The Art of Creativity: Flow (Part 3 of 5)

This is Part 3 of a 5 Part Series on Cre­ativ­ity. Click here to read Part 1.

We con­tinue the series on cre­ativ­ity this week. Click here to read the series from the begin­ning.

When cre­ativ­ity is in full fire, peo­ple can expe­ri­ence what ath­letes and per­form­ers call the “white moment.” Every­thing clicks. Your skills are so per­fectly suited to the chal­lenge that you seem to blend with it. Every­thing feels har­mo­nious, uni­fied, and effortless.

That white moment is what psy­chol­o­gists call “flow.” In flow, peo­ple are at their peak. Flow can hap­pen in any domain of activ­ity. The one require­ment is that your skills so per­fectly match the demands of the moment that all self-consciousness dis­ap­pears. If your skills are not up to the chal­lenge, you expe­ri­ence anx­i­ety; if your skills are too great, you expe­ri­ence boredom.

When skills and chal­lenge match, then flow is most likely to emerge. At that instant, atten­tion is fully focused on the task at hand. One sign of this com­plete absorp­tion is that time seems to pass much more quickly—or much more slowly. Peo­ple are so attuned to what they’re doing, they’re obliv­i­ous to any distractions.

Neu­ro­log­i­cal stud­ies of peo­ple in flow show that the brain expends less energy than when they are wrestling with a prob­lem. One rea­son seems to be that the parts of the brain most rel­e­vant for the task at hand are most active, and those that are irrel­e­vant are rel­a­tively quiet. By con­trast, when one is in a state of anx­i­ety or con­fu­sion, there is no such dis­tinc­tion in activ­ity lev­els between parts of the brain.

Flow states often occur in sports, espe­cially among the best ath­letes. In his biog­ra­phy, bas­ket­ball star Bill Rus­sell describes those moments as ones of a nearly super­nat­ural intu­ition: “It was almost as though we were play­ing in slow motion. Dur­ing those spells I could almost sense how the next play would develop and the next shot would be taken. Even before the other team brought the ball inbounds, I could feel it so keenly that I’d want to shout to my team­mates, ‘It’s com­ing there!’—except that I knew every­thing would change if I did.”

While in a flow state, peo­ple lose all self-consciousness. The Zen idea of no-mind is sim­i­lar: a state of com­plete absorp­tion is what one is doing. Says Ken­neth Kraft, a Bud­dhist scholar at Lehigh Uni­ver­sity who has spent many years in Japan, “In Zen the word ‘mind’ is also a sym­bol for the con­scious­ness of the uni­verse itself. In fact, the mind of the indi­vid­ual and the mind of the uni­verse are regarded ulti­mately as one. So by emp­ty­ing one­self of one’s smaller, indi­vid­ual mind, and by los­ing the intense self-consciousness, we are able to tap into this larger, more cre­ative mind.

The idea of merg­ing with the activ­ity at hand, which is basic to flow, is intrin­sic to Zen. “It’s taught in Zen that one per­forms an action so com­pletely that one loses one­self in the doing of it,” Kraft explains. “A mas­ter cal­lig­ra­pher, for exam­ple, is work­ing in a no-minded way.”

No-mindedness is not uncon­scious­ness, some kind of vague spaci­ness. On the con­trary, it is a pre­cise aware­ness dur­ing which one is undis­turbed by the mind’s usual dis­tract­ing inner chat­ter. Says Kraft, “No-mindedness means not to have the mind filled with ran­dom thoughts like, ‘Does this cal­lig­ra­phy look right? Should that stroke go there or here?’ It’s just doing. Just the stroke.”

In a pro­found sense, all of our cre­ative acts express who we are at that moment. In his study of peo­ple who shaped the 20^th cen­tury with their cre­ative genius, Howard Gard­ner found that although each of them had reached the lim­its of their domain, they shared what seems to have been a child­like fresh­ness in their approach to their work. “I think every person—whether they are a Big C cre­ative indi­vid­ual or a lit­tle c—is draw­ing not just on their knowl­edge and mas­tery, but draw­ing from childhood.”

Click here to read Part 4.