What part of the brain activates when you enter the creative flow state?

That’s the question that Dr. Charles Limb, then a neuroscientist at Johns Hopkins, sought to answer in a novel study. Fascinated by improv jazz and freestyle hip hop, Limb put artists in an fMRI scanner to study what parts of the brain light up when performers switch from playing known bars of sheet music and enter into creative flow.

As you might imagine, the “creative” (ie self-expressive) part of the brain turns on. But it’s not particularly illuminating to say that the creative part turns on. The most interesting part of the study was that creative flow wasn’t just a function of what turns on.

Creative flow has every bit as much to do with what turns off.

You know what part of the brain deactivates when you enter creative flow? The part responsible for judgment. That’s right: to enter into creative flow, you’ve got to turn off censorship, that critical part of your brain that says, “That’s a dumb idea.”

The implications of this finding are hard to overstate, if only because of our lack of training. Our conventional education system and organizational incentives are built upon the bedrock of critical thinking. And yet, to cultivate creativity, we also need to know when and how to deliberately turn those well-honed muscles off.

To be creative, we need to flex a totally different muscle: we need to decide to not evaluate, or defer judgment, as we say at Stanford. Amy Edmondson has insisted to promote psychological safety, we need shared language to express our objectives. But before we can have shared language around creative work in organizations, we need to have shared understanding of what kinds of thinking fuel creativity, and what thwarts it.

And surprisingly, what thwarts creativity is the very mindset that we prize in so many settings: judgment.

If you find yourself stuck in the routine judgmental mode, here’s something you can try. One simple flip folks find helpful: “Instead of asking, ‘What do I think of this idea?’ ask yourself, 'What does this idea make me think of?’”

Instead of being judgmental, seek to be sparkable. Or rather, in addition to being judgmental, know when to be sparkable.

Related: Have Lots of Bad Ideas
Related: Frame the Work
Related: Be Sparkable

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