Afterthoughts: How Art and AI Unlock Human Potential

Creativity and the pattern recognition underneath it is a flow trigger. And so, you know, here you have this single tool that's going to amplify health, longevity, flow. So you're going to get productivity and all the, all the other elements of peak performance.

Hey folks, welcome to Flow Radio. I'm Ryan Wicks, Chief of Staff at the Flow Research Collective. And today, as always, I'm joined by our executive director and bestselling author, Steven Kotler and our Chief Science Officer, Dr. Michael Mannino. This is an episode of Afterthoughts where we really geek out on our previous episode and answer some of your questions that you've either dropped in the comments section of our podcast wherever you're listening to them, or on our social media channels. Instagram is the best, best spot to get a hold of us. So Steven, Ivy Ross, she's the Vice President of Hardware and Design at Google. She and her team created the design language for the Google hardware products that launched in 2017. Since then, they've won over like 240 awards in the past, you know, 6 years on those products. And then her co-author of Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us is Susan Magnusson, Mag Simon. She's the founder and director of the International Arts in Mind Lab at the Center for Applied Neuroaesthetics at Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, where she is a faculty member. And she is also the co-director of the NeuroArts Blueprint. And I wanted to kick it over to you, Stephen. What was the big takeaway that you took away from that conversation?

The big takeaway, both of the conversation and their work, is— and I always feel I'm biased a little bit when I, when I say this as a creative, as a writer. And I also, because, you know, if you really push me, who do you identify as? I always identify as an artist and a creative more than than, than a lot of other things. And what I— all right, so this is a little bit of a story, uh, to lead us in. If you read Small Furry Prayer, uh, one of the stories that opens that book is, is my wife and I have literally had going on— it's almost a 20-year argument at this point. It's like, it's our oldest argument, and it's, you know, and it's what we call art versus altruism. And it's about, you know, 'cause we have done, my wife and I have done frontline dog rescue. And Joy, my wife, came up in the art world. She knew a lot of really famous artists. She dated them. She was involved with art dealers and people who ran galleries. And then that was a little bit of her world. And it was very LA in, you know, this was a long time ago. So this was LA in the 1790s. Excuse me, the, uh, '90s, '80s, um, you know, back when Lincoln was president. Um, but, uh, she— her point was that, like, you know, if, if you— art was all— she didn't think it had a point. She thought it was worthless in the world. And, you know, she would say, look, if you're not doing frontline altruism 'Your life is bullshit.' And I would be like, 'No, no, you can inspire people. You can inspire change.' And, um, this has been an ongoing argument forever. And what I couldn't— what I thought about throughout this conversation with Ivy and Susan, who I love talking to— this was, this was awesome— was I felt vindicated. And not like always, my argument for art was on what the impact you can have in other people's lives. But what their argument was, was, was much more personal. It was, who cares about other people's lives? Creativity in your own life is so foundationally important. So, so important. We talked a little bit about that, right? They talked about the creativity and its impact on longevity. This is, uh, this is one of the findings that inspired my book in our country. It's Gene Kohn's work originally. Um, Gene Kohn is, is often thought of as the pioneer of successful aging, what became peak performance aging these days. And one of his core findings was older adults get access to a ton of cognitive superpowers in their 40s and 50s, whole new levels of intelligence, wisdom, perspective-taking, creativity, empathy. All these skills start coming online in our 40s and 50s, but they have a trigger. It's an if-then thing in the brain. You don't just automatically, it doesn't happen like kids automatically go through the terrible twos. This is adult development doesn't work that like that way. It's usually an if-then condition. What psychologists talk about is moderators. So if you do this, you get all this. And what adult development teaches us is you have to be able to think creatively. Creative activity is what unlocks these superpowers later in life. And some of that may be because part of the superpowers start unlocking when the two sides of the brain start communicating much more frequently, which happens in creativity. That's part of it. There's some other things going on, but it's a, like everything else in the brain, it's use it or lose it. Like these abilities are there, but they're gonna lie latent without creativity. And bonus, it has a huge impact. Cause I, I believe the number, uh, they put on in their book and in when we were talking 7 years, 7 additional years of life for regularly being creative. So what I was thinking a lot during the podcast was, wow, I'm vindicated. I've got more ammunition in this argument with my wife, which I don't know if it's gonna hold any water. Nothing has yet, but that was the takeaway at a high level. And at a lower level, and we didn't get into this as much also, but we touched on it. Michael and I can go deeper and then I'll shut up on this because Michael should weigh in on this one. We've been harping in our newsletters and even in our podcasts over the past 3 or 4 months in a world where, well, I think the stat is 78% of all companies now rely on AI for at least one service in a world where we are going to be collaborating with AI. And the individuals in the companies who are going to have jobs are the ones who do this best. I kept thinking, okay, what humans bring to this table is human creativity. AI is really good at narrow pattern recognition but can't do big lateral thinking, right? Where you're jumping outside the box thinking, comparing things that are really unlike one another that humans are great at. We're fantastic at it. AI can't do this. And I was thinking, it's, you know, think outside the box. Thinking is a trainable skill, right? It's a kind of insight. It's, it's kind of far-flung insight, but it is trainable, right? And so what I really walked away from the podcast thinking is, if your interest is health, if your interest is longevity, if your interest is being employed in a world where AI is prevalent. And bonus, creativity and the pattern recognition underneath it is a flow trigger. And so, you know, here you have this single tool that's going to amplify health, longevity, flow. So you're going to get productivity and all the, all the other elements of peak performance. You're also— and this is what I think sort of Ivy gets at, and, and I think you, when you, when you read Ivy's background, it just leads up like that design team is, is out of sight, right? They just keep winning award after award after award. That to me is what you have when you get like— that's what group flow does, right? It just feeds into the next idea and the next idea and the next idea and the next idea. And that's a team who is really like— they understand their customers really well, they understand design really well, but they understand how to harness flow really well. And I would argue, and I think Ivy implied this as well, that they're harnessing flow to collaborate with AI. I mean, it's obvious it's Google, but like, um, so I just like, it was interesting to me is it was very sort of internally validating, but it was really an emphasis on this skill that, you know, this, like when I go to, if we go to our customers and say, hey, we're gonna, we're gonna teach you creativity, nobody gets super fired up except the artsy people. Right? They get fired up. But regular, if we go in and we're like, no, no, no, no, this is creative problem solving, right? This is a form of critical thinking. When you present it that way, right? What we're talking about is, hey, you have 10 challenges you gotta solve every day. Creativity is how you come up with interesting, new, novel, exciting, useful solutions and not the same thing you do all the time. So you have to sort of spell that out sometimes. When people hear creativity, they don't often apply it to their own lives. But what I got from the women and talking to them is, oh my God, is there a lot at stake.

Yeah. So, so my biggest takeaway, and Stephen, I want to unpack a lot of what you said right there, especially with peak performance aging. But, um, you know, creativity is a broad term, right? And it impacts not only art but also even science, right? Even in the scientific method, you have to be creative and coming up with hypotheses, different ways to set up an experimental protocol. So science is also a very, very creative act. My— one of my biggest takeaways going back to art in particular was this idea of the aesthetic mindset that they talked about. And, and that was— and I want to ask you about the relationship between the aesthetic mindset and aging. And wisdom. So, but I'll get there in a second. But yeah, like the necessity of the aesthetic mindset for the science of wellbeing and flourishing. And she's talked about art equals life, right? That art permeates all of our wellbeing and is a necessary criteria for flourishing and for our wellbeing throughout our lifespan. But the aesthetic mindset seems very important and also not just for seeing that the world is beautiful, seeing beauty in the world, seeing beauty in science, seeing beauty in mathematics, seeing beauty in all of these different things that permeate our lives, but just understanding like, just having the aesthetic mindset as a lens to see everything and how that might correlate with more flow, more creativity, and more wellbeing. But Stephen, I wanted to ask you in particular about peak performance aging. And, you know, you and I have talked about Elkanan Goldberg's work and the wisdom, the wisdom paradox. So what's the relation? What do you think the relationship is between wisdom and creativity? Because as we age, because wisdom, we talk about like, okay, there's more experience, to draw from, more neural pathways are, you know, there's more neural pathways that are activated as we age, more cognitive reserve, right? These might be neural mechanisms for being wise and having more wisdom as we age. Does that— do you think that there's a positive correlation between that and creativity?

That's an excellent question. There's two sides of it. One side of it goes back to something neuroscientist Eric Kandel talked about, one of the sort of the godfathers. I think like the, the big-ass neuroscience textbook over my right shoulder is his. Um, and he talked about— and this, this, I love this— he talked about what he called, uh, the aesthetic experience. And for him, it was— his point was that the co-mingling of This is not a, this is not a jaw-dropper, I don't think. It's just, it's one of those obvious things that, that seem to matter. But he talks about the commingling of our sensory perceptions and our cognitive functions is what dictates perception, right? And the world, it's, it's both and, right? We're getting data from the senses, we're mixing it with perception, and what it creates is an aesthetic experience that is unique to all of us. And it informs our lives, our performance, The reason I'm bringing it up in the conversation around peak performance aging is this is one of the other findings that comes out of the aging data. Ryan and I, when we were running our peak performance aging experiments, the NARA country experiments that we did, this really mattered. So everybody has an authentic play style, right? And authenticity and play are both really important to big performance aging. I think authenticity these days is really important to everybody, and I think play is making a comeback as well. These are, uh, in a sense, creative choices, right? In a sense, one of the things about the aesthetic mindset doesn't— we— it's not even— they don't even talk about it that much, but it's a very authentic mindset. It's based on your unique ability to connect sensory information with cognition. So it's very much, it's got like our individual, right? You know, in a world where everybody wants to be a unique snowflake, this is actually the thing that makes you a unique snowflake, or one of them that really makes you a unique snowflake. So that's foremost. Secondly is, I don't, from a peak performance aging standpoint, creativity really matters. Authenticity really matters. Play really matters. These are all sort of things that float around the aesthetic mindset. The thing that I wanna mention that I couldn't help but think a lot about when they were talking is sort of about training that mindset. And I'll give you an example, and I talk a lot about this in sometimes when I teach Flow for Writers, but when I was coming up as a journalist, I fell into a category. It was a category, it's got a fancy name, but it's not a fancy category. It means a very specific thing. I was known as a big think writer. And as opposed to like a follow the money guy, follow the money journalist can take like a single piece of information and just like drill down the trail of that information for decades. And if you've ever like gone to a hall of records or a police records room with like a follow the money person, like that was the first, that was the, all I needed was one experience to realize, oh, I don't do this as well as other people. Like I'm gonna need to work with these people. I don't have this skillset. What I had was what big think writers sort of can do, which is a big think writer literally is somebody who looks at the intersection of trends. So a lot of my early work was actually at the intersection of science, spirituality, and politics. And that sounds a little bit strange, but if you go back to the '90s and you think about, I was working on a number of things, stem cells, for example, we're sitting, right? This is when George Bush had banned stem cell research in this country on religious reasons. And so here was a science story, a religion story, a politics story. It was 3 trends bumping heads. There was a, and so like I was trained as a big think writer to look for the intersection of trends and I got really good at it cuz I, it's how I paid bills, right? If I can't spot those intersections of the trends, they're not gonna hire me for the follow the buddy stories. They're not gonna hire me. I mean, I got hired for the put the celebrity on the COVID stories. Um, every now and again, but that really wasn't my beat. So you get, you know what I mean? I got hired for these science and X stories that required this very specific kind of creativity. And what I noticed after a while, it was always very natural to me. Like, I, I got gravitated towards it, but this was that, this was my version of the aesthetic mindset. And what I, what, you know, what's interesting about it also, we didn't cover this it comes with blind spots, right? Like, the follow the money stuff was a blind spot to my aesthetic mindset. But there were other things that I started to notice. I am very good— for example, the joke I always make is I'm great at finding the cutting edge of anything. You could point me into a field and I'll figure out where's the cutting edge and who's lying and etc., etc. But what I can't tell you is like, where's a mainstream audience and what do they care about, right? I'm not any good at that. And so, uh, I'm limited by my own aesthetic superpowers in a sense. And so they— that's one of the things I was thinking is that they, you know, it's, it's useful to know the limits and the powers of it, but I think it's, it's incredibly powerful. And I remember like I trained it for years, you know what I mean? I would look at subjects, I'd be like, well, how does that intersect this subject? What's the link? Because maybe I can get paid. That kind of thing was, you know, I didn't really— I wasn't usually that mercenary, but that was the motivation. And when you're hungry, it's a great motivation. I don't know if that's the exact answer, Michael. Um, let me ask you something.

Well, wait, hold on. Okay, yeah, but yeah, before you— so that might explain— so this is something, let's get to the neuroscience and neurobiology for a second too. So that might explain something that I— we didn't get a chance to talk about, but I wanted to ask them both, and let's discuss it here a little bit. Is there's an interesting paradox in the neural mechanisms of how the brain explains art. And one of those, the paradox is, and this is a little controversial, but the idea is that when we have, when people have brain damage, stroke or neurodegeneration or something like that.

People get more creative with Alzheimer's, for example.

Right. Exactly right. So your aesthetic mind— not the aesthetic mindset, the aesthetic experience, right? Your artistic abilities may get better, right? They may actually improve. And this is like— does not happen with any other cognitive process. Like when you have a stroke, you don't get better at language or, or, you know, perception or your ability to pay attention or something like that. But it happens with art. And it's a very interesting there's very interesting neural mechanisms I think behind that can help explain this phenomenon, but it's super—

Let me— The one thing that I was wondering, in a sense, is this the prefrontal cortex is becoming less active, Alzheimer's, for example, the other things you talked about, I don't have as much knowledge about. So I'm gonna— you, maybe you can talk to those. Uh, is it transient hypofrontality, which happens in flow, right? The prefrontal cortex deactivates. You're sort of— and creativity increases, right? You're sort of seeing something similar, but this— I didn't— I dodged your question earlier about creativity and wisdom. Wisdom is neuroprotective because it backs up the prefrontal cortex. So I would be, in a sense, arguing against myself. I don't really— I don't know. I don't— yeah, I think I'm gonna— yeah, I mean, like, I can puzzle— I can go a bunch of different ways, but I think I'm talking out of my butt. So what do you know?

Well, I, I just think it's very interesting. I don't think, like, you know, there's any easy answers to describe, like, you know, to explain this phenomenon. But we see in certain, like, social communication disorders, like autism, for example, there's synesthesia, for example, as well.

So there are synesthesia. Okay, so let me back up. But synesthesia, the way— and I got to interrupt you here— is if we're talking about anything on the spectrum, I mean, One of the questions I'm always asking is if you're seeing the world slightly differently, right? Perception is altered, right? And let's— one of the things I don't think there's a better or worse. I think we're talking about neurodivergence. So it's different, right? Let's say that first off, because I'm on enough different spectrums that I'd just be insulting myself, I think. But likewise, right? But my— what it's access to different pools of information So perception, we talked about like yours, your, what, you know, Kendall's idea about your aesthetic experiences is cognition and perception. Um, in any neurodivergence, both things are changed, right? Both things. So you're getting connections that aren't normally made. That's part of it. My other question was synesthesia. You're synesthesia, of course you're getting more creativity cuz it's functioning not unlike a psychedelic in the brain. It says connections between parts of the brain that don't normally talk to one another. So that's right. My— what I would think with autism, with Alzheimer's, with anything that amplifies creativity, one of the things that's got to be amplifying is that, right? You're getting connections that most people don't normally get. Um, yeah, I don't know. It's what it— so should I— can I ask you a question, or do you have a—

yeah, go ahead. No, go ahead.

Okay. One of my— one of the things, um, 2 things actually. Let's start with this because it's more aligned with, with your question. So we didn't get to talk about this, we came really close to it, but it's one of my absolute favorite studies ever. And it talks about Ivy or Susan, I can't remember whom, uh, towards the end of the podcast was talking briefly about time in nature and how time in nature is such a foundational important aesthetic experience. And, um, You know, clearly for peak performance aging, we see that like creativity is a big part of it, but you also want that creativity if you can take place in a novel outdoor environment because it supercharges these whole effects. And you get, right, you, you calm down with serotonin. But the thing, Richard Taylor, who's at, uh, University of Oregon, um, did this really crazy study. So this is my favorite example of like how we're hardwired for nature. So one of the reasons we're hardwired for aesthetics in nature is, nature is very predictable fractal patterns, right? You look at a definite landscape and you see fractals. Everything is roughly the same, but it's totally different, right? At ev— at every step. And there's a very specific— in natural landscapes, there's a, there's a very specific ratio. I can't remember what it is right now. That underpins, um, complex geometric shapes and self-similar complex geometric shapes. So Jackson Pollock made splatter paintings, and it turns out that the Jackson Pollock splatter paintings that most duplicate the fractal patterns in nature are the ones that have sold for the most money, which is crazy. The other one I'll give you— you asked a question about is Is nature good for us? And this was another, another study I, and we can link these actual studies in the show notes. But there's another study that says if you want to see how well a school is going to do for your kids, you want to put your kids into a school, you can literally look at a satellite photo of a neighborhood and the schools that are surrounded by the most greenery, the kids, they test, the kids do better, much better, higher grades, better test scores across the board. They're better schools, they learn better. and it's literally how much greenery is around their space. So I think about those two things a lot when I think about kind of the healing power of creativity and how deep art is sort of permeated into our DNA, this aesthetic experience that we have in nature. And we don't talk about it as like the experience of art. We talk about it, we call it awe, right? And Every now and again, somebody will go to a museum and stand in front of the Mona Lisa and go, oh, I'm experiencing awe. But that's— we tend to reserve that more for natural worlds and have slightly different language. So that was, that was one of the things I was really thinking is for those phenomenon to be real, it's really, you know, you started out, uh, Michael, asking, uh, an evolutionary question about the evolutionary biology and art, how, uh, how hardwired that it And I was thinking about those things as they were talking. And when you ask that sort of question about wisdom, again, I don't, I don't know what the answer is. I just know that it's really deep in us for those things to be true. It's very old.

Yeah. Blue spaces as well. Like there's a study that shows that living by blue spaces, people are calmer, um, more higher heart rate variability. These kinds of things. Yeah, I think there's a certain reflection between what's going on neurobiologically and the structure and function of the brain and the way the universe works, right? The mathematical sort of, you know, underlying physical laws of how the universe works. You see a lot of those memes, right? The Cat's Eye Nebula and then the structure of the eye. You see like the large-scale structure of the universe. And then you see the structure of neurons in the brain and how there are similarities, right? And there is certain— there's some research that actually leads to the conclusion that there are— these similarities are not just coincidental. And I'm not making any claims here.

I mean, is that— I mean, isn't that I mean, that doesn't surprise me. If you go back to like the foundation of chaos theory, right, he was talking about weather patterns, cloud patterns, James Gleick, right? Things like that was early chaos theory. When James wrote Chaos, um, that's what they were talking about. And you know where that progressed to? All our work is essentially in complexity science and the brain. It's the same laws that, you know, that govern cloud formation govern neurological function as well. So, all you're saying is, hey, wait a minute, one scale out, one scale, biggest scale possible, there's this self-similarity, right?

Yeah, self-similarity. And, I will say there was a great quote from Santiago Ramón y Cajal, one of the founder of the neuron doctrine that the neurons that have gaps and synaptic plasticity, And this is great because when I first started doing my PhD, I noticed on my advisor's website this quote, and I just, it was amazing. He said, "As long as our brain is a mystery, the universe, the reflection of the structure of the brain, will also be a mystery." So I love that, you know, it's a very aesthetic experience, right? Just that's the aesthetic mindset, right? Like understanding what's in here and the structure and function of what's in here and the structure and function of what's out there in the universe and thinking about the similarities between them. It's a very, you know, as you're talking about the intersection of science and spirituality as an aesthetic experience, that's it.

Let me ask you, because I know we're trying to not talk forever and keep these things tight, tight. So I'm going to move us towards a final A final question.

No, no, it's not.

You asked one question, I think I talked for 10 minutes. Are you kidding? The, uh, but let me, let me, let me ask you this question. It was something they write about in Your Brain on Art. It was one of my favorite. It was a little tidbit in there, but they were talking about Roger— I want to say Beatty, Betty, a B-E-A-T-Y. He's director of cognitive neuroscience at Penn State. I hope I'm not slaughtering his last name. But he was talking about, as a practical tip for hacking creativity, and my question to you is, what are your practical tips for hacking creativity? But he had one that, one I think I've intuitively used for years and I really liked it. He talked about how when you have these really deep focus sessions, flow or microflow for random examples, but focusing on anything, you're about to task switch, you know, we always advise people really focus on distraction management, you know, in, in the gaps between tasks. Um, because especially if you were in flow, you don't want to go to social media, then bump into something that could really knock you out of flow, anything like that. But he suggests mind wandering, literally like pausing, letting yourself daydream, for 30 seconds, a minute between tasks as a way of actually amplifying creativity in the brain. So people are always like, how do I train creativity? How do I train creative problem solving? And his point was literally let yourself daydream, block out like 1-minute gaps throughout your day to let yourself daydream. And one of the things that's sort of interesting in between tasks is you're going to start connecting the old past to the new, right? That's what your brain's going to do. That's that lateral thinking pattern recognition stuff that we do. So I think that's also interesting as sort of a gateway drug. So one, what are your creative acts? What are you, what are you, what are you doing here? You're a scientist and you're a musician and a bunch of 6 or 7 other things that, you know, actively require creativity on a day-to-day basis. So what are you doing?

Yeah, doubling down on my sleep, of course. That's a no-brainer, pun intended. But, you know, one of the biggest things is embracing boredom. And two things, embracing boredom and focusing on your mood, right? We interviewed John Koinios and he said mood is the number one important thing for creativity.

I'm trying to get past my boredom, I'm just saying.

Okay, so beyond, okay, beyond, okay, listen, we, the, okay, I don't know what to do with that.

So sorry.

It, it, that's back to your mind wandering point, right? There are neural mechanisms behind that. Mind wandering, daydreaming is associated with the default mode network, which is associated with imagination.

Yeah, he's got very confident, but he calls it the imagination network. He doesn't even want to call it the default mode network.

Exactly. So we know neurobiologically that boredom is associated, can be associated and highly correlated with creativity. So embracing those moments and not trying to then go do something, give your brain a rest, give yourself a chance to be bored. We talk about staring at the wall and those kinds of things. I think it's good to embrace those moments and understand those moments that they're natural ebbs and flows, especially when you're trying to get into flow, task engagement, that kind of thing. And mood, you know, that there's so much evidence that mood is so important for creativity. Getting yourself in, not in the mood to be creative, I don't think is the, but a more positive sentiment, right? A more positive mood where you have things like dopamine and serotonin, you know, being amplified in the brain that can produce more lateral connections and so on. So I think those are good things. As I said, sleep as well is enormously important. So those are, those are life more, you know, not like sort of tips and tricks to actually get yourself in a creative zone, but they're just sort of daily and weekly practices that I would recommend that then, you know, change the plasticity of your brain to be more creative.

Yeah, you know, it's interesting. It's, it's funny. I always think, and it's— I've been a little irked by ChatGPT. One of the— so I've always— I'm of the believer that if you can make a creative choice, right, do it. So in other words, like, if you're gonna cook a meal try to be a little creative, right? ChatGPT, what I was kind of commenting about is like people are like, hey ChatGPT, I've got XYZ in the refrigerator, what recipe can I make? And sure, okay, fair enough. I personally think no, no, no, no, no, no. That's always a chance to be a little bit creative. Don't waste it, right? I think about this often when I'm hiking. You know, I'm going out, I'm going to walk the mountain behind my house, which I walk all the freaking time, but I'm always trying to be creative in my pathfinding, in my route finding. How can I make little decisions? Or, you know, one of the things that is really important to me when I hike in the backcountry— I think this is important to everybody— is really cultivating your curiosity. Oh, that's a cool thing over there, let me go look at this. I'm not fixated on walking this trail, I'm like following my creativity and my curiosity a little bit through the backcountry. And I'm not— I'm doing it for a lot of different reasons, but one of the reasons is the same thing, Michael. I agree with you. These are not— it's hard to talk about creativity hacks. I think you nailed it. They're more like lifestyle choices that have this downstream impact of amplifying creativity, problem-solving, and of course flow, uh, along the way.

Um, Yeah, agreed. Totally.

Speaking on flow before we drop, in my personal experience, this is just totally anecdotal here. I find a ton of microflow in art, even when I'm not actively practicing, like pencil and paper. If I have the time, right, Michael, I'm just leaning into boredom. I can doodle and get lost. Do we know? I mean, is there any research to support just the arts being quick ramps into microflow?

Lots of, lots of stuff on that one, right? Very, very good microflow interventions. And, you know, it's this still, Ryan, it's this is— I think Ivy said it, maybe Susan said it, but You can draw in for 20 minutes a day, play music for 20 minutes a day. Like, these little injections of creative decision-making art, you know, into your life has, has a real, uh, big effect. I, uh, for a long time now I've been making one drawing a day, and I all— to me, it's usually, it's the last thing I did before I sort of go back to be with my family at the end of the day because it resets my brain. It may— like, I move out of work mode and into sort of like human mode a little bit because it's hard to go a million miles an hour when you're making a drawing. You're totally— you're immersed. It is— it's, it's a little microflow moment, I think.

And also it's a mindset. It's like it— yeah, go ahead, Ryan.

Sorry, I was just gonna ask. So after you're done with your task management stuff at the end of the day, you're going— you're going to draw before you reconnect with it?

Yeah, yeah. Meaning, am I— am I like— I'll do my clear goals list for the next morning And yeah, also, yeah, usually, and so by the way, sometimes I will actually, if especially if I'm stressed, I'll do, I'll draw first and then I'll set up my clear goals list. There you go. Because it calms me down. And what I don't wanna do when I create my clear goals list for the next day is get like stressed out. 'Cause I'm about to try to like, I'm going from there into active recovery, right? And that's what, that's what's next. Um, so yeah, that's how I sort of think about it.

Cool tip on the refrigerator, man. I, I really like that tip on the refrigerator, just not going to the internet to, uh, get an answer for it.

Just, Stephen, I think you nailed it about intentionality and just, you don't need— so creativity is something that we can train, that we can cultivate. Just like you talked about grit, these kinds of things. It's a meta skill that we can train and cultivate, but we have to be intentional with doing it. So even if we're not artistic, and Ivy and Susan made this point, right? Even if we're not aesthetic or artistic people, right? In terms of like doodling or painting or something like that, it's just looking for any activity that you do in your life. Like you talked about cooking a meal, right? Everybody cooks meal. It's being intentional about and seeing those activities that you're doing through your life, and they're not necessarily artistic activities, through the lens of, okay, how can I think about this differently, right? And I think, um, I think that intentionality is so important.

I, you know, I, I, the— we talk about it when I teach flow for writers and I'm trying to teach style, writing style. I always point out that, um, fashion. And like, you know, as he sits here in an Armada sweatshirt, but one of the things I like about, uh, clothing style is it's not— it's just a style is just I've made a decision, right? You can have style. I've got, uh, I've got a friend who works for one of the big tech companies and they're a manager and they always wear khakis and a button-down, right? White button-down, khakis. And it's like you would look at that and go, that's the least stylish choice you can make for dressing. But it's not because this guy doesn't want his clothes to stand out. He wants to blend in with the people he manages. He doesn't want ever his clothes to be a barrier between him and the people that he works with. He's making a choice. Every time you make a choice, it's, it's part of your who you are, your style. It's a creative expression. It's an opportunity for our creative expression. Of you. Um, and that's, to me, you— we started this with the creative mindset. Michael Stark talked about that. That's what I think about. I think about like the moment-by-moment opportunities throughout the day to train creativity. And, uh, one of the reasons I think it's so freaking critical— maybe this is the last thing I'll say— is you're going to take in 9 negative bits of information for every positive bit that gets through under the normal processing ratio of the brain, right? Unless you're doing a daily gratitude practice, and— or you've trained yourself to not— to look at things differently. Like, when you think about the creative mindset, one of the first things you learn, or first things I learned when I was in art school, was how to look at negative space in a drawing, right? How to look at the negative space around a figure. And I always think that when I look at the world, I'll always look at the world twice, right? I'll look out my window, I'll see the positive space, and I'll look again and I'll flip it and I'll see the negative space. And I do that fairly frequently, sort of automatically, because I, you know, I studied art decades and decades and decades ago, back again when Lincoln was president in the 1790s.

I don't think Lincoln was president in the 1790s, actually.

No, it's not a history podcast.

You're right. No, I don't think you're— Washington is '76 to—

No, no, it's 1787. The Constitution was ratified. All right, you're right, you're right, you're right. So they chose George Washington.

No, but wait.

Okay, one more thing. Let's— I want to get a little geeky. Let's finalize. Let's sum up with some geekery. So let's bring it back to technology and AI and creativity. And I think there's something— there's some really important lessons maybe and this is an open question that we can learn from AI being creative. You know, it was like, I don't know if it was AlphaGo or Deep Blue with Garry Kasparov, but I forget, but it was like, it was game 2, move 37 or whatever, that there was a move that Deep Blue made. I actually think it was AlphaGo playing Lisa Dahl actually. That was game 2, like move 37. It blew everybody away. It blew Lee Sedol away. It blew all of the observers away. It was like a creative act by AI. And it completely took— it dumbfounded, right? Lee Sedol playing AlphaGo. So we think about like the neural mechanisms in creativity and what is required for creativity? We're not talking about the aesthetic mindset now. We're talking about like literally like the neurobiology of creativity. What is required and will, you know, in terms of like this interaction and conversation and collaboration between human creativity? Yeah, so Michael, I gotta go. Hold on, let me finish up.

So what—

I got a very exciting answer.

If we think about If we think about this conversation and collaboration between human intelligence and artificial intelligence and between human creativity and artificial creativity, where is it going? And can we build these AI systems to have creativity in the way that we experience creativity? And, you know, what good will that do, right? In order to have a safe optimal and flourishing relationship with artificial intelligence? Do— does, you know, I'm just riffing here, does artificial intelligence need to have that sort of like machinery that the human brain has?

So, but let's talk about this because I would argue it does already, sort of. Let me give you— let me tell you, make it— so remember that when we say creativity, if we're going by the standard technical definition, is the creation of novel ideas that are useful. Useful. Useful is the key thing, right? You can't just have a neat idea. You gotta do something with it in the world. It's gotta do something. If that's— even if that's something is nothing more than producing an aesthetic experience for a, for a viewer or a listener. So think about ChatGPT and think about where it goes wrong. When ChatGPT makes an error, a prediction error, right? It's a probability, gets the probability wrong. This is not the next word. So it says something fucking crazy. It tells you to put, you know, cream cheese in your carburetor. That's creative. That's actually creativity. Oh, that's good.

That's excellent.

Yes. The only problem is the frame is not useful. It's being creative. It is actually being creative. It's just not being creative in a useful way. So one of the things I always sort of thought when I was— when I watched ChatGPT make errors and things like that is if you— and I'm not— I don't know how, I can't give you a how, um, and I've been thinking about this, uh, in terms of sort of backpropagation and neural nets, and I've been asking myself this question, but could you build a bigger— like if you had it, it's random, it's sort of you increase the probability space inside a limited sphere, sort of what flow does with connections, right? It gives you inside a tight window the task. It can go be creative in a lot of different directions, right?

Constraints. Constraint.

Exactly.

So my question is, like, with ChatGPT or those kinds of systems, we know we have a— we call it an error, right? But it's actually being creative. It's just being creative in a non-useful direction. So the question is Is there some kind of like metaframe that you could put around it? The problem solves inside here and inside this metaframe is this is the use, this is the window of usefulness kind of thing. And I don't know.

Yes. So no, that's a great point. What you're making me think of, and we've talked about this before, is this idea of agency, right? Having goals. AI yet doesn't have its own goals. We give it the goals, right? The tasks to do. It does not yet have its own goals. It does not have agency. And we don't want to confuse this idea of AI agents and agency.

Right. And yeah, that's going to be a mess. But yeah, I hear you.

So let's not go down the rabbit hole. But agency, the ability to act in the world, to solve a problem, to change the world, to fit a goal, right? To do that. And I think like that might be a requirement for creativity. And so when, when, if AI gets agency, then maybe we can, we can think about like a really powerful collaboration of creativity between humans and AI.

Yeah. So one of the things I was thinking as you were talking, because the wildest example of creativity in the human brain is probably psychedelics or some kind of mental condition where you're getting the same kind of wildly creative links between stuff.

And, um, because of getting rid of a default mode network—

but that's because you're getting rid of the default mode network and you're making all these random connections. But what you're pointing out is that even that has a goal, because there's— it's still contained in the container of the self, and the self has a shitload of goals. Right. So even when you totally enlarge the human frame, there's still— you're— I'm just thinking about all the different ways your comment is smart and right.

And no, no, I'm just— I'm just doing the rabbit hole.

I can't take it further other than saying no, no, you were— that you're right, and I'm sort of in line with that.

It's interesting conversation.

Perfect.

All right, thank you everybody. All right, next Afterthoughts.

Thank you, Stephen.

Thank you, Michael Menino. Ryan Wicks signing off. Peace out, everybody.