_John Kounios
Kounios is a professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of the PhD program in Applied Cognitive and Brain Sciences.
Here’s how you — and your brain — can reach optimal creative activity: Don’t try so hard.
A neuroimaging study from Drexel’s Creativity Research Lab is the first to reveal how the brain gets to the creative flow state: by letting go.
The College of Arts and Sciences researchers studied the brain activity of 32 experienced and amateur jazz guitarists while they improvised their playing. The resulting 192 recorded jazz improvisations, or “takes,” were subsequently played for four jazz experts individually so they could rate each for creativity and other qualities. The researchers then analyzed the electroencephalograms (EEGs) measuring electrical activity in the brain to discover which brain areas were associated with high-flow takes (compared to low-flow takes).
_FLOW JAM
Kounios’ lab measured creative flow by attaching brain activity monitors to a student researcher as he played guitar.
They found that creative flow can be achieved by training people to release control when they have built up enough expertise in a particular domain.
“A practical implication of these results is that productive flow states can be attained by practice to build up expertise in a particular creative outlet coupled with training to withdraw conscious control when enough expertise has been achieved,” says John Kounios, professor in the College of Arts and Sciences and director of the Creativity Research Lab. “This can be the basis for new techniques for instructing people to produce creative ideas.”
Kounios led the study, later published in Neuropsychologia, with David Rosen, an alumnus from the college and a Johns Hopkins University postdoc. Their findings support one of two prevailing theories about how flow is involved when people produce creative ideas — that it’s expertise plus release rather than a state of hyperfocus.