Healthy Brain, Happy Life (36 page)

While these findings provide evidence that physical activity can increase aspects of creativity, the mechanism by which these effects occur is still unknown. It’s possible that other forms of mild physical activity that free your mind, like knitting or fishing, would work in the same way. It’s also possible that walking might improve mood and therefore make you more apt to be creative. So, while we don’t yet know the connection between movement and creativity, the finding is both useful and immediately implementable. If you want a boost in your creativity or need to dislodge a creative block, take a walk. So, once again, exercise is good for your brain!

My own exploration of
creativity has been one of transitions and evolution. I started out a very classic deliberate creative thinker, slowly building up my cognitive knowledge so I was able to ask interesting scientific questions about how memory works in the brain and how new long-term memories are born. I explored previously unexplored brain areas and discovered new things about them. More recently, I have moved beyond deliberate and focused creativity and started to explore the more spontaneous and emotional aspects of creativity in my work and in my life. My exercise research was inspired by my love of the practice and a genuine hope that I could harness the power of exercise to improve people’s learning, memory, and cognition. I still use a great deal of incremental focused attention to study neuroscience and come up with key experiments that will help me reach this goal, but now I feel that my scientific work is infused with much more emotional resonance than it was when I started in this field. The artists, musicians, and other creative types in my circle of friends help feed the creative spark in me.

But maybe the biggest shift I see in my own creative life is my reaction to what my friend Julie Burstein, a public radio producer and bestselling author of the book
Spark: How Creativity Works,
calls the “tragic gap” or, in other words, the unknown. Early in my career that tragic gap terrified me. I knew this was part of science, but my approach to not knowing was just to put my head down and work as hard as I could until something interesting emerged. Maybe the strategy was okay, but the attitude definitely needed tweaking. The adventurous side of me was attracted to science for exactly this reason: to be able to explore the unknown corners of the brain and see what I could find. But then the reality of tenure and the number of high-quality publications I needed to produce to get tenure got in the way of that romantic dream, and I went about reaching my goals in the only way I knew how—with focused, unrelenting work.

The biggest change in my own approach to science today is that I am now able sit in that tragic gap of the unknown and appreciate that this is the place where the most creative ideas occur, when you don’t know what the answer is or how an experiment is going to turn out. It’s an uncomfortable, scary, lonely place, but ultimately, if you let yourself dwell there long enough it becomes, more often than not, a rewarding experience. The process involves letting go of expectations and quick answers and being open to strange ideas and intense feelings. This is where my meditation practice also helps enormously. And from this collision, new ideas emerge. No amount of controlling will help. You have to believe that by keeping an open mind and an open heart, you will encounter or discover an interesting path, and that seems, to me, the essence of the creative spirit.

There has been one last realization that I have made about my own creative process that I’d like to share.

While I’m convinced (and there is good supporting evidence available) that increased and sustained aerobic exercise has improved my learning, memory, attention, and mood, I also think that exercise may have improved my creativity. Why? Because exercise not only enhances the functions of the prefrontal cortex, which we know is important in creativity, but also enhances the function of the hippocampus, a key area involved in future thinking, or imagination. Improved mood has also been implicated in higher levels of creativity. Currently, this is not a proven fact, just a personal observation. But just as walking can help give you a creative burst, I suspect that long-term increases in aerobic exercise may work to grease the wheels of creativity and help you let go, be open to novelty, face your limitations, and sit happily in the tragic gap.

TAKE-AWAYS: CREATIVITY

•  Creativity involves both sides of the brain and involves the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex interacting with emotional areas (the amygdala, anterior cingulate cortex, and ventromedial prefrontal cortex) and areas involved in long-term knowledge and memory (the cerebral cortex and hippocampus).

•  The hippocampus is also implicated in imagination and future thinking, which are critical for the process of creativity.

•  Some studies note that damage to the left frontal lobe causes a release from control, resulting in striking bursts of creative output in some patients.

•  All these findings together support the idea that creative thinking is just a particular version of regular thinking that can be practiced and improved like any other cognitive skill.

•  A key to creativity is learning to be in the tragic gap between ideas and to enjoy the process of discovering the unknown.

BRAIN HACKS: CREATIVITY

Creativity can be jump-started when you use more of your senses at one time. It can also be stimulated when you get out of your comfort zone and test your abilities. Try to learn something new!

•  Use toothpicks and jelly beans or other soft candies to make a geometric sculpture.

•  Get colored paper and try to make cutouts (like Matisse did) that look good to you.

•  Go to the kitchen and create something good to eat using only what you have on hand (this will probably take more than four minutes, but you can try to plan the cooking strategy in four minutes).

•  Make up new lyrics to one verse of a favorite song.

•  Sit outside and blindfold yourself; for four minutes, listen to the world’s sounds in a new way.

•  Try to fix something in your house that you have never tried to fix before.

•  If you are not already an actor, read part of a Shakespeare sonnet or a poem out loud with feeling.

MEDITATION AND THE BRAIN:
Getting Still and Moving It Forward

L
ike many of us, over the past several years, I have been inundated by information related to the benefits of meditation on the mind and on the body. Meditation can calm you down. Meditation can pump you up. Meditation can make you happy. Meditation can help you sleep better. Meditation can make you kinder and more altruistic. There have been many studies purported to suggest all the wonderful things meditation can do for us, but what if you just can’t stick with it?

CONFESSIONS OF A YO-YO MEDITATOR

I came to meditation as a natural extension of my journey with exercise. As I have written, exercise changed my life. Mindful exercise, or exercise with purpose, created even more change and helped my brain to more fully respond to what exercise was doing. Meditation felt like the natural next step after intentional exercise, and with all the talk of the benefits, I was bent on making the practice a part of my life too. But I’ll admit it: I’m a yo-yo meditator.

Even now, after years of making meditation a part of my life, I still don’t have the kind of solid, unwavering, gotta-do-it-every-day kind of dedication that I want to have. I have never aspired to be a monk who could sit for many hours at a time in deep meditation. I was just hoping to get to a solid, reliable ten- or fifteen-minute meditation each day, but even that modest goal is easier said than done. For me (and I think for countless others), developing a regular personal meditation practice turns out to be a lot harder than I ever imagined.

It’s not that I haven’t tried. I am, in fact, a veteran of multiple meditation challenges. The first one was during my intenSati teacher training; we were asked to follow a twenty-minute YouTube video presented by Dr. Wayne Dyer called the
Morning AH Meditation,
every day. Dyer instructed us to meditate to the sound
Ah
. He explained that this sound is particularly powerful because it is included in the word for
God
in many different cultures: God, Allah, Buddha, Krishna, Jehovah. He also believes that the
Ah
sound is one of pure joy. According to Dyer there is something very powerful about vocalizing this sound while directing our attention to what we want to bring about or manifest in our life. The result, according to Dyer, is that when we regularly focus our attention through an
Ah
meditation practice, what we wish for starts to come true.

I was already a strong believer in the use of manifesting (another word for focusing my attention on specific things I wanted in my life), and I do believe mantras (like
Ah
) can help focus my attention during meditation. So I was happy to pair my intentions with the chants along with Dyer to try to kick-start my meditation practice. If the manifestations came true, so much the better!

At that time, my goal was to do the
Ah
meditation for thirty days straight, as we had been instructed in intenSati training, because doing anything for thirty days would make it habitual. I came out of the gates with a bang, and I definitely saw changes in my ability to meditate over that first month. In the beginning, when I sat down for my daily meditation, my right foot had the annoying habit of tapping as if it (or I) were impatient to get the meditation over with. I intentionally forced my foot to stop tapping and became much less fidgety in my month-long course. I also learned to control my breath better so I could sustain the
Ah
sounds during the entire meditation. To be honest, I got a tiny bit competitive trying to sustain my
Ah
as long as Dyer did (he gives a really long
Ahhhhhh
in this video). This was probably not the most Zen approach to meditation, but it helped keep me coming back.

Sure, I missed a day here and there, but I was pretty consistent for those thirty days. Did I notice any effects in my life during this exercise? Absolutely! I noticed that my focus was sharper; I felt less distracted and more efficient.