Creative thinking: Your brain, creativity and meditation
The power of CREATIVE THINKING, creativity and your brainwave state:
Today we’re going to get “science-y”* as we talk about creative thinking and the connection between creativity, your brainwave state, yoga and meditation. *(I mean, as “science-y” as you can get on a blog filled with cartoons)
A good part of the beginning of last year I spent researching this connection for my 500 hour yoga teacher training and I’ve mentioned the link briefly in a few posts (like this one and this one) but today I wanted to look specifically at creative thinking and exactly what is happening in that brain of yours when you get into “creative flow”
We have several different brainwave frequencies that our brains can tune into – and I’ve ‘represented’ 4 of the most common ones above – DELTA, THETA, ALPHA and BETA.
Before we get into the creative thinking portion I think it’s useful to explain each of these brain wave states a bit more below.
As we develop, from babies, our brainwave frequencies develop beginning from DELTA and then develop up until adulthood when we have a full spectrum of brainwave states to access different thinking styles, thought patterning and brain activity – (ie: ranging from “sleeping” to “high focus”)
DELTA BRAIN WAVES:
From the age of roughly 0 – 2 years of age, we are predominantly in a DELTA brain wave state. This is our “deep sleep” state – which is why babies of this age struggle to stay awake longer than a few hours at a time. Their brainwave pattern is one that is in “sleep mode” the majority of the time. When we access this brain wave state in adulthood – we fall asleep!
THETA BRAIN WAVES:
From the ages of around of 2 – 5, we move up into the THETA brainwave state. This is part of the subconscious mind, which is why they say that safe, nurturing and loving relationships from carer to child is so fundamental around the ages of 2 – as we are being directly imprinted on into the subconscious. If we think about this state in adulthood it is the same as that feeling of allllmost drifting off to sleep – like that little twilight zone when you are juuuust dozing off at night or coming out of deep sleep in the morning (FYI: that “juuuuust dozing off at night” moment is round about the time when my already-fast-asleep-husband-“sleep-twitches”-and-shocks the lights out of me, which is always really fun). Anyway, it’s why affirmations first thing as you open your eyes or last thing as you drift off to sleep are so powerful for the subconscious mind.
ALPHA BRAIN WAVES:
From about age 5 – 8 we are predominantly in the ALPHA brain wave mode. (Note that it is not a rigidly segmented block of time – and with each developmental stage we move up and down through a variety of brain waves states that we’ve currently accessed). The Alpha brain wave state is the “imagination zone” – it’s like that feeling of “lucid wakefulness” like a hazy daydream – you are completely awake and “there” but not hyper focused or analytical. Think about the ‘average’ 5 year old – how they are completely in their own imaginary world, drifting away with daydreams and wonderful made up worlds. This is ALPHA brain wave state in action. The alpha brain wave state is the state in which we are in creative flow and it is where creative thinking most naturally occurs.
BETA BRAIN WAVE STATE:
From about the age of 8 and onwards we move into the BETA brainwave state – this is our “BUSY” mind. It’s where analysing, thinking, rational thought processing and focusing comes into gear (Think about an 8 year old asking ALL the questions). It is a hyper alert and present brainwave state that we use for learning, cognitive activities, decision making and focused mental stuff. From this age we begin to question and analyse the world around us as we come into the BETA brainwave frequency. Beta brainwave state is necessary for function, learning and survival – but, unfortunately it is the place where we tend to spend most of our time as stress (and the general lifestyle that we live these days) brings us into this hyper-alert, ever-analytical, over-processing “busy” mind all the time and we seldom take time to drop back down out of it.
Creative Thinking and Creative Flow
Creative thinking most naturally arises when we are in an ALPHA brainwave state. Creative thinking and creative flow on the one hand CAN be about pencils and “art” but on the other hand, creative thinking is ALSO about seeing a new solution to an existing problem or that sudden “AHA! moment” that you get in the shower.
(As a side note: did you ever wonder why so many great ideas come to you in the shower? It’s because when we get into the shower – most of us RELAX a little bit, we allow the tension and stress from the day to simmer down, we let go of the thinking busy mind just a little bit and in doing so, our brainwave state drops down from BETA to ALPHA and BINGO! That’s when creative thinking arises, and suddenly we’ve got a brand new way of looking at something or a great new idea!)
In my research on brainwave state and creative thinking, I came across researchers (Beeman et al.) who discovered something known as an “insight moment” – this is defined as the sudden awareness to the solution of a problem. It’s not you having to analyse, focus, over-process – it’s just the thought/solution/creative thinking suddenly appearing in your head – like when you’re taking a shower and “AHA!” the thing just appears! This is an important characteristic of the creative process in that we suddenly “receive” these creative signals from…. where-ever they come from 😉 (I call it “the universe” or natural intelligence!)
Take a look at the scramble of letters below and let me know what word you think it says (leave a comment or reply on instagram!):
G O Y A
now what about this one:
H P A P Y
and what about these?
M A D I T E T O N I
C A E R I V T I T Y
R I B N A W V A S E
NOW –
Can you work out HOW you solved the answers to this word jumble?
Really take a moment to think about HOW you did it!
* * * * *
There are two ways to “solve” these problems – the first being through a process of “deduction” – what this means is that you will try one letter, then try the next letter and see if those make sense. Then when you have a combination of two letters that make sense you will move on to trying the third letter in combination and you will keep going in this way, “deducing” the answer letter by letter.
The other way of solving this is through having what is known as an “insight moment” – this means, that you’re not exactly sure HOW you worked out what the word was – but you feel like, suddenly you just kind of “saw it” or suddenly “knew” what it was – without really being able to explain how you got there. If you solved these words above without really knowing how you did it – or you feel like you worked it out because it suddenly just “came to you” – you are more likely currently in an ALPHA brainwave state. And, the more frequently your brain comes into the ALPHA brainwave state, the more likely you are to classify yourself as “creative”.
(If you’re looking at these word scrambles at work and you’re really busy and can’t seem to figure them out – I’d encourage you to look at them again when you get home and have had some time to relax, chill out, breathe a bit (which is essentially lowering your brainwave state) and see if anything comes to you!
The researchers I mentioned above did these exact tests on a variety of different groups of people – those that classify themselves as “creative” and those that classify themselves as “less creative” and they found that people who solved these problems for “insight” (ie the second method) classified themselves as “more creative” compared to the people who solved through deduction. What they also discovered, which was so interesting is that people who solved for insight were in the ALPHA brainwave state when they solved them.
Following this research they were then able to accurately predict (without any other questions/tests) which people would classify themselves as “creative” and which would classify themselves as “less creative” based purely on measuring their brainwave states.
More ALPHA = more tendency for being CREATIVE.
The incredible thing about this is that MEDITATION, MINDFULNESS and practices such as YOGA, literally bring our brains back down from BETA towards ALPHA.
ALPHA brainwave state = CREATIVE THINKING
The more often we bring ourselves into those lower brainwave states like ALPHA the more often we are able to access our creative thinking and tap into our creative resources for: problem solving, finding solutions to things, thinking about things in new ways, having new ideas, ideation, writing, creating, drawing, painting, approaching tasks from a fresh perspective –
When Einstein said:
“We can‘t solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.”
I truly believe this is what he was talking about! If we are in BETA (the busy/hustle/analysing mode) – our brains need to literally drop down into a different thinking style (ALPHA) in order to be able to find fresh creative solutions.
And that is exactly the power of yoga and meditation in the creative journey!
Come put all of these things into action in the yoga, meditation and creativity inspiration platform!