Hidden Brain - Unleashing Your Creativity

Episode Date: June 1, 2026

For centuries, people have described creativity as something mysterious: a flash of insight, a whisper from the muse, a sudden idea that seems to arrive out of nowhere. Psychologist Ap Dijksterhuis explores the hidden mental processes that lead to these moments of inspiration, and why breakthroughs often emerge when the mind is at rest. Should you worry about your memory? For many of us, forgetting a name or losing your keys feels like a small failure. But what if forgetting is actually one of the most important things your brain does? Check out our new video on the surprising (and reassuring!) science of forgetting to learn more. Episode illustration by Chloe for Unsplash+   Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Across centuries, artists and writers have tried to make sense of the mysterious force that brings ideas to life. The ancient Greeks imagine the muse as a literal spirit, a whispering goddess who breathed inspiration into the poet's ear. Renaissance painters courted her through ritual and prayer, while romantic poets look for her in storms, mountain peaks, and moonlit walks. Now, psychological research is discovering that what the ancients call divine inspiration is really the brain at play.

When we are relaxed, taking a shower, folding laundry, staring out a window, our minds slip into a pattern of spontaneous association. Neurons fire across disparate brain regions, linking old memories with half-formed ideas. Then, suddenly, and insight bubbles up. It feels like a gift from the heavens,

but it's really the product of our own unconscious minds. This week on Hidden Brain, and in a companion story on Hidden Brain Plus, the origins of creativity and how to find the muse within. When we think about how creative work unfolds, we usually imagine it happening in moments of intense focus, a painter standing before his canvas,

a scientist peering into who, her microscope. But research shows that many of our most original ideas do not appear when we are concentrating hard. They arrive when our minds wander, when we're driving, showering, or staring into space. Op Dykstra House is a psychologist who recently retired from Ratbout University Namaghan in the Netherlands. He studies the origins of inspiration and creativity. Op Dexter House, welcome to Hidden Brain. Thank you. Op, you're familiar with the story of Friedrich August Keckhule, a German chemist born in 1829. What was the great research project of his life?

Kekule was working on the structure of molecules that was in the 1860s what the most famous chemists did. And some of the structures were known by then. We knew what water looked like or oxygen. But Kekule was working on more complex molecules. So these complex molecules often were related to carbon and how carbon molecules took the form of long chains, right? Yeah, yeah, exactly. And he was, I think, at the time working on what they called benzene, which is part of crude oil. And he was working on it for quite a while.

He couldn't figure out the structure of that molecule. And at some point, he thought about it, he thought about it, and he thought about it even more. and then he dozed off in front of his fireplace, and he fell asleep. And in his dream, he suddenly saw a snake biting its own tail, and he woke up, startled, and he suddenly knew that benzene had the shape of a ring.

So in other words, these carbon molecules had these long chains, but the insight that he got while he was sleeping was that this long chain in some way circled back on itself and formed a ring. Yeah, and that was exactly, in a dream. and that was at the time completely new. Nobody had thought about it. He must have been very startled to have woken up from this dream

with this dream of a snake and realized that in some ways it had solved his problem. He was shocked. Yeah, he was shocked himself. And of course also elated because he immediately realized that it was not just a dream, that it was the solution. He must have been euphoric as well.

So some years after that discovery, a French scientist and mathematician, Henri Poincaray, was working on a problem related to what are known as fusion functions. Again, like Keculet, he found himself stumped? Yeah, Puancaray did all kinds of different things. He was really almost a universal scientist, but one of the things he did was indeed Fuxian equations. There he worked on, I think, for seven or eight years already.

And he made some progress, but there was a big puzzle that he couldn't solve. Then at a day where he wasn't going to work, he was in the countryside doing something completely different, and he stepped on a bus. And the moment he stepped on the bus, almost the exact millisecond, he saw the solution.

He just knew it. And it felt like it came out of nowhere, but he knew the solution. One of the striking things was, in both the Kekewley story as well as in the Poangare story, the answer seemed to come almost effortlessly. Yeah.

If you have one of those sudden flashes of insight or inspiration, it feels like it comes out of nowhere. And for a long time, people believe these insights came from God. Or in the old Greek days, the time of the old Greek philosophers, they thought it came from muses, the nine goddesses. And Pueng Coray was probably the first one who explicitly said, you know, it came from your brain. But it's in an area of your brain where you're,

just can't reach. And at a certain point, you have this sudden flash of insight. Henri Poincaray wrote about his epiphany, and it's, I think, instructive to listen to his words directly. He describes getting on this bus, and he writes, we entered an omnibus to go someplace or other. At the moment when I put my foot on the step, the idea came to me without anything in my former thoughts seeming to have paved the way for it, that the transformations I had used to define the fusion functions were identical with those of Euclidean geometry. I did not verify the idea. I should not have had time. As upon taking my seat in the omnibus, I went on with a conversation already commenced, but I felt a perfect certainty. So this is another

quality of these epiphanies, which is that they not only come to us out of the blue, but when they come to us, we feel like we have absolute certainty that they must be right. Yeah, the sudden burst of inspirations are wonderful in different ways. One of them is indeed, if scientists have these ideas, yes, they feel absolutely right. And some people describe these moments of insight basically as love. They give you a lot of energy at the same time. And the third thing is that it feels almost magical. And that's why you feel forced to do something with it. You can't have a wonderful moment of insight and then say, oh, I'm going to ignore it for the forthcoming three days, I just, you know, I'm now going to do something completely different. That's impossible.

I understand that after this experience, Henri Poincari changed the way he worked. How so, up, what did he do? Well, Poincorre said, okay, if my unconscious works on mathematical problems, I should give it time. So what he started to do is he worked only four hours a day, two in the morning and two in the afternoon, at least in a conscious way. He worked in a conscious way four hours a day, and the rest of the day he assumed that his unconscious would work on the problems he was working on.

You tell a wonderful story involving the scientist Lawrence Bragg. Who was he up, and how did he spend his time? Lawrence Bragg was the youngest Nobel Prize winner ever, and I think he still is. He was 25 or 26 when he won the Nobel Prize. in physics. And what he did, he had one day a week where he chose to go gardening

rather than working in his lab. And the assumption, of course, is that he was working on his scientific problems unconsciously. And what is, especially in music, about the story, is that he was dending the garden of an elderly lady in London who didn't even know

that she had this very famous gardener So until, and it lasted until one of her friends came, and she stood there in front of the window looking outside in the garden. And she said, my dear, do you realize that the Nobel laureate Sir Lawrence Bragg is actually pruning your hedges? Before that, she didn't have an idea that she probably had the most famous gardener. But yeah, he really believed in the importance of sometimes doing something completely different. For centuries, we've been told stories about inspiration as something that visits us,

a spark from the gods, a sudden gust of grace. Science is now finding that the spark is already burning inside us, and there are things we can do to give the spark oxygen. When we come back, how the brain comes up with original ideas. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. I remember reading a poem by Percy Bixie Berm. Shelley many years ago. In hymn to intellectual beauty, which is partly about the nature of

inspiration, he writes, sudden, thy shadow fell on me, I shrieked and clasped my hands in ecstasy. This idea that inspiration comes out of nowhere, that it is unpredictable, untamable, this is a very old idea. Op Dykstrahaus is a psychologist who studies the science of inspiration and creativity. Bob, one of the most intriguing ideas in your work is that you have found that the brain has the capacity to continue to work on problems, even when our attention has turned to other things. How does this happen? Most of us think that we focus on problems and then we solve those problems because we're focused on them. I once wrote a children's book about psychology, and I compared thinking to a whale, you know, a whale sometimes surfaces.

but most of the time a whale is actually underwater and it still continues to swim. And thinking is like that. If we set ourselves important goals or if we work on something that we find very important, we think about it when we pay attention to it, but also when we don't pay attention to it, when we're doing something completely different, like watching a movie, our brain continues to work on that important problem. For things such as inspiration and creativity and problem solving,

this is extremely important. In some ways, I think this dovetails really nicely with a central idea of the Hidden Brain Project, which is that even as we feel like everything that happens in our minds happens at a conscious level, significant amounts of what happened in our minds, in fact, are hidden from us. That's the origin of the term hidden brain.

And really what you're saying is that the same thing happens with creativity, that in some ways left to itself, that there are things that happen under the surface that we're not aware of. And I love that metaphor of the whale that spends most of its time underwater and then surfaces now and again to take a breath of air. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think the first episode of Hidden Brain I ever listened to was simply because of the title, because of the name Hidden Brain, I thought, this is what I'm working on. Yeah, it's very much comparable.

Researchers using brain scanning equipment have monitored the brain while it shifts from task to task. What have such studies discovered about how the brain works up? Well, when we started to study the idea that people think unconsciously, that's the way we call it, what we did is we gave information about four different apartments in the city of Amsterdam. This was at the time where I was working at the University of Amsterdam. We gave students information about four different departments, and we made sure that one apartment was more attractive than the others. But they got a lot of information.

It wasn't all that easy to figure it out. And we said to these participants, choose the best department. And we had two groups. The first group simply read the information and they chose. And the second group, they read the information. We told them to choose later on. And first they were distracted with a word puzzle, something simple. And then just a few minutes later, they were asked their favorite department.

And they performed much better than the other group. So if you give yourself a couple of minutes to unconsciously think about something, you make better decisions. And we added a third group where we said to, after people read the information about the apartments, we said, well, you can forget about the information of the apartments. We're not going to ask you anything about it. And then they still got the word puzzles. And then we, it's a bit mean, but we said, okay, sorry, but we do want you to choose the best apartment.

And they failed again. And in the second stage, other researchers show that when people read the information about the apartments, and certain brain areas become active. They're thinking about the apartments. And then when you set a goal to later make a choice and you do these word puzzles, then the brain area still continue to work on the apartments. When you tell people you can forget about the information of the apartments,

we're not going to use it. The brain activity in that particular area stops. So this is fascinating. What you're finding is that when you tell people to focus on a problem and to focus exclusively on the problem and come up with an answer. In some ways, they do worse than people who are asked first to focus on the problem and then do something else that's a little distracting and then return to the problem.

But the people who are told to focus on the problem and then forget about the problem, they in fact do not do as well as the people who are given the distraction task. So in other words, focusing on something and being distracted for a little while is a great way to get your unconscious mind to continue to think about the problem. Yeah, exactly. And the only thing you need is motivation. or you set yourself a goal. So let's say you talk to your partner and you think about,

it's now Thursday, you tell yourself, okay, we're going to make a city trip, but you have to decide which city you want to visit. And then you say, okay, we're not going to talk about it for too much any longer, but let's say on Sunday evening when we have dinner together, we're going to make a decision. From that moment on, you give your unconscious mind or your hidden brain, you give a job to do, and it will think, it will think about it unconsciously for the two, three days until Sunday.

And you increase the chances that you actually know what you want by Sunday. Now, there are some goals that, in fact, are best left to the conscious mind. So if you're evaluating potential mortgages, for example, or you're consulting a manual to fix an appliance, there are domains where, in fact, thinking about the problem is better than not thinking about the problem. Yeah. You can actually distinguish between three categories. There are things that our unconscious will always think about,

and these have to do with basic routines or also with survival, or things that are very much based on emotions. You can think about love. You know, these are things that, you know, your mind, or your minds of most people anyway, will work on naturally. Then there's things, creativity, inspiration, scientific problems, for instance, where your mind can think about if you set yourself goals, but it's not, it doesn't do so naturally.

You have to want it. You have to set yourself goals. And then there's a third category, and that's where you are referring to. These are like mortgages or pension plans or from the perspective of your unconscious. This is just a lot of modern nonsense that it's not going to, it's not going to think about, you know. So, yeah, if you have to make decisions. that domain, and of course in modern life, we sometimes have to make such decisions.

You have to do it with a lot of conscious thought. Yeah. The unconscious is not going to do it for you. Let's take a look at some of the qualities of unconscious thinking that can make it so generative. You say that unconscious thought processes are capacious and can hold more information than conscious thoughts can hold. Why would this be the case? it's simply a consequence of the of the enormous capacity of our brain and a rather limited capacity of consciousness consciousness is one wonderful quality it's very precise you know i could ask you what's 14 times 17 and you can use a calculator but if you don't use a calculator your consciousness can solve this

within a few seconds the unconscious will never solve you can you can solve word puzzles for six weeks. You still don't know the answer. So that's the wonderful thing about consciousness. But the unconscious has this vast capacity where, let's say, you have to make a decision to buy a house or not, or even to choose between various houses. The amount of information you have to process in order to reach such a decision is really enormous. And this is a, it turns out this is something that the unconscious is much better at than consciousness. in some ways I think what you're saying is that the conscious mind functions almost like a spotlight. It basically focuses on something and is able to illuminate that thing very well.

And the unconscious mind has perhaps a wider aperture. It basically it's a floodlight that is covering a much larger terrain. That's exactly what it is. Yeah, that's exactly what it is. And that also makes the unconscious more wild and associative. a way and in a sense also more creative you know if you if you think about something unconsciously you come up with things sometimes at least that are quite unexpected and and yeah wild and consciousness on the other hand yeah exactly it's a spotlight it's very it's very precise it's not the most adventurous thinking usually but it's it's precise you also say that unconscious thought processes

can draw on the deep recesses of our memory um Talk about how such memories might enrich our creativity up. Well, I think what happens is if you think unconsciously, yes, it's almost unlimited when it comes to the information your unconscious uses, and it can involve basically everything, you know, including childhood memories. And I think that's one of the reasons that if scientists or artists, if they engage their unconscious, they are much more creative. They come up with things that are,

very much unexpected. They associate things with each other that are usually not associated. You once ran an experiment where you asked people to write down the names of as many Dutch cities as they could think of that began with the letter A. Tell me about this experiment and what you found. That's an experiment where, yeah, I had two groups. So one group I simply asked, name as much cities and villages starting with the letter A. in the Netherlands and the other group.

I said, you know, later I want you to list as many cities or villages with the letter A, but we're first going to do something else. And again, they engage in a few minutes in solving word puzzles with the idea that they would think unconsciously about these cities and villages with the letter A. And in terms of the sheer number they came up with, the number of villages and cities, it was the same between the two groups. but people who thought consciously came up with the more obvious choices like Amsterdam or the bigger cities. And people who thought unconsciously who were doing the word puzzles first,

they came up with much more, you could say, unusual villages that some of them I had never even heard of. You also say that unconscious thought processes don't engage in concrete details as much as the essence or the gist of the information at hand. And in some ways, this is related to the spotlight versus floodlight metaphor, which is, again, you're trying, the unconscious mind is involved in, in sort of capturing the general feel of something, not necessarily the precise contours of many things. Yeah, the gist. That's probably the single best word to describe it. So if you think about something consciously, you focus on, also on a precise wording of information. if you think about something unconsciously, you look at the gist about what are the underlying traits.

We have done experiments, for instance, where people have to form an impression of a hypothetical person. And you describe this person with all kinds of behavioral information. Like he likes to read newspapers. He's usually very late. And if you then later ask people what they remember about the person, You see that people who thought about it consciously have much better memory for the concrete information, reading the newspaper, for instance. And people who thought about it unconsciously, they have a feeling for what the underlying trade is.

Is somebody forgetful or chaotic or maybe very intelligent? So the unconscious is more about the underlying meaning of things. In the example we talked about earlier with Henri Poincaray, you know, he talks about how the insubes, insight that he eventually had as he stepped onto this bus was an insight that allowed him to combine two ideas that, in fact, came from very different places. Talk about the idea that unconscious thought processes allow diverse ideas and experiences to mingle and combine in novel ways. Yeah, I think that is also one of the things unconscious thought is capable of doing. You know, for instance, even childhood memories can be part of such an unconscious thought process.

And it's almost like a definition of creativity that you combine things that aren't usually combined. And this is something our unconscious is known to be better at than if we think about something very consciously, very attentively. And in some ways, this then connects with the idea that unconscious thought processes are going to be associative. In other words, one thing leads to the next. And something from your childhood might intersect with something that happens in your workplace, which might intersect with something that you see in a sports game. whereas conscious thought processes are going to be more focused and convergent.

And so you can see how conscious thinking can lead us very systematically down a path, whereas unconscious thinking, you know, it can lead us into, you know, dead ends and blind alleys, but it can also produce these unexpected connections that can lead to creativity. Yeah, first it leads you deeper into the mire,

as sometimes scientists say, but in the end, yeah, it often leads you to the real solutions. by using the most unusual associations and combinations, yeah. One remarkable capacity of unconscious thought processes is that they seem to generate seemingly complete and perfect answers. When Poincaray basically made his discovery, he said, you know, I felt a perfect certainty,

and he says later when he got home, for conscience's sake, I verified the result. In other words, he said, I knew the result was correct already, but just to go through the motions, I had to verify it. Why would that be the case? Why would unconscious thought processes come up with more complete answers, do you think of? Well, we don't really know, and the unconscious doesn't do it all the time, unfortunately.

It only does so occasionally. But when your unconscious comes up with a solution to something, occasionally it's just perfect. There's no interference of consciousness. It's just sort of truth arriving in its purses. form and you see it in many many different areas not just in science and if you look at popular music what you see is that if you look at bands or musicians the song that that is written most rapidly is also the most famous and with poetry it's the same thing you know some of the best poems were written in five or ten minutes and Picasso when he painted he would

immediately stop if he if he felt that he was thinking about it too much. He was thinking, Conce. It would just have to be, it would have to occur naturally to him. And if he didn't occur naturally anymore, he would just stop. So yeah, there's something about the unconscious that it can come up with something that is very pure, very beautiful. Unfortunately, not every day, but it occasionally happens. Yeah. You described the story of the singer and songwriter Suzanne Vega, who wrote a very famous song that also came to her in a flash. What song was a song? was this, describe what happened to her up?

This is Luca. Yeah, her song, Luca. I remember watching a documentary about her on Dutch television, and she showed her interviewer the lyrics she wrote for Luca, and it was just a piece of paper that she showed. And she said, this is when I, you know, the first time I wrote it, and nothing was crossed out. It was just there.

She, the lyrics just basically appeared to her, she only had to write them down. And this is actually not too unusual. A lot of musicians have one or two of such songs, and they're usually their most famous. Amy MacDonald wrote, This is the Live in about 15 minutes. Now, the song, Luca is about child abuse.

It describes a story of a young boy who basically is being harmed, presumably by his caretakers. And Suzanne Vega later said that in some ways, the song was autobiographical, that she was writing about herself. And here again is an example of someone's musical abilities and talents intersecting with their own childhood experiences

and coming up with something that almost feels complete from the get-go. Yeah, it's a wonderful example of, yeah, an idea that is suddenly there and it's beautiful and it's pure and it's, yeah, it's finished. You know, she didn't have to do much about it. I think it was both the lyrics and the music were there within minutes. Yeah, it's a wonderful example. of what a creative unconscious can come up with. I understand that volunteers were presented once with riddles or problems

that could be solved either through analysis or by sudden insight. What kind of problems were these? And what was the outcome of the experiment up? This is a tradition in cognitive psychology in the 1980s where people wanted to see, they wanted to study inside problems. And one example is, I think it goes like this. So these are riddle. Every day, water lilies double the surface area they occupy.

And at the start of the summer, there's only one lily leaf in the lake. After 60 days, the entire water surface is covered. On which day was the lake half covered with water lilies? Now, if you hear such a riddle, your conscious mind is inclined to just say, okay, so you start with one lily, and then the next day there's two, and then the third day there's four, and then you, but this is not going to get you anywhere. And what you need is inside. You need this sudden flesh where you understand the riddle. And this is usually, this usually occurs to you only when you take a little distance first. maybe even, you know, go and take a walk or something.

And then you realize, well, okay, if after 60 days the lake is fully covered and the number of leaves doubles every day, then of course half covered means it's the day before the last day. It's on day 59. And if the right answer comes to you, it comes in a sort of a flash. It never comes when you approach it very analytically or consciously. One of the things I like about that puzzle up is that in some ways, it requires us to actually turn the problem on its head. So in other words, instead of starting from day one and saying,

okay, day one, there's one, there's one, day two, there's two, and so forth, you actually start from the end, and you say, okay, day 60, the lake is full, and now working backwards, when was the lake half full? And in some ways, you're turning the problem on its head, and when you turn the problem on its head, the problem actually becomes easy. Yeah. And then understanding the problem by turning us on its head is already the solution, Because then once you know it, you know, it's actually incredibly simple.

Yeah. Yeah. Unconscious thought processes are operating even when we are asleep, of course. You write about a study in which volunteers who had experienced REM sleep were able to better solve problems requiring divergent thinking. Tell me about this work. I think it started about 30 years ago where scientists discovered that during sleep, we engage in memory consolidates.

So this means actually if you learn something, then during REM sleep we consolidate this information so that the next day we have better memory. And then people started to do more and more experiments and also more complex experiments where in the evening participants in experiments would read quite complex information about the relationship of certain stimuli like A is always bigger than B and B is always bigger than C and C is always bigger than D. but in later experiments, they made this information quite complex. And during the night, people could sleep. Other people did this during the day, so they also had eight hours until they came back to the testing room, but they couldn't sleep. And it turns out that during REM sleep,

this is where people make these interesting connections and people start to understand these very complex relations between stimuli. So only the group that slept during the night in a normal way could solve these complicated problems. People who were woken up during their REM sleep couldn't, and people who studied this during the day and so didn't sleep, they couldn't solve these problems either.

Now, REM sleep has long been associated with dreaming, and I'm wondering in some ways if the process of dreaming is in fact a process of creativity, because unusual things get linked when we are dreaming. Yes, indeed. dream sleep is our, is basically our dream sleep, and it's long been known that it is indeed associated with creativity. KQ Le, of course, is a good example. We know that yesterday, probably the most famous song by the Beatles, the melody of yesterday was dreamt by Paul McCartney. He woke up in the

morning, and he played that melody that he had dreamt. But for weeks, he thought, you know, it must have been plagiarism. I must have heard it somewhere before, and that's why it reappears. in my dream. And then he and Lennon and the other fellow band members started to listen to other music, but they couldn't find it. And only after a few weeks, they realized, no, this is really something new.

And he dreamt up a melody. And in some ways up, this speaks to what parents and educators have been telling children and students for a long time. If you're studying something, you're studying a subject or learning a difficult concept, the sleep that you get is actually an essential portion of your learning process. Absolutely.

Yeah. And I think the more research we do, the more we figure out how important it really is. I remember my grandmother telling me, and I think this is something universal, that if you have to make an important decision, you have to sleep on it, literally. You know, don't make a decision tonight. Go sleep. And then tomorrow morning, you know, if it still feels good, then maybe you should do it. And that's like a universal wisdom.

And I think maybe in the old days people thought it was useful because at least it made sure that you weren't hurrying yourself or you would put in too much pressure on yourself. But now we realize more and more that no, during our sleep, a lot of very useful things happen. There are higher cognitive processes going on while we sleep and especially while we dream. If the first step in understanding creativity is recognizing that the muse lives inside us,

the next step is learning how to invite her to make an appearance. We cannot order inspiration to appear, but we can create the conditions where it is most likely to materialize. When we come back, habits and practices to coax creative ideas from the quiet corners of our minds. You're listening to Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. This is Hidden Brain. I'm Shankar Vedantam. Have you had an experience of struggling with a problem only to have a good night's sleep

and then find the answer came easily to you? Have you struggled to untangle a naughty conflict in a relationship and then found during a calm walk in nature that the problem seemed to unknot itself? If you are willing to share a personal story about inspiration and creativity with the Hidden Brain audience, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone.

Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at Feedback at Hiddenbrain.org using the subject line, Inspiration. Again, that email address is Feedback at Hiddenbrain.org. Psychologist Op Dykstrahaus is the author of Inspiration, where the best ideas come from. Op, in terms of creating the conditions that generate insight, there are other situations, of course, besides sleep,

where we also have this kind of generative thinking. The author J.K. Rowling says the idea for Harry Potter came to her while she was riding a train. Yeah, it's one of the more famous and wonderful stories. She was a writer already, but she hadn't written anything that, well, she hadn't written anything of note. Let's put it that way. And then she took the train from Manchester to London. And in the train compartment, it basically just hit her. The story goes that within about an hour or so, basically the entire Harry Potter story came to her with the most important persons, with the plot, the storyline, and she frantically wrote everything up.

And, well, in the next 15 years, she had to work really hard to actually write all these seven novels. But the idea came, yeah, during a train ride. And it was, again, one of those examples of an idea that is both beautiful and pure. more or less finished at the same time. It came to her and it was all there. Yeah. And in some ways, I think this speaks to an idea that we referred to earlier where, you know, you gave students a task

and some students had to solve the task right away and some students were distracted and then they came back and a third group were told about the information by then instructed to forget the information. And you found that the students who had been distracted in fact did the best on the task. And we've had other guests on Hidden Brain who've talked about this idea that when it comes to our attention, there are things that

our minds attend to that are, you know, harshly fascinating, which is, you know, you're in Times Square, for example, or you're at a sporting event, and there's a lot of stuff happening, and it takes up all of your mental space. But there are also experiences that we have that are quietly fascinating or softly fascinating, where we're walking in nature. So in other it's not like there's no stimulation coming in, but it's not hyper-stimulated. And riding a train is a little bit like that. It's softly stimulating because things are changing. The landscape is changing as the train is proceeding, but it's not changing so dramatically that it takes up all of your attention. And it seems like it's in those situations that the mind

is able to wander and come up with creative ideas. Yeah, those moments are indeed the best. I studied the working habits of artists and scientists, And what occurred to me is that most of them, especially work in the morning. Some of them work more often than just in the morning. But the morning is usually the most productive time. We know that people are, the cognitive abilities are usually at their best between about one and a half and five hours after you wake up, although that's not true for everybody, but it's true for most people.

And then in the afternoon, what you see is that many, many of them walk. and walking is just one example of what you may call a lightly meditative state the same as the train ride jk k rowling's train ride there's a few more of those and yeah those are indeed the most productive activities when it comes to unconscious thought and i think there's two reasons one of them is that unconscious thought itself is working best under those conditions if you if you compare it with time square or to a situation where you are working very hard on something like a complex problem your unconscious thought is not working too well because too much capacity is taken by other processes and the second reason is that of course

there has to be room there has to be space in consciousness for a good idea to land so if you're watching a very you know a very good movie you're engrossed in the movie so there's you're not going to get any good ideas at least not at that time and when you when you walk in nature Yeah, there's plenty of room in consciousness to, let's say, receive ideas from the unconscious, from your hidden brain. So you say that a goal that engages the unconscious and generates inside should also be intrinsically oriented up? What do you mean by this? Well, intrinsic motivation basically means that you're doing something that comes out of you, comes from the deeper regions of your brain or maybe metaphorically from your heart.

It's something you really like to do, as opposed to extrinsic motivation. These are goals that you want to achieve because of money or fame or some kind of external awards that you can win, for instance. A little bit of extrinsic motivation isn't necessarily bad, but if you want to last, if you want to persevere for a long time, you need intrinsic motivation. Extrinsic motivation dries up usually quite quickly. You tell the story of Marco Pierre White, who became the youngest chef to receive three Michelin stars. Paint a picture for me of how he came to accomplish this and what the result was of these accomplishments up. So Marco quit school when he was 16. And his father, who also was a cook, said, well, you know, okay, if you want to quit school, you can quit school, but you have to go to work.

And then he said, you know, why don't you go work in the kitchen? It was a working class family, no frills, just work in the kitchen. And Marco started to work in a professional kitchen and he said the first time I saw it, it was like stepping in a jewelry box. He loved it. He thought it was absolutely fantastic. And within two years, he was the pastry chef in one of the best restaurants in the north of England. And within a few years, he had his first Michelin star.

And he was very much intrinsically motivated. He loved to cook. He was very creative, wonderful chef. And then a few years later, he had three Michelin stars. He was the most successful young chef. And then he continued for a while, and one day he just woke up, and he didn't like it anymore. And he realized that he had been too focused on extrinsic rewards,

like the three Michelin stars. And that gradually his intrinsic motivation, slept away through his fingers and his extrinsic motivation became more important. And actually what he did is he just stopped. He basically gave the three Michelin stars back to Michelin. He said, you can have them. I don't need them anymore.

He later in the interviews, he said the problem was also that up until he had these three stars, he loved cooking and he did everything he could to become a better chef. he wanted to improve himself, he wanted to challenge himself. And then he had these three Michelin stars. And the only thing you can do then is lose them again. So he was, he started to cook in order to not make any mistakes, which is a completely different way of, you know, doing things. And he, he lost his interest. He didn't like it anymore. So in some ways, this dovetails with work by the psychologist Ed D.C. and others that show that intrinsic motivation and

and extrinsic motivation are really these separate forces that live inside our minds and that extrinsic motivations are fine. There's nothing wrong with them, but they do have this tendency to slowly erode our intrinsic motivation. So in one of his more famous studies, if I remember this correctly, he went up to people who were doing some activity like solving crossword puzzles, and they were doing this activity on their own because they enjoyed doing it. And he then offered to pay them a small amount of money for each time

they finished a crossword puzzle. They paid them a dollar for every crossword puzzle they finished. And of course, you would think, well, this is going to increase their motivation to do crossword puzzles because they were doing them anyway, and now they're getting paid for doing them. But what he found was over time, the volunteer stopped doing the crossword puzzles unless they received the dollar. So in other words, the intrinsic motivation started to crowd out the intrinsic motivation, which is exactly what you are describing in the story with Marco Pier White.

Yeah, exactly. And there's other examples. Even studies with children, you know, you ask them to make drawings. And this is what most children naturally love to do. And then you start to pay them or give them some other kind of reward. And they actually start to like it less. Yeah, the big problem with extrinsic motivation is not the extrinsic motivation itself, but it's the eroding, as you said, of the intrinsic motivation.

You know, it's like a cuckoo in the nest, you know. It pushes the other eggs out. I understand that you yourself had an experience in Ecuador some years ago that generated a moment of inspiration for you. Tell me what happened up. I wanted to write a book about creativity. And after about a year, I gave up because I liked the topic, but I didn't have a good idea of what the book would be. It was all still very vague. And then about three, four years later, I tried again, and again, I failed.

And then I was in Ecuador, in Keith, the capital and there are four or five very old churches and convents in the old town and and it suddenly dawned on me how amazing that was you imagine it's 16th century you're on a boat for many many months and then you land on the shore of Ecuador and then with a group of of people you you go into this crazy jungle and you walk for a couple of weeks until you reach a mountain range and then you climb up to 8,000 feet. Your leader says, let's make a couple churches here.

What these colonialists did, the first thing they did when they arrived there is built four or five of these huge churches that are obviously still standing there. They're beautiful. And then that's when it dawned on me that the book shouldn't be about creativity. It should be about inspiration. So for me, it was a very important moment, yeah. You're clearly a fan of the Beatles because the Beatles have come up several times in our conversation. And you say that John Lennon and Paul McCartney had an unusual way of selecting the songs that they felt were worth keeping.

They generated, of course, many melodies and lyrics, but didn't always finish all of them or publish all of them. What was their process up? They would jam in their studio and just come up with new songs all the time. but they didn't have any recording equipment at the time. So they basically had to memorize what they did. And then at some point, they just realized that, okay, if we play something in the afternoon, maybe we remember it the next morning, and then it's probably good. And if we don't remember it the next morning, well, fine, because it's probably not good enough anyway.

So they had a very natural selection process in coming up with their songs. You know, it's striking to me up as we are talking today, I'm realizing that in so many different ways, we are not in our daily lives, in our modern lives, really allowing the unconscious to flourish. You know, we write down every single thought we have. We are so focused on our emails and our work. We're basically very directed in what we are trying to finish. We have goals and we say, okay, I'm going to work on this goal very closely.

And taking a day off every week to go and garden would be a waste of time. Talk about the ways in which our modern world, in some ways, is working against the capacity. of our unconscious minds to help us be creative? I think that basically all this modern technology, it's highly useful in some ways, but it also clutters our mind. These days you need to remember a password when you want to order something from your local butcher.

It's pretty crazy these days. And you have to almost literally clean your mind, and you do this by things such as walking, by doing other things. and this frees up your unconscious mind again for things that you actually want to achieve for useful things. Email, let's face it, email these days,

is a to-do list where other people put things on. If you see it in this way, it's easier to sometimes just say, sorry, now I'm going to choose for myself. Inspiration often feels like a bolt of lightning. As we've seen, there are a number of things we can do to make our minds hospitable places for creativity. In our companion story to this episode, available exclusively to subscribers to Hidden Brain Plus,

we explore the role of effort in producing inspiration that feels effortless. If you're a subscriber, that episode is available right now. It's titled, Inspiration Meets Perspiration. If you're someone who spends a lot of time scrolling social media or attending to emails and text messages during the day, please listen to this episode. It will tell you why you are selling yourself short. when it comes to being creative. If you're not yet a subscriber,

go to support.hiddenbrain.org. If you're using an Apple device, go to apple.com slash hidden brain. Again, that's support. com.hiddenbrain.org or apple.com slash hidden brain. Psychologist Op Dykstrahaus is the author of Inspiration,

where the best ideas come from. Op, thank you so much for joining me today on Hidden Brain. Thank you. Thank you, Shankar. Can you think of a problem you solved after being stuck for a long time? What techniques helped you unblock yourself? If you have a personal story you would be willing to share with the Hidden Brain audience or a question or comment about this episode, please find a very quiet room and record a voice memo on your phone.

Two or three minutes is plenty. Email the file to us at Feedback at Hiddenbrain.org using the subject line, inspiration. Again, that email address is feedback at hiddenbrain.org. Hidden Brain is produced by Hidden Brain Media. Our audio production team includes Annie Murphy-Paul, Kristen Wong, Laura Querell, Ryan Katz, Autumn Barnes, Andrew Chadwick, and Nick Woodbury. Tara Boyle is our executive producer.

I'm Hidden Brain's executive editor. If you like this episode, please think of a couple of friends who would find it interesting or useful and tell them to listen to the show. If you're a parent or a teacher, consider sharing this episode with your kids or in a classroom. I'm Shankar Vedantam. See you soon.