Owais Awan, Multidisciplinary Art Director, We Are Social Why is it that some people seem to come up with novel ideas more frequently than others? Why do ideas seem to hit at the most odd hours? Could research in treating brain strokes help you develop a more creative brain?
If the goal of creativity is to think up novel and useful ideas consistently, then it’s worth asking: How does the thinking bit actually happen?
That’s what this passion project, Anatomy of a Creative, sought to explore – compiling 25+ years of the highest quality peer-reviewed research we have from some of the best neuroscientists in the world.
While the following is an attempt to fit an ocean into a teacup, by the end, you’ll hopefully have a better understanding of how creativity happens on a physiological level in the brain, as well as some actionable insights from academia and others on how to build a more creative mind.
The myth of the creative type
We’ve all undoubtedly at some point experienced or seen a seasoned creative effortlessly crack a brief in what felt like seconds. People whose first brain fart looks like other people’s hours of sleepless effort.
When this happens, it’s easy to get comparative and rattle off phrases such as, “Oh, I’m not the creative type”, or, “It’s something you have or you don’t.”
Good news; literature on the topic seems to say otherwise.Somewhere along the way, we convinced ourselves that creativity is a gift – a spark bestowed upon a select few, as if imagination were some genetic lottery.
But if you scrutinize that line of thinking, you realize: that can’t be true. You, me, the critically acclaimed Chief Creative Officer and pretty much everyone is running the same hardware (the brain). A brain that hasn’t really changed in the last 250,000 years. So what gives?
Neurons that fire together wire together
It’s less about the brain itself and more about how the brain wires itself through a process formally known as neuroplasticity – which is our brain’s ability to rewrite itself and physically change in response to experience.
This makes frequently-used pathways quicker and more robust, not unlike building muscle at the gym. Neuroplasticity is what we sometimes refer to when we colloquially say muscle memory.
This concept is the overall basis upon which most of Anatomy of a Creative is based upon, and the neuroscience is unequivocally clear; creativity isn’t a fixed trait, it’s a trainable process.
The woman who felt like she was perpetually falling
After a routine infection, Cheryl Schiltz received the ototoxic antibiotic gentamicin, which in rare cases damages the inner ear’s vestibular organs. She was left feeling as if she were constantly falling and often collapsed when standing.
Neuroscientist Paul Bach-y-Rita’s team trained her with a “BrainPort” device that converted head motion into gentle electrotactile patterns on the tongue, allowing touch to substitute for missing balance signals. With repeated sessions, her stability persisted even after the device was removed, lasting longer each time.
It’s important to note; she never healed the damaged part; her brain learned to remap balance via a new pathway. Her brain literally learned to use her tongue for something most of us rely on our ears for. Now read that again.
Similar principles of sensory substitution and intensive practice have helped many patients after brain strokes and certain types of sensory loss. If the brain is so resilient that it can rewire itself past such harsh conditions, then surely it can rewire itself to be more creative.
The science of ideas that move people
If we’re going to get big brained about brain science, then it’s worth being specific on how the brain does creativity. The short version is; we have an auditory cortex, a sensory cortex, and a visual cortex. Note how there is no such thing as a creativity cortex. That is a multi-network job.
Here’s the best version of how creativity works in the brain as we know it so far:
- Default Mode Network (DMN): Responsible for mind-wandering, memory recombination, and remote associations. Not very logical, however. This is the part that really goes off when you’re dreaming.
- Executive Control Network: Responsible for goal maintenance, working memory, inhibition, and sequencing. The ruthless editor, and the part that asks “yeah, but does it answer the brief?”
- Salience Network: Acts a switchboard between the two networks above. It detects novelty and importance. The part that says “focus here, there’s something worth exploring”.
It goes without saying this is a radical oversimplification and these networks do a lot more than what’s mentioned above.
But if you look at the networks, they look awfully familiar to divergent and convergent thinking commonly seen in brainstorming.
Creative mastery as we know it is the ability to to seamlessly go back and forth between these modes and to know when to do so.
Cool, but what can I do to become more creative?
Actual papers will list a myriad of ways to promote the right kind of brain rewiring for creativity.
Repetitive brain-training exercises function similarly to the gym. Rotating objects in your head in 3D. Listing as many use cases for a thing as possible, and so on.
But below are my shortlists that result in the greatest and quickest yield.
Quality is a side effect of quantity
The key here is quantity, not quality. Creative quality follows a numbers game: more attempts produce more creative outliers.
High output creates high quality. Every trial adds a potential winning idea to the pile (Simonton’s BVSR theory), which strengthens associative networks and helps ideas flow more freely.
Now, stop working and slack off
No, seriously. Ever wondered why the “aha!” moment seems to happen in the most random times? From the shower, to the gym, or eating dinner.
Often when you aren’t really trying. It’s because this is when your brain’s Default Mode Network gets really active and is free to make those novel connections.
Most seasoned creatives kind of know this intuitively – to not start working as soon as the brief comes in. This has been a well-understood mechanism for a long, long time in psychology called incubation.
There’s this idea that if you sit there doing nothing, relaxing, nothing cognitively demanding, that your brain would be “less active”. The logic tracks… but this simply isn’t true. A good analogy is to think of your brain like a restaurant.
During the day, it’s busy cooking, serving people, bussing tables, and once closed; busy cleaning and prepping for tomorrow. It’s equally as busy, just doing different things.
The best thing you can do in the early stages of brainstorming is to promote Default Mode Network activation. And that happens – ironically – by not trying. Go on a walk, or anything you can do on autopilot, and let your mind wander. Here’s a good checklist to know before doing this.
- What are you trying to achieve?
- How did the current solution come to be?
- What are the restrictions I’m working within?
- Who is ultimately responsible for this thing?
- What criteria would make a successful solution?
If a creative needs to connect the dots, then it helps to have a lot of dots
Imagine the following scenario: You’re on a small island with the goal of finding buried treasure. You take a hula hoop, throw it at a random spot and decide to only dig within the confines of the hoop, as deep as you may need to go.
We can hopefully agree that this is a terrible tactic. You’d want to spread out and cover as much ground as possible to hedge your bets to strike gold. The same logic applies here. Remember the Default Mode Network, while amazing at association, can only do so with the memory you have. This is also why it’s impossible to dream of faces you’ve never seen.
In practice, that means diversifying your tastes. Beyond the go-to digital platforms, social media or frankly… digital anything for that matter. Go to galleries, visit libraries, talk to eclectic people. Ideas don’t limit themselves to office hours.
The problem with being surrounded by algorithmic recommendations is that it prevents you from being challenged or surprised a lot of the time. Everything is molded to preferences you’ve already expressed. Another benefit of an analog approach, besides diversity, is that you’d be surprised at the amount of information that isn’t easily available online.
Take notes
Although it may not feel like it, this isn’t the first time in our history that we’ve had to deal with an overwhelming amount of information. Think the Renaissance, the Age of Enlightenment, the telegraph era and so on. Each time, people have turned to some version of a notes system to act as a second brain.
Taking notes and journaling isn’t new advice, but most people’s notes look something like a collection of fragmented ideas, usually grammatically disjointed (no judgment, same here), and often stay that way, making most notes apps a graveyard for ideas.
An old notetaking method called Zettelkasten solves this problem. In its most basic form, you structure your notes as follows:
- Fleeting notes – Any thought that came from you (ideas, sparks, shower thoughts).
- Literature notes – Anything that came externally (books, quotes, music, articles, etc)
- Permanent notes – After 2 days or so, revisit the two above and turn them into full and refined, self-contained insights written clearly so they stand on their own.
The magic comes from revisiting after a delay: your brain has time to forget context and then reconnect the notes more objectively, often finding new links. Repeated linking strengthens associations, so new connections and ideas surface faster.
Bonus points: it also makes you turn those fragments into fully fleshed-out ideas that can now live outside your notes and benefit others, turning that once graveyard into more of a garden.
A more academic approach
Earlier, we compared the likeness of some of these protocols to that of muscles at a gym. There are some exercises that you can do to help further strengthen those connections.
And yes, some look odd or trivial, just like half the moves you see in a gym. What matters is that they target known mechanisms of learning and plasticity:
- Perspective shifting: Pick an everyday object (e.g., a mug). Rapidly imagine it from many viewpoints: a child’s, an engineer’s, someone 200 years ago, an ant’s. The goal here is to help break assumptions & strengthen cognitive flexibility
- Alternate uses: Choose a common object (brick, paperclip, spoon). List as many unusual uses as possible in 2 minutes. The aim here is to train divergent thinking fluency.
- Assumption reversal: Take a familiar product/process, list its basic assumptions, then flip each one. Example: “A fridge must always be cold.” What if it were hot?
Most of the time we dig ourselves into a box before the brief even shows up via the tools we use, “the ways it’s always been” etc. This promotes challenging those hidden constraints.
If you did these for about 15 to 30 minutes a day, and then, for some reason, happened to find yourself in an MRI machine; there’s evidence that you would see a structural change in your brain in about four to eight weeks, depending on your practice.
The takeaway for a creative
I would be remiss if I didn’t also take a moment to note nuances. Deliberate practice is definitely an aspect that impacts creativity.
There are many other variables that also come into play on a day-to-day level. The kind of food you eat, your childhood environment, sleep, your culture, class, neurodiversity, even the kind of hormone levels of your mom while you were still developing. There’s also a heritability component to creativity and a lot more.
As it stands, the brain is the most complicated piece of engineering in the known universe. Our understanding of how it works and imaging methods are still in their infancy… but that doesn’t negate what has been said so far.
When I first started piecing together Anatomy of a Creative, I sought not to glorify creativity, but to demystify it. Because when you strip away the romanticism, what’s left is a system that can be studied, understood, and strengthened.
The idea that creativity is an exclusive club is not just outdated, it’s scientifically wrong. We all have the same hardware. The only difference lies in how we train it.
By Owais Awan, Multidisciplinary Art Director, We Are Social
