How Does the Brain Enter the Zone?

You may remember moments when you were in flow state, or being "in the zone," when you get involved in a task or are working on something creative. This research study from Drexel University is studying how flow state works in the brain. They focus on flow state with musicians, but engaging in art can rely on the flow state as well. Flow state is also what can work very well in art therapy for deeper processing.

What has your experience been with the flow state?

https://neurosciencenews.com/creativity-zone-neuroscience-25697/

Unlocking Creative Flow: 

How the Brain Enters the Zone

FeaturedNeuroscience

·March 4, 2024

Summary: A new study unveils how the brain enters the creative flow state, famously known as being “in the zone.” By analyzing jazz improvisations through EEGs, the research confirms that creative flow combines extensive experience with a conscious release of control, allowing for automatic idea generation.

This “expertise-plus-release” model suggests that deep creative flow is more accessible to those with significant experience and the ability to let go. The findings offer a new understanding of flow, challenging previous theories and opening avenues for enhancing creativity through practice and relinquishment of control.

Key Facts:

1. The study supports the “expertise-plus-release” theory of creative flow, indicating that expertise and the ability to release control are essential for achieving deep creative states.
2. High-flow states are associated with increased activity in the brain’s auditory and touch areas, and decreased activity in executive control regions, supporting the idea of reduced conscious control during creative flow.
3. Practical implications suggest that achieving productive flow states requires building expertise in a creative field and then training to “let go,” enabling the brain’s specialized circuits to operate autonomously.

Source: Drexel University

Effortless, enjoyable productivity is a state of consciousness prized and sought after by people in business, the arts, research, education and anyone else who wants to produce a stream of creative ideas and products.

That’s the flow, or the sense of being “in the zone.” A new neuroimaging study from Drexel University’s Creativity Research Lab is the first to reveal how the brain gets to the creative flow state.

The study isolated flow-related brain activity during a creative task: jazz improvisation. The findings reveal the creative flow state involves two key factors: extensive experience, which leads to a network of brain areas specialized for generating the desired type of ideas, plus the release of control – “letting go” – to allow this network to work with little or no conscious supervision.

Led by John Kounios, PhD, professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and Creativity Research Lab director, and David Rosen, PhD, a recent graduate from the College and Johns Hopkins University postdoc – the team determined their results suggest that creative flow can be achieved by training people to release control when they have built up enough expertise in a particular domain.

“Flow was first identified and studied by the pioneering psychological scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi,” said Kounios. “He defined it as ‘a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.’”

Kounios noted that although flow has long been a topic of public fascination as well as the focus of hundreds of behavioral research studies, there has been no consensus about what flow is. Their new study decided between different theories of how flow is involved when people produce creative ideas.

Theory: Is Flow a State of Hyperfocus?

One view is that flow might be a state of highly focused concentration or hyperfocus that shuts out extraneous thoughts and other distractions to enable superior performance on a task.

A related theory based on recent research on the neuroscience of creativity is that flow occurs when the brain’s “default-mode network,” a collection of brain areas that work together when a person daydreams or introspects, generates ideas under the supervision of the “executive control network” in the brain’s frontal lobes, which directs the kinds of ideas the default-mode network produces. Kounios likened it to the analogy of a person “supervising” a TV by picking the movie it streams.

Alternative Theory: Flow is Expertise Plus Letting Go

An alternative theory of creative flow is that through years of intense practice, the brain develops a specialized network or circuit to automatically produce a specific type of ideas, in this case musical ones, with little conscious effort. In this view, the executive control network relaxes its supervision so that the musician can “let go” and allow this specialized circuit to go on “autopilot” without interference.

The research team said the key to this notion is the idea that people who do not have extensive experience at a task or who have difficulty releasing control will be less likely to experience deep creative flow.

The study’s results support the “expertise-plus-release” view of creative flow.

The researchers tested these competing theories of creative flow by recording high-density electroencephalograms (EEGs) from 32 jazz guitar players, some highly experienced and others less experienced. Each musician improvised to six jazz lead sheets (songs) with programmed drums, bass and piano accompaniment and rated the intensity of their flow experience for each improvisation.

The resulting 192 recorded jazz improvisations, or “takes,” were subsequently played for four jazz experts individually so they could rate each for creativity and other qualities. The researchers then analyzed the EEGs to discover which brain areas were associated with high-flow takes (compared to low-flow takes).

The high-experience musicians experienced flow more often and more intensely than the low-experience musicians. This shows that expertise enables flow. However, expertise is not the only factor contributing to creative flow.

The EEGs showed that a high-flow state was associated with increased activity in left-hemisphere auditory and touch areas that are involved in hearing and playing music. Importantly, high flow was also associated with decreased activity in the brain’s superior frontal gyri, an executive control region.

This is consistent with the idea that creative flow is associated with reduced conscious control, that is, letting go. This previously hypothesized phenomenon has been called “transient hypofrontality.” 

For the high-experience musicians, flow was associated with greater activity in auditory and vision areas. However, they also showed reduced activity in parts of the default-mode network, suggesting that the default-mode network was not contributing much to flow-related idea generation in these musicians.

In contrast, the low-experience musicians showed little flow-related brain activity.  

“A practical implication of these results is that productive flow states can be attained by practice to build up expertise in a particular creative outlet coupled with training to withdraw conscious control when enough expertise has been achieved,” said Kounios. “This can be the basis for new techniques for instructing people to produce creative ideas.”

Kounios added, “If you want to be able to stream ideas fluently, then keep working on those musical scales, physics problems or whatever else you want to do creatively—computer coding, fiction writing—you name it. But then, try letting go. As jazz great Charlie Parker said, ‘You’ve got to learn your instrument. Then, you practice, practice, practice. And then, when you finally get up there on the bandstand, forget all that and just wail.’”

About this creativity and neuroscience research news:

Author: Annie Korp
Source: Drexel University
Contact: Annie Korp – Drexel University
Image: The image is credited to Neuroscience News

Original Research: Open access.
“Creative flow as optimized processing: Evidence from brain oscillations during jazz improvisations by expert and non-expert musicians” by John Kounios et all. Neuropsychologia

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Abstract

Creative flow as optimized processing: Evidence from brain oscillations during jazz improvisations by expert and non-expert musicians

Using a creative production task, jazz improvisation, we tested alternative hypotheses about the flow experience: (A) that it is a state of domain-specific processing optimized by experience and characterized by minimal interference from task-negative default-mode network (DMN) activity versus (B) that it recruits domain-general task-positive DMN activity supervised by the fronto-parietal control network (FPCN) to support ideation. We recorded jazz guitarists’ electroencephalograms (EEGs) while they improvised to provided chord sequences.

Their flow-states were measured with the Core Flow State Scale. Flow-related neural sources were reconstructed using SPM12. Over all musicians, high-flow (relative to low-flow) improvisations were associated with transient hypofrontality. High-experience musicians’ high-flow improvisations showed reduced activity in posterior DMN nodes.

Low-experience musicians showed no flow-related DMN or FPCN modulation. High-experience musicians also showed modality-specific left-hemisphere flow-related activity while low-experience musicians showed modality-specific right-hemisphere flow-related deactivations.

These results are consistent with the idea that creative flow represents optimized domain-specific processing enabled by extensive practice paired with reduced cognitive control.

 

Interview with Teen Mental Health Society about Art Therapy, Creativity, and the Psychology of Art

The podcast that I interviewed with recently on the TMHS Show is finally live!  I spoke with host Aayushi Kulsunge with the Teen Mental Health Society about the psychology of art, creativity, and art therapy. Tune in here!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/7nC6grY7YjZSKzjSAZbHc4?si=45ifBLlVSD2iO_VRRR44Xg

Blogger Recounts Mental Health Journey and Creativity

 I was contacted a while back from a blogger to check out her site called "Creating My Odyssey" as she started to rebuild her creativity and talk about her mental health experiences.  She gave me permission to share one of her entries...and perhaps we will see more of her in the future with collaborative blogs!

Dried Up

 

When I was depressed, I didn't want to create art, and I felt really disappointed as an adult when I felt that way. As a moody teen and early twenties at home, my mother would say: 'When you feel like that, you should paint.' I appreciate her sentiment now, but I just didn't want to paint, or do anything artistic. She couldn't possibly understand because she wasn't made that way, and she never would. At least she tried, bless her.

But, as an adult, although, when depressed, I didn't have the inner spark to want to create art. I was happy to write though. That was easy. I had had light hearted anecdotal articles published too. And I could write exactly how I felt, particularly if I felt embarrassed and couldn't verbalise what I was thinking, especially if the thought concerned Husband.

For instance, I felt sad about my hobby, the wild west. What? You may well ask. (See what I mean about embarrassment?) I wanted to be a cowgirl, a rough 'n tough, smokin', cursin', drinkin', sharp shootin' frontierswoman. Not stuck at home, looking after family. And I couldn't indulge that hobby much because I didn't have the energy and also I felt out of it because of anxiety among the more intense living history re-enactors who I was anxious may judge (some did, because I was portraying an unconventional female character).

Husband, insightfully, had said long ago when I began to head into depressions, that he could see my hobby rearing its head and being the subject of my depression. I'd be obsessed with something (I was good at being obsessed with things) and the wild west was it. I was writing my novel (about a cowgirl, naturally...) and that did help, although, of course, I wanted my book to be perfect. So, yes – that was a subject I had to write about to make sense of it.

I had considered art therapy. To paint, draw or collage how I felt. That didn't work either. I didn't want to do any of that. In order to express how I felt, I wrote. If I did do anything artistic, the subject would be anything I would normally do, nothing to do with depression or anxiety. That was what writing did for me.

But I did, so much, want to be artistic. And I wanted to be happy working in my 'creative space' (I was too embarrassed – that word again – to call it an art studio) in our conservatory. But I wasn't, for a long time, happy working there. I'd be okay for a short time, then depression would gradually swallow me up. So I wrote a lot, about lots, and not in my creative space. It wasn't until really recently that I began to feel good about being there and being creative. It's taken this long.

And I'm delving into dark, dusty corners and discovering artwork that I'd done in the dark and distant past and forgotten about. 'Wow! That's good!' I've thought, occasionally. No time for modesty, thank you. Anyway, shoving modesty aside, I'm uploading them onto Facebook and my blog and getting lovely responses to them. I'm also on the verge of recreating and organising my art area. And I'm beginning to get quite excited about it. A plant or flowers here, a water feature there, paints here, pencils there, sketchbooks here, boxed canvases there...

Yay! Artistic me is coming back!

Creativity and Mental Illness: Is there a link?

Many people assume that there is a fine line between creativity and insanity, and some may cite examples to support their case, such as Van Gogh or possibly Beethoven.  But this article from Scientific American looks into this assumption much more closely.

The Real Link Between Creativity and Mental Illness

     By Scott Barry Kaufman | October 3, 2013           

“There is only one difference between a madman and me. I am not mad.”          

—Salvador Dali

The romantic notion that mental illness and creativity are linked is so prominent in the public consciousness that it is rarely challenged. So before I continue, let me nip this in the bud: Mental illness is neither necessary nor sufficient for creativity.

The oft-cited studies by Kay Redfield Jamison, Nancy Andreasen, and Arnold Ludwig showing a link between mental illness and creativity have been criticized on the grounds that they involve small, highly specialized samples with weak and inconsistent methodologies and a strong dependence on subjective and anecdotal accounts.

To be sure, research does show that many eminent creators– particularly in the arts–had harsh early life experiences (such as social rejection, parental loss, or physical disability) and mental and emotional instability. However, this does not mean that mental illness was a contributing factor to their eminence. There are many eminent people without mental illness or harsh early life experiences, and there is very little evidence suggesting that clinical, debilitating mental illness is conducive to productivity and innovation.

What’s more, only a few of us ever reach eminence. Thankfully for the rest of us, there are different levels of creativity. James C. Kaufman and Ronald Beghetto argue that we can display creativity in many different ways, from the creativity inherent in the learning process (“mini-c”), to everyday forms of creativity (“little-c”) to professional-level expertise in any creative endeavor (“Pro-c”), to eminent creativity (“Big-C”).

Engagement in everyday forms of creativity– expressions of originality and meaningfulness in daily life– certainly do not require suffering. Quite the contrary, my colleague and friend Zorana Ivcevic Pringle found that people who engaged in everyday forms of creativity– such as making a collage, taking photographs, or publishing in a literary magazine– tended to be more open-minded, curious, persistent, positive, energetic, and intrinsically motivated by their activity. Those scoring high in everyday creativity also reported feeling a greater sense of well-being and personal growth compared to their classmates who engaged less in everyday creative behaviors. Creating can also be therapeutic for those who are already suffering. For instance, research shows that expressive writing increases immune system functioning, and the emerging field of posttraumatic growth is showing how people can turn adversity into creative growth.

 So is there any germ of truth to the link between creativity and mental illness? The latest research suggests there is something to the link, but the truth is much more interesting. Let’s dive in.

 The Real Link Between Creativity and Mental Illness

In a recent report based on a 40-year study of roughly 1.2 million Swedish people, Simon Kyaga and colleagues found that with the exception of bi-polar disorder, those in scientific and artistic occupations were not more likely to suffer from psychiatric disorders. So full-blown mental illness did not increase the probability of entering a creative profession (even the exception, bi-polar disorder, showed only a small effect of 8%).

What was striking, however, was that the siblings of patients with autism and the first-degree relatives of patients with schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and anorexia nervosa were significantly overrepresented in creative professions. Could it be that the relatives inherited a watered-down version of the mental illness conducive to creativity while avoiding the aspects that are debilitating?

Research supports the notion that psychologically healthy biological relatives of people with schizophrenia have unusually creative jobs and hobbies and tend to show higher levels of schizotypal personality traits compared to the general population. Note that schizotypy is not schizophrenia. Schizotypy consists of a constellation of personality traits that are evident in some degree in everyone.

Schizotypal traits can be broken down into two types. “Positive” schizotypy includes unusual perceptual experiences, thin mental boundaries between self and other, impulsive nonconformity, and magical beliefs. “Negative” schizotypal traits include cognitive disorganization and physical and social anhedonia (difficulty experiencing pleasure from social interactions and activities that are enjoyable for most people). Daniel Nettle found that people with schizotypy typically resemble schizophrenia patients much more along the positive schizotypal dimensions (such as unusual experiences) compared to the negative schizotypal dimensions (such as lack of affect and volition).

This has important implications for creativity. Mark Batey and Adrian Furnham found that the unusual experiences and impulsive nonconformity dimensions of schizotypy, but not the cognitive disorganization dimension, were significantly related to self-ratings of creativity, a creative personality (measured by a checklist of adjectives such as “confident,” “individualistic,” “insightful,” “wide interests,” “original,” “reflective,” “resourceful,” “unconventional,” and “sexy”), and everyday creative achievement among thirty-four activities (“written a short story,” “produced your own website,” “composed a piece of music,” and so forth).

Recent neuroscience findings support the link between schizotypy and creative cognition. Hikaru Takeuchi and colleagues investigated the functional brain characteristics of participants while they engaged in a difficult working memory task. Importantly, none of their subjects had a history of neurological or psychiatric illness, and all had intact working memory abilities. Participants were asked to display their creativity in a number of ways: generating unique ways of using typical objects, imagining desirable functions in ordinary objects and imagining the consequences of “unimaginable things” happening. 

The researchers found that the more creative the participant, the more they had difficulty suppressing the precuneus while engaging in an effortful working memory task. The precuneus is the area of the Default Mode Network that typically displays the highest levels of activation during rest (when a person is not focusing on an external task). The precuneus has been linked to self-consciousness, self-related mental representations, and the retrieval of personal memories. How is this conducive to creativity? According to the researchers, “Such an inability to suppress seemingly unnecessary cognitive activity may actually help creative subjects in associating two ideas represented in different networks.”

Prior research shows a similar inability to deactivate the precuneus among schizophrenic individuals and their relatives. Which raises the intriguing question: what  happens if we directly compare the brains of creative people against the brains of people with schizotypy?

Enter a hot-off-the-press study by Andreas Fink and colleagues. Consistent with the earlier study, they found an association between the ability to come up with original ideas and the inability to suppress activation of the precuneus during creative thinking. As the researchers note, these findings are consistent with the idea that more creative people include more events/stimuli in their mental processes than less creative people. But crucially, they found that those scoring high in schizotypy showed a similar pattern of brain activations during creative thinking as the highly creative participants, supporting the idea that overlapping mental processes are implicated in both creativity and psychosis proneness.

It seems that the key to creative cognition is opening up the flood gates and letting in as much information as possible. Because you never know: sometimes the most bizarre associations can turn into the most productively creative ideas. Indeed, Shelley Carson and her colleagues found that the most eminent creative achievers among a sample of Harvard undergrads were seven times more likely to have reduced latent inhibition. In other research, they found that students with reduced latent inhibition scored higher in openness to experience, and in my own research I’ve found that reduced latent inhibition is associated with a faith in intuition.

 What is latent inhibition? Latent inhibition is a filtering mechanism that we share with other animals, and it is tied to the neurotransmitter dopamine. A reduced latent inhibition allows us to treat something as novel, no matter how may times we’ve seen it before and tagged it as irrelevant. Prior research shows a link  between reduced latent inhibition and schizophrenia. But as Shelley Carson points out in her “Shared Vulnerability Model,” vulnerable mental processes such as reduced latent inhibition, preference for novelty, hyperconnectivity, and perseveration can interact with protective factors, such as enhanced fluid reasoning, working memory, cognitive inhibition, and cognitive flexibility, to “enlarge the range and depth of stimuli available in conscious awareness to be manipulated and combined to form novel and original ideas.”

Which brings us to the real link between creativity and mental illness.

The latest research suggests that mental illness may be most conductive to creativity indirectly, by enabling the relatives of those inflicted to open their mental flood gates but maintain the protective factors necessary to steer the chaotic, potentially creative storm.

© 2013 Scott Barry Kaufman, All Rights Reserved

 Disclaimer: Portions of this post were taken from this post and this book.

Note: For much more on the real links between mental illness and creativity, I highly recommend the upcoming book “New ideas about an old topic: Creativity and mental illness,” edited by James C. Kaufman, due out next year! I also recommend the following paper by Andrea Kuszewski: “The Genetics of Creativity: A Serendipitous Assemblage of Madness.”

photo credit #1: creepypasta.wikia.com; photo credit #2: woman writing by valerie hardy; photo credit #3: searching for a baseline: functional imagining and the resting human brain; photo credit #4: istockphoto

About the Author: Scott Barry Kaufman is a cognitive psychologist interested in the development of intelligence and creativity. In his latest book, Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined, he presents a new theory of human intelligence that he hopes will help all people realize their dreams. Follow on Twitter @sbkaufman.

The views expressed are those of the author and are not necessarily those of Scientific American.

 

Musicians use divergent thinking more often than non-musicians

I came across this article via a colleague and though it's a few years old, it still seems relevant. Even though the focus is specifically with musicians, I wonder if some of the same principles are true for any of the other arts as well.

Musicians use both sides of their brains more frequently than average people

Posted on Thursday, Oct. 2, 2008 — 4:14 PM

Supporting what many of us who are not musically talented have often felt, new research reveals that trained musicians really do think differently than the rest of us. Vanderbilt University psychologists have found that professionally trained musicians more effectively use a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also use both the left and the right sides of their frontal cortex more heavily than the average person.

The research by Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park is currently in press at the journal Brain and Cognition.

“We were interested in how individuals who are naturally creative look at problems that are best solved by thinking ‘out of the box’,” Folley said. “We studied musicians because creative thinking is part of their daily experience, and we found that there were qualitative differences in the types of answers they gave to problems and in their associated brain activity.”

One possible explanation the researchers offer for the musicians’ elevated use of both brain hemispheres is that many musicians must be able to use both hands independently to play their instruments.

“Musicians may be particularly good at efficiently accessing and integrating competing information from both hemispheres,” Folley said. “Instrumental musicians often integrate different melodic lines with both hands into a single musical piece, and they have to be very good at simultaneously reading the musical symbols, which are like left-hemisphere-based language, and integrating the written music with their own interpretation, which has been linked to the right hemisphere.”

Previous studies of creativity have focused on divergent thinking, which is the ability to come up with new solutions to open-ended, multifaceted problems. Highly creative individuals often display more divergent thinking than their less creative counterparts.

To conduct the study, the researchers recruited 20 classical music students from the Vanderbilt Blair School of Music and 20 non-musicians from a Vanderbilt introductory psychology course. The musicians each had at least eight years of training. The instruments they played included the piano, woodwind, string and percussion instruments. The groups were matched based on age, gender, education, sex, high school grades and SAT scores.

The researchers conducted two experiments to compare the creative thinking processes of the musicians and the control subjects. In the first experiment, the researchers showed the research subjects a variety of household objects and asked them to make up new functions for them, and also gave them a written word association test. The musicians gave more correct responses than non-musicians on the word association test, which the researchers believe may be attributed to enhanced verbal ability among musicians. The musicians also suggested more novel uses for the household objects than their non-musical counterparts.

In the second experiment, the two groups again were asked to identify new uses for everyday objects as well as to perform a basic control task while the activity in their prefrontal lobes was monitored using a brain scanning technique called near-infrared spectroscopy, or NIRS. NIRS measures changes in blood oxygenation in the cortex while an individual is performing a cognitive task.

“When we measured subjects’ prefrontal cortical activity while completing the alternate uses task, we found that trained musicians had greater activity in both sides of their frontal lobes. Because we equated musicians and non-musicians in terms of their performance, this finding was not simply due to the musicians inventing more uses; there seems to be a qualitative difference in how they think about this information,” Folley said.

The researchers also found that, overall, the musicians had higher IQ scores than the non-musicians, supporting recent studies that intensive musical training is associated with an elevated IQ score.

The research was partially supported by a Vanderbilt University Discovery Grant.

Folley is a postdoctoral fellow. Park is a professor of psychology and psychiatry and a member of the Center for Integrative and Cognitive Neuroscience. Gibson was an undergraduate student and research assistant in the psychology department at Vanderbilt when this work was conducted and is now a Peace Corps volunteer based in Namibia. Park and Folley are Vanderbilt Kennedy Center for Research on Human Development investigators.