Shift Your Brain From "Spotlight" Mode Into "Lantern" Mode

It's possible to enter a more creative state of consciousness.

Imagine you have a task to accomplish—say, walking to the corner store to buy a quart of milk. Inside the store, you will operate efficiently and effectively: locating the milk on the refrigerator shelf, handing it to the cashier, arranging payment. You probably won’t notice much about the store or its wares; your brain has engaged what neuroscientists call its “task network,” narrowing your focus on the job to be done. 

You likely won’t notice much about the trip to and from the store, either; while walking, your brain will activate its “default network,” and you’ll occupy yourself by ruminating about some event from the past or anticipating some event in the future.

Alison Gopnik, the UC-Berkeley psychologist and philosopher, invites us to imagine carrying out this same errand with a young child. “It’s like going to get a quart of milk with William Blake,” Gopnik says. Everything is amazing; everything is worthy of observation and speculation and story-making. There are airplanes in the sky! There’s trash blowing around on the street! There are gates that creak back and forth in the wind!

As will be familiar to anyone who’s tried to get a young child ready for school or for bed, this intense engagement with the texture of the material world is not efficient in the least. But it is deeply creative. Young children meet every moment with a freshness of perception that we adults have largely lost to the forces of routinization and habit. It’s possible, however, for us to shift from a mode of ruthless efficiency into a mode of porous impressionability—once we understand how these states of consciousness operate. 

In her scientific research, and in popular books like The Philosophical Baby, Alison Gopnik has elaborated the idea that we all have access to many modes of consciousness, each of which entails an unavoidable tradeoff. When we engage the brain’s task network, for example—a mode that produces what psychologists call “spotlight consciousness”—our attention tightens its lens on that one activity. The task we have to complete is brilliantly illuminated, while all else is draped in darkness. 

Spotlight consciousness is the mode we’ve trained ourselves to turn on when it’s time to get work done; it’s the kind of consciousness that is promoted by schools and workplaces. It allows us to tick through our to-do list in an efficient and directed manner. But it does come at a cost. All of the other possibilities present out there in the world—even the other ways of accomplishing our task besides the single way we’ve selected—become essentially invisible to us. 

Children habitually engage a very different mode of attention—what psychologists call “lantern consciousness.” Instead of singling out one aspect of experience to highlight, their minds cast a diffuse radiance on everything they see. Because children have fewer preconceptions about what will turn out to be interesting or important, they take it all in at once. Gopnik calls it “the vivid panoramic illumination of the everyday.”

Most of us have had the experience of getting down to work with the explicit intention of creating something new—and then finding ourselves utterly stymied. Determinedly we apply the approach that works so well in other domains: focusing our attention, pushing hard on our capacity to concentrate and execute. 

It doesn’t work. The spotlight mode of consciousness, for all its virtues, is inimical to the flexible, open-ended, indeterminate and incidental kind of thinking that generates creative ideas. So try putting away the spotlight and bringing out the lantern. Borrowing from the brilliant Alison Gopnik, here are three ways to enter that Blakean state of wonder that makes the whole world seem fresh and new. 

Engage in open awareness meditation. Although some types of meditation prescribe a a one-pointed focus—on the breath, on a mantra—other types encourage paying heightened attention to everything around us. At the same time, such practices also deprive us of diverting objects to which our attention could be drawn: we look down at the floor or gaze at a blank wall; we repeatedly pull ourselves away from our usual mental machinations.

“The experience that results, at least for a brief moment, is very striking,” Gopnik writes. “Suddenly, as your attention to specific external events and internal plans diminishes, you become vividly aware of everything around you at once. The texture of the floor, the delicate movement of light on the walls, the sound of the birds and passing cars, all seem to be illuminated simultaneously, with little distinction between the trivial and the important, or the internal and the external.”

Travel somewhere new. Gopnik again: “An adult in a strange place is like a child in many ways. There is a great deal of new information available at once. And the traveler is not in a good position to make top-down decisions beforehand about exactly what kinds of information are going to be relevant. Like the child, the traveler's attention is likely to be caught by external objects and events, rather than determined by her own intentions and decisions. This is especially true if the traveler makes her journey for its own sake, rather than in pursuit of some particular goals.” Lantern-like consciousness has no agenda.

Seek out an experience of awe. Gopnik notes that children are frequently in a state of awe: so much about the world seems amazing and wondrous to them. “Coming into contact with something that’s bigger than we are seems to be one way that adults can get back into that childhood state,” Gopnik said in a recent interview. “It’s easy to think of that [awe-filled state] of consciousness as if it’s a strange kind of hallucination, but I think there’s a pretty good argument that that is when we’re seeing the truth of the world, and that the usual sense that we have—of a self that’s incredibly important and what it’s doing is the most important thing in the world—that’s the hallucination, that’s the illusion.”

And one more . . .

Practice “mindfulness,” Ellen Langer-style. Working quite apart from Eastern meditative traditions, Harvard psychologist Ellen Langer has investigated what she calls “mindfulness”: a state of active, open attention, attuned to the present moment. Her research finds that people who are mindful are engaged in creating new categories; welcoming new information; remaining open to more than one point of view; and committed to placing process before outcome. Langer has written that mindfulness is best understood as “the process of drawing novel distinctions.” 

We don’t usually bother to do this—a tree is a tree is a tree, and we may only notice it when it’s dropping leaves all over our lawn—but we can set out to see it anew, by looking at it with the intention of “drawing novel distinctions.” In the state of lantern consciousness that this process generates, we start to notice things we previously overlooked: the way the tree’s leaves show their pale undersides when ruffled by the wind, the way the shape of its branches repeat themselves at ever-smaller scale.

How about you—have you ever experienced a state of lantern-like consciousness? What was it like?