Creative Flow As Optimized Processing

Flow was first identified and studied by the pioneering psychological scientist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. He defined it as “a state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter; the experience is so enjoyable that people will continue to do it even at great cost, for the sheer sake of doing it.”

Although flow has long been a topic of public fascination as well as the focus of hundreds of behavioral research studies, there has been no consensus about what flow is.

One view is that flow might be a state of highly focused concentration or hyperfocus that shuts out extraneous thoughts and other distractions to enable superior performance on a task.

A related theory based on recent research on the neuroscience of creativity is that flow occurs when the brain’s “default-mode network,” a collection of brain areas that work together when a person daydreams or introspects, generates ideas under the supervision of the “executive control network” in the brain’s frontal lobes, which directs the kinds of ideas the default-mode network produces. The analogy would be that of a person “supervising” a TV by picking the movie it streams.

An alternative theory of creative flow is that through years of intense practice, the brain develops a specialized network or circuit to automatically produce a specific type of ideas, with little conscious effort. In this view, the executive control network relaxes its supervision so that the person can “let go” and allow this specialized circuit to go on “autopilot” without interference. The key to this notion is the idea that people who do not have extensive experience at a task or who have difficulty releasing control will be less likely to experience deep creative flow.

A practical implication of the study’s 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. This can be the basis for new techniques for instructing people to produce creative ideas.

If you want to be able to stream ideas fluently, then keep working on those musical scales, physics problems, or whatever else you want to do creatively—computer coding, fiction writing—you name it. But then, try letting go.