How does creativity work?

You know that feeling when time and space melt away and new ideas seem to flow through you? Neuroscientist Heather Berlin explains what we know about how creative flow states might change the way the networks in our brains interact. Guest: Heather Berlin, author of The Fine Art of Losing Control To watch this episode on video, find us on ⁠⁠⁠⁠Netflix⁠⁠⁠⁠! For show transcripts, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unxtranscripts ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠For more, go to ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/unexplainable ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠And please email us! ⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠We read every email. Support Unexplainable (and get ad-free episodes) by becoming a Vox Member today: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠vox.com/members ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:15Speaker 02

  Whether you're a scientist, a ballerina, a parent, we all need to be creative. We all want fresh, new, interesting ideas, but the question is, where do they come from? There are times where we enter this concentrated state where the ideas are coming so easily and the time passes by without you noticing at all. And then there are times when we hit these creative blocks that just no matter how much you try, you just can't see your way out of. So what's going on in our brains when this happens?

• 1:56Speaker 02

  Today's guest, Heather Berlin, is a neuroscientist and a writer. She studies how things like creativity comes together in our brains.

• 2:07Speaker 03

  The cerebral cortex alone has 125 trillion synapses. So that's like the number of stars in 1,500 Milky Way galaxies.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Her research focuses on how impulsivity and consciousness impacts our ideas, impacts how we think. So today on Unexplainable, can we measure creativity?

• 2:48Speaker 02

  Hi, Heather.

• 2:48Speaker 04

  Hi.

• 2:49Speaker 02

  Thank you so much for coming and joining us today.

• 2:51Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me.

• 2:52Speaker 02

  To talk about creativity.

• 2:54Speaker 04

  Same.

• 2:55Speaker 02

  When we talk about creativity, what are we, what are we talking about? Like, what are some of the ways that scientists have tried to define what creativity even is?

• 3:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a, that's a very good question because there's not really one kind of test or necessarily definition. I like to say, you know, it's making divergent connections between ideas, but also curating and knowing which are the right ideas to actually execute and follow through with. Because not every generative idea is a good idea. I know a lot of people, some people like, you know, when they're like on drugs or something like, oh my God, I had all these ideas. And then you like, they write it down, you look at the next story, you're like, what? Like, no. Like, at the time, you think it's the best idea ever, and you're just like, no. So it's one thing to generate the ideas, and it's another to be able to curate and execute and know.

• 3:49Speaker 04

  But I think a lot of creative people, it's about making actually decisions.

• 3:52Speaker 02

  Right. Yeah, I feel like you could have more ideas, or better ideas, or quicker, rarer ideas, but like, all of those feel like they're pulling on different aspects of this really diffuse thing that's hard to differentiate from like, thinking in and of itself.

• 4:10Speaker 04

  Right. And like, you know, scientists are creative too. It's not just artists. It's in all fields. You know, an athlete can come up with creative ways to do things. But even, you know, when you think of Darwin and evolution, that everybody had access to the same data, the same data points. But like, he came up this novel way to put it together in this theory of evolution, which when you see it, you're like, oh, obviously. But nobody else had like, really thought of it. Or, you know, people were tangentially thinking about it in different ways. But it's that kind of thing where you have an insight, and it's not coming from nowhere. You do the hard work first and take in all the information and the data, and then let

• 4:52Speaker 04

  the unconscious kind of percolate and do its thing, and then you come up with these novel ideas. And I think that is what we think of when we're talking about creativity.

• 5:02Speaker 02

  So what are, what are some of the tools that neuroscientists have to explore something like creativity that is, you know, so hard to define?

• 5:13Speaker 04

  You know, it's a relatively new field to look at the neural basis of creativity. And I've been interested in the neural basis of consciousness, but also these unconscious processes that are really the main thing that's dictating our behavior. Like, we think we're in so much control, but really, it's a myth that we only use 10% of our brain. We use all of our brain all the time. It's not, you know, it takes up so much energy and resources. So all those movies was like, imagine you could use all your brain.

• 5:44Speaker 02

  Unlocking the superpowers.

• 5:46Speaker 04

  Yeah. I got really upset because like, my ex showed my son this movie, Limitless.

• 5:51Speaker 05

  And you know how they say that we can only access 20% of our brain? Well, what this does, it lets you access all of it.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  I'm like, what are you doing? Like, this is, you're sending, teaching him the wrong message. I had to like, deprogram, like, this is not real, like, this is not how the brain works.

• 6:09Speaker 02

  Bradley Cooper had it all wrong.

• 6:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's all wrong. No offense Hollywood, and I'm sure there are great films and very creative, but it's not true to the science. So much of what is happening in our brain is happening unconsciously. And when you're in certain creative states, we can get into the science of it, but it's, you're lowering certain parts of your prefrontal cortex in terms of activation, so you can access some of these unconscious brain mechanisms that are normally being suppressed in our everyday life. Rightly so, because if we're always in that state, it wouldn't be great either. You want to be able to dip into it and out of it. But, so the tools that we have, I mean, there's various tools. There's neuroimaging, where you're looking at correlations. There's ways in which we can kind of directly manipulate the brain to sort of create creative

• 6:54Speaker 04

  states by using something like transcranial magnetic stimulation. Or we can look at people who are being monitored for epileptic seizure and have electrodes like, on their brain. So there are ways to directly kind of impact the brain and see the effects. And then there are behavioral studies as well. We can look at, for instance, there's really interesting studies on the effect of sleep on creativity or daydreaming on creativity. And so you can set up experimental paradigms to look at that.

• 7:21Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think kind of like separating those out, looking at like behavioral studies. What is it that folks are like, using as a metric for creativity?

• 7:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, there are these kinds of measures. I think a lot of the most interesting studies, at least from my perspective, are the ones that have these novel tasks where you actually have to do something in real time, like, rather than like, a questionnaire or something. So there are people who use things like, there's a riddle, and there's a novel way to solve it. And you have to be able to kind of think outside the box to be able to solve this riddle. So that's just an example of using something like, coming up with a novel solution as a measure of creativity.

• 8:04Speaker 02

  Could you tell me a little bit about the neural imaging, like, actually looking at the brain and what that can tell us?

• 8:11Speaker 04

  Sure. The first thing I'd like to do, since we have this platform, and whenever I get the chance, is to just debunk certain things that people think about the brain and creativity.

• 8:26Speaker 04

  This whole left brain, right brain thing, like-

• 8:28Speaker 02

  Get out of here.

• 8:29Speaker 04

  I mean, yes, there is what we call laterality in the brain, and there are certain functions that are more specialized to the left or the right brain in some people, not everybody. Some people are less lateralized, like, language tends to be on the left side, but not for everyone, and there's some language on the right. But it's not like creativity is the right side of the brain, and like, logic and reason is the left side of the brain, even with that bit of laterality there. So I'm going to debunk that. Also, there's no like, one spot in the brain that's like, the creativity spot or something.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Right. It's like, oh yeah, just-

• 9:02Speaker 04

  Yeah, just like, plug into that spot.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  Like Fonzie with the jukebox.

• 9:05Speaker 04

  Right. That's a great old reference. I bet you half this audience won't even know what that is, but I do.

• 9:13Speaker 04

  So one, one line of research looks at improvisation. So creativity in real time, where you put somebody in the scanner, fMRI, which looks at blood flow to different parts of the brain, which is a proxy to neurons firing because the blood's going to go where, you know, the energy is needed.

• 9:33Speaker 02

  Yeah, we can't get down to the neuron level, but we can kind of, you know, extrapolate from seeing what needs oxygen, what needs blood.

• 9:40Speaker 04

  Right, and you're getting these, since it's vox, like these voxels that are like little bits of information that tell you about blood flow to that particular area, but that little voxel is composed of like, you know, thousands of neurons, right? So it's a very coarse measure of brain activation, but you get some general idea. And so we look at, you can look at, say, a jazz musician who's playing a memorized piece on a piano versus an improvised piece while they're in the scanner, which is hard because you've got to stay perfectly still. So they just have their hand like doing this. And you can look at the difference in brain activation between the improvised and the memorized.

• 10:24Speaker 04

  And they've also done this work with freestyle rappers, where you do a memorized piece and then a freestyle piece. And it's sort of, it has to stay on beat. It's in real time, like you don't have a lot of time to think. But in both cases, let's say the jazz improvisers and the freestyle rappers, you see a very similar pattern of brain activation when they're freestyling or improvising versus not. And you get comparatively decreased activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex of the brain. And it is the part of the brain that has to do, broadly speaking, with making sure that your behavior conforms with social norms and self-awareness.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  So when you're in this state, you have decreased self-awareness, kind of when you're in these flow states, you, anything goes. So the filter is kind of turned down. And the second you become too self-aware, you kind of fall out of the flow, right? So it's like impossible almost to be in the flow and also be like, what are they thinking? Oh, my God. So you get decreased activation of this part of the brain. You get increased activation of the medial prefrontal cortex, which has to do with the internal generation of ideas. So you kind of have the filter and like, which is like filtering your behavior like to social norms and all that, that's turned down. The internal generation is turned up. So you get these, like, almost like a, you know, a springwell of ideas

• 11:49Speaker 04

  that is lacking sort of the monitoring. So it, you know, when you're in these states, you have to kind of let go. And sometimes weird things can come out, right? That's inherent in the process. The other thing that neuroimaging studies show is that you get these differences in the brain networks that are active. So creativity is more about interacting networks in the brain than it is about, again, any one place. So when people are being creative in that generative kind of place, you see more activation in this default mode network, which is a network of brain areas that are active when you're kind of not actively focused on any particular thing.

• 12:34Speaker 04

  You can think of it, that's why it's like default mode, and the kind of like what you go back to.

• 12:38Speaker 02

  The screensaver.

• 12:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, exactly. It's like what you go back to when nothing else is going on. And they found this because when they were doing neuroimaging studies, we'd always give people a task to do. And then we'd compare that task to this task and see the difference, right?

• 12:52Speaker 02

  Always like engaged.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Engaged. But then like researchers started noticing when they were just kind of laying there, hanging out, it would go back into this pattern of activation. And that hence this term, the default mode.

• 13:07Speaker 04

  But when you're in that generative, it's not doing nothing. It's your mind wandering, you're coming with ideas, you're. So that's the generative phase. But then there's the executive control network, which evaluates. So you have, it generates ideas and then it needs to evaluate and monitor it and see how it coincides with your goals. And so you have to actually toggle between these two brain sort of networks. And then there's the salience network, which kind of helps you toggle between the two and tells you like what's most important when, hence salience. So you have these three brain networks that are, that are in this interplay. And creativity is sort of when that's working at a certain pace

• 13:51Speaker 04

  and a certain rhythm that you're getting to these creative states. It's not just one thing in the brain that's, this is creativity.

• 13:58Speaker 02

  Are there limitations to some of these studies? Like, I can imagine that improv doesn't correlate perfectly to like creativity. Like, maybe the first thing, the first idea I have off the top of my head is, is cliche or rote and not necessarily like a new way of looking at something. It's just the first thing that occurred to me.

• 14:17Speaker 04

  You know, I guess ironically, the, you need to be creative with the experiments that you can do. And there are things that I've thought about where, you know, I want to look at people who are actively in like painting or doing dance improv or comedy improv. And, you know, I've thought about electrodes that you can put on so you don't have to be stuck in the scanner. So you can do EEG, but still it's cumbersome. There are studies with TMS, with transcranial magnetic stimulation, where you can stimulate parts of the brain with a magnet, which.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  Sounds pretty sci-fi.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, it effectively, we think it's disrupting a particular network. So you can kind of like temporarily turn off or disrupt a particular part of the brain for a moment. And what, there's an interesting study that looked at creativity. I think it was solving a riddle kind of experiment. And then when you deactivated the, when you put it over the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, they actually were better at solving the problem.

• 15:26Speaker 02

  So that's the like self-critic, what are they thinking of me? Kind of network.

• 15:30Speaker 04

  And turning it down. They were better able to solve the problem. Or there's this moments of insight, like people, the aha moment.

• 15:38Speaker 02

  Eureka.

• 15:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, and that's sort of, it's hard to measure because that happens unexpectedly, right? And so it's.

• 15:45Speaker 02

  You can't be like, just hold that, just wait. Like, let's get you into the fMRI machine.

• 15:49Speaker 04

  Exactly, let's hold that thought. So anyway, it's very hard to capture.

• 15:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:53Speaker 04

  These processes.

• 16:02Speaker 00

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• 18:08Speaker 02

  It often feels like creativity is talked about as like some external force, like you get a visit, like Singing to Me Muse, or like you're struck by lightning or something. Is there like a way that your brain is working that feels like inspiration comes from the outside rather than the inside?

• 18:26Speaker 04

  Yeah, there are so many examples of this of great artists talking about, you know, it comes from somewhere else or just generally people who are in flow states where you feel like you lose your sense of self and time and place. And from what we understand about the brain when you're in these states, like I'd said, this dorsolateral prefrontal cortex is decreased in activation. So your sense of self kind of dissolves. And we see similar patterns of activation during certain types of meditation or when people are in psilocybin, which is like the psychedelic ingredient in mushrooms. We see a similar pattern of brain activation. And in all these states, people

• 19:11Speaker 04

  subjectively say that they feel like they've lost their sense of self, or they feel like connected or one with everything, right? The boundary, right? Boundary between self and other kind of dissolves. And that makes sense, given what we understand about the brain. So it feels like you're not generating it, but it's coming through you because your sense of like self is down when you're in these states. And so that's when people, that's why people call it flow, because it's like, oh, it's flowing through me or it's flowing out of me and I don't know where it's coming from. And you lose your sense of time as well. And that, whatever that is for you, like maybe it's sewing or something. That's your flow state. You were in it and it could be rock climbing.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  It could be anything where you just kind of forget. And suddenly you're like, oh, my God, it's been an hour. What, where was I? What happened?

• 20:01Speaker 02

  I'm just so immersed.

• 20:02Speaker 04

  So immersed. And I love it. It's like bliss. And you know, eventually you come out of it and you got to get back to the real world.

• 20:08Speaker 02

  You gotta eat.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, you gotta eat, you gotta eat. But it feels like you're not there. It feels like it's coming from somewhere else. And some people attribute that to the divine or whatever it may be. But it makes sense that that's the subjective state that people describe.

• 20:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, because creativity involves so much. What remains unanswered? Because we don't have the tools or the experiments to get to some aspect of creativity.

• 20:36Speaker 04

  So we can start to break it apart as scientists and look at mechanisms for different facets of creativity. But it is hard to look at it as just one thing. Maybe you're not a creative in art or whatever, but you are the best person in your executive board meeting at coming up with a novel way to like make the company make more money. Right? And that's creative. And so, or as a scientist, you're coming up with novel ways to put the data together. So it's manifested in real life. But when you have to break it down in a lab, we kind of make it artificial with these particular measures to try to get at this larger concept that we're trying to really understand that's in our everyday lives.

• 21:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:17Speaker 04

  There's social context, there's real world context. So we always say, you know, is the experiment you're doing in the lab ecologically valid? Does it really map out to what's happening in the real world? And a lot of it is counterintuitive. Like, like with creativity, you can't just demand people to be creative. Okay, now be creative now, right? You know, so we have to come with creative ways to get to creativity. But in the real world, I'll tell people, if you want to be creative, you have to do the opposite. You have to not try to be creative. So now we're going to take someone in the lab and be like, okay, don't try to be creative. Like, it's very difficult.

• 21:51Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:51Speaker 04

  I liken it to the sort of that Chinese thumb like thing.

• 21:56Speaker 02

  The finger trap?

• 21:56Speaker 04

  The finger trap thing, yeah. Where you like, the harder you pull, the tighter it gets. You actually have to do the opposite of what you think and let go to actually release it. And so it's very similar with what you kind of have to do in your minds with creativity. And so measuring that in a lab can be difficult.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. Does that create blind spots?

• 22:15Speaker 04

  Absolutely. I think the more we know, the more we know what we don't know. And so the more you kind of explore the brain, the more you see how much you don't know. And I think that applies to any aspect of what we're trying to understand in terms of subjective states. So creativity being one of them. We're learning a lot, but there's still so much we don't understand.

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. I'm curious, do you think that there are things about creativity that we'll never know?

• 22:47Speaker 04

  Of course, yeah. I think there are things, a lot of things that we might never know. The whole thing with science is that it's exploration of the unknown. Right? And there's this whole saying of like the God of the gaps.

• 23:01Speaker 02

  I've never heard that.

• 23:03Speaker 04

  One idea is that people would put God in the place of things that we couldn't explain with science. This concept of God, or whatever you want to call it, like magical thinking moves to the spaces that are still unexplained. There's always going to be unexplained stuff, but science is kind of chasing those spaces of the unexplained and trying to figure stuff out. So I don't think there's ever an endpoint. But taking a kind of scientific or neuroscience lens to these kinds of things like consciousness and creativity is relatively new. I don't know that we'll ever have all the answers. And that goes with everything, including our exploration of creativity.

• 23:45Speaker 02

  That makes sense. Thank you so much for your time today, Heather. It's been fascinating and I'll definitely keep all this in mind in my next creative endeavor.

• 23:54Speaker 04

  Awesome. Thank you so much for having me.

• 24:03Speaker 02

  If you want to hear more from Heather, you can check out her upcoming book next year called The Fine Art of Losing Control, which we'll link to in the show notes. She also has a TED Talk and a Substack coming out in early November. And if you want to see this episode on video, you can head over to Netflix. Just look for Unexplainable. This episode was produced by Valerie Shankman and me, Meredith Hodnot. It was edited by Joanna Selatarov. Our video editor is Jacob Reynolds. Our animator is Kareem Karia. Our fact checker is Melissa Hirsch. Mixing and sound design by Christian Ayala.

• 24:46Speaker 02

  And music from Noam Hasenfeld. Thanks as always to Brian Resnick for co-creating the show with Noam and Bird Pinkerton. If you have thoughts about the show, we would love to hear from you. Please email us at [email protected]. Or if you'd like to support the show, join Vox, become a member. You can go to vox.com/members. And if you signed up particularly because of us and because of this show, please write in and let us know. Unexplainable is a part of the Vox Media Podcast Network

• 25:25Speaker 02

  and we will be back next time with everything that we don't know quite yet.

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