Accessing the Riches of Your Creative Mind

It takes a bit of trickery, but it can be done.

Haruki Murakami is a celebrated novelist, the author of books like Norwegian Wood, Kafka on the Shore, and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle. He is also a committed runner—a veteran of more than two dozen marathons who logs as many as fifty miles a week. He’s even written a book about his athletic endeavors, titled What I Talk About When I Talk About Running.

“I’m often asked what I think about as I run,” Murakami writes. “Usually the people who ask this have never run long distances themselves. I always ponder the question. What exactly do I think about when I’m running?” Not a lot, he concludes. That’s kind of the point. “As I run, I don’t think much of anything worth mentioning. I just run. I run in a void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.”

What is this “void” Murakami mentions? It may be that what he’s referring to is a state that researchers call “transient hypofrontality”: a temporary phase in which the frontal areas of the brain are less (that is, hypo-) active. The term was coined by the neuroscientist Arne Dietrich, a professor at the American University of Beirut. 

“The central idea behind the hypofrontality process is that the brain is forced, during exercise, to make profound changes to the way it allocates its metabolic resources,” Dietrich has written. Intense physical activity involves the consumption of an enormous amount of energy—not just by the body, but also by the brain, which must coordinate all that complex motion. (There’s a reason, notes Dietrich, why computers can beat humans at chess, but no one has yet designed a robot that can rival a human tennis player or basketball player.)

As metabolic demands on the brain grow steeper, the brain begins shifting resources toward the sensory and motor cortices, away from the prefrontal cortex (PFC)—the frontal region that is the seat of capacities like self-reflection, working memory, executive attention, temporal integration, abstract thinking, and cognitive control. Dietrich likens this process to “peeling an onion”—the most advanced and recently-evolved regions of the brain are the first to be downregulated, while regions that support more basic functions remain online.

The functional disappearance of the PFC during intense exercise may help account for the phenomenon known as the “runner’s high”: a euphoric state in which the sense of self dissolves and a feeling of well-being seems to pervade the world. Dietrich theorizes that every altered state of consciousness—those produced by dreaming, meditation, hypnosis, or drug trips—entails transient hypofrontality, a temporary reduction of the PFC’s influence.

Dietrich’s model—which has received support from a host of recent studies—leads to a fascinating insight, one that’s relevant to the act of creativity. Altered states, which are often regarded as “higher” forms of consciousness, are actually lower forms of consciousness. An altered state of consciousness is one that’s missing the full complement of abilities that are present when the brain is functioning normally. Yet a brain in this state is able to do things that the normally-functioning brain cannot. 

A case in point: One of the most important tasks carried out by the prefrontal cortex is inhibition. In order to think in a directed way about a particular task, we have to not be thinking about a thousand other things. Such non-task-relevant thoughts must be actively inhibited. When we’re being creative, however, we want to come up with surprising, unexpected, even off-the-wall ideas and connections. 

The problem is that we can’t simply tell the PFC: Hey, ease up, will you? Stop with all that uptight inhibition. The cognitive process that inhibits (apparently) non-useful information works smoothly and efficiently in daily life precisely because it operates automatically and under our awareness. Potentially creative ideas are evaluated and ruled out of bounds before we can even consciously consider them. The search for associations and connections remains limited to those spheres that the PFC deems directly relevant, cutting off a wider and potentially more fruitful exploration. 

Because we can’t directly dial down the inhibiting activity of the prefrontal cortex, we have to find indirect methods of doing so. One way is to use up so much of our brain’s resources on physical movement that the PFC goes temporarily offline; others include engaging in meditation, entering a flow state, and attending to our dreams—the visions that emerge as the frontal parts of the brain take the night off.

One of the appealing things about this theory is its proposal that much of what we need to be creative is already present within us. When we enter a highly creative state, we’re not accessing some alternate reality, some higher plane “out there.” Rather, we’re glimpsing the inner richness of our own minds. We don’t need to add anything; in fact, our task is to subtract—to find ways to temporarily loosen the grip of the judging, inhibiting PFC.

Arne Dietrich’s theory is also a reminder that what he calls the “pinnacle of human evolution”—the sophisticated capacities of the prefrontal cortex, which is often equated with the self, with the “I”—is not all there is to us. The richness goes all the way down.

This idea puts me in mind of a line from the painter Philip Guston: “When I first come into the studio to work, there is this noisy crowd which follows me there; it includes all of the important painters in history, all of my contemporaries, all the art critics, etc. As I become involved in the work, one by one, they all leave. If I’m lucky, every one of them will disappear. If I’m really lucky, I will too.”

[How to achieve transitory hypofrontality through intense exercise? Note that low- and moderate-intensity exercise does not generate this disinhibiting effect. (Indeed, research has found that moderately intense physical activity actually enhances executive function.) Achieving transient hypofrontality generally requires exercising at one’s “ventilatory threshold”—the point at which breathing becomes labored, corresponding to about 80 percent of the exerciser’s maximum heart rate—for forty minutes or more. It’s a daunting summit to scale, but when it is reached, observes Kathryn Schulz, another writer-runner, it can “provoke a kind of Cartesian collapse”: mind and body melding together in what she calls a “glorious collusion.”]

How about you? Have you found ways to access the richness of your own creative mind?