Can you meditate to become more creative?
As a professional creative, its obvious that being creative is literally your game, your livelihood — and hopefully, your passion. Have you ever thought about meditation as a way of fostering that creativity? There is plenty of research to suggest that this is the case.
In 2012, a Dutch cognitive psychologist, Lorenza Colzato, ran a research study where she had a group of novice meditators try two forms of meditation:
- Open-monitoring, which involves observing and noting phenomena in the present moment and keeping attention flexible and unrestricted.
- Focused attention or concentrating on one object, for example the breath — and ignoring other stimuli.
Each meditation session was followed by testing to assess the subjects’ ability to perform a variety of cognitive skills. They discovered that the open-monitoring form was highly effective in producing the creative function of divergent thought, whereas the focused attention meditation was more useful for convergent thought — narrowing down ideas.
A couple years later, another Dutch psychologist followed up on Colzata’s work and concluded that the ability to observe is closely connected to openness to experience — a personality trait which several studies suggest is a reliable predictor of creative achievement.
Its no secret that as we age, we lose more and more of our creative ability. Dr. George Land of the University of Minnesota and Pulitzer Prize nominated author, designed a highly specialized “divergent thinking” creativity test, which he gave to 1,600 five year old's. 98% of them scored at the ‘creative genius’ level. Testing the same group of kids just five years later, only 30% of them scored at the same level. And at 15 years old, that number had dropped to only 12%.
Pictures of Einstein’s brain show an incredibly well-connected, thick, and broad corpus callosum, which is a large, C-shaped nerve fiber bundle found beneath the cerebral cortex that connects the left and right cerebral hemispheres.
According to a 2012 UCLA School of Medicine study, meditation strengthens the corpus callosum, making it bigger, thicker and better connected.
As adults 25 years and older, only 2% of us have been able to sustain the same level of creative genius as those 5 year old's. The world needs us to be creative to advance and progress. That should be enough for us to quiet our minds and look more inward — our future depends on it.
