Dopamine Elevating Stimulus for Divergent Thinking

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You need some level of elevated dopamine in order to engage in divergent thinking, but not so high that it starts to inhibit that process. We can't actually count the number of times that we blink unless we're actively paying attention to it. But you can learn to calibrate your mood and assess whether or not you're in low, medium or high mood. You could scale it on one to ten and then decide whether or notyou're going to use some dopamine elevating stimulus from the outside. Again, could be music, could be exercise is an excellent way to elevate dopamine.

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.