The Effects of Dopamine on Divergent Thinking

2min Snip

00:00

Play full episode

Summary

Transcript

Episode notes

If you're in a low mood or kind of meh, by all means engage in something probably for about five to 30 minutes that elevates your mood before trying to engage in divergent thinking. If you happen to be in a pretty positive mood, even if you're not 10 out of 10 on mood, then bringing in additional stimuli to increase your levels of dopamine can hurt the divergent thinking process. I would recommend not using stimulants such as caffeine prior to divergent thinking, but rather use stimulants if you do want to use stimulants suchas caffeine prior to convergent thinking.

In this episode, I explain how the brain engages in creative thinking and, based on that mechanistic understanding, the tools to improve one’s ability to think creatively and innovate in any area. I discuss how convergent and divergent thinking are essential for generating creative ideas and provide three types of meditation tools (open monitoring meditation, focused attention meditation & non-sleep deep rest; NSDR), which improve our ability to engage in these creative thinking patterns in specific and powerful ways. I also discuss how dopamine and mood contribute to the creative process and describe behavioral, nutritional and supplementation-based approaches for increasing dopamine to engage in creative thought and implementation. I explain how movement and storytelling (narrative) approaches can generate novel creative ideas and how substances like alcohol, cannabis, and psilocybin impact our creative ability. Excitingly, creativity is a skill that can be cultivated and enhanced; this episode outlines many tools to help anyone access creativity and apply creative patterns of thought to different domains of life.

For the full show notes, visit hubermanlab.com.