This hypnotic, hyper-productive state has been described by writers, other creatives, musicians, business professionals, and sports athletes. It’s a huge gift. But what is it? Is there a scientific basis for it? How can we achieve it? How does meditation relate to Flow State?
As a writer, letting your creative juices flow is the most productive state of mind you can imagine. Whatever you are creating, it’s all about letting your brain do its thing. Being practiced at something and being able to surrender and let go to it are super important for getting into a creative groove.
Being effortlessly productive is like gold for people in business, the arts, research, education, and anyone who wants to generate a flow of creative ideas and products.
I’ve been in Flow States with my writing and it’s hypnotic. In fact that is how I write: I meditate for 20 minutes, then sit at my desk and allow what needs to come through me to come through me. An idea arises in my head and I can’t get it written down quickly enough. My mind disappears onto the page. I watch the words appear - and I don’t have an inkling where they came from. It just happens. Like magic.
According to headspace.com this is how it works: “You may have experienced a Flow State at some point - that sense of fluidity between your body and mind, where you are totally absorbed by and deeply focused on something, beyond the point of distraction. Time feels like it has slowed down. You are alert and relaxed at the same time. Your senses are heightened. You are at one with the task at hand, as action and awareness synchronise to create an effortless momentum. Some people describe this feeling as being “In the zone.” This is the Flow State and it’s accessible to everyone, whether you’re engaged in a physical activity, a creative pursuit, or even a simple day-to-day task.”
I remember a few years ago watching Rafael Nadal play an opponent in the early rounds of Wimbledon and his opponent, who was a relative unknown, absolutely thrashed the Champion and beast that is Nadal. Nadal's opponent was in the Flow State for the duration of one match. However, he lost his next match in two sets. What was it that allowed him to destroy the world number one at the time of his previous match? The answer is: Flow State. This is the key to sports psychology and any performance-based endeavour.
Flow State
What is Flow State?
What is the “Flow State?” Otherwise known as ‘being in the zone’, the Flow State is a sense of complete mental immersion in an activity. It's a state of tranquility, alertness, bliss, and optimal performance. Think about a time when you were fully focused on doing something and so deeply into it that even the sense of time seemed to disappear. Flow States are often associated with doing activities that challenge your skills at the perfect level where you’re fully engaged with doing the task at hand but you don’t become overwhelmed. When a person achieves a Flow State they experience a slowing down, alertness, an immense sense of satisfaction, and peak performance. It is also often accompanied by a greater sense of both creativity and productivity.
Flow states are optimal states of consciousness where we feel our best and perform our best.
Flow is the combination of expertise and surrendering. Extensive practice leads to the development of a specialised brain network or circuit, enabling the effortless production of specific types of ideas, like musical ones.
According to this perspective, the person can relax the executive control and allow the specialised circuit to function on its own.
The research team in the study described below concluded that individuals who lack expertise or struggle with relinquishing control are less inclined to experience profound creative flow. The results uphold the notion of creative flow as a combination of expertise and release.
Some see flow as a heightened state of concentration that eliminates distractions and allows for exceptional performance.
One theory, based on recent neuroscience research, proposes that flow results from the default-mode network and executive control network collaborating to generate ideas.
Kounios compared it to a person “controlling” a TV by selecting the streamed movie. Once the movie plays, it flows naturally and without prompting.
It’s the opposite of watching a film with your family where people talk, give their opinions on the film, tell you something they just remembered from their day or ask you for a cup of tea. In a Flow State, there are no adverts, interruptions, requests for cups of tea, or breaks.
Scientific basis
There is science behind the magic.
In the latest April 2024 issue of Neuropsychologia a study led by Professor John Kounios entitled, “Creative flow as optimised processing: Evidence from brain oscillations during jazz improvisations by expert and non-expert musicians” has found how and why the brain enters the ‘Flow State.’
In the research paper, Kounios et al. scanned the brains of jazz musicians while performing improvisational pieces of music. They found that the blend that activated the Flow State in their neuroimaging was what they’ve called ‘expert-plus-release’.
The musicians were all guitarists and the examination was as such, they were each given some background music to improvise along with while being hooked up to an electroencephalogram (EEG), a set of wires and cables attached to the head to measure brain activity. They exhibited reduced conscious control.
Basically, this is the idea that once a person is proficient enough at a certain skill they can ‘let go’ of what they seem to know, or in other words, let go of the control they have when performing their task and allow their muscle memory and senses to take over the reins of the task. It’s not a conscious decision however, it rather kicks in once a certain level of expertise within the task is recognised from within our minds. It’s where science meets magic. It creates miracles.
What they found was that while the more proficient players were jamming, the area in the brain associated with control, the superior frontal gyrus, a ridge on the brain’s cerebral cortex, saw decreased activity. This means that the area that should have been in charge actually surrendered to another part. The part of the brain that saw increased activity, the left-hemisphere auditory and touch areas, showed the researchers that the brain, instead of trying to keep control, gave it over to the parts where we’d see intuitive behaviour coming from.
So, another way of looking at it would be to say that intuition took over from reasoning.
These are the conclusions from a study from the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, Drexel University, United States…
When you’re in the zone, your brain is more active in the auditory and touch areas, and less active in the control regions, showing that you’re not consciously controlling your creativity.
The research talks about the “Expertise-plus-release” model. This suggests that if you have lots of experience and can let go, you’ll find it easier to get into a creative flow.
The findings offer a new understanding of flow, challenging previous theories and opening avenues for enhancing creativity through practice and relinquishment of control.
The study looked at how the brain works during jazz improvisation and found that being in a creative flow state is all about having lots of experience and letting go of control, so your brain can come up with great ideas without you even realising it.
To examine the competing theories of creative flow, the researchers recorded EEGs from 32 jazz guitar players with different levels of experience. The musicians improvised on six jazz lead sheets, with programmed drums, bass, and piano accompaniment, and evaluated the level of flow experience for each improvisation.
The study, directed by Professor John Kounios, PhD, concluded that training individuals to relinquish control after gaining enough expertise in a specific field can lead to creative flow.
Kounios states that when people are fully engaged in an activity, nothing else matters. I have seen this with musical performers when a mobile phone rings in the audience: It’s not that it doesn’t bother them – it’s that they don’t even hear it.
It’s a fascinating piece of research comparing various theories on the role of flow in creative idea generation.
During the research, four jazz experts assessed the creativity and other qualities of each of the 192 recorded jazz improvisations. The researchers examined their EEGs to determine the brain regions connected to high-flow states (compared to low-flow states). Flow was more frequent and intense among highly experienced musicians compared to those with less experience. This shows that expertise enables flow. However, expertise is not the only factor contributing to creative flow.
The EEGs revealed that increased activity in left-hemisphere auditory and touch areas, which process music and touch sensations, was associated with a high-Flow State.
The researchers found a link between increased flow and decreased activity in the brain’s superior frontal gyrus (a ridge on the surface of the brain), which plays a role in executive control.
This concept supports the idea that creative flow is connected to a decrease in conscious control, particularly the act of letting go. This previously hypothesised phenomenon has been called “transient hypofrontality.”
We’re not all virtuoso jazz guitarists though, but for the rest of us it means that falling into the Flow State is still very much available to us. First, we need to build up our skills in an area and then trust ourselves by letting go of our sense of control when doing it. To lose ourselves in the moment. It’s all quite Zen and I love it.
To quote Mr Kounios from the paper: “A practical implication of these results is that productive flow states can be attained by practice to build up expertise in a particular creative outlet coupled with training to withdraw conscious control when enough expertise has been achieved."
“If you want to be able to stream ideas fluently, then keep working on those musical scales, physics problems or whatever else you want to do creatively - computer coding, fiction writing - you name it. But then, try letting go.”
The scientific paper can be read in full here:
How can we achieve Flow State?
When in a state of flow, highly experienced musicians exhibited heightened activity in auditory and vision areas. Writers, in a Flow State, similarly switch off their executive function.
We too can achieve productive Flow States by honing our skills and expertise in a particular creative domain (writing), and then learning to let go of conscious control through training.
It has the potential to be a starting point for novel approaches to guiding people in generating imaginative ideas. It is a starting point for your novel - or even your next article.
Honing skills in music, physics, coding, or fiction writing can improve the ability to generate ideas. Try it. Allow yourself to detach.
Practice makes perfect. The more you write, the more you tune out to everything else and let your mind go, the more likely you are to enter a Flow State.
Charlie Parker, the jazz icon, emphasised the importance of learning your instrument. You keep practicing, practicing, practicing. It’s the same with writing.
As a writer, when you next sit down at your keyboard, let go of everything and start typing.
How does meditation relate to Flow State?
“Meditation is not about feeling a certain way. It’s about feeling the way you feel.” (Dan Harris). The Buddha said, “Quiet the mind and the soul will speak.” My experience has been that, while meditating, being able to focus on an idea or experience, allows me to see things a little clearer, a little closer, and have an overall sense of peace. Being able to meditate with deep concentration, I find I can translate that to being able to focus clearer when I’m doing something else.
So, we can practice meditation to increase and improve focus, and, by doing so, we become able to use the same techniques to enter a Flow State while active. It can be very soothing while productive.
It does take a while for me to settle my “monkey mind” (a Buddhist concept that describes a state of restlessness, capriciousness, and lack of control in one’s thoughts.) but, when I do, I can slow down, most of the time. There are those days that I have trouble doing it, to be honest, but they are not as frequent.
'Meditation Benefits From a Neuroscientist' with Dan Harris and Dr Richie Davidson
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