THE SCIENCE BEHIND: CREATIVITY, FLOW AND MEDITATION BY KATIE OHMAN
When you meditate, the goal is to achieve flow. Flow is the act of doing a task simply for the purpose of doing it. Your entire being is immersed in the activity, and an intuitive sense of clarity accompanies flow. The term was first coined in the 1960’s by Dr. Mihaly Chentmihalyi, who set out to study happiness and ended up coining the phrase flow to define how truly happy people operate within their environments (1).
In Hinduism, karma yoga is the meditation of unselfish works or actions. Flow is achieved by concentrating on chores or by devoting your work to a higher power. It reminds me of a quote my mother has on her vanity mirror, which says:
Life is denied by a lack of attention to details. When you’re washing the dishes, the dishes must be the most important thing in your life. Just as when you are drinking a cup of tea, drinking tea must be the most important thing in your life.
Flow is also used to describe a person in a creative mindset. It’s the fluid intelligence on display when rappers freestyle and painters seamlessly capture lines and shapes.
Endeavors to define creativity in the field of neuroscience are beginning to back what the Hindus have known for centuries, and the concept of flow can be mapped through individual neural networks. The diagram below is a figure drawn from a recent study aimed at predicting creative ability.
The high-creative network displays fewer connections between different regions of the brain, but the selective regions exhibit a higher density of connections. That is to say, they’re more focused. Additionally, within the 25 highest regions utilized by the high-creative network, 12 of the regions belong to a network associated with default thinking, 4 to a salience (focused attention) network, and 3 to a network that coordinates executive functioning (2).
Therefore, the flow found in creativity can be seen largely as a default experience that gives deference to a few salient connections and even less to executive reasoning. It’s the same flow that defines meditation and allows meditators to focus solely on their breath or the words pouring from a guru’s mouth.
For many including myself, creativity is happiness and the ability to be intuitively connected to the world around me. It’s washing the dishes and thinking only about the warmth of the water and the bubbles on the plate. To live creatively is to maintain flow throughout the day. It’s a default state that taps into the intuitive network of our minds, and the only thing to do is to let it flow.
1. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience; Csíkszentmihályi Mihály
2. https://www.pnas.org/content/115/5/1087
