Translator: Tanya Cushman Reviewer: Peter van de Ven
So I've been studying creativity for my whole career,
first as a journalist, interviewing people who create music and art and fashion,
then for the last 10 years,
I've been working at a company called IDEO as a designer,
and I've worked in everything from video games to education systems,
and I've advised big organizations on how they can be more innovative.
But a year ago,
I realized that although I could talk a good game around creativity,
maybe I myself had kind of got out of the groove of it.
So I've been conducting a bunch of experiments
where I try and reignite my creative fire.
My first theory was I'm just too busy,
I'm overwhelmed.
So I thought about meditation.
I've always been a fan of people who meditate:
they have incredibly good posture
and they always seem to be calm about everything.
(Laughter)
So I downloaded a meditation app and locked myself in a room
and focused on my breathing,
and it was really great for about 30 or 40 seconds.
(Laughter)
And then these thoughts bubbled up, and I tried to push them down,
and more thoughts came up,
and I found
I was locked in this furious game of whack-a-mole with my own brain.
And so then I wondered, well, maybe I didn't need quiet time.
Maybe I needed inspiration.
Maybe I needed something from the outside,
ideally a trip to Kathmandu on a vintage motor bike
or hang gliding in Peru.
But I had some budget issues.
(Laughter)
So I tried a technology approach.
A colleague offered to curate for me
a different virtual reality experience every day for a week,
starting in the morning.
And we began with him putting me in soothing forests and on beaches.
Then the next day, he'd turn me into a robot,
and then I was on a rather nauseating roller coaster,
and then he locked me in a dark room with the ghost of a murdered person.
(Laughter)
And from the outside,
I was this slack-jawed fool
with what looked like a shoe box strapped to my face,
but on the inside, it was a revelation.
I was having these very strong emotional experiences.
And after each session, I set myself creativity tests -
things like "come up with new names for colors."
And for the first few sessions, these went really well.
As the VR experiences got more intense, actually,
I was too disoriented to have ideas.
(Laughter)
But I did notice I did feel inspired;
I felt like I was seeing the world in a new way,
and the experiences had jolted me out of this safe rut that I'd fallen into.
And so I formed a theory.
I thought, well, maybe the more discomfort I experience,
the greater the boost to my creativity.
[Discomfort = Good?]
And so I thought, well, what would make me really uncomfortable?
And I'm somebody who likes to prep things in advance,
so the thing that really makes my palms sweat
is the idea of being in front of a bunch of people
and having to make stuff up, without a script.
And so the thing that was going to give me peak discomfort
would be improv.
Now, I'd tried this once before,
and I'd been forced to do a rap of my life story
in front of a crowd of stony-faced marketing executives.
(Laughter)
It had been a nightmare,
and therefore, according to my theory, it would be a good thing to do.
So I took a deep breath,
and I signed up for lessons at the Second City in Chicago.
And I remember my first class.
It was in a windowless room with bright lights -
kind of like an interrogation center -
and sitting in there,
trying not to look at each other, with other students.
There was a waitress, a basketball player, a lawyer, an Uber driver.
It was kind of like a grown-up version of "The Breakfast Club."
(Laughter)
And into this rich psychic stew bounded Nicole, our teacher,
and she demanded we all jump up,
and we had to start passing an imaginary ball to each other,
then multiple balls,
and then balls with emotions attached to them:
happy ball, sad ball, angry ball.
And gradually, she chipped away at our collective self-consciousness.
Then she had us pair up and start acting out scenes together,
and she gave a tip.
She said, "When you're talking with your scene partner,
you should say stuff that defines what your relationship is
or where you are or what you're doing."
And I grabbed onto these rules
like a drowning man grabbing a life preserver,
but no sooner had I absorbed them, then they started working against me.
I began opening scenes with these absurdly convoluted sentences
like "You're a wonderful wife, Helen.
It's a shame you lost your arm in the alien invasion."
(Laughter)
And Nicole had to step in and rescue me.
And she said to me, "You're getting in your head.
Instead of trying to think of the perfect thing to say,
you should be just feeling things and letting emotions guide your way."
[Getting in my head]
And at first, this idea of getting in my head being bad -
um, I didn't really get it.
I was just like, "Well, um, that's where my brain is -
that's a good thing to do."
But as a demonstration,
she had me act out a scene with her at the side,
suggesting to me what emotions I should feel.
And so what followed
was a bizarre exchange between me and the basketball player,
where we discussed the death of her dog,
what had happened to the dog,
and then the coach shouted to me, "Be angry."
And these words just bubbled up inside me:
"I put it in the microwave."
"Why'd you do that?"
"It was wet,"
(Laughter)
and, and, and this -
It was a really strange feeling
with Nicole suggesting emotions to me.
It was like my conscious, analytical self just stepped out of the way,
and these words were bubbling up inside.
I was feeling what it was like to not be in my head.
And so I really thought I was onto something at this point,
but I was wondering,
Is this just a weird improv thing,
or is there some science
behind this feeling of unconscious creativity?
And around this time, I received an invite to a psychology event at UPenn,
and the invitation came with the additional thing which said,
"Every attendee will have their brain scanned."
And I thought, "Well, okay, that sounds great."
My enthusiasm lasted until I saw the MRI machine,
and it was behind thick safety glass
with lots of warning signs and flashing lights.
But I climbed onto the plastic bed
and was slid like a torpedo into the machine.
And then I spent an hour trying to think of creative things
while these superconducting magnets jiggled all the cells in my head.
And looking at the scan afterwards,
I found myself marveling
at the sheer weirdness of a human brain and of cognition.
This glowing walnut contained all my knowledge,
all my moral feelings,
my hopes and dreams,
the unconscious lunatic who's thinking about microwaving dogs -
it was all in there.
And I spoke to the guy running the event,
a psychologist called Scott Kaufman,
and I asked him,
"What's the latest neuroscience of creativity?
Does the whole left brain-rational, right brain-creative thing still hold?"
And he told me that was hopelessly out of date,
and scientists now think of brain function in terms of networks.
The executive attention network
is what you use when you focus on things and make decisions
and, generally, get stuff done.
But in the MRI experiments,
the scientists had noticed another state, with much lower frontal lobe activity,
which was associated with imagination and dreaming and daydreaming, wandering.
And Kaufman had dubbed this the "imagination network."
And at first, I was like, "Well, executive attention-imagination,
left brain-right brain.
Does it really matter what you label these different things?
But there's important differences.
The left brain-right brain model, it implied a kind of stasis.
People would say, "Oh, I'm a right-brained person,"
as if that was their identity.
Is it like being a right-handed person?
But the network model makes it very clear
that everybody is using these different networks all the time
and has to switch between them.
[Competing networks]
And the other thing about the networks is they're in competition.
They actively repress each other.
So if you want to get out of your head,
if you want to get into your imagination,
you have to stop with the executive attention.
You have to let go of that conscious control.
[The creative gift]
I found this insight really interesting:
it helped me understand
something I'd observed earlier in my career when I was a journalist.
I always used to get very frustrated when I was talking to artists
and they wouldn't tell me how their creative process worked.
"It just happens," the musician or fashion designer would say.
"It's a gift."
And I thought this was an ego thing.
I thought they were just saying it's magic
because "I'm really cool, and I want to explain how it happens."
But now I was wondering, well,
maybe if these breakthroughs for them are happening unconsciously,
maybe they don't know how it happens.
Or maybe they have some intuition
that if they shine the spotlight of their consciousness onto this process,
it might actually stop it working.
It also made me think about me and my process.
As a creative professional,
I was actually rewarded
for providing explanations as to why an idea was good.
When you're working with teammates or you're working with clients,
everybody likes it if you can provide a rationale and explain;
it makes everyone feel safe.
But I was starting to wonder,
well, if I'm providing explanations for everything,
maybe I'm building this scaffolding that's keeping me locked in my head.
So in the weeks following my brain scan,
I looked around for other examples of unconscious creativity at work.
And I found some examples in the history books.
Thomas Edison, after a hard day of light bulb tweaking,
Edison liked to take a nap in a chair,
and he would have a handful of ball bearings in his hand
and a metal pie tin on the floor.
And the moment he fell asleep, his hand would open,
the ball bearings would drop,
and the clattering sound would wake him up.
So he would literally have half a second of sleep.
But he reported that in this moment
of going from wakefulness to sleep and then awake again,
he'd find ideas bubbling up for him.
And I was surprised to find that Salvador Dalí, the artist,
used exactly the same technique - also sleeping in a chair,
this time with a spoon dropping onto a hard floor.
What was interesting
is what these guys were doing matched the current brain research.
When you fall asleep, your executive attention stopping,
things can bubble up.
It's like Dalí and Edison had found a way to hack their imagination network,
using household objects.
So I tried this,
and I really wish I could report to you
that napping with a spoon
is the "one weird trick" that will lead to instant creativity.
(Laughter)
What I've learned so far
is that it's extremely hard to fall asleep in a chair while holding a spoon.
(Laughter)
But rather than focus on this just-going-to-sleep moment,
I've had much more success with the just-woken-up moment.
A lot of writing coaches
talk about how good it can be
to get on a computer or typewriter right after waking up -
before your brain is fully on -
and just do freewriting.
And I've been trying this with a piece of software called "Flowstate."
This is a very sadistic word processor,
where you set a period of time,
and then you have to write continually.
If you pause for more than two seconds,
the app would delete everything that you've written.
(Laughter)
It's tough love.
But when I go back and review the stuff that I've written on this app,
it's uncanny
because it doesn't look like the sleepy ramblings you'd expect.
It actually looks like it's written by somebody else,
and there's a lot of visual imagery and emotion in it -
it's very interesting.
And I'm starting to feel that these fragments of my time -
the moment just of falling asleep,
the moment of just waking up,
the moment of daydreaming or zoning out -
these fragments could be quite precious windows
into unconscious creativity,
but up until now, I just haven't valued them
or because they haven't been associated with an appointment on my busy calendar,
and like a lot of people, I've labeled them "dead time."
And I'm starting to wonder about that.
Because ...
This is where I want to introduce the villian of my piece,
the surprise villian of my piece:
my precious phone.
This miracle of technology.
This Pandora's box of distraction and entertainment.
I used to fantasize
about sending this thing back through time to my teenage self,
bored in 1980s England.
But now I'm not so sure, actually.
I'm starting to wonder if this device is the annihilator of dead time.
From Facebook to Flappy Bird, from Instagram to Instapaper,
I got into a habit of playing with it
as soon as I woke up or just before I went to sleep
or when I'm in line for an ATM or on a train -
pretty much any time
where I might otherwise use my imagination.
I'm starting to wonder if future, more creatively enlightened generations
might look back on the smartphone with a little of ambivalence.
They might see it as a portal-enabler of an unhealthy habit,
a bit like we today look back on the hip flask.
(Laughter)
In the 1800s, people thought the hip flask was super cool.
But now we look at it and say,
"Well, you were just spending your whole time drunk.
I mean, that's not an ideal mindset to be in day-in, day-out.
Well, I wonder if having your attention constantly tweaked
by an electronic device,
I wonder if that's an ideal mindset to be in day-in, day-out.
I have to admit, I still love my phone,
but I've started putting it into airplane mode
during quiet moments,
and as I reach my finger for that little image of the plane
and cut the data connection,
I find myself willing my thoughts
to take wing.
It's a bit like the meditation I did at the start.
But instead of trying to control my thinking,
I'm trying to be open to everything.
I think about that glowing walnut of the brain scan
and those big frontal lobes.
The frontal lobes - we know, which drive our attention -
they've been the pride of the human race.
They're the thing that's changed most as we've evolved from our ape-like past.
You know, our ancestors were quite literally "lowbrow."
And the frontal lobes have given us all these wonderful achievements:
you know - cities, cars,
the Hoover Dam, the Panama Canal.
But I wonder if humanity has achieved so much
by being able to focus and plan
and provide logical explanations for things.
I wonder if some of our next breakthroughs
might be about turning all that attention off
and giving our imaginations more freedom.
So maybe put down your phones,
grab a spoon,
and remember:
to live life at your best, you don't always have to pay attention.
Thank you.
(Applause)