Speaking of Psychology - Creativity, insight and “eureka moments,” with John Kounios, PhD

Episode Date: August 18, 2021

“Eureka moments” have led to some of humanity’s greatest achievements in science, medicine, mathematics and the arts. But they’re not always that dramatic -- we’ve nearly all had the experience of solving a nagging problem in a flash of insight when we’re least expecting it. John Kounios, PhD, a professor of psychology at Drexel University, discusses how does this type of creative insight differs from more analytical thinking, where creative insight comes from in the brain, and how can you encourage more creativity in yourself and set yourself up to experience more of these “aha moments.” Listener Survey - https://www.apa.org/podcastsurvey Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Have you ever worked on a problem for hours or days or even weeks, turning it over in your mind until you were ready to give up finding a solution? But then the answer came to you in a flash, maybe in the shower or while you were taking a walk or doing the dishes. Many of us are fortunate enough to experience these spurts of insight at least occasionally. Aha or eureka moments have led to some of humanity's greatest achievements in science, medicine, mathematics, and art. From classic songs to life-saving cancer treatments, even to the invention of the slink, But most of the time these insights are more prosaic. Maybe a crossword puzzle answer that's eluded you for days comes to your mind in the shower

or the perfect title for a paper you're writing pops into your head while you're digging a hole in the garden. Eureka moments like these are a form of creativity. They involve coming up with a new idea or a novel solution to a problem. So how does this type of creative insight differ from more analytical or methodical thinking? Where in the brain does creative insight happen?

are some people naturally more creative thinkers than others? And how can you encourage more creativity in yourself and set yourself up to experience more of these aha moments? Welcome to Speaking of Psychology, the flagship podcast of the American Psychological Association that examines the links between psychological science and everyday life. I'm Kim Mills. Our guest today is Dr. John Cunios,

a professor of psychology at Drexel University in Philadelphia. Two decades ago, his work purpose, provided some of the first evidence from brain imaging studies, that creative insight is a distinct form of thinking separate from analytical thought. Since then, he has continued to study what's happening in people's brains during moments of creativity and insight. He is also author of the book The Eureka Factor, AHA moments, Creative Insight, and the Brain. Thank you for joining us today, Dr. Kunios. Thank you. Thanks for inviting me. So a moment ago, I said that aha moments or Eureka moments are a form of creative thinking. Let's talk about that a little more. A lot of people think,

think of creativity more in terms of things like musical or artistic ability. What makes an aha moment a type of creativity? Okay, well, let's first start with what creativity is. Creativity is not just in the arts. Creativity occurs in science. Creativity occurs in everyday life, in all aspects of life. So probably the most common definition is that for something to be creative, it involves coming up with an idea or a product that is both novel and useful. I'm not crazy about that definition. It seems to be as close to a standard definition as we have at this point. So for something to be novel, obviously has to be novel for the individual. So if I have never read Shakespeare's Hamlet, but I sit down and I write Hamlet, then it's novel to me. It's not novel to the world,

but at least it's novel to me. It would be very creative if I could do that, not having read Shakespeare's Hamlet. Useful? That's a little bit harder. Useful to whom? Certainly there are, for example, brilliant theorems that have been proven in mathematics that at the time were of no use to anyone. And perhaps 100 years later, theoretical physicists used it to come up with a novel understanding of, say, particle physics or string theory or whatever. So something could be useful at one time and not be useful anymore later. So that's not a great definition either. Maybe a little bit better is to say that something is appropriate. So you could come up with an idea that is new to you. And it may not be right. Perhaps it's a brilliant

failure. I mean, we all have had brilliant failures. They were creative, but they just didn't pan out. But at least they were appropriate to a particular problem or question or of some interest. So novel and useful, novel and appropriate. That's one way of thinking creativity. Another approach, which I like a little better, is that creativity is the ability to take the elements of thought and break them down and reorganize them into something that is. new. So, for example, you could take the notes of the musical scale and rearrange those to come up with a beautiful melody. You could take words, rearrange those to come up with a poem. You could take the elements of mathematical equations, rearrange those to come up with a new theorem, a new equation.

So I kind of like that. It gets away from the useful part. I mean, it still has to have something appropriate to it. So, for example, if you have someone who has schizophrenia, they may be reorganizing all of their associations in novel ways. But those could be kind of random. They're not really, we wouldn't call it creative, because it could be just gibberish. If it has some purpose, some appropriateness, then we can still call that creativity. Yet another possible way to think of creativity is the ability to think on your feet. So this is what cognitive psychologists call fluid intelligence.

So it's your ability to deal with novel situations where you can't rely that much on past experience. You have to improvise. Think on your feet. That would be one potential form of creativity. And as we can talk about later from our studies of musical improvisation, it's creativity can be different for people who are novices in a particular field versus being experts in that field. So those are just, you know, different ways of defining creativity, and you can apply that

to all areas of life, whether it's arts, the humanities, science, practical aspects of daily life, you know, trying to get a toddler to eat vegetables. You might come up with some great idea to do that. Those are all forms of creativity. So how do you study this? I mean, you use neuroimaging to look at what's happening in people's brains when they're having insights, but you can't necessarily predict when an insight will happen. So how do you measure when someone is having an actual eureka moment? Okay. So these eureka moments or aha moments, they're one form of creativity. So one way to look at this is that since it's difficult to come up with a definition, of creativity that everyone agrees on. The approach that I've mostly taken in my research is to take

some phenomenon that everyone agrees is a manifestation of creativity. And these aha moments or eureka moments, researchers seem to have a consensus that those are one manifestation of creativity. So we can focus on that. Now, the famous eureka moments, you know, could be Isaac Newton with the apple falling in gravity or. or Paul McCartney having a dream of which gave him the melody for the song yesterday, all of these things. You know, these are kind of rare events. We can't chase people around, predict when they're going to have an aha moment or

as psychological scientists call them an insight, and then stuff them in a brain scanner and wait for it to happen. We just can't do that. And neuroimaging also requires not just a single instance of an aha moment. it requires multiple instances. We have to average over many of these things in order to extract the brain activity that's associated with Yohama. So my colleague and collaborator longstanding Mark Beeman, who's at Northwestern University, who also co-authored the book, The Eureka Factor with me. Many years ago, we decided to take a different approach. And that is, instead of waiting

for these insights to come, we would use little verbal puzzles that a person could solve in a few seconds. And we could give people many of these. So the analogy might be that biomedical researchers studying a disease, trying to come up with a cure for disease. They use a, say, a mouse model. And the mouse model is in many respects, I mean, mice are not humans, but they've been engineered genetically to have certain characteristics that would allow us to predict based on how a mouse responds to things, whether this drug, for example, might be helpful for humans. So we're sort of using a mouse model in a way. We use these little problems, which we have every reason to believe differ from the big Eureka

moments only in their size or scope. We can give people many of these little puzzles and study the brain activity when people solve little puzzles that either with a flesh of insight or solve them analytically. So we've selected types of puzzles such as anagrams or other types called compound remote associates. These are little puzzles that a person can solve in one of two ways. They can solve it, say you have an anagram. One way to solve the anagram is you consciously, deliberately, methodically, rearrange the letters to find a word. We would call that analytical thinking. That goes back, that term goes back over 100 years. In other ways, you look at the anagram, and then after a second or two, the solution just pops into your awareness. It could take longer than a second

or two. You have your aha moment that gives you the word. That would be insight or an aha moment. So by giving people lots of these puzzles, and for each one that they saw, we asked them, did that just pop into your head or did that result from sort of working it out in a conscious, deliberate way? We can sort the solutions into aha moment solutions and analytic solutions and compare the brain activity for the two of these. And we can look at, you know, what are the brain areas that you are uniquely activated when a person solves the problem with a sudden insight versus solving it analytically. So you've found evidence that some people tend more toward analytical thinking and more

toward insightful thinking. But what are the actual differences between the two and do most people tend more strongly in one direction than the other? So, yes. So actually, let me back up a little bit. So what we found in our initial study, which we published in Plos biology in 2004, was that for a particular type of verbal puzzle. The inside itself, the aha moment itself,

corresponds to a burst of brain activity in the right temporal lobe, just above the right ear. High frequency, EEG, and also electroencephagram, and also using functional magnetic resonance imaging, fMRI, an increase in blood flow just at the moment that the person has the solution pop into awareness.

So we were able to then, over a series of studies, trace backwards in time, what are the precursors that lead to a person having an aha moment? And so you're talking about individual differences between people, which are some people more likely to solve these puzzles or any kind of puzzles by insight and others more likely to solve them analytically? And the answer is yes. So in a study led in my lab by Brian Erickson, who's now a research professor at Drexel University, this was part of his doctoral dissertation research in my lab. The study was funded by the National Science Foundation. We recorded people's resting state electroencephalgae. They're resting state eGs.

So they're sitting there, no task to perform, no idea what's going to come next. They're just sitting and relaxing. We record their brain activity. And then weeks later, we give them, in this case, anagrams to solve. And we note for each subject, you know, which ones they solved analytically and which ones they solved insightful, with an aha moment.

We then divided the subjects into groups, which ones tended to solve the problems with a flesh of insight, and which ones tended to solve more problems analytically. And we compared the resting state brain. activity that we recorded weeks earlier and we found substantial differences between these two types of people. So first of all, it's amazing that recordings of resting state brain activity can predict your cognitive style in Cycle versus analytic weeks in advance, up to seven weeks in advance at least, maybe longer. We haven't determined that yet. And what we found is that

the analytical thinkers in their resting state tend to have more brain activity over the frontal lobe. We could record over the frontal lobes. And the insightful thinkers tend to have more resting state brain activity in left posterior parts of the brain. So the frontal lobe is the seed of what we call executive processing, cognitive control. It gives us focus. It sets goals. It focuses a tension, when the frontal lobe is more deactivated, it's less active, then thinking becomes sort of fuzzier, less goal-directed, less organized, and people who have less frontal lobe activity, at least on average, tend to have more of these aha-mooms, these sudden insides. And that's sort of why people tend to have these aha moments when they're, say, in the shower, you know, taking

a nice warm shower. They're relaxed. It feels good. They don't have anything else to do at the moment. Their minds wander, you know, and they get relaxed and in that fuzzy state, then they can have a homoids. But if, you know, you have a couple of cups of coffee, you have a test to perform, you're maybe have a deadline, you're very focused, that boosts analytical thinking. And you tend to work things out in a more, more methodical, deliberate way. So yes, so there are analytical thinkers, there are insightful thinkers on average. I mean, virtually all of the subjects we've tested, and we've tested hundreds of subjects over the years. Virtually all of them solve some puzzles with insight and some puzzles analytically. There's no one who's, you know, never has an

ha moment that we've found and no one who never thinks analytically. I mean, it's just that some people tend to be balanced more one way or the other. And you can sort of nudge people one way or the other in various ways and we can we can talk about that too. That really resonates. I'm a great fan of the New York Times spelling beat, right? Which is you get seven words every morning and you have to arrange them into words and I see myself, sometimes I'm thinking analytically to come up with them. And other times I just look at all the letters, and boom, there's a word. So I get exactly what you're talking about. So let's talk about the different hemispheres of the brain. There's kind of an accepted wisdom that one side of the brain is where we do our creative thinking, the right side,

yeah, and that the left side controls are analytical abilities, such as speech, mathematics, things like that. In some sense, we're told that never the twain meet. Now, you've done some research with jazz musicians that has pretty much turned that thinking on its head to make a bad pun. What did you learn from that research about creativity and the two hemispheres of the brain? Okay. So the study that you're talking about was published last year in Neuro Image, also funded by the National Science Foundation. And it was led by David Rosen, who at the time was a graduate student in my lab. And so the topic of the hemispheres of the the brain and creativity is a very controversial topic among psychologists and neuroscientists.

So, you know, the pop wisdom going back, oh, at least to the 1960s, is that, you know, the right hemisphere of the brain is creative. The left hemisphere is logical and analytical. And that is a leap from early studies that were done on patients who had the hemispheres of their brains separated to help inhibit epileptic seizures. Right. So surgically separated. Yeah.

Surgically separated. And it was quite a leap. But the idea infused the pop culture. And we talk about right brain thinkers and left brain thinkers. So neuroscientists correctly say that, you know, the normal brain is not cut in half. the two hemispheres of the brain work together. They work together almost all the time. So it can't be that the right hemisphere is the creative hemisphere and the left hemisphere is the analytical hemisphere.

It can't be. The whole brain's involved. Well, that's going a bit far too. Because what the research has shown, in our case with our studies of particular types of these puzzles, is that the aha moment, the brain activity at the moment of insight is a burst of activity in the right temporal lobe. And, you know, that's the right hemisphere. It's kind of suggestive right there. There's something going on.

Work that my colleague Mark Beeman and his longtime collaborator, Ed Bowdo, have done behavioral work and mostly. And also research that presents information directly to one hemisphere. of the brain or the other suggests that the right hemisphere of the brain processes what we call remote associations. So for example, if I say the word water, you might think of the word glass. That's a word that comes to mind immediately, because those are close associations.

You think of a glass of water. If I were to say the word water, and then you came up with the word table, right? like water table, that is a remote association. It's not the first thing that comes to most people's minds. Bowden and Beeman's research suggests that these remote associations tend to be stored in the right hemisphere of the brain, and that the left hemisphere of the brain processes close association.

So if I say water and you say glass, that's left hemisphere. If I say water and you say table, that's right hemisphere. And the right hemisphere is necessary for, for example, understanding the gist, understanding humor, understanding things that are not like face value straightforward. And that work still holds up and there's something to it. But we can take that a step further. So there's what we found in our study of jazz improvisation. We measured people's EEGs while they improvised on the guitar, jazz.

And some of these musicians were experts who had been performing jazz gigs for decades and decades. They were really good at it. Others were novices, and they hadn't been doing it very long. And then we had people who were in between. So we looked at, for each subject, we looked at their, they did a series of improvisations, and we had experts later on rate the creativity of each improvisation, not knowing who actually performed. So we looked at the best versus the worst improvisations for each subject, in terms of most creative versus least creative.

And what we found is that experts improvisations, their best versus their worst, activated the left posterior parts of the brain. for the novices, their best versus their worst, activated the right hemisphere, mostly right frontal areas of the brain. We found this surprising. So looking around in the literature, there's kind of an old theory of the hemispheres in creativity that was first proposed by a neuropsychologist named Elkonen Goldberg.

And what he argued is that the right hemisphere processes novel, stimuli, novel experiences. When there's something new for you, a new task, a new stimulus, it's the right hemisphere that's engaged. As you become more and more practiced at it, as it becomes more and more familiar, that activity moves to the left hemisphere. So, for example, in most people, the left hemisphere is dominant for language because adults are so practiced at language.

it moves from the left to the right. So what this looks like, in our case with our jazz musicians, is that for the novices, improvisation is still not that familiar for them. It's a still kind of a new experience. And when they have to improvise, they improvise in our study to set chord and rhythm sequences that we gave them. This was sort of an unfamiliar task. So they work it out, you know, deliberately, analytically, if you will. They're consciously strategizing. Right, I'll do this. Now we'll do that.

That didn't sound so good. Now we'll try this. That worked better. Okay. The experts don't do that. The experts, if they've been doing this long enough, and they really have been, many of them did it for decades and decades,

they just sort of turn it on. And it's like a faucet. And it just flows. It just flows. And so the novices are using more of this, think on your feet type of creativity. But as the years of practice go by, it shifts to the left hemisphere. And it becomes more, just turn it on, it's automatic, it flows. You don't have to think about it. And that may relate to this idea, this older idea, it's not that old, of beaming and

and embowed and that I've worked on also, of remote association. So in the right hemisphere, So when you get something that's new, it's remote. It's a remote association. You don't think of that normally. So if I were to say water table, water table, it might be a new idea for you. But if you start thinking and reading about water tables a lot, it might move from the right hemisphere to the left hemisphere, eventually, because it becomes practiced. So this might be a way of thinking about the hemispheres and creativity. It may be that it's not sort of creative in the right hemisphere versus uncreative in the left hemisphere.

What it may be and what the newest data suggests is that the right hemisphere, and especially the right frontal lobe, is especially good at and very important for creativity in terms of thinking on your feet, dealing with a novel situation, something that's unfamiliar. It might be what intelligence researchers call fluid intelligence, whereas the left hemisphere is more of the focused on this practiced creativity. It would practice in that particular genre or test, say musical improvisation, could be other things. It gets baked in. It becomes more effortless. You don't, a lot of it becomes unconscious. The music just flows and goes right to your hands as you're performing. So that is sort of our latest way of thinking about creativity in the brain. And so in a sense, the right hemisphere, according to this idea, is the seat of one form of creativity. And that is this ability to deal with novelty, whereas the left hemisphere is this ability to take from baked in experience, longstanding experience, and process the information unconsciously, and then it just flows. It kind of speaks to the idea of the creative geniuses in human history, like you mentioned, Isaac Newton and the falling apple,

Thomas Edison and the electric light, for example. And there's some thinking that these insights arise spontaneously, and yet if you look more closely at the lives of some of these people, they've actually spent hundreds of hours working at their craft or their science before they reach these achievements. I'm just wondering how much of genius, as we call it, consists of aha moments and how much is only possible because of the obsessive focus on a particular specialty,

whether it's music or science or painting, whatever it is that you're obsessed with. It depends on what you want to be creative about. So everyone is an expert at something. I mean, everyone is an expert at daily life. Nobody knows your daily life better than you do. So since you're an expert of daily life, you're in a position to have these aha moments about how to do things in your daily life. Not everyone is in a position to have aha moments about particle physics. I mean, that takes years of study. It takes a lot of

analytical ability to understand the mathematics and the experimentation involved. So if you want to be creative of particle physics, you've got to do your homework, years and years of homework, and then you'll be in a position to have these amazing insights. You need the immersion and the practice to gain the specialized knowledge, but you don't necessarily need to have immersion in a particular question or problem. So, for example, you know, it's well known the idea that, you know, you have a question or a problem, and you might have an aha moment later on, whether you're in the shower or it wakes you up during the night or something like that. But there are instances where people have an aha moment that gives them a solution or an idea.

It's like a solution to a problem they didn't even know they had. So one example that I really love of this is that there was this engineer aboard a Navy ship, U.S. Navy ship in 1943, his name was Richard James. And his job was to install springs to, like shock absorbers, to cushion instruments so that when there was a rough sea and the ship was being buffeted about, the instruments would be stabilized. There were like gauges and things like that. So he's installing the springs, and then one of the springs got loose and started bouncing around like it had a life of its own. So he looked at that. He thought, wow, this would make a great toy. And after some development, it became the slinky. Now, was he thinking about toys before that?

I doubt it. There's no evidence of that. It just, he saw this. It sparked this idea in his head. And it wasn't as if he had been sort of incubating or struggling with this problem for a long time. it was just a great idea that was a solution to a problem he didn't know he had. And so, you know, again, so insight, creativity can be spontaneous. It doesn't have to be triggered by a problem. It could just happen. And that's one of the amazing things about creativity is that the spontaneity of it, as well as it being the product occasionally of, you know, deliberate grappling with a problem or a goal. What can people do to encourage this kind of creative insight?

I mean, are there things that we can do that will spark more aha moments in our lives? Because I think we'd all like to be more creative. Yes. So there are, and this is ongoing research. research that will be, I mean, some of it's well established, some is emerging, others will, other aspects of it will, in a number of years, we'll know for sure. But let's start with sort of the basics of what we know. So there is a principle in psychological, psychological safety. You can feel safe and unthreatened or you can feel threatened and anxious. So for example,

when say you're an early human on the savannah in Africa and you see a lion way off in the distance at that moment you're going to become very focused and anxious because if that lion detects you, you're finished, right? So you're going to freeze, you're going to focus on the line. You're going to think, all right, has the line detected me? What can I do to avoid being detected? Am I upwind or downwind of the lion? Am I going to make noise? If I run away, will the lion see the motion? You're going to be really careful.

That is analytical thinking. It's deliberate. It's focused. It's very organized because you can't afford to make a mistake. On the other hand, you're still that early human. You're in your cave at night with your clan. You're all well-fed. You're all safe.

You feel relaxed. When you're relaxed, there's no threat. When there's no threat, your attention expands. There's no risk. There's no risk to thinking crazy thoughts. There's no risk to exploring, you know, off-the-wall ideas. And it's very different from the lion situation, because in the lion's situation, you can't make a mistake.

You have to be really careful. You can't try things out. So what we know from longstanding research by many researchers is that creativity is enhanced by a positive mood. When you're in a positive mood, you have this feeling of psychological safety. Your attention expands. You become less self-critical. But when you're anxious, and that anxiety could be caused by a lot of things, it could be fear of embarrassment, it could be a deadline, it could be a lot of things.

You become more analytical. You do things in a very careful way. And analytical thinking can still result in a creative product. So, for example, if I give you a task to come up with a number of ideas and say they all have to be creative, you'll probably, and you have like 10 minutes to do it, you'll probably, that deadline will make you focus and be very analytical. but you'll probably consciously reject all of the non-creative ideas. So what you present will be the best, the most creative of your thinking, right? You filter, you use your analytical-focused thinking to filter yourself out.

So, but in general, positive mood enhances insightful thinking, anxiety, and anything it causes focus will result in more analytical thinking. And this also, you can extend this to this idea of expanding attention. So, for example, if a person is in an expansive environment, they go outside or they're in a big room with high ceilings, there's a link between what's called perceptual attention and conceptual attention. The two are linked. When your attention expands to fill a large space.

That expansion of perceptual attention also expands conceptual attention. So that's why a lot of creative figures, they like to take walks in nature. Or even in the shower, you know, there's white noise. Your vision is kind of blurred. You can't sense the, it's a hot shower. You can't sense the boundary between what's outside of your skin and what's inside. You kind of feel almost disembodied. and that allows your attention to expand, and you can get these crazy, wonderful ideas.

But if you're in a cubicle and you're guzzling coffee and you've got something due in an hour, your attention will narrow and focus and become analytic. So you can sort of jumpstart this expansion of attention by being in wide open spaces and avoiding things that grab your attention. It could be striking works of art. It could be anything that grabs your attention, bright colors, that will narrow your focus. So being in sort of fuzzy, warm environments,

kind of new agey, all of that, attention expands, and it expands the scope of thought. Another thing is working, doing your creative work, when your thinking is a little fuzzy. So some people are morning people, some people are evening people. You do your best analytical thinking at your peak time, whether it's morning or evening or afternoon. You're more likely to think in sort of an insightful creative way during your off-peak hours when you're thinking is a little fuzzy and not so analytical.

Also, and I'm not recommending that people drink alcohol, I mean, because there are health repercussions, But there's plenty of research now that shows that an alcoholic beverage, you know, we're talking just in moderation. It makes you're thinking a little fuzzy, and you can start making these connections that are harder to make if you're more focused and analytical. Probably one of the most powerful ways to jumpstart creativity is sleep. And for three reasons. One, if you sleep, then it puts you in a better mood. If you're sleep deprived, you're cranky, you don't feel good. But if you get enough sleep, you're in a positive mood, and that helps creativity.

Sleep also helps with what's called fixation forgetting. A lot of creativity is blocked because you're focused on a bad idea or bad ideas or non-creative ideas. When you sleep, and this is the reason why breaks help. If you're stuck on something, you take a break, you do fixation forgetting. It flushes. You forget the wrong idea that you're stuck on. Sleep supercharges fixation forgetting and flushes out bad ideas so you can start with more like a blank slate and come up with creative ideas. Sleep also promotes what's called memory consolidation.

So the information you take in during the day while you sleep, it becomes consolidated in the brain. And part of that is a reorganization of the knowledge. the information, that reorganization can bring out non-obvious ideas, non-obvious features, which is why a lot of people have, they get ideas, sometimes they wake up in the middle of the night with an idea, or the idea presents itself in the morning just as you wake up and you're not fully there yet. And for example, Paul McCartney got the melody for the song yesterday in his sleep. He woke up, there it was, he wrote it down, He didn't even know if this melody was something he had come up with or something he'd heard somewhere else.

So he ran the tune by John Lennon. John Lennon said, never heard it before. It sounds great. You ran it by their manager. The manager said, never heard it before. Sounds great. So he put words to it. He said, it must have been my idea, you know?

And he wrote it. And it was voted as the greatest pop song of the 20th century right there. That's amazing. So sleep, even a short now. sleep can supercharge creativity. So, all right, so those are kind of, you know, that's kind of the more established signs. Looking forward, there's emerging research that suggests that electrical or magnetic

brain stimulation may eventually be, protocols may be developed that will enhance creativity. Now, I don't think this will become a practical solution for people in general, like, you know, oh, I have to come up with an idea for an advertising campaign. Let me juice my brain with electricity. I don't think that's going to become a practical solution, but it's interesting, and there may be some very selected situations in which that might be helpful. Another possibility is using drugs to enhance creativity. You know, since the 1960s, people have been talking about psychedelic drugs.

for example, to enhance creativity. And there's been research. Most of it is not very rigorous. Most of it shouldn't be taken too seriously. But now, starting now, is starting to be some research that looks at the issue, the question of whether psychedelic drugs or other drugs may enhance creativity. And the jury's out. I do not recommend people use psychedelic drugs.

we don't really know what the health implications will be. And we don't even know if it'll really help with creativity. It may help people to feel like they're being creative, even if it doesn't help them to actually be creative. So we don't really know at this point. But in the future, I wouldn't be surprised if there was developed a sort of a pharmacology of creativity that might even be helpful, maybe even nutrition, certain foods, chemicals in certain foods, may eventually be shown to enhance

creativity. So that's sort of the future. And we don't really know at this point. But the general principle of positive mood, feeling safe and getting a lot of sleep, feeling good, being in an environment where your attention can expand, we know that can promote insightful. creativity and the, you know, a little bit of stress, little bit of anxiety, not too much, because, of course, if you're too stressed and, you know, you won't be thinking clearly about anything, right? But just a little bit of pressure, a little bit of stress promotes more analytical thinking. And the ideal thing, of course, is to sort of be able to alternate between these two things. You know, in an insightful frame of mind, you generate ideas, then you kind of narrow your focus

and you edit it, you evaluate it, you can maybe tweak it, make it better, maybe you can just throw out your ideas if they're no good. And then you go back to idea generation and then back to idea analysis. That's the ideal thing. And it's not clear whether people can control or learn to control going back and forth between these two modes of thinking. Certainly a lot of people can naturally swing back and forth. And, you know, when they're in a particular frame of mind, they can do a particular type of work. When they go to another frame of mind, they can do another way of thinking, another cognitive style. But, you know, it would be great if we can develop a technique to train people to shift back and forth at will. And that would be, you know, that would be fantastic,

but that's, I think, a ways off. I think you've offered a lot of good advice. for people to basically put ourselves in places and positions where we can have more of these aha moments. I hope our listeners have gained some insights from your insights. Thank you so much for joining us today, Dr. Kunios. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. Thank you very much for invite me. You can find previous episodes of Speaking of Psychology at www. speakingof psychology.org or on Apple, Stitcher, or wherever you get your podcasts. If you have comments or ideas, is for future podcasts, you can email us at Speaking of Psychology at APA.org.

That's Speaking of Psychology, all one word, at APA.org. Speaking of Psychology is produced by Lee Weinerman. Our sound editor is Chris Condyenne. Thank you for listening. For the American Psychological Association, I'm Kim Mills.