The Science of Creativity & How to Enhance Creative Innovation

Huberman Lab

Scicomm Media

Science, Health & Fitness, Life Sciences

4.8 • 26.2K Ratings

🗓️ 19 December 2022

⏱️ 137 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In this episode, I explain how the brain engages in creative thinking and, based on that mechanistic understanding, the tools to improve one’s ability to think creatively and innovate in any area. I discuss how convergent and divergent thinking are essential for generating creative ideas and provide three types of meditation tools (open monitoring meditation, focused attention meditation & non-sleep deep rest; NSDR), which improve our ability to engage in these creative thinking patterns in specific and powerful ways. I also discuss how dopamine and mood contribute to the creative process and describe behavioral, nutritional and supplementation-based approaches for increasing dopamine to engage in creative thought and implementation. I explain how movement and storytelling (narrative) approaches can generate novel creative ideas and how substances like alcohol, cannabis, and psilocybin impact our creative ability. Excitingly, creativity is a skill that can be cultivated and enhanced; this episode outlines many tools to help anyone access creativity and apply creative patterns of thought to different domains of life. For the full show notes, visit hubermanlab.com. Thank you to our sponsors AG1 (Athletic Greens): https://athleticgreens.com/huberman ROKA: https://www.roka.com/huberman Thesis: https://takethesis.com/huberman LMNT: https://drinklmnt.com/huberman InsideTracker: https://www.insidetracker.com/huberman Supplements from Momentous https://www.livemomentous.com/huberman Huberman Lab Premium https://hubermanlab.com/premium Timestamps (00:00:00) Creativity (00:04:30) ROKA, Thesis, LMNT, Momentous (00:08:51) What is Creativity? (00:11:16) Creativity in Visual Arts, Escher & Banksy (00:23:37) Neural Circuits of Creativity (00:31:58) AG1 (Athletic Greens) (00:33:13) Creative Ideas & Divergent Thinking (00:42:09) Testing Creative Ideas & Convergent Thinking (00:46:41) Dopamine, Convergent & Divergent Thinking Pathways (00:57:02) InsideTracker (00:58:06) Tool: Open Monitoring Meditation & Divergent Thinking (01:07:38) Tool: Focused Attention Meditation & Convergent Thinking (01:11:06) Mood, Creativity & Dopamine (01:16:00) Tool: Mood Calibrating, Caffeine & Dopamine (01:23:41) Dopamine Supplementation; L-Tyrosine, Caffeine (01:30:15) Tool: Non-Sleep Deep Rest, Mesocortical Dopamine & Divergent Thinking (01:43:13) Serotonin, Psylocibin & Creative Thinking (01:49:13) Alcohol & Autobiographical Scripting; Cannabis (01:52:04) Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) & Creativity (01:54:45) Tool: Movement & Divergent Thinking (02:01:02) Tool: Narratives & Storytelling for Creativity (02:14:47) Zero-Cost Support, YouTube Feedback, Spotify & Apple Reviews, Sponsors, Momentous, Neural Network Newsletter, Social Media Disclaimer Title Card Photo Credit: Mike Blabac

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Huberman Lab podcast where we discuss science and science-based tools for everyday life.
0:08.7	I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of neurobiology and
0:12.1	Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today we are discussing creativity.
0:17.4	Creativity is a topic that to many people is very abstract. That is we know when something seems creative,
0:24.1	some of us know people who are creative or perhaps are creative and yet the ability to be creative
0:31.0	resides in everybody and we know that because the neural circuits that underlie creativity
0:36.0	have been somewhat defined and the steps and processes within the brain and body that lead to creativity are well known.
0:43.3	That said most people don't know how to access creativity and if they do know how to access creativity
0:49.3	they are only able to access creativity in a fairly limited number of domains of life for instance in the visual arts or in
0:56.7	music or within science or engineering or any number of different domains ranging from the kitchen to sport to
1:05.5	childhood interactions that is childhood games in other words some adults are able to access their creative spirit when
1:12.6	engaging in childlike play with children or for that matter with adults.
1:16.5	But as it turns out all of creativity stems from just a small subset of neural structures in the brain that need to be
1:24.2	activated in a particular sequence or order. Today we will talk about what those neural structures are,
1:29.0	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
1:36.7	implement those creative strategies. We will also talk about different ways to access creativity that include
1:42.9	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
1:50.9	that will allow anyone whether or not you consider yourself creative or not to be able to apply these tools in
1:57.5	different domains of life work, family, play and on and on. By the end of today's episode you will have a better understanding of what creativity is
2:06.1	and how to access it and if you like to bring others into your creative endeavors
2:12.2	which as you'll soon learn can massively expand the extent to which you yourself can express your creative talents.
2:19.3	As is the case with all episodes of the Heuberman lab podcast today we will discuss both scientific mechanisms and nomenclature
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