Creativity Isn’t Right-Brained (So You Can Stop Feeling Bad if You Are Left-Brained)

What neuroscience says about creativity.

For as long as I can remember, I’ve associated creativity with the right hemisphere of the brain. And this was always a problem for me because I’m language-oriented, and language is apparently left-brained. Whenever I struggled creatively, I secretly feared it’s because I’m not right-brained enough. Maybe you’ve worried about the same, particularly if you see yourself as being a logic-driven person. The idea that the left brain is somehow the logical, straight-laced side and the right is the free-flowing, creative side, while not entirely inaccurate, has become ingrained in popular understandings of where creativity comes from, and what kind of person gets to be called creative.

In the last decade or so neuroscience has evolved in how it views the brain. It has shifted from seeing brain functions as domain-specific, and now understands that it is the connectivity between brain areas that determine our functionalities. Cognitive processes are complex (shocked, I am!), with multiple regions working together to create different effects. It turns out creativity is both-sided. It relies on two types of cognition that must be used in an iterative sequence, and that use networks that span the brain: the central executive network (CEN) and the default mode network (DMN).*

The CEN is the cognitive process that gets activated when you are involved in an external goal-oriented task, whereas the DMN gets triggered when you are not involved in anything that requires that kind of focused attention in the outside world. The DMN is the “daydreaming” mode of the brain. The thing to understand about these two processes is that they are mutually exclusive. They do not operate at the same time. What this means is that if you are always or even predominantly goal-oriented, you are not giving your DMN enough time to process, and thus dampening or blocking your creativity. If there ever were evidence that compulsive goal setting is toxic to creativity, this is it.

For those of us who live in a task- and goal-oriented societies, such as the US, our CEN is usually well-developed and highly active. Hyperactive, even. We spend relatively little time intentionally encouraging our DMN. It does get activated regardless – any time you find yourself zoning out, thinking about the past or future, about other people’s emotions and motivations or your own, you are in DMN-land. But we don’t know how to use our DMN to our advantage, largely because we tend to view its associated thought process, i.e. daydreaming, meandering thoughts, and rumination, negatively. But they are essential to the creativity, in combination with the task-directed thought processes associated with CEN.

In order to be useful to creativity, the mental wandering of the DMN state must be somewhat directed. A free-for-all going on in there may be useful for other purposes (general relaxation, or just for fun), but for creativity, you must begin in the CEN and create a goal. However – and this is very important – the goal needs to be vague and broad, i.e. diffuse. So for example, lets say I want to write a novel. You’d be tempted to say the goal is “finish novel.” This is too specific. A diffuse set of related goals is better: write regularly, get to know characters better, have fun, learn stuff, etc. The reason diffuse goals are better is that one, they give you more targets to hit, and two, they give your brain more to work with. This is where the DMN shines.

Once you have your diffuse goal(s), creativity is divided into two parts that iteratively follow on each other. The first is CEN-related: you sit down and do your creative work. You write, or brainstorm, or play your music, whatever. The next part is DMN-related: you involve yourself in other activities that do not require you to explicitly focus on completing tasks. Passive enjoyment of something aesthetic is a great way to do this, like music, art, or TV shows that give you space to let your mind wander (ever feel compelled to zone out by binge watching mindless TV after arduous cognitive tasks? Yep, that’s your DMN making its needs known!). Other activities that are somewhat rote, like walking, gardening, or cleaning could also work. What you’re looking for is semi-boredom. You don’t want to be totally zonked, just relaxed. Importantly, don’t try to actively think about your creative project. Just let things percolate.

Guess what comes next? Yes! More CEN, task-oriented creative work. And so on and so forth. As you get better at going back and forth and learn to trust the DMN time more, you may find that you have more flashes of inspiration during your down time. At the very least, you’ll start to feel more creatively fulfilled once you realize that your creative work is part of a larger experience of life, and that your whole life, including your zone-out time, can be part of your creative process. You will begin to feel the benefits of this back-and-forth practice once you understand how it works and intentionally incorporate it into your life, because it naturally facilitates creativity. So give it a try!

* Information for this post comes from Elkhonon Goldberg, Creativity, Oxford University Press: 2018.