Chapter 6 - The Creative Trance and the Brain

Summary

The mind is the seat of trance. The ways that we think, consciously and unconsciously, shape our creative process and structure its creative trance. Every thought we have, every movement we make, changes the landscape of our brain, producing its own neural signature from the solution of everyday problems to meditations that progress toward transcendent states. With its contradictory styles of thought, creativity has a unique assembly of neural processes not usually found in ordinary cognition, and is associated with the release of dopamine, endorphins, serotonin, and oxytocin, and can be shaped by insight and synesthesia. Cognitive neuroscience reveals the heterogeneity of creative trance states through activation of different brain regions, such as the medial temporal lobe memory network, the prefrontal cortex, both brain hemispheres, and significantly the default mode network, which is associated with divergent thinking and daydreaming. As the Nobel Prize–winning pharmacologist James Black said, “I daydream like mad.”