The Science of Creativity & How to Enhance Creative Innovation

If you are somebody who wants to get better at divergent thinking and convergent thinking, the two elements of creativity, that is, I would encourage you to do a dual meditation—that is, a meditation that starts with open monitoring for maybe 5-10 minutes and then transitions to focused-attention for maybe 5-10 minutes.

If you're in a low mood or kind meh of mood, by all means, engage in something, probably for about 5-30 minutes, that elevates your mood before trying to engage in divergent thinking. However, if you happen to be in a pretty positive mood... then bringing in additional stimuli to increase your levels of dopamine will not help you and in fact can hurt the divergent thinking process.

I would encourage any of you that want to explore the creative process for whatever reason or get better at the creative process dedicate some amount of time, maybe even just 5 minutes every other day, to doing this open monitoring meditation.

If people are already in a very good mood, elevating dopamine further is not conducive—and in fact is detrimental—to divergent thinking. And in that case, they would be better off, for example, not engaging in any activities or taking anything in the way of pharmacology that would further increase their dopamine.

I would recommend not using stimulants such as caffeine prior to divergent thinking, but rather use stimulants, if you do want to use stimulants, such as caffeine prior to convergent thinking.

My recommendation would be for those of you that are trying to enhance divergent thinking and creative ability that you would do [NSDR] at a minimum once per week. And I should say, if you were going to do it once per week, I'd recommend doing it for about 20 to 30 minutes.

Divergent thinking itself does not occur during NSDR, AKA Yoga Nidra. The NSDR, Yoga Nidra, deep relaxation meditation, whatever it is you want to call it sets a dopaminergic tone... It raises the baseline of dopamine transmission in that circuitry that then positions you to engage in divergent thinking more effectively.

There is absolutely zero, zero, evidence that alcohol increases creativity. However, by way of reducing activation of the prefrontal cortex, there is some evidence that alcohol and other substances reduce what's called autobiographical scripting ... It can enhance divergent thinking at very low doses.

Divergent thinking is the critical element for initiating the creative process ... Divergent thinking involves taking some starting point—in this case, a pen—and then radiating out from that in... a random walk, just kind of wandering through your thought space and memory space about what could be related to this pen.

Whatever surfaces, surfaces. That's open monitoring meditation ... Open monitoring meditation on a regular basis improves divergent thinking capability.

When dopamine levels are elevated, the blinking reflex is more active; people just blink more. When dopamine levels are lower or less active in this pathway, people tend to blink less.

If you are somebody who really seeks to be creative, you really do need to be somebody who forages for information and structured information, in particular ... You can't break rules that you don't understand.

If people are blinking fairly often.... what they find is that those people can engage in divergent thinking very easily. In other words, being in a good mood facilitates divergent thinking.

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.

When thinking about biology, it's almost always better to think about verbs as opposed to nouns. So, rather than think of creativity as a noun or somebody being creative as an adjective, think about the verb creativity—that is, what are the steps required?

Creativity is a rearrangement of existing elements into novel combinations that reveal something about how we or the world works. And, this is very important, it tends to be things that are useful.

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 early years—in particular, in the years between age 5 and 25.

Microdosing of psilocybin for a series of weeks on a daily basis.... does seem to increase divergent thinking ability.

For something to be creative, it actually has to reveal to us something fundamental about the world or about how we work.