just in the negotiator pathway or just in the mesa cortical pathway again, the negotiator pathway associated divergent thinking, the musical dal pathway associated with cognitive sisters and convergent thinking if you were to amplify dopy levels, for instance, by taking the amino acid precor of dopamine l terracing, something that occasionally, due to enhance dopamine levels for sake of work or energy, five hundred thousand grams or a thousand milligrams, even available. Racine, sometimes all combine that with other things like alpha gpc. It's going to enhance dop.

Me transmission in the negro o pathway that is a critical pathway, but also in the me olympic pathway and also, for that matter, in the tube in frontier lar pathway associated with the pauvre. 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 top me. So it's cocaine or eph to me, and those will greatly increase dopamine, but non selectively across all those different pathways. And likewise, with any drugs that inhibit or block or tag, izis is called dopamine.

This is why people who, for instance, have schizophrenia a and take drugs to suppress auditory hallucinations. Some of those drugs work because they block the so called d two receptor of the dopamine pathway. D two receptors are present in all four of the dopa energy pathways in the brain, and often times those drugs will in fact suppress psychotics, symptoms, auditory hu cino at set up, because they reduce, stop, mean.

But those people often times will have problems with movement. They will express what called in the clinical literature, tardive. This kinda kind of driving in the face and the body from suppression of doping within the negotiator pathway, which is associated with movement.

They were sometimes have deficits in eyes blinking people with parkinson's who actually have selective deficits of depine within the substantial igra negro street to number of substances. Nigra showed deficits in what in movement, in the smoothness of movement. Often times they won't blink at all.

They will have kind of a blank stare, and they have other issues as well. So if you're somebody who is interested in increasing dopamine e through the use of legal safe pharmacology, and I would hope you would be the case, they're always to do that reasonably safely for most people. Again, people with bipolar disorder issues with the diplomatic gic pathway should not do this.

I know nowadays is a lot of use of drugs that increased dopamine, such as riddling, adderall, modano or modafinil, often prescribed for things like IT attention deficit hyperactivity disorder within an entire episode on A D H D and pharmacology prescription supplement and behavioral nutritional tools, radiation. You can find that episode of huberman lab 点 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 at set up.

And the fact that they increase focus, they are effective, that they do have their side effects, sometimes severe, sometimes habit forming, sometimes even addicting as well. But the fact that the increase focus should automatically tell you something that those drugs, in particular, increased dopamine in the so called missile deal. And these olympic 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 doping within this mis olympic and missile cortical pathway. So yes, those drugs increased opening across the board, but there doesn't m to be some waiting of dopamine told 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 rest. Or somebody else is board certified who can really govern that. There are, however, ways to increase depine more evenly across the board using non prescription approaches, and one I already mentioned, which is all tyre take, typically in dosages of five hundred two one thousand milgram altera.

Acy is not as potent in the casing doping as are the prescriptions drugs that I referred to before tends to be milder for some people. IT can have a very amplified effect. They feel that 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 caine of a one to three milligrams per kilogram of body way per day also will increase depine receptor efficacy and density, which will make any existing dopamine more effective, whether not that dopamine is triggered by things like altera acy, nary.

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 cafe. But again, caffeine should be taken prior to convergent thinking type task, probably more than IT should be taken prior to diversion thinking test. And of course, there there are other legal supplements that can elevate dopa mean as well.

In particular, fano eth aiming is very effective in doing that. Six hundred milligrams of that has a brief effect, lasting only about thirty to forty five minutes. But this is one that many people find beneficial for sake of studying or for creative thinking and so on.

And so for now, that pharmacology, and in fact, there is an extensive landscape of prescription and supplement based pharmacology, and indeed, nutrition for incense, the consumption of foods that are high and alteration acy, such as aged, permanent on cheese, for instance, of all things, very, very high and altiera y the precor to doping certain foods. You can look up online which foods contain high levels of alter racy, in which ones are compatible with your nutrition. But leaving from ecology aside, there's a very exciting pharma logic tool, a purely behavioral tool that the research literature has told us can selectively increased open mine within the negro straight al pathway.

The pathway is involved in divergent thinking and can do so very dramatically as much as sixty five percent above baseline. And so this is a behavioral tool that is useful for a number of things, but that I find particularly interesting in leveraging towards the exploration and enhancement of creativity because, first of, it's purely behavioral, so it's zero cost and IT involves no manipulation of brain, no modulators or chemistry through for macy logy. So it's something that you can explore very safely and certainly not having to purchase anything.

And what's really remarkable is the selectivity or I think it's fair to say the immense selectivity that this particular behavioral intervention seems to exert on dopamine within this pathway associated with divergent thinking. So the study that i'm about to describe as a study that dates back twenty years now, that should not concern you. In fact, the early arrival of this study, what now seems to be early arrival, I mean, wasn't that long ago, is really exciting because the first line of this study really illustrates how important or how much of a landmark study this really is.

And so I 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 prove 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 transmitter release dodgers, means within us and conscious experience. So what the 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. Game will provide a link.

The first author is care. I think i'm pronouncing IT correctly, although probably not K, J, A, E, R at all. And the title of the study is increased dopamine tone during meditation, induce 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 using the study was more akin to what is Normally called yoga nedra or nsd r non sleep depressed.

Now yoga eja and nsd r have been discussed many times before on this podcast. Yoga eja, for instance, is a practice that's been around for hundreds, if not thousands of years in which people deliberately lies 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 x al breathing. Sometimes some intentions, sometimes some visualization, but it's really self directed relaxation.

And the key component is that people stay awake, engage in very little movement. And the keyword there is movement. Now, non sleeps, depressed is a acronym term that I coined. It's not a term that I coined in order to trying to wipe away or discard with organic. I am a person who has great respect for yoga.

Ega and its traditions is a term that a coined in order to encompass a number of practices that don't include any mystic type language or scientific language for that matter, and that doesn't involve intentions and involve deeper relaxation, yet remaining wide wake and conscious. Sometimes people fall a sleep, and that's okay. But this is really an a typical 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 not you call IT, you're meja, you call A N S C R, whether not you call IT, meditation induced shift in consciousness as they didn't study, although they do refer to organize, all refer to the same thing, which is being motionless and yet aware and relaxed.

Ed, I should mention. So in this study, what they did was they brought subjects into the laboratory. They had them either undergo this self directed deep relaxation while they are motionless or mostly emotionless, or they had them listen to an audio script while also just lying there with ice clothes.

And then they use a number of chemical tricks. And I don't want to get too deep into those now because they can be a little but distracting. For those of you that are interested, you can look at in the study. This is A 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 e changed in the brain, and where specifically in the brain, dopamine changed its levels before daring and after this particular behavioral practice in one or the other group.

And what they discovered is that people who did this deeper 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 sixty five percent increase in dopamine release. Now here is key dopamine release, and they observed an increase and so called data activity. Data activity is a pattern of brain way 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 negotiator pathway, this pathway associated with the virgin thinking. So this is very exciting.

This is a study that really points to a behavioral al tool that can be used to selectively elevate doping 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 the study. First of all, the reduction in bodily movement was essential.

In fact, when people raided or and 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 a 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 dobin that occurred during this practice, this yoga edra like non sleep or N S D R 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, wait down. Not surprising, they were pretty much motionless. But interesting.

Ly, as the level of retina ess 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 in, in fact, areas of the brain that are associated visual injuries, such as the visual, or so called oxide al 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. Whether when we lie down or sit down and close our eyes and we are motionless, the degree of visual imaging 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 give 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. What IT points to is the factor that this is a very simple, completely non formal logic behavioral practice of lining down motionless for some period of time.

And I confess the amount of time that they using this study was quite long IT was longer than sixty minutes. But all the data that i'm aware of in terms of nsd r and yoga eja and there's a growing body of literature on these practices I should mention. Show that even ten minutes, or even Better, would be twenty or thirty minutes of lying motionless with eyes closed and allowing the mind to drift whatever happens to go.

But focusing on relaxing by doing long excel breathing, perhaps doing a body scan of focusing your attention on particular body parts, but not keeping IT focused on any one particular body part for that long. That general practice of deeper relaxation while awake and being relatively motionless really favors 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 of increase, sixty five percent 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 at once per week, i'd recommend doing IT for about twenty to thirty minutes. Some of you might be able to do IT for as long as sixty minutes.

I myself do such a practice on a daily basis anywhere from ten minutes to twenty minutes, sometimes thirty minutes. There's an example of an n sdr script completely zero cost. I confess that does have to mean my voice.

Um so forgive me um in advance there are other options of nsr you can go to youtube put nsd r in my name again, completely zero cost. You can get a sample of what a ten minute A N S D R script looks like that um through virtual put that out there um so thank you virtue for putting that out there. Zero cost.

There are examples of twenty and thirty minute nsd r scripts and yoga eja scripts, some that I particularly we will also provide a link to some of those. Again, they are are completely zero cost for you to explore but more important than you follow any one particular yoga eda nsr 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 deeper relaxation. Again, if you happen to fall asleep, that's know not necessarily a bad thing, all the ideas that you stay in a shallow plane of consciousness or sleep um hence the term non sleep deep breast.

So in any event, I think this is a very useful practice that many people could benefit from. And the fact that is zero cost in purely behavioral, I think add 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 stayed on this um 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 suggested that we can increase dopamine using specific types of meditation induced consciousness.

Those increases in dopamine e 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 N S D R A K A yoga edra or similar. The name doesn't really matter.

After all, the practice is what matters. In order to enhance dopamine e in this negotiator pathway and enhanced divergent thinking, the key thing to understand here is that the period of motionlessness and deeper relaxation while awake increases dopamine in in the negotiator pathway. IT increases mental imagery.

That is the reason, 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 N S D R A K A yoga edra, the nsc r and yoga edra deeper relaxation meditation, whatever is you want to call IT sets a dopa energy c tone. And that's actually the appropriate use of the dopamine ergimo.

One IT raises the baseline of dopamine e transmission in that circuitry that then positions you to engage and divergent thinking more effectively. So the idea would be to do anywhere from ten to twenty, maybe thirty minutes, maybe even as much as an hour, depending on how much time you had to dedicate of such a meditation n sdr practice. And then not necessarily immediately, but within the five to fifteen 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 ndr or yoga eda practice. The nsc r yoga eda practice prepares you for divergent thinking that you do in the hour or hours that follows. And just to contrast that with, I am not aware of any specific dopamine related from ecology that would allow us to selectively increase dopamine in the very pathway associated divergent thinking and creativity.

Now there are are forms of pharmacology that can shift brain neutral transmittals in neuromodulators in ways that favor of creativity. And this is certainly a topic that we will go into in more depth than a future episode. But there is an exciting study that was performed just this last year looking at the role of serotonin, another neuromodulator in divergent and convergent in thinking. And that turns out that sera onan underlies ed, a lot of the brain activity that's responsible for both divergent in for convergent thinking.

And there's one particular form of form ecology which can enhance activation of the certain eric pathways associated the so called five H T that serotonin 5h that's the abbreviation five H T two a recept certa in two a receptor in particularly 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 heard of IT, referred to as microdot ing of slynn.

Now I do want to say, because we will be entirely inappropriate for me to not say this, that in most areas of the world, in particular in the united suicide ban 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, john's hopkins at stanford, at versa call for just go and elsewhere expLoring suicide and for the treatment of depression, for trauma, for eating disorders. Most of those studies focus on a microdot of solicited on not microdot in. There are far fewer studies of microdot in of solicited.

And I do have to point out that solve and use in position and of course, sale is still illegal. So I would be remissions. I didn't state that. However, I will provide a link to the study that shows that microdot in slicer bin for a series of week on a daily basis.

So these are dosages of solicitation and 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 asteroid S A highlight in an underlying beneath the statement i'm about to make, which is that pharmacology of the serotonin system, just as for macos gy of the dopamine in system is very broad band.

It's a shotgun approach. You're onna hit all the circuits of the brain that involves otani with microdot I A. Although IT has some selectivity for the five H T two a receptor, IT can attach to other receptors as well.

And act. There is the same reason why S R I selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors can indeed shift mood and appetite, but can also shift libido and other things. It's because there are so tonal 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 increased opening will also be broadband and to hit a number of different circuits in parallel. So this is why I always say behavioral tools really should come first. I don't say that because I dislike pharmacologic s say that because in many cases of behavioral tools are not only safer and easier to tiring to adjust.

The dating said then is pharmacology, but also because they can sometimes, as in the case of the study, which just describe afford you more specificity, not less, then pharma logy. Pharmacology has its place, can be wonderful, provided safe and legal eta, but IT can cause a lot of so called off target effects. So for those who you are interest in increasing creativity through pharmacology, I would say stay tuned for the data on silica bran and microdot Sullivan.

If you are absolutely obsessed with the idea of mo docs suicide on for enhancing creativity and you'd like to go straight to the study, I will tell you what that study is. And therefore, you can access some of the specifics in terms of dosage ing and protocols. Etta, so since I can help myself just very briefly, ly summarized that microdot psychology study, the title is study, which was published two thousand and eighteen, is expLoring the effect of microdot ing psychological on creativity in an open label natural setting.

Interesting title. This was a microdot ing event organized by the dutch psychiatric society. The examined the effects of psychiatric truffles where they knew what sorts of pure delic compounds were contained there.

On two creativity related problem solving task, the picture concept task, which I don't expect you to recognize or no, but IT assesses convergent thinking. And the alternative uses task, which I also don't expect to know, but is a standard tasks for assessing divergent thinking. They tested once before taking a microdot. And while the effects were expected to be manifested, they say out, interesting, they use the word manifested on study of psychiatric science is changing. indeed.

In any case, what they found was an enhancement of creative that is divergent and convergent thinking, not surprising, giving the fact that the five H T2 a receptor activity is increased by microdot y Sullivan， and five H T2 a receptors are present both on the neural circuits underline divergent and convergent thinking。 So again, this is not a plug for microdot s suasive. And this is really in response to what I know will be a number of different questions about what sort of pharmacology 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 kinna is on creativity. We did a long indepth 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 ex of alcohol. I didn't choose for the answer to be that, but that's what the data tell us. Not telling you you can't drink more than two drinks per week.

I'm just just saying they're you're going to do that. You should really consider offsetting that with some other behavioral measures. all. Eis ode and alcohol. And despite what people think, there is absolutely zero, zero evidence that alcoa increases creativity.

However, by a way of reducing activation of the preference to cortex, there is some evidence that alcohol and other substance ces that reduce what is called autobiographical scripting. That is a narrative about ourselves and our self awareness, that I can enhance divergent thinking at very low doses. And this makes sense.

Very thinking involves remembering certain things that we can use these elements in the creative process, but suppressing narratives about what the use of those would mean. Well, people like IT will they not like IT will lead to the outcome we want? Will IT won't all of that autobiographic scripting involves the forebrain being very, very active in specific regions, the forebrain in particular.

And that all needs to be suppressed, which alcohol in very low doses can accomplish. But again, that's not a plug for alcohol. I think behavioral tools will be a much Better out. But IT, therefore shouting.

Be surprising why some people have used lotos alcohol in order to engage in the creative process, because involves less inhibition or sense of self that could be detrimental to the divergent thinking process. Now, with respect to kind of us, I went in depth into the biology and the various uses, misuses, angers and in some cases, benefits of cannabis use in certain key where there is certain populations. And I also go into whether not cannabis can be used to increase divergent and convergent thinking.

So that's time stamped in that episode of refried to that episode. But the long and short of IT is that many of the ideas that people come up with went under the influence of cannabis. In particular, high T H E containing cannabis, does lead to enhance divergent thinking.

But so enhanced IT turns out that often times those ideas can be constrained by the convery thinking process. In other words, they have lots of ideas that makes sense while under the influence of cannabis, but that later cannot be implemented into a coherent framework that leads to any actual creative endeavor or creative product. Or as is often the case with canvas, they simply can't remember what they were thinking about.

Anytime there's a discussion about dopamine, there seems to be a discussion about motivation, desire and drive. And of course, that makes sense given the rules of dupine. We did entire episode on dopamine in motivation and drive.

Its one of our most popular episodes. Again, you can access that with time stamps in all formats that you have loved up com. And anytime there's a discussion about doping and motivation.

We also seem to have a lot of questions about attention and focus on A D, H, D, or attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in particular. So just as a brief mention, there is a literature, although not terribly extensive, a small but strong literature on the relationship between adhd and creativity. And the long and short of that literature is that people who have adhd, regardless of age, do seem to have an ability to focus.

I mentioned that in the episode on adage, provided that they are interested in the thing that they are focusing on. So that runs counter to this idea that people with A H he simply can't focus. They can.

But IT tends to be a focus that selected for things that they are very excited about or interested in as about to a general ability to focus. What's also highly underappreciated is that people who have A D H D often times are very effective at divergent thinking, but are less effective at convergent thinking. What this tells us is that people with adhd can often have excEllent novel and indeed creative ideas, but that the implementation of those creative ideas is sometimes chAllenge.

And that's one reason to explore rational pharm macos gy nutrition supplementation, IT said. There's are all things to explore in concert with, or I should say, in working closely, whether board certified physician or ideally psychosis expert in A D H D. You can also check out the episode on eight.

There are a lot of tools there. A lot of science mentioned there to support those tools. Again, you can find that huberman lab dot com. But I did think he was important to point out, even if briefly, that having add is not a barrier to creativity, in fact, may actually be an enhanced portal to creativity, but that IT doesn't allow people to access the convergent thinking that allows creative ideas to be implemented into specific strategies, pressure tested and eventually delivered in the form of a final product of music art.

Etta, that is not to say that people with adg cannot accomplish that, but that IT is going to require some additional steps and protocols in order to enhance convergent thinking in that episode and the episode that we did on focus and in particular, tools to enhance focus, is very much directed at ways to enhance convergent thinking. So if you have idea, know somebody who does, and you just in the creative process or focusing generally, please check out the episodes that I mentioned. There's also a small but none's very exciting literature on the relationship between physical movement and divergent thinking.

This should come as no surprise to us. As mentioned many times now in this episode, the negotiator pathway involved in divergent thinking, and that involves dopamine, is also responsible for eyeblink and for movements of the limbs of the body in very deliberate ways. This tells us that there's some direct or maybe indirect relationship between movement of the body and divergent thinking.

And despite the fact that is only a few studies there happened, some of whether not people are able to engage and divergent and thinking more effectively when they are doing things like passing or walking. And this could be on a trade Miller back and forth across the room. And in fact, that is absolutely the case.

If you're somebody like myself who tends to have their best ideas. Not saying that my ideas are always terrific, but the among the ideas I have, some of the Better ones, arrived to me. While on my long sunday run, I can do a long run or hike on sunday's, sometimes of the light wait vest or something in that sort.

But when i'm in the state of essentially not directing my attention to any one thing in my external environment, this is extremely key. For reasons that now should be obvious. Anytime we are directing our attention to a visual target or an auditory target, we are not as able to engage in divergent thinking.

This is why I will sometimes listen to podcast or to audio books while I go on these runs. But for portions of these runs or hikes, I tend to turn those off and just focus on the movement and focus on not focusing on anything in particular. And they will stop and write down ideas that suddenly or seemingly suddenly um appeared to me or or guide to the surface.

I'll have an ideas. Sometimes those are good ideas, sometimes less good ideas. The fact that happens for me and the fact that many people ar Epaces o r r unners a re c ome u p w ith t heir b est i deas a s w ell i n t he s hower, or while engaging in activities that don't require a lot of sensory attention to one specific location, either visual or order.

Tory sa, that is because IT engages the negotiator pathways through movement, which then opens up this library of ideas and allows the intersection of different ideas that Normally would be constrained to separate categories. One way to think about this, by analogy, would be, know, when I was a kid, you d go the library now as you just go online. But the different pages of different books on different topics are kept distinct from one another that is bound by different books, covers and book ends different shelves in the library.

It's as if different pages in elements from those books are now being combined in a suda random, not random, but in a suda random way. And in that combination, new possibilities about ways that information could be combined and implemented start to arise. So the tool that emerges from this is very simple and IT won't necessarily apply to everybody.

But if you are somebody who finds that you're sitting in a chair and trying to be creative is very chAllenging, some of you might benefit from for incense if you are engaging in writing or or you want to write to talk into the voice record of your phone while walking or simply walking and not attending to any one specific thing visually or through headphones. And then as ideas surface seemingly out of nowhere, which is how IT happens, that you could either put them into your phone by voice dictation, or you could type them out if you like. The key thing is to not be distracted by other things in your phone, not to start going on the social media or doing phone calls, are looking at text messages because that by definition, is going to take you out of this.

Um what the biologists call a pu du random walk. And the photo random element is IT extremely important. We know, for instance, that many circuits within the brain how what's called dedicated point to point wiring.

So for instance, deep brain circuits that govern your breathing, the brain circuits that govern heartbeat, the brain circuits that govern your specific movements once you are an adult and allow for smooth directed movement, are very precise, very little slop, if any, in the iring. However, there are aspects of your brain circuitry, yours and everybody else is, I should say, that are maintained into adult hood, that include a lot of extra wiring. And this, these are fine wires and not the major highways between different areas, if you will, to sort like google maps has highways and streets and little little passages and allies.

But he says, if there's a little web of additional possible pathways cast over that entire thing, the human brain maintains such webs of possible passage. And it's only during activities such as walking, running, cycling, swimming, hiking, pacing, eeta, that the activation of those purdon random pathways starts to rap up. So this is a purely behavioral approach to engaging different elements with neural networks that Normally would not communicate with one another when we are completely still.

So again, the practice is that I talk about earlier of being completely still to raise doping and enhanced divergent thinking, those I just want to reemphasize are designed to position you, to ready you to engage in the kinds of activities like walking in, pacing, IT, set the best, facilitate divergent thinking. So if you are somebody who wants to enhance divergent thinking, I would encourage you to explore how different patterns of movement, in particular patterns of movement that don't require any conscious attention to anyone specific thing, allow you to access new ideas and new ways of combining existing elements in whatever domain IT is you want to be creative. Now, this is also an opportunity to underscore something I said back at the beginning, which is you are not going to come up with great works of music if you don't understand chords and Melody and notes and music.

Those basic elements have to be built up through some sort of formal, at least rigorous or regular training in the same way that you're gonna take a walk and and suddenly be able. To painting an incredible picture. If you have no painting ability, that is not going to happen. What i'm talking about here are ways to enhance your capacity for divergent thinking, such as nsd r and ways to engage divergent thinking, such as through certain forms of movement that don't require a lot of conscious attention to your surroundings or anyone specific sensory target, and in doing so, enhancing your ability to be more creative in the domain for which you already have some degree of skill or even mastery. Now, in keeping with the theme of how to enhance our creativity, there's a very exciting and yet parallel literature to the literature that i've been describing thus far.

I promise you that i'm not going to open up an entire library of new information related to neural circuits and so forth, but I would be remiss if I didn't mention this parallel literature because IT speaks very specifically to some important practices that we can all use in order to enhance creativity and to do so the first time and every time. And this is really because certain scientists out there have really gone through the trouble, I even say, the painstaking trouble of really trying to dissect what the creative process is, both for individuals and in groups, or even in pairs. And so what i'm about to tell you is beautifully encapsulated in an article entitled a new method for training creativity narrative as an alternative to divergent thinking again.

And we've been talking about divergent thinking that one pathway into the creative process. But there are others as well. And as IT turns out, they're not so distinct in terms of the underlying brain mechanisms.

none's. Let me describe briefly how narrative can be used to train creativity and to become more creative. And in order to do that, i'd like to just briefly periphrase or read from the first paragraph of the pay.

So what i'm about to read are the author's words, not mine. Quote, here's a paradox. According to current research, Young children are more imaginatively creative than adults, and indeed that is true, by the way.

Yet also according to current research, creativity is main. Neural engine is divergent thinking, which relies on memory and logical association. Two tasks at which Young children under perform adults, that is, children are not as good as divergent thinking as adults are.

So how could I be? The authors are asking that children are more imaginative, and thus more creative than adults. This can only mean that there are alternate pathways to creativity, and indeed, that is the case.

And so what this paper really explores is other ways to access creativity. What they described is what's called narrative theory. And there is a number of different aspects to this narrative theory.

But they agree that the standard definition of creativity is the same one that we were talking about, the force, or we're not talking about a different form of creativity here. We're talking about a different way to access creativity. They describe the standard definition of creativity as quite the ability to generate novel ideas that are useful.

So the commonly accepted one, and what they cite as the basis for narrative theory, is this breakthrough finding in the one thousand nine hundred and fifties. This is the work of gillard. D some people out there might be familiar with that.

I was not at the outset of researching this episode. What the theory is from gillman d essentially states is that there are different intellectual capacity that are not captured by standard I Q test. I think that generally accepted in nowadays know there's emotional intelligence.

We knows a standard I Q. I set a. But the important element to understand is that these authors, we're able to trace back the idea of narrative training as a way to enhance creativity, long before gillen d in the one thousand nine fifties, all the way back to aristotle.

And so this is incredible. Narrative theory was actually birth in three thirty five bce in his writing, called poetics, which I think is incredible, at least to me, that people long before us, we're thinking about creativity. And what goes into creativity, and what aristotle said, what willford then elaborated on, and what the authors of this paper further elaborate on, and actually have developed training protocols for, is the idea that there are three elements that we can use in order to enhance creativity.

In those three elements are what's called the world building. And explain what these are, are in a moment, perspective shifting, action generating and write off about the word action should raise a flag for you, and by that I mean a positive flag, because once again, we are back into the world, and therefore the neural circuits of movement and motion. Okay, so three elements of world building, perspective shifting and act of generating, or what makeup, this narrative approach to creativity.

And I should mention that these authors and others are using such approach with companies, with groups, with individuals. So this is using a bunch of different context to approach and enhance different forms of creativity. So let's talk first about world building techniques.

This is going to be immediately familiar to you when you hear IT. But one of the key elements of creativity is to, at the outset, come up with some idea that make sensor is attractive to you about how the world is different inside of your creative endeavor. So for those that write science fiction or think about science fiction, they're some obvious aspects to this.

But for those of you that don't, maybe you come up with a narrative, for instance, in the context of story telling that in your world we are the house cats, and the cats are actually the ones that are the curators of the earth. Okay, so right there, there is a conceptual shift that the world in which whatever creative idea is going to emerge is entirely different than the one that we actually live in. So that sets a certain number of important constraint.

That means certain things are now possible, other things are not possible, that are very different from the world that we live in. You can see the parallels here to kind of childhood maginness, where essentially anything can happen in the child's mind because they are unconstrained. The second element is this perspective shifting techniques.

And the idea here is that not only are we supposed to have the reader or the listener or the observer or us explore for creativity and develop a creative idea by thinking differently, right? Was this kind of a generic term? How do we actually think differently? But rather than just, say, take the perspective of somebody else in terms of what they would see or do or say or think, rather, we are supposed to think about their underlying motivation.

So we could do the world shift, that is, the world structure shift from step one. And then in step two, you would ask yourself, okay, rather than write about or think about or move from the perspective of myself, let's say you're feeling particularly happy that day. You would say i'm actually going to take the perspective of somebody who's angry. But rather than just act angry, i'm going to think about what they're motivation for being angry is maybe they had to break up, maybe they were jealous, maybe somebody had to wrong them in some way, maybe they are just generally angry at the world for whatever reason, and then Operate from that motivational stance. And this is a very interesting and powerful step, because what IT really captures, at least as viewed by me, the news scientist s, is that captures a whole set of neural circuits about what that motivational state means, because motivational state dictate a huge number of possible different outcomes.

But they really constrained the number of different actions and outcomes that any of us would engage in, rather than saying, i'm going to view the world the way that someone else view the world by stating that we are going to be motivated by their set of motivations and not our own IT includes a lot more possibilities, and yet not an infinite number of possibility. They are constrained in a logical way, which is one of the key elements of creativity. And then the third element, which is action generating techniques, is a really cool one that you will immediately notice implications for the workplace, which is forced collaboration.

So inside of this thing that we're building here, this kind of story, you create a novel rule for the world that your stories going to exist in, or your music is going to exist in, or your sport will exist in. Then you create a perspective shift where you take on the motivation of someone else different than you. And then you force collaboration between that person who has this alternate motivation different from you, and someone else who has an entirely different motivation.

And in doing so, you create these kind of what are called the creative collisions and other collisions, because they're crossing one another and something new has to emerge from them. They could be antagonistic. They could be arguments fighting physical or verbal or others SE.

They could be cynical gish. They could take on any number of different forms, depending on the motivations and the individuals that are involved. But even though I just describe this in poorly top countour, what I just described is actually the core elements of any story or any creative endeavor.

Just that many stories are from the perspective of what we already know and believe and think the world to be, and our own perspective, and the actions that we would take, given that world in that perspective, where as if we want to be creative, we want to think outside of our usual framework, and yet using elements that exist within us, right? No one has to tell us the creative narrative. We're trying to come up with that on our own.

We want to essentially think, in a child, likely, how do children think? Well, they have new, different or entirely novel concepts about how the world works, but they was are bounded. And this is a keyword.

Those are bounded. They're not infinite. Not anything can happen, right? Some kids will say, you can fly and you can shoot lasers out of your eyes. You can do all sorts of them.

Are uniforms and Candy falling from the sky? At some point, if you don't bound the change in the world, IT just becomes pure chaos. And even children don't do that. So we need to bound the change in, create some alternate universe, if you will, in which the story takes place, or the creation of any kind doesn't have to be a story takes place, then there has to be a perspective shift. And this is very useful.

This is a actually a tool that we can all use of trying to take the perspective of others, but not just asking what they would feel or think or do, but ask what is their motivation in life generally, or what kind of mood stance or goal stance are they taking? Are they trying to extract from others? Are they trying to give to others? Are they're very altruistic at, set at? And then you take that individual, you do that also for another individual or group of individuals.

And you start thinking about how those different individuals, because of their different motivational states. Would engage at the level of action, what they would do, what they would say, what they mate, what they fight, what they at at sea. You think of any story, the story of star wars, the greek myths.

You think of any story that has been created, which we consider great and novel works, and you start to find these three elements, world building, perspective shifting and action generating techniques. And so well, this is, again, just A A broad control of what this narrative approach involves. This is a very important and very exciting one because IT gives us a formula, right? We already know that divergent thinking and convergent in thinking are both elements of the creative process.

This is suggesting that, whether non evolved divergent thinking or not, these authors seem to think this is distinct from divergent thinking that capturing some of the elements of creativity that are present in childhood, but that then tend to disappear as we start to assume identity, build identity and understand rules about the actual world we live in. All of those basic elements of early childhood creativity can be reawakened, and in fact, they have data to support the fact that they can be reawaken in adults in meaningful ways that can lead to new product design, new workplace interactions and on and on. That I find very exciting.

And as a consequence, I do intend to do an entire episode at some point on narrative storytelling and the role of narrative and storytelling, not just for sake of creativity, but also for accessing neural plasticity and for enhancing memory and so on. There's an entire landscape of literature and exciting tools and things to understand there. But in the meantime, we will provide a link to this paper, and for those of you that choose not to access the paper, simply understanding these three aspects of narrative as an alternative to accessing creativity, that is, a dedicated and well understood or established world shift that you choose, perspective shifting and taking on the motivation of others, and creating some sort of landscape of exploration for what sorts of interactions would occur between that individuals or groups of individuals and other individuals that have other motivations and yet are still living in this alternate t world.

Those three elements, we now know can be combined into what you or I, or anyone would consider important creative works. So today we discussed creativity, this absolutely fascinating aspect to human brain function that has allowed us, as a species, to develop everything from great works of art and music to technological innovations that allow us to fly and allow us to access people all over the world through little screen devices that we Carry around in our pockets and on and on. As I mentioned the beginning of today's episode, I find creativity to be one of the most fascinating aspects of brain function, and in particular, because we don't actually know what the upper limits of creativity are.

And yet we understand that there are certain bounds, there are certain requirements, and the key requirement for creativity is this aspect of utility. Now that doesn't necessarily mean that for something to be considered creative, IT has to be useful in the practical sense. But IT does seem that for something to be considered truly creative, or especially creative in some cases, that IT revealed to us something fundamental about the way that we or the world works.

We discuss some of the neural circuits that underlie different aspects of creativity, in particular divergent and convergent thinking, as well as narrative building, and some of the tools and steps that can allow us to Better access divergent thinking and convergent thinking. And those tools include behavioral tools as well as pharma logy. And we talked about narrative building as a way to reawaken, or I should say, we access the child hod creativity that did indeed exist in all of us at some point in time.

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