I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear and Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

Whether it's athletics, whether it's cooking, whether it's comedy, whether it's rap, whether

it's music, whether it's classical, whether it's jazz, I think there's a core universal

creative sub-shade in the brain that allows us to do all of these things depending on the

nature of the task and how spontaneous it is, it may phase in and out, but from my experiments,

I'm convinced that one of the core attributes is the ability to turn off your brain and

how quickly and how deeply you can do that.

That's Neuroscience's Charles Lim. He's combined his ability to visualize a working

brain with his passion for music, especially jazz, in a search for the origins of human

creativity. He's now extending his research beyond jazz musicians to comedians and even

rappers. And the surprising finding is that being spontaneous and creative depends on

using less of your brain, not more. I'm really looking forward to talking with you because

what your work involves is what I've devoted my life to, which is creativity and improvisation

as well. As a scientist, how did you move into creativity? A lot of people don't think

they go together.

Yeah, no, thank you for the question. I have to tell you that for me, as the anomaly

might actually be that I became a scientist, I started out my life as a somebody who was

deeply, deeply obsessed with music. It's always been my true kind of, if there's one thing

that really grips me more than anything else, it's music.

And so as a scientist, I was studying hearing. And in specific, I was looking at the inner

ear. And so I was a surgeon that was training in hearing restoration. And so the more you

look at the ear, the more you realize that you're never going to really understand something

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