The Medicine of Flow Sacred Scholarship

As part of the inaugural, 2020 NeuroSomatic Flow™ Teacher Training, students were required to submit a scholarly paper & video presentations based on their learnings from the course.

One of those submittals is featured below . . . .

Somatics, Flow, And Creativity

By Leah Emmott

Sacred Scholarship Video Presentation & Paper

NaiAsa Institute NeuroSomatic Flow™ Teacher Training - Sept 2020

Introduction

When I first discovered poi, I found myself in it for hours, drilling new moves, dancing to music and getting lost in the flow. As the movements became more familiar in my body, the practice began to take on a more meditative quality. For example, I would get sucked into a 3 beat weave pattern for ten minutes and feel a complete sense of ease in my mind that could never attain during traditional sitting meditation. Then something interesting started to happen: I would have bursts of inspiration come through while flowing. I’d stop quickly to sit down at my computer and pump out some words, notes, ideas and whatever else would be coming through. Then I'd return back to the flow, only to have to stop again and jot down a few more notes. On good days, my flow session would turn into a full-blown writing session. I was beginning to wonder if there was a correlation between my flow practice and the creativity that was pouring out from me. Beyond that, I was starting to notice another peculiar phenomenon: my entire life was flowing better. I’d notice more synchronicities and happy coincidences happening, and things started to line up perfectly for no apparent reason. It was as if I was finally beginning to understand what it meant to be co-creating my reality with the universe. I felt my sense of spirituality start to awaken as I became more grounded in nature’s flow.

As these attunements started to become more consistent, an obvious question arose: is this flow practice priming my brain for creativity? Furthermore, I wondered if this creative energyI was cultivating was helping me tap into broader powers of manifestation. When I began this Neurosomatic Flow course, I sought to understand more about how flow states affected the brain because my own felt experience seemed to be turning into a case study. I could feel the circuitry in my brain up-levelling each time I came back to the practice. Was it possible for flow arts be used as a hack to prime ourselves to tap into our creativity more effectively and effortlessly? This research paper seeks to understand that question by looking at the intersection between creativity, somatics and flow. We will explore existing research and current neuroscience to uncover what we currently know about how these pieces weave together. 

Flow States and Creativity

The neuroscience of creativity is still quite a nuanced field with many different areas of study. This is mostly because there are so many facets to creativity, ranging from simple problem solving to full-on improvised artistic expression. What we do know is that many parts of the brain are at play and that creativity activates several neurological systems, including the executive attention network, the default network and the salience network. The ability to switch between networks is a vital aspect of creativity.

Researchers have discovered that creativity is linked to the ability to silence the inner critic. A study (Limb, 2008) investigated the neural correlates of jazz improvisation in pianists’ brains. They found a de-activation in the dorsolateral prefrontal and lateral orbital regions, which is the part of the brain responsible for self-monitoring and conscious control of actions. This speaks to the Transient Hypofrontality Hypothesis, which shows that flow states help deactivate parts of the brain that may inhibit us from trying new things. They also found that there was an activation of the medial prefrontal (frontal polar) cortex, which is thought to be involved in generating autobiographical narratives and the creation of self. This touches on the story-telling aspect of creation, which suggests that human creativity is ultimately a process of understanding and reflecting on one’s own personal journey through life and making meaning of it. 

When looking at the link between flow states and creativity, researchers like Steven Kotler have found that brain waves in flow states move from the busier beta wave of normal waking consciousness to the slower border between alpha and theta waves. Alpha states are akin to daydreaming modes and theta states are characteristic of the deep trance-like states usually felt right before falling asleep. This ability to be able to slip between thoughts quickly allows for more novel combinations of ideas to merge together, thus enhancing creativity. 

Furthermore, research done at Harvard by Teresa Amabile (2005) found that individuals see a spike in creativity for a number of days after experiencing an affective state similar to that experienced during flow. Amabile also found that creative insights were consistently associated with flow states. This points to a residual effect that flow states may have on keeping people in a creative zone over longer periods of time. 

On the subject of neurochemistry, Kotler explains that: “Large quantities of norepinephrine, dopamine, endorphins, anandamide, and serotonin flood our system. All are pleasure-inducing, performance-enhancing chemicals with considerable impacts on creativity. Both norepinephrine and dopamine amp up focus, boosting imaginative possibilities by helping us gather more information. They also lower signal-to-noise ratios, increasing pattern recognition or our ability to link ideas together in new ways. Anandamide, meanwhile, increases lateral thinking—meaning it expands the size of the database searched by the pattern recognition system.” Perhaps there is a link between the Anandamaya kosha (bliss body) and the secretion of these neurochemicals. 

There also appears to be a link between meditation and creativity. Research done on Tibetan Buddhists in the 1990’s found that longtime contemplative practice can produce brain waves in the gamma range which primarily occur during the “binding” phase of the creative process, when novel ideas are generated for the first time (Kounios, 2014). This suggests that meditation may amplify the initial stages of creative problem solving. As flow arts can be considered to be a form of active meditation, this opens up new possibilities for further inquiry. 

Embodiment and Creativity

t's not uncommon for people to report bursts of inspiration while running, biking, swimming and driving, so why not flow arts? The hypothesis seemed simple enough to explore, but when I started to dig into the existing research, I was surprised to find the field of ‘embodied creativity’ to still be relatively new. In looking at the relationship of somatic awareness to creative process, Hass (1996) conducted a study on women aged 20-51 who were prompted to do a daily practice of exercises designed to increase conscious awareness of sensations in their bodies. These included 

conscious breathing, walking meditations, Authentic Movement, Body-Mind Centering, Feldenkrais, Awareness Through Movement, yoga and theatre improvisational games. She found that participants reported heightened states of awareness, self-knowledge, power, energy and receptivity. She concluded that somatic awareness seems to be a means of enhancing and fostering creativity.

Cognitive embodiment research seeks to understand how the body contributes to cognitive processes. It is based on the premise that the brain and body evolved together to understand and interact with the world. A number of studies have looked at how we essentially think with our bodies. In looking at creative cognition in dance choreography, Kirsh (2011) found that dancers used their bodies as active tools for physical sketching in creating new concepts and elements.

The act of walking while working on creative problems has shown to be effective in helping people come up with new insights. This is an ancient practice that goes back to the days of Aristotle and his propensity to walk while philosophizing. Leung et al (2012) found participants who engaged in creativity tasks while free-walking outside of a 5’x5’ box had better scores on both divergent (originality) and convergent thinking tasks than when sitting inside the box during tasks. They even found that virtual-reality (imagined) walking was also beneficial for stimulating ideational originality, fluency and flexibility. Participants whose avatars free-walked generated more original responses than those with avatars walking in rectangular patterns. This suggests that visualizing certain flow movement patterns may even be enough to prime the brain for creativity. 

The most relevant piece of research that supports the hypothesis that flow-arts style movements prime the brain for creativity is a study done by Slepian and Ambady (2012). They had participants trace two different drawings, one to elicit fluid arm movements (using curved lines in a stacked figure 8 pattern) to enact thinking fluidly and one to create zigzagged movements (using straight lines and angles) as a comparison (see Figure 1). Across 3 experiments, fluid arm movement led to enhanced creativity in 3 domains: creative generation, cognitive flexibility and remote associations. Elevated mood and motivation were also reported. Participants in the fluid condition showed improved fluency, originality, flexibility and better connected remotely associated concepts. This suggests that circular and non-linear patterns of movements can influence cognitive processing and enhance creative processing and the generation of new ideas. 

Conclusion 

Based on my preliminary research, there is a lot of supporting evidence that flow arts movements can prime the brain for creativity. If even simple movement patterns can have a positive effect on unlocking creativity, I would infer that more complex flow patterns could indeed stimulate parts of our brain that are responsible for novel ideation and artistic expression. When 6 combined with greater understanding of the mind-body somatic connection through physical movement, there seems to be a lot of promise in this new and emerging field of study. The next layer of curiosity would be to look at how these practices effect consciousness, self-actualization and spiritual wellbeing, thus forming a broader holistic view of how flow arts can be used both in therapeutic and personal development contexts.

Citations

Amabile et al, (2005). Affect and Creativity at Work. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.2189/ asqu.2005.50.3.367 

Haas, Jeannine D, (1996). The relationship of somatic awareness to creative process: An experimental phenomenological study. https://scholarworks.umass.edu/dissertations/ AAI9638966/ 

Kirsh, (2011). Creative Cognition in Choreography. https://philpapers.org/archive/DAVCCI.pdf 

Kotler, Steven, (2014). Flow States and Creativity: Can you train people to be more creative? https://www.psychologytoday.com/ca/blog/the-playing-field/201402/flow-states-and-creativity 

Kounios, (2014). The cognitive neuroscience of insight. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ 24405359/ 

Leung et al (2012). Embodied Metaphors and Creative “Acts”. https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/ soss_research/1077/ 

Limb & Braun, (2008). Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0001679 

Slepian & Ambady, (2012). Fluid Movement and Creativity. https://web.stanford.edu/group/ipc/ pubs/Slepian-Ambady_Fluid-Movement-and-Creativity_%20in-press_JEPG.pdf