I wrote a previous post about creativity, which focused on the back-and-forth exchange of intuitive thinking and more structured narrative thinking. What I didn't talk much about was the experience of creative activity, which can be one of the most rewarding sensations. The feeling of creativity was the research focus of another notable psychologist who died in 2021, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. (Despite being a famous psychologist, Dr. Csikszentmihalyi has a name that's famously hard to pronounce. Try it like this: Me-HIGH, CHICK-sent-me-high). He described the very pleasant feeling of losing yourself in creative work with the memorable term flow. Flow can be defined as a state of total absorption and pleasant concentration.
Besides positive mood, one key characteristic of this state is that people lose track of the passage of time. A lack of time awareness is one important clue that the Intuitive mind is strongly engaged during these creative states, even if some logical, problem-solving Narrative thinking is also going on. In my previous post I argued that the best creative results come from a combination of Intuitive-mind “divergent thinking” (which was one of the older definitions of creativity in the psychology literature), combined with a Narrative-level process to evaluate, prune, or improve the spontaneous ideas that emerge. Robert Weisberg's scientific study of creativity is an under-appreciated work that provides empirical evidence of great creative work emerging from a process of combining and editing ideas rather than emerging fully formed in a flash of insight. Csikszentmihalyi's flow state seems to emerge when the brain is engaged in such a mix of Intuitive- and Narrative-level work. Contemporary neuroscience research confirms the idea that creativity involves simultaneous activation of at least two brain networks: the "default attention network" located in the lower brain and connected to some Intuitive-mind processes, plus the "executive network" based in the cortex that handles Narrative-level tasks associated with language and focused attention. A third brain system called the "salience network" may also be involved in monitoring events and ideas for meaning, and coordinating between the other two networks. This, too, seems to be an Intuitive-level function of the brain.
The link between flow states and brain states is particularly noteworthy because Csikszentmihalyi was not himself a neuroscientist; instead, he was a psychologist who approached the study of creativity by examining people's subjective experiences. This illustrates the way in which Csikszentmihalyi was himself a creative individual who was able to take the field of creativity research in major new directions. He first came to the discipline of psychology when he heard Carl Jung give a talk in Switzerland about the psychology of UFO sightings. His concept of flow developed out of early work on intrinsic motivation beginning in the 1970s. Along with former APA President Martin Seligman, Csikszentmihalyi emerged in the 1990s as one of the leading voices in the new field of positive psychology, which differed from its predecessor models in focusing on people’s strengths and interests more than their deficiencies and unmet needs. (Freud, for instance, had proposed that the greatest examples of human creativity came out of a need to compensate for something or work through early trauma, a theory that is still with us in pop-psychology form today).
Csikszentmihalyi’s major contribution was to recognize that the flow state itself is rewarding, and that seeking this timeless and creative state can motivate people to engage in hard work for its own sake. Many of us who write for a living can empathize with the novelist Frank Norris, who said “I don’t like to write, but I like having written.” On a good day, though, many of us can also understand what Csikszentmihalyi means when he talks about the enjoyable state of flow. That flow state, just as much as the concrete outcome of the written product or the reactions of others to our work, is what motivates many of us to keep writing even in the absence of any material reward for the work. Flow can feel like a revelation, a gateway to new levels of thought or experience that are difficult to put into words, perhaps something like the mind-expanding experience that can be triggered by psychedelic drugs. Csikszentmihalyi suggested that the highest and best products of human creativity were in fact outgrowths of this intensely positive state, and did truly reflect visionary experiences rather than just relieving internal pressures within the mind. Where Freud saw the ego working to manage mental tensions or work through trauma, Csikszentmihalyi saw an ego-negating activity that took the creative artist outside of him- or herself. His early inspiration Carl Jung, who viewed creative expression as a process of tapping into archetypes that are larger and more powerful than any individual person, would likely have found some common ground with Csikszentmihalyi’s point of view.
There is, however, a potential dark side to the pursuit of flow. On a bad day the absence of the pleasant flow state can be the source of many people’s writer’s block, and some people believe that they can only do creative work when flow is present. This relates to the classical idea of one’s creative muse being present or absent on any given day, and might be the reason that so many famous authors have used or abused alcohol to get the wheels of creativity turning. It’s important to recognize that flow states are not always present even in the circumstances where we might have encountered them before, and that good work still can be done in the absence of that pleasant feeling of flow. In fact, Weisberg’s creativity research shows that major works by great artists are usually accompanied by an increased quantity of minor works as well, and entrepreneurship research shows that for every major innovation there are dozens of good ideas that never make it to market. Therefore, despite the powerful reinforcing effect of the flow state, it is good advice for creators to stay engaged in the creative process even when they don’t particularly feel like it.
And there is an additional benefit of routine, non-flow-inspired creative efforts: Sometimes the slow and workmanlike pursuit of writing (or any other creative activity) can unexpectedly open the door to a delightful flow state even on a day when flow initially seemed absent. We don’t yet know enough about these highly creative states to predict them, and perhaps we never will. We can only create the conditions in which the muse is more likely to visit us, and be thankful when she arrives.
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