Flow's Frequencies: What Brain Scans Tell Us About Creativity with Dr. John Kounios

Hey everybody, welcome to Flow Radio. I'm Dr. Michael Mannino. I'm the Chief Science Officer here at Flow Research Collective, and joining me is our Executive Director, bestselling author Stephen Cutler. We're thrilled to have our distinguished guest, Dr. John Koinios, today, a professor and a professor of psychological and brain sciences at Drexel University in Philadelphia and a renowned cognitive neuroscientist. His research on insight, creativity, problem-solving, memory, and aging has deeply influenced us at the Flow Research Collective. He co-authored several international bestsellers, The Eureka Factor, Aha Moments, Creative Insight and the Brain. In his recent paper in Neuropsychologia, Dr. Kounios and his team explored the neural mechanisms of the creative flow state during jazz improvisation, which we'll get into today. We'll discuss their fascinating findings on flow and creativity in our conversation. Stephen, I know how much John's work has influenced you and a lot of your work in bringing flow neuroscience to the forefront, especially in academia and research. Can you kick us off with some of how that influence has impacted your work?

Yeah, I have to say, Tied with Csikszentmihalyi's Creativity for the best book ever on creativity is The Eureka Factor, first off. And as a practical playbook for creativity and for optimizing the brain to maximize creativity, I still think it's the Bible on that topic. And I think the supporting research, it's just cool. You went at the aha insight. Everybody else was fumbling around with dual process theory and a whole bunch of theories, and you just went after the core neurobiology, and we learned so much from that research and what it's built out. And I believe the singular cortex is now probably my favorite part of the brain, thanks to you, among many other things. As a way to kick us off, if I can ask a first question, and I know it probably makes sense to start with creativity and insight and work our way into flow, but I'm actually going to go backwards. I'm going to ask you a question about your latest paper on flow because there's a core question at the center of that paper. You were looking at two different really interesting theories about flow and why creativity gets amplified in flow. And so, I wanted you to start maybe talk a little bit about that question and where did it come from for you guys and the team that went after it? After it.

Okay, so the— first of all, I have to credit, uh, my team, uh, the team of graduate students led by— at then graduate students— led by David Rosen, who's now a postdoc at the Psychedelic Research Center at Johns Hopkins, and Yongtek Oh and Christine Chesbrough, who are both postdocs right now. So these— they were my grad students at the time when we, we collected the data. And I come to this from creativity research. I had never done any flow research before, but David Rosen is really into flow. And he said, oh, we have to build flow into this project, which was actually the experiment itself was part of his doctoral research, doctoral dissertation research. And I said, okay, fine. I didn't know that much about flow at the time. So we ran the experiment and we published another paper on creativity based on the data. And then Dave said, well, we gotta figure out the flow data and do this. So I started looking at the flow research, the literature, which goes back decades. And I'm a cranky old experimental psychologist, right? So nothing is precise enough, Nothing is rigorous enough. I just, I'm one of these old, you know, cranky researchers who just are never satisfied with things. So I looked at this, this body of research, and there's a lot of good stuff in there. But any one paper, you look at it, and, you know, there's this wrong in this paper, this wrong in this paper, that wrong in that paper. It's just not, nothing was ever right. So it was hard to compare one paper to another because, or to sort of bring them all together because all of them made me kind of uncomfortable in one way or another.

As a good scientist.

Yeah, yeah.

And Michael, I'd just like to point out that includes our papers on flow too.

No, that includes my papers. I'm not happy with any of my papers. I mean, so have you ever heard the expression dustbowl empiricism? So in experimental psychology, the Midwestern schools in the old days, and I went to graduate school at University of Michigan, they were famed for picky empirical, you know, really uncompromising research. No one's ever satisfied with anything. And I come out of that tradition. So I looked at this literature coming to it from the outside as a creativity researcher. And thinking, what can we make of this? I mean, what— how do we put this all together? I mean, all of these interesting ideas, interesting data, but it just— it didn't connect or congeal for me. So, um, you know, we, we read these papers and, and just thought about it and looked at our data and came to the conclusion we had to extract from these data a question. A, something grounded in neuroscience and in good cognitive neuroscience, a question that we could interrogate the dataset about for a paper. And one of the unique things about this dataset is the role of expertise. So just to summarize, we used jazz musicians of varying levels of expertise. These were jazz guitarists 32 of them, and they ranged in expertise as measured by the, uh, the number of public gigs they've given, public performances. And they range from, you know, just a handful of gigs up through people who have given hundreds, if not thousands, of performances over decades. We're talking a really broad range of experience. And we, uh, we had these guitarists improvise to chord sequences and rhythms that we provided while we recorded their EEG, their electroencephalograms. And that's a real challenge because EEG, when you measure EEG, most of what you're recording is not the brain activity. Most of it is noise, electrical noise from the muscles, the eye blinks, swallowing, the jaw tightening and all of this other stuff, skin potentials from sweat. And when a person's actually moving, playing the guitar, there's even more of that. So we had to really work with the musicians. We showed them their EEG while they were playing and said, look, this is junk, this is noise, this is noise, sort of calm down a little bit. You don't have to be tightening your face and doing all these things. Just relax, relax your muscles. And don't move any more than you need to. And then we use the very latest high-tech algorithms for cleaning the remaining electrical noise out of it to leave the EEG there. And it was a real challenge to do that. And we looked at, we correlated the EEGs for these performances with creativity and with flow states in the following way. One was that we had subjects, these performers, for each of their performances, each of their improvisations, rate the intensity of their flow experience using a questionnaire. We also had expert judges rate the creativity of their performances from recordings. So we had those objective ratings. And we had them self-rate their creativity. And we looked at the brain areas that correspond to high versus low creativity, high versus low flow. And we use the latest algorithms for localizing in the brain where these signals are coming from, these signals that we measure with electrodes on the scalp. And for the— so we, the question we posed is, what is flow? And is it a state of, as some writers talk about it, a state of heightened hyperfocus, enhanced attention, greater cognitive control that will cut out distractions and interference and internal noise? Or is it a state, is it the opposite? Is it a matter of relaxing control, letting go of control so that inner processes can sort of take over? What would be those inner processes? Well, in the expert musicians, they've been doing this for so long that they become automatic at it. When they start improvising, they don't think about it. They just start playing and it just, it happens. The novice musicians or the ones who are less experienced, they have to think about it consciously. It's like, all right, I'll try this. Oh, that didn't sound so good. Now I'll try that. Oh, that's better. Well, I'll do a twist on it. I'll do this. So they're engaging this conscious, deliberate process. So it's sort of like the distinction that Daniel Kahneman made in his book Thinking Fast and Slow between System 1 and System 2. System 1 processes, which are now called Type 1 processes, Those are automatic, fast, unconscious. There's an emotional quality to them. Whereas system 2 or type 2 processing is conscious, deliberate, and effortful. And it seems that the experts are using more of these type 2 processes— sorry, type 1 processes. They don't think about it. It's automatic. It just flows. Whereas the novices, engage more of the type 2 deliberate conscious processes. So we looked at what were the brain states involved. And the first thing that jumped out is that people who were in the experts— or sorry, not just the experts, all the people who were performing in a high flow state had reduced frontal lobe activity. It's called transient hypofrontality. That's a term I believe coined by Arne Dietrich, who's a cognitive neuroscientist.

John, can I pause you there for a second? Of course. I want to ask you a question about Arne's work. I've known Arne for a really long time at this point, and we've argued back and forth about this question, which is his original argument, as you know, was the deeper into an altered state you go, the more the prefrontal cortex shuts down, the more transient hypofrontality you see. We argued based on all the massive data, that same massive data that you looked at, that, and this is also Andy Newberg's suggestion, that you see sort of a task-specific localized transient hypofrontality. It's not across the board shutdown. And I think that's what you found, right? I just want to, because our language is slightly different. I'm just, it's a sort of a clarification. I want to make sure that we're looking at the same thing and I'm not misinterpreting the data.

This distinction between global and local shutdown of brain cortex?

Yes, yes, we found this decrease in brain activity bilaterally, both sides, in the superior frontal gyrus, which is not actually sort of a part of sort of the classically defined executive control system. It's involved in aspects of working memory and also even in terms of self-awareness, interestingly enough. But I think it probably, you know, with future research, I think it'll probably end up being more complicated than that, because I have a hypothesis that, you know, you could be in the state of trenchant hypofrontality, or you can be in a state of ramped-up cognitive control. I believe that it takes cognitive control to change states. So you need sort of this initial effort to get into a state of transient hypofrontality.

Super geeky question, super geeky question about that. Is that going to require the activation of the salience network at the front end?

Do you think? I don't know. I would guess not, but it's, you know, who knows?

I mean, it was just, it was a conscious unconscious question is really what I was trying to get at. All right, please.

Let me just go ahead.

Michael, jump in.

In our paper, this is a good segue for that. We did argue that exactly that, that getting into flow is an uber cognitive control. It's a difficult to reach state. And in neural dynamics, that is how different brain areas communicate with one another, there's this idea of controllability. And the brain is finding, just like a car, you don't go from first gear to sixth gear, you go from 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. You have to like slow, the brain has to find that difficult to reach state, which is a state we argued of uber cognitive control, which ties back to, I think, your point about it might be more complex than that. And later on in the show, I actually want to tell you about some research that we're doing right now with our collaborator, Richard Husky, on just that fact actually. But is there this possibility, you know, there's some research and we actually just submitted a paper at the Flow Research Collective on flow and intuition, believe it or not. And there's evidence that there's a third—

Which draws a lot on your work on insight, by the way.

A lot of your work. We just actually submitted two papers on the neurodynamics of intuition and then flow and intuition. And a lot of that is drawn upon your work on insight and distinguishing between insight and intuition. And some people argue that there's a third type of cognition called Type 0. Cognition in which you might have a combination of both, that there's this non-conscious cognitive control. And so I'm wondering if it might be the case, and this is not to argue against your empirical results, but that there might be some more complexity between local transient hyperfrontality and what's going on when people actually then become, have this automated level of expertise then release.

Well, I think what you're suggesting, if I'm understanding correctly, which may very well be the case, is that cognitive control and consciousness are not identical to each other. So you could have— and again, it depends on how one defines cognitive control. There's no universally agreed upon definition of what cognitive control is. But if you define it in a particular way, then yeah, I could easily see there being such a thing as unconscious cognitive control. I would say that cognitive control, whatever it is, is invoked whenever you have an explicit goal. If you have an explicit goal, now that goal can be conscious, but it doesn't necessarily mean that you're consciously deliberately trying to effortfully do something. It could be a longstanding goal, in fact. It could even possibly be an unconscious goal. I wouldn't rule that out. But I would— so if—

John, that tracks exactly with Richard Husky's research and what we lobby for in our intuition papers, actually.

Great minds think alike, as they say. So, so yeah, it— a lot of these terms are not precisely defined yet. And the definitions of them emerge over time with research. It sort of sculpts away, you know, it's sort of like chipping away at the rock until you get at the sculpture inside. So, so yeah, it all sounds, it all sounds very possible, very plausible, maybe even likely to me. But doing the actual experiments to isolate these things is complicated. It's hard.

Yeah, and then you found across the boards better performances in flow, much better at the expert level.

Um, yes, the— creatively, in general, experts both were in flow more often than the non-experts, and, uh, their, their performance quality and creativity levels were significantly higher than than the non-experts. It seems that, I mean, you could look at this in a couple of ways. One is that you need flow to have the quality, or another way, which is not mutually exclusive, is that you need a lot of experience at a particular task to be in flow in that task or to potentially be in flow at that task. So the idea is that the high experience people through decades have built up a specialized brain network for creative production in that task. And once the cognitive control is released one way or another through this transient hypofrontality, this reduction in localized activity in the frontal lobes, then it unleashes this automatic network, which in this case was in the left hemisphere, mostly temporal, temporal lobe areas. So it's sort of like, you know, you have to let go. But if you letting go isn't going to do any good, if you don't have that experience network built up already. Now everybody's experienced something. Everybody's an expert at something. So people can Everybody's experienced at conversation. I mean, people can go into flow during conversation under the right circumstances if they let go. But in music, musical improvisation, not everyone's an expert. Most people are not experts. And to get into flow, that takes, I believe, the data suggests, a foundation of expertise. So that you can reduce cognitive control and then unleash that experienced specialized network to do its thing.

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So let's talk about the release part of this equation, the expertise plus release, a little bit more. This ties into a model that we talk about at the Flow Research Collective that Steven has worked on quite a bit called the Flow Cycle. Now, in our previous research that we've done, we've actually pulled from some of— Stephen, you can talk about this from your work— extrapolating from some previous models like Herbert Benson's and Wallace's model. You know, you have this classic 4-stage cycle of creativity: preparation, incubation, illumination, and then verification.

John, you and I have discussed this.

You guys have discussed this.

A lot, actually, over the years.

You have Herbert Benson's model, right, of struggle, release, the breakout or peak experience, and then this improved new normal. In the flow cycle, in Stephen's work, which we are now empirically grounding in some neurobiological and psychophysiological mechanisms, which we can get to later, you have this struggle phase, this release phase, getting into the flow state, and then recovery, right? The second aspect of recovery neuroscience on the back end. So you're really— this, this idea of release, letting go, I think phenomenologically, like this sense of just, okay, what can I do to let go mentally and physically? Maybe that's some low-grade physical activities, right? Stephen, you talked about Einstein going sailing and so on. What is this supporting? This is your research. That's the question. Is your research supporting this sort of cyclical process maybe in getting into flow?

I don't think that— I mean, our research, we've only done this one paper. So it's not like this huge body of research that can support or refute various hypotheses.

Good answer.

But so I think that flow is actually the same thing as insight, the aha moment. Just extended in time. So you have an aha moment, an idea pops into your awareness. And creative flow is the same thing, only it's not just a moment, it just keeps going and going and going in certain tests that are amenable to that. Yeah, so we have evidence from resting state brain data, resting state EEGs. There's a paper that we published in 2018 in which we recorded resting state EEGs from a number of subjects. And then weeks later, we gave them various verbal puzzles to solve. And we noted for each puzzle, based on their self-reports, whether they solved the puzzle with an aha moment or whether they solved it in a deliberate analytical fashion the type 2 processing that takes effort. And then we divided the subjects up into 2 groups, the ones who were sort of the high insight, high aha group, and the high analytical group. So some subjects solved most of these puzzles with an aha. Some of them solved the puzzles mostly in this deliberate analytical fashion. Then we went back to their resting state brain data from 7 weeks earlier. And we analyzed the resting state brain data separately for these two groups. And we found that the high analytical group, the people who were doing this deliberate solving of these puzzles, had greater activity in frontal areas of the brain, mostly midline and right frontal. And the subjects who saw later, 7 weeks later, solved most of the puzzles with an aha moment had greater posterior brain activity, mostly left parietal. And that kind of matches a lot of the data we have from our jazz studies as well. So we have that front-back difference. It seems that the high insight, high aha people, they have, it looks like, well, certainly it's less frontal lobe activity, which implies less cognitive control, sort of chronically. And the high analytical people, they have greater frontal lobe activity in a resting state, implying greater cognitive control. So you can imagine, you know, some of these high analytical subjects, they're sitting there, they're very focused on what they're doing, they don't get distracted, they're very organized. The high insight, high aha, high intuition subjects, they're kind of, you know, they're all over the place, they get distracted by things, they notice things, those things that they notice in the environment may trigger aha moments. They, their thoughts may flow in sort of an associative chain. So they come up with interesting ideas. They may be less productive because they're less structured and focused. But they, they have these sort of outside the box thoughts. So yeah, I think I think it fits quite nicely.

And let me ask you a question that was tucked inside of what Michael said, and it's work out in The Erika Factor. You have a great list of sort of productivity hacks sort of in there. And what I was wondering, Michael was talking about how we've found that low-grade physical activity often is the release phase. And that, by the way, sometimes that's taking a shower, which is the classic aha experience. But there's a deep embodiment thing where you're paying attention to multiple sensory streams. It tends to bring attention into the present, plus all the other soothing whatever. Right. And so it can happen. Like, sometimes a long walk in nature seems to be very productive for some people. But I was wondering if, you know, all that's actually needed— and I know this isn't exactly in the data that you found on flow and the jazz musicians, so I'm extrapolating— but you talk about, for example, wide vistas. And sort of what that does into the brain. And this is all in service of getting the interior cingulate cortex to find a far-flung solution to the pattern recognition problem it's trying to solve essentially. Do you think when we talk about releasing creative control, releasing control, transitioning from completely focused attention to this more creative state, are those things also going to work there? Is that what we're looking at if insight is just— flow is insight extended?

So what my theory, my hypothesis is that there is a general sort of balance between frontal and posterior areas of the brain. Frontal areas of the brain are exerting cognitive control over posterior areas, when that frontal cognitive control is reduced, posterior areas sort of go rogue, and maybe are a little disorganized, but can come up with outside-the-box thinking. I think that there also seems to be part of that front-back axis is the degree of attentional focus. So if you go out and you look at wide vistas, for example, that if it's part of that axis, it all goes together. So more posterior activity, less frontal activity, that would be expanded attention, wide attention. Part of that is also mood. You get pleasant moods are associated with these, these wide vistas and a broadening of attention. And also, so the mood, the attention, and I'll say flow, but certainly insight are all— I think the term that's sometimes used in the literature, these things are clamped. So you get— they come together, the mood, positive mood, broad attention, and creative associational thinking. And the other end of that would be cognitive control, negative mood, especially anxiety, and narrowed attention and greater organization and focus of behavior. So anything that tips you one way or the other is going to affect your cognitive style. And there are ways to tip it. We did in one paper. We looked, there was a hypothesis posed by some social psychologists that future thinking, thinking about the distant future, would put people in an insight creative frame of mind. And we weren't entirely convinced by that paper. So we did our own, I think, better controlled, more rigorous experiment. And we actually found the opposite. When you think about the distant future, that puts you in an analytical frame of mind. It primes you to think analytically. So we had subjects write about for 5 or 10 minutes, write about scenarios in the distant future or scenarios in the immediate future, say next week. And we found that, then we gave them puzzles to solve. And we found that thinking about the distant future, 10 years in the future, put them in an analytical frame of mind. They were solving more puzzles analytically. And that lasted 20 to 30 minutes, that priming. Whereas thinking about the immediate future, prime people to think insightfully. And again, lasted 20 to 30 minutes. So it's all part of, I believe, the same front-back axis of activity that, you know, so all of those factors, mood, attention, style of thought, they're clamped, they go together.

So, all right, that's amazing. Super interesting. The, okay, another question for you, John. So your study highlights differences between high experience and low experience musicians. And this also gets back to this question about release, right? Releasing in different aspects and different modalities. Can this framework, by the way, let me actually take a step back before I answer the, ask this question. So are we agreed right now that Dietrich was right? We are unique.

Well, again, as a cranky old experimental psychologist by training, you know, I never give you sort of like a definite absolutely yes. I mean, future experiments might find that this is like a special case of a particular task. But, you know, if I had to bet the farm, I would say yes.

Okay, if you force me, we, we have, um, so I have two questions actually. One is segued about from this, this part of the conversation here. So we, um, are about to, at Flow Research Collective, in collaboration with Richard Husky and some other folks, um, Scott Kelso, um, submit a paper. We analyzed some of Richard's data, and I don't want to say too much about this because it's not yet peer-reviewed and it, um, and it's just about to be submitted, so But we analyzed some of Richard's data doing a task on some of his fMRI data. And we—

Michael, let me back this up for those people who aren't familiar with Richard's experiment. He was looking at video game players in flow and using fMRI to look at what was going on and specifically focused at the neural dynamical level of the brain. So networks of brain activity. Please continue. Sorry.

Yes, perfect. Thank you, Stephen. So we're looking at this from an information processing perspective, right? Because we know, and Csikszentmihalyi and Stephen have proposed that in flow we're processing more information than in normal consciousness, if flow is an altered state of consciousness. And so what we did is we applied some of these complexity metrics from complexity science and complex adaptive systems. Things like entropy and so on. These are technical terms of analyzing just neural activity and seeing if there's patterns in that neural activity and trying to glean from that those patterns if there's more information processing. And so what we've found is that number one, yes, there seems to be a different kind of information processing when you're in flow versus not. Distinguishing flow from non-flow states. And that too, yeah, back to this point that there is more complexity going on in terms of is it just local transient hyperfrontality, or is it this other synchronization theory where you have frontoparietal control networks synchronized with reward networks and intrinsic motivation networks? And so it seems, so it seems—

and by the way, an unusual amount of activity in the cerebellum. Like an unusually high amount of activity in the cerebellum also that—

Unfortunately, with EEG, we can't reliably measure cerebellar activity. It may be embedded in there, but it's difficult to know. So I'm always interested to hear about cerebellar activity.

Yeah. Well, hopefully this paper will be published soon and we could talk about the results, but they are suggesting, let's just say, that the answers are more complicated and complex about what's going on in terms in terms of network dynamics and different brain areas talking to one another and recruiting one another and so on. So, but so back to this question is, again, in your study, you're talking about differences between high experience and low experience musicians. How can your understanding be applied to enhance learning and creativity and flow in other fields other than jazz improvisation? So this gets to like this idea of, What are some of the limitations, future directions of your, of your work? And can— do you think these results can be extrapolated in an applied sense and to other, maybe even like non-creative aspects of flow that we can get into flow in other situations?

Okay, well, that's a whole bunch of questions right there.

Yeah, okay.

Yeah, I can keep them all in short-term memory. So, all right, first caveat, our study is about creative flow, which may or may not have differences to flow in other situations. So flow in running, flow in gardening, flow in anything, those would be relatively non-creative, although people doing gardening might disagree with that. But there certainly are non-creative test in which you can get into flow. And that could be something like, you know, adding up numbers, you could get into that. And it's kind of boring for most people, but that, that is possible. So we were looking at creative flow specifically. So, are— do our results generalize to non-creative, non-creative flow tests? I think so. I'm— that's my hypothesis. But I don't have any hard evidence for that yet. We'd have to look in some other tests. And we'd also have to look at creative flow in some tests other than jazz improvisation. So this, what I think would be different would be that in experts, the expert brain network that is responsible for creative production would be different in some other tasks. So for example, we found with jazz improvisation, it was a collection of left hemisphere, left temporal areas that was this putative expert musical improvisation flow network. But if it's some other test like drawing, it would probably be very different expert brain network built up over years and years. But the transient hyperfrontality, the letting go, the release of cognitive control, I believe, I hypothesize, would be the same. That would be the common mechanism across different tasks. So in terms of applications, where does, where does this leave us? There's sort of two ends to this. One is, in a particular task, you would need to have some level of expertise in order to achieve flow. No one's going to achieve flow in a task they've never done before, because they have to be very deliberate and conscious and try to, you know, figure out what to do. And that is sort of antithetical to flow right there. So now, what is the level of experience that's necessary? I don't think anyone knows. But certainly, you have to have some level of experience, some degree of automaticity, some degree of expertise baked in. Then the other component of that is the letting go, the reduction of cognitive control, so that that expert network can take over. So because if you exert too much cognitive control, if you're micromanaging your own mind, then you can choke. It's sort of like, say, an expert, say, a major league baseball player who is having a dry streak and striking out a lot and not getting on base. And some, some coach who doesn't know what he's talking about says, oh, you have to lift your elbow a little more and you have to do this. And once you can make those adjustments, you'll get back on track. Well, what does that do? That causes the athlete to micromanage himself, focus on all of these little things he's doing instead of just letting go and letting his expertise take over. So you need, you need to find ways to let go. Now, people do it in jazz. It could be that the same cognitive control mechanisms suppress both, and then you reduce the cognitive control, and both associative thinking and widened attention and positive mood get released. So again, we don't really know the causal relationships between all of these things. But yeah, I would agree based on what I know.

Yeah, an interesting study came out a few years ago, Stephen, I don't know if this is actually where you're getting it to, but that the brain encodes social network structure. And it actually does this with spatial process, like areas of the brain involved in spatial physical processing. So it uses those areas of the brain to actually encode social relationships in like a social network structure. So there's like this deep embodied—

that's the dominance of the hippocampus as a mapmaking structure, which is probably not the best place to end our podcast, but probably not.

But here's a good— here's a good place to end it, possibly. John, a little bit more of an applied question, right? So what, what sort of And you did write about this in your book, but maybe just based on this recent research, what practical advice could you give to some of our listeners for achieving flow states in their work, in their hobbies, usually very creative, obviously some possibly not, but what hacks, I use that word very cautiously, what practical advice might you give for some of our listeners for achieving flow states and maybe we're letting go specifically.

Yeah. Well, first of all, the first one is not a hack. It's simply you've got to do your homework. You have to gain experience in a particular task, particular line of work to have something, this foundation to build on. Once you've built up that experience, then you have to let go and allow that expert brain network that you've built up over years to take over. Now, different people will find different ways to do that. For some people, it may be chemical means. I don't recommend that to sort of suppress frontal lobe activity. For other people, it may be anything that puts them in a good mood, that relaxes them, puts them in a good mood. Anxiety kills creativity in most situations. I mean, there is such a thing as producing creative output through high cognitive control, through deliberate sort of manipulation of ideas. But that is, that's not going to get you outside the box thinking. We're talking about, you know, the real sort of transformational outside the box thinking that usually results from associative thinking, sort of leaps of thought. So anything that's going to relax you, expand your attention, Go outside, be in a room with high ceilings, large room where your attention can expand. Avoid things that grab and narrow your attention. And all of those things in principle should release this creativity, put you in a more creative flow state. But again, there's so much research, so much low-hanging fruit in terms of the research that it's just, you know, where's the funding, you know, to do it? That's the real, the real challenge at this point. Not doing the research is getting the resources to do it.

Back to your first point, Stephen, one time you told me that the universe respects quality. So it seems John is confirming that.

I do think the universe respects quality, which is great because we're going to end our super geeky science podcast on a weird metaphysical note.

Okay, awesome.

Well done, John.

Uh, Stephen, thank you so much for joining. Uh, a really fun conversation. Looking forward to your, your future research. Maybe you'll do some more research on flow. Maybe you'll want to collaborate with the Flow Research Collective. Planting the seed right there. But thank you so much, John.

I'd love to do that. The drawing study that you propose at the end, end of your research, I've wanted to do 3 groups like drawing versus video games versus something just because video games show up in so much flow research, like drawing video games and then something, Ulrich's math equations, which I think is the dumbest protocol ever invented for a flow study where we could use that as a control and I could all claim that nobody gets into flow doing addition. Well, there's like 4 people. They're somewhere, but I've never met them.

Well, let me— the final thing I'll say is I think we had some flow in this conversation.

So we definitely did. We definitely did. It was this— John, it's always a delight. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for the work you've done. I meant it. It's been a huge influence on my work. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.