I heard an NPR interview about creativity last week. Sting was the guest. He was asked what he considered the most important quality needed to be creative. I was surprised by what he said, but it made be rethink a few things.
He said “Fearlessness.”
Try to remember way back. We were all pretty fearless about proclaiming our great ideas when we were kids, before we emerged into a world of judgements and comparisons, school for example, and grades, and competition for praise.
You’re worried.
Maybe somebody else has a better idea. Would you look stupid, even when you certainly, demonstrably weren’t stupid? Will people laugh at your ideas, particularly the special idea that only you’ve come up with? It’s easy to understand why there can be reluctance.
That’s the bad news. The good news is that it’s not all over after your ninth birthday.
The process of making art or inventing anything puts you in this arena. You have to overcome a lot of that very natural anxiety and go through a vulnerable process in which you can easily feel that the criticism or rejection of your ideas is a criticism of you as a person. It’s hard to separate it and it never completely goes away. That’s one reason why some artists stay in their studios and either don’t show their work or do so very, very selectively.
You learn to be sufficiently comfortable with that to be effective and successful.
How do we get past that fear and reluctance?
Believe it or not, it’s neuroscience to the rescue.
Very high-level research shows us just how the brain works during the creative process and that actually can help all of us, architects, artists, composers and writers, to be fruitful and even pretty fearless.
It seems that the total immersion kids have when doing art is very accessible to us adults by finding our way to what’s called “the flow state,” in which you forget time, you forget food, you even forget sleep. In fact, it can be fatigue helps get us there. It also requires 100% engagement.
Here’s the picture:
Research is showing that areas of the pre-frontal cortex go very quiet in a few related states:
profound experiences of awe and beauty, natural and man-made;
deep meditation and prayer;
moving toward solving a big problem, sensing a solution at hand;
being lost in music; and
IMPROVISATION.
Dr. Charles Limb at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore is a neuroscientist consumed with curiosity about creativity. He’s also a musician and able to play over a dozen instruments. He’s put this together in an experiment in which he slides his head into an fMRI machine that measures his brain activity while he props a keyboard on his lap and plays classical music, music he’s memorized. Certain parts of the brain activate, or light up; others quiet.
Next, he plays jazz, improvising and exploring where the music can go. Other parts of the brain light up very brightly, including areas associated with:
Emotion,
and pattern recognition
and, interestingly, the visual cortex.
Turns out music is visual, too.
In addition, and not a small point, when the improvisation is going well, the fMRI shows that endorphins, the feel-good neurotransmitter, start to flow from the pleasure centers in the brain. That also happens with big-time problem solving. Seems they’re very similar and that’s highly relevant in our profession.
All the aspects of our unconscious and conscious mental activity ultimately are aimed at our most critical goal as a species, survival, which depends deeply on problem-solving. That’s why making us feel very good about that problem-solving is so pivotal.
Discovering how to make fire was a good one. Brunelleschi figuring out how to make the domes of his cathedrals would be able to praise God without it collapsing on everybody below was another.
Pretty much everything that feels good is programmed to help with survival. The pleasures of food and sex are obvious examples. But another one, one that doesn’t have an obvious connection to survival, is art. I think art is problem-solving, too. The process of experiencing art, of making it and engaging with it, activates those pleasure centers, is measurable. All you have to do is stick your head in that fMRI.
Artists, Architects and Composers, along with other inventors and other problem solvers (even lawyers!), know the feeling that happens when they’re deep in the work, after the clumsiness of beginning, after the initial rebounds from ideas that clearly are not working, when they start to feel that little glimmer of hope and excitement and the anticipation that builds on it to find the answer that resonates profoundly.
You know it when you experience it and you want that to happen again. In this way, art and invention are habit-forming. Maybe artists have a particular sensitivity to, a particularly high responsiveness to certain sculptural, graphic or form cues that make those endorphins flow. A good fit in your work should be addictive. The best artists (all types included) are more than fully engaged. In a way, they don’t have a choice. It’s their path, their highest calling and part of the payoff is those endorphins and it helps us understand our loyalty and passion for our own goals as artists.
You want that pleasure to happen every time you really work on a project, and you now know scientifically that less than 100% engagement won’t get you to the flow state where success lives.
It turns out that creativity very specifically disengages part of your prefrontal lobe, the part that is the most logical, quiets during creativity. It turns out that getting to the flow state for some percentage of the time is quite possible, even inevitable:
If you're working very hard
and if you're not so worried about the outcome.
Another way to describe an obstacle in the design process is “overthinking,” too much logic, too much of that prefrontal cortex. Remember what the older Spock says to the younger Spock: “Put logic to the side. Follow your feelings.”
Risk, it turns out, is an inevitable part of creativity, because you’re not a kid anymore. Nonetheless, one good path to overcoming it, the flow state, is accessible to you and, like any skill, can be enhanced over time. In a profound way, getting there is a part of the design process that’s essential for all artists and problem-solvers.
The creative process is like a three act play in which the characters are introduced in the first act and in this case the characters are the program and the problem statement and context and your predispositions that precede the project.
In the second act tension builds as the confrontation and conflicts between these elements increases. That means the search for resolution is definitely desired at that point. That’s called dramatic or artistic tension and can’t be achieved until the third act in which the characters, or design elements, agree at some core level and there is an outcome, a design, that puts it all together in a satisfying way.
How do we get from the clumsiness of Act One to Act Three?
Try to remember the Flow State and how you’ve accessed it in the past. Let it happen. Be reassured that high-level meditators and improvising musicians and artists all experience deep aesthetic response to awe or beauty with the same brain activation profile, all enjoying those great endorphins.
The beauty that can emerge from our work in the flow state comes back to all of us in aesthetic experience, whether it’s a cathedral or a garden. Professor and architect Julio Bermudez, from Catholic University of America in Washington DC has gotten lots of people to put their heads in fMRI machines to reinforce this scientifically.
The best from and in each of us somehow resonates with the best in all of us, in a universal way, sounding the deep tones of what’s authentic and ancient in us, whether we’re makers or just regular folks enjoying art, music and architecture.
So, while I absolutely know that me saying “Be Fearless” doesn’t get anyone there, I’ll say it anyway:
Be Fearless.