Boosting Creativity – The Hyperfocus Masterclass
The Amplified Impact Podcast
October 17th, 2023
Today, we’re taking a little detour into the awesome world of creativity.
Sure, it might not seem directly linked to flow and hyperfocus, but trust me, it’s a secret weapon.
Creativity isn’t just artsy stuff; it’s about mixing info in new and useful ways. And in your brain, there are three cool squads running the creativity show: Executive Attention, Default State, and Salience.
Now, why should you care?
Well, these networks are guided by a brain region called the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and when it’s fired up, creativity explodes.
And here’s the thing…creativity can lead you into the sweet spot of flow.
So, here are three simple ways to light up your ACC:
- Mood
- Goals
- Novelty
Don’t forget to grab our PDF and dive into some fun homework.
Get those creative juices flowing and open up the doors to more flow and hyperfocus in your life.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“Clarity breeds confidence, and through that breeds creativity.”- Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Anthony Vicino:
Welcome to part four of the Hyper focused Masterclass. Now, today we’re going to take a little bit of a detour away from talking about flow and hyperfocus directly, and we’re going to unpack a concept that’s integral to those states. It is creativity. Now, we’ve already talked about how when you’re in flow or the hyper focus state, it leads to a 300% increase in creativity. We talked about how that’s measured by the number of attributions and alternative uses for a water bottle, let’s say, that somebody could come up with and how novel and useful those ideas are. We’ve defined creativity not as this artistic expression of being able to play music or paint really well, but instead it’s the ability to combine two or more pieces of information in new, novel, functional ways. And then we talked about why this is so know. A study conducted by IBM of a bunch of CEOs found that creativity is the number one leadership skill in the modern workforce.
Anthony Vicino:
So we understand that about creativity. But now what we need to understand is how creativity works on a neurobiological level. And this is important because one of the really interesting consequences of the relationship between flow and creativity is that flow leads to an increase in creativity, but creativity also leads to flow. Now, that’s really interesting. It primes us for the flow state so that if we can activate three neural networks in particular that oversee that govern creativity, then we have a better chance of launching ourselves into the flow state. Now, we’re going to be talking about some neurobiology here, so stick with me as we take this from a really high level, 50,000 foot square or 50,000 foot view, and then we narrow in to make it applicable. So to understand creativity, we have to understand the neurobiological underpinnings. And there are three neural networks that oversee creativity in the human brain.
Anthony Vicino:
That is the executive attention, that is the default state, and the Salience state. And so these are neural networks. The executive attention network is all about data collection. And if you think about what creativity is, it’s the ability to combine multiple pieces of information in new novel ways. So you would assume that data collection, the ability to bring in inputs and collate them, that’s an important attribute of creativity, right? So we have a neural network in our brains that is responsible for overseeing this. That is called executive attention. Now, the default state is more about imagination and lateral thinking. So if we bring in the inputs, now we have those inputs, we have to combine them in new novel ways, which means we can’t just come at them from the same angle that we’ve always come at them.
Anthony Vicino:
We have to come in laterally. And that’s where the default state really comes into play. Salience is the third neural network, and this is our ability to make connections, to see things that aren’t so obvious when it’s like this piece of information. And this piece of information, we could connect in this weird new way. And at the end of the day, that’s really what creativity is. It’s a recombinatory process. There’s three b’s of creativity. We can bend things, we can blend things, we can break things.
Anthony Vicino:
So when we bend inputs, when data comes in, we can bend it into something new and different, or we can blend it with another piece of information, or we can just break it into something completely different. And that’s really what creativity is. At the end of the day, we just do those three things over and over. Bend, blend, break it. And those are overseen by these three neural networks the executive attention, the default state, and salience. Now, why does any of that matter? Why should you even worry about any of that stuff? It’s because this those three neural networks are overseen and governed by a particular part of the brain called the anterior cingulate cortex, the ACC. And this little piece of the brain, if we can light it up like a Christmas tree, it’s going to lead to more creativity. But get this, it’s also going to lead us into the flow and the hyperfocus state.
Anthony Vicino:
So by lighting up our ACC, we can use that to springboard, in a lot of instances, into flow, into hyperfocus. So let’s talk about real broadly, how do we actually light up the anterior cingulate cortex? There’s three things in particular that we want to consider. One is our mood. Just being in a good mood helps you be more creative. If you’ve ever been a grumposaur, you know that you’re just not in an open minded place. You tend to tunnel vision on things. And that’s not the best state of mind to be in when you’re trying to take new pieces or pieces of information and do new things with them. You have to see possibility and potential.
Anthony Vicino:
And that requires being in a good mood. So that means eating well, getting a good night’s sleep, and just generally being happy. Second, to really light up the ACC, we have to have goals. We have to have a reason for wanting to combine the things into something new and creative, right? And so clarity breeds confidence, and through that breeds creativity. So once more, clarity breeds confidence, which creates creativity. That doesn’t really flow very well. We’ll work on that anyways. Number three is novelty.
Anthony Vicino:
The third way to really light up the ACC is through novelty, the brain. We have these little monkey minds, and when we get new novel information, it lights up. This is why we love movies. This is why we like unexpected things. It’s like, whoa, that’s fascinating. That’s why we pay so much attention to it. And so one of the ways that we can really breed novelty know, get outside of your normal workspace. Go to the coffee shop where it’s new and different.
Anthony Vicino:
But one of the most powerful ways to really, really light up the ACC is just to get into nature. That’s crazy, right? If you think about the human connection with nature, of course we evolved from the wilderness, and so we would have a special relationship with it. But by being in beautiful locations and broad vistas. Things that expand the imagination and the mind, that lights up the ACC, which makes total sense when we go back to the default state, which is all about imagination and lateral thinking. The executive attention state, which is all about data collection and salience, which is the ability to make connections. Right. When we’re in nature, we’re in these broad vistas, our brain just starts to expand wider and wider. If you’ve ever felt that sense of when you’re in nature, the sense of like, oh my God, that’s your ACC, the limitless potential of the universe just is abundant and it’s right there and you’re aware of it in a way that you’re not when you’re just sitting in a cubicle.
Anthony Vicino:
And so those are three ways to light up the anterior cingulate cortex, mood, goals, and novelty. And we’re going to talk about these more. We’re going to keep unpacking these as we come up with new triggers for getting into the flow state. But we wanted to go on this side quest so we could first understand creativity and the unique role that it plays in priming us for the flow and hyper focused state. So before you take off, before you get out of here, there is the PDF. There is a homework that you got to do because remember, it’s not enough just to listen to the video and to watch this and consume it passively. We have to apply it. And we want to make sure that it actually sticks and becomes something that we can utilize on a daily basis.
Anthony Vicino:
And so to really reinforce the learning, we’re going to coincide this video with the PDF. So go read that. It’s going to restate all this information in a new, different way that’s going to help create more connections for you. And then there are some exercises in there that are going to help you come to a better understanding and clarity on creativity and how you could utilize that in your day to day life, even outside the flow and hyper focus state, just to generally increase the baseline creativity that you can output. So I hope that was really helpful. Guys, go do the homework and we’ll see you in the next module.
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