Neuro Post-it 12: Tips on Enhancing Creativity
A new series of neuroscientific digestible insights! Written in collaboration with Cesca Centini.
Our brains are wired for creativity. Like our intelligence and capacity for language, it is an inherent quality that we all possess. We just have to learn to put it to good use.
Early in the Neuro Post-it series, we covered musical creativity, visual creativity, and literary creativity. Now, we’re returning to this incredible topic of creativity to provide you with five big tips on how to enhance it using neuroscience-backed techniques.
Creativity is one of our greatest superpowers. We don’t realize how powerful it is until we understand just how much we can do with it to push the bounds of what’s possible in science, the arts, and other disciplines. There are different neural circuits responsible for different forms of creativity—although many of them overlap. And because they are wired into our brain’s architecture, there are ways to train these neural circuits so we become “automatically creative” in a sense.
Mind-wandering
Our first tip is simple: let your mind wander. Let your brain rest, to indulge in its own thoughts and ideas. As we discussed in Neuro Post-it 4 about literary creativity, there is a brain network that particularly activates in creative writing (and other forms of creativity) called the default mode network (DMN). Remember that? Yeah. It is a HUGE ally of creativity that arises from daydreaming and imagination. Because the amazing “ah-ha!” moment typically happens during such times when you’re not trying to actively solve a problem.
A more detailed rundown: the DMN is a set of brain regions—which includes the medial prefrontal cortex, posterior cingulate cortex, and angular gyrus—activated when you're not focused on the outside world. During these "off-task" periods, your brain retrieves memories, simulates scenarios, and combines seemingly unrelated information, fostering powerful creative insight.
The DMN activates in low stimulation environments, and you’ll find out how that is the case below.
So how exactly can you activate it? Go on a walk, daydream when you can, even when taking a shower → that’s where some of our best thoughts occur. Why? These are all low stimulation tasks that activate our DMN. Once the brain enters this mode, it performs high-level internal work like retrieving personal memories, integrating ideas from various domains, constructing hypothetical scenarios and even simulating the future. In this state, your brain becomes a creative demon. It begins spontaneously generating ideas that you may have never consciously thought of.
What to do:
Take breaks from focused work at regular 1-2 hour intervals and go on a walk to clear your mind and boost mental clarity
Instead of your phone or other electronic device, have a notepad near you to jot down unexpected thoughts and ideas that come to your mind
Practice mindfulness for 2-3 minutes during each break to calm neural noise
Do light chores like washing dishes or doing laundry → ****repetitive motion + minimal focus = creative engine activated
Let your mind roam before sleeping or after waking up
Literally just free-write or doodle endlessly (no seriously, it’s so effective)
What do you avoid? High-stimulation tasks like…
Social media (again, keep your phone out of sight!)
Consciously and stubbornly thinking about a problem with one specific method in mind (essentially forcing solutions through brute-force thinking)
Rapidly switching between tasks or tabs on your computer
Doomscrolling the news
Mind-wandering is part of a broader component in the creative process that psychologists call incubation (more on this later). When you stop to consciously think about a problem, you allow your brain to breathe. It begins to make unexpected connections between distant concepts and unconsciously processes problems in the background, returning to them with fresh perspectives and novel insights. And there is some fascinating neuroscience to support this, as studies with fMRI (like this one) have demonstrated that creative thinking strengthens the connections between the DMN and executive control networks in the brain. Because of this, mind-wandering is often associated with increased originality and divergent thinking scores in tests like the Alternative Uses Task.
It’s amazing that by simply allowing our brain to enter this idle state, we can enhance its capacity for creativity.
Think like a child
Children constantly explore and take in information from their environment. Their brains are incredibly active, trying to piece together how the universe works. And in the process, this exploration feeds their creativity circuits in so many ways. This is why children are inherently creative—they love scribbling…building things with lego…even making up their own vocabulary.
It’s a beautiful process, and can teach older people so much about creativity.
Children are amazingly creative for a reason: their brains are wired to learn through exploration. During development, the young prefrontal cortex (PFC) is largely immature and therefore isn’t as active as it is in adults, which means that they plan and think less and rather create freely without bounds.
They’re less inhibited, are more playful with their ideas, and are more likely to entertain unlikely possibilities without being blinded by a fear of failure. Yeah, as adults there’s so much we can learn about by simply going back to what we were like as children. It’s truly liberating.
Research, like this, has also demonstrated that children and adolescents exhibit more widespread activity in their DMN.
Think about the first time you saw a place you hadn’t seen before, learned a new word, or discovered a new thing about how the laws of nature work. The awe, the intense feelings of curiosity and fascination that accompanies that pure sense of wonder. This is what we are missing in much of adult life. Everything seems so routine and known to us that we almost stop to actively explore and pursue the way we used to as kids.
And this is the enemy of creativity.
Adults can reactivate this kind of childlike neuroplasticity by constantly asking “what-if?” questions and engaging in novel, low-stakes creative tasks, or even switching their environment to make their world seem new again—for instance, by simply taking a new path to work every day.
Re-introducing this novelty into our lives is crucial to rebuilding our connection with the world through wonder and learning to adopt the creativity we had as children again.
Because let’s face it, this period of our lives was special. And much of us yearn to return to the novelty of everything we sensed and learned in our early days.
And a big part of that is how free of noise and open to constant learning our minds were, fostering a powerful creativity that was unique to our young, developing brains. There is a lot we can do to reignite those feelings, and much of it begins with how we rekindle our cognitive awe.
Avoid perfectionism at all costs
Perfectionism is not a quest for the best. It is a pursuit of the worst in ourselves, the part that tells us that nothing we do will ever be good enough - that we should try again. — Julia Cameron
Kids scribble with no concern for accuracy or technique. They just scribble without too much thought, and this often results in surprisingly innovative visual metaphors. Essentially, they express their abstract emotions and ideas without censoring themselves.
This is the beauty of creativity: it does not at all have to be perfect.
Perfectionism is one of creativity’s deadliest enemies. When trying to be perfect, you activate your brain’s dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC), a region associated with error detection and self-monitoring. It makes sense. When you’re overly obsessed with doing everything “the right way”, your brain naturally diverts its energy away from divergent thinking and idea generation toward self-criticism and inhibition. In attempting to be perfect, the dACC ramps up activity and constantly scans for mistakes, comparing outcomes to expectations and flagging anything that deviates even slightly from the “norm”. So when it comes to being creative, try not to activate this part of your brain!
At the same time, such hypervigilance suppresses the DMN while locking you into executive control mode. As we’ve learned previously, this executive control is regulated by the PFC, which always prioritizes planning and rigid goal-pursuit over the open-ended exploration that happens when you let your mind wander. Creativity is a flexible, unconstrained pursuit to which rigidity is detrimental.
When perfectionism fuels self-criticism, this activates the amygdala and insula in your brain’s limbic system, which heightens emotional responses such as fear or an irrational fear of rejection. In turn, this feeds the emotional circuits in your brain by flooding them with cortisol, further impairing access to the creative states that lead to innovation.
A neurobiological cascade of events that impairs creativity in an unrealistic attempt to be perfect.
When you obsess over doing things completely right and stress when that doesn’t happen, you are neurologically priming your brain to avoid risk and novelty—cornerstones of creative thinking.
Being creative means being imperfect. Embrace imperfection and use it as an impetus to propel your creative endeavours.
Nothing in the world is perfect, so why should you be? Be imperfect and let creativity become your greatest superpower.
Tap into the power of sleep
It is by logic that we prove, but by intuition that we discover. — Henri Poincaré
Time and time again, breakthroughs in science and art have come not from focused work, but rather from stepping away—often during sleep. This is where the incubation effect comes into play: when your brain continues processing problems without your conscious awareness while you’re at rest.
But wait…how exactly does this happen? Does our brain do us wonders when we’re not aware? Sorta, yeah.
The Incubation Effect
During slow-wave and REM sleep, the brain consolidates memories and reorganizes neural circuits, helping form novel associations between unrelated regions of the brain. This is a key aspect of creativity.
Sleep enhances the integration of remote associative elements, likely due to reduced activity of the PFC (which includes the dACC) and increased activity in the hippocampus and associated areas, including the DMN. This is because REM is supercharged by incubation, leading to…
High activity in the limbic system, particularly in the hippocampus and amygdala…
Lower activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and…
Increased theta oscillations, facilitating access to unusual associations…
this makes the neural environment ripe for loose connections and the emotional insights that fuel our creative thinking.
The key to these loose connections is a concept called “spreading activation”, in which neural activity spreads to more distant, unrelated concepts, gathering distant associations from long-term memory and recombining them in novel ways—promoting originality and boosting idea novelty while suppressing the effects of a logical, focused brain state. This knowledge is stored in semantic networks, which are webs of related ideas. And while your conscious mind is focused elsewhere, your brain still traverses related memory nodes as spreading activation continues quietly.
Incubation is not a pause in creativity or from the task at hand. Rather, it is a different mode of creative processing that becomes possible once you disengage from consciously trying to be creative. It’s beautiful that you can do this to allow your brain systems to explore novel combinations of information and connect dots you never knew existed, leading to that euphoric ‘ah-ha’ moment that characterizes the pinnacle of much of our creative endeavours.
The power of dopamine
During more relaxed, exploratory states, dopamine is more actively released in the brain. Higher dopamine levels facilitate cognitive flexibility, crucial for shifting perspectives and generating new ideas. This, is the essence of divergent thinking, keeping the mental engine idling and ready to leap when insight strikes.
But there’s a caveat.
Like most things in the brain, balance is key. A lack of dopamine can lead to mental rigidity or apathy—as seen, for instance, in Parkinson’s. In this case, the entire brain appears to act like the DLPFC in the executive control network. Meanwhile, excessive dopamine can lead to chaotic or disorganized thinking that is messy and unable to filter or prioritize ideas—resulting in a flood of spurious associations that lack relevance or coherence.
Creativity thrives in the middle ground. The Goldilocks Zone where the amount of dopamine is not too little nor too much. In this state, curiosity and idea generation can be facilitated without impairing cognitive control or coherence. In this state, dopamine allows you to explore, to imagine, to create. It fuels the mental agility and reward sensitivity that underpin the creative incubation process—where the brain works behind the scenes to establish surprising, innovative connections.
Engage in cross-modal learning and sensory stimulation
Exposing your brain to multiple types of stimuli—whether that be visual, tactile, auditory, or kinesthetic—forges novel neural connections across different areas of the brain, enhancing your creative capacities. There’s some truly fascinating neuroscience behind this.
Cross-modal stimulation engages broader neural networks, encompassing in particular the parietal and temporal association cortices, which help synthesize information from multiple sensory inputs.
An important concept to understand is that creativity thrives not just on how much you know, but in how flexibly your brain can combine different bits of information. And this is the key to cross-modal learning. Your brain is able to forge richer, more flexible neural pathways that enhance your creative circuits through a variety of paths.
It’s all about developing a broader and more integrated neural network capable of synthesizing disparate inputs and producing novel associations with them—a hallmark of creativity credited to the wonders of neuroscience.
Creative thinkers often show enhanced connectivity between sensory areas and higher-order executive regions of the brain, enabling them to toggle between abstract thinking and vivid sensory imagination.
Of course, there’s neuroplasticity involved here as we’ve seen time and time again ;)
When we engage in multisensory learning, we don’t just activate more brain areas—we leave lasting changes in how those areas communicate. It’s like remixing a song: this flexibility strengthens creative cognition, which makes it easier to interpret or recombine your existing bits of knowledge into something new. How damn cool is that?
Here’s a practical tip: try experimenting with learning or expressing ideas in different ways—draw a concept instead of writing it down, listen to music while brainstorming, or use physical movement to demonstrate abstract ideas. Many dancers, for instance, use movement to explore certain emotional or conceptual themes before choreographing. Try it, it helps!
There’s so much you can do to train your brain to become naturally more creative. All it takes is liberating it, allowing it to breathe and make the novel connections that spark the amazing creative potential inside of you.
Resources and interesting bits
https://www.hubermanlab.com/episode/the-science-of-creativity-and-how-to-enhance-creative-innovation
Co-written beautifully with the incredibly amazing
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