“Time slows down. Self vanishes. Action and Awareness merge. Welcome to Flow.” Steven Kotler
- “Flow creates powerful intrinsic motivation – by releasing the most addictive neurochemicals in our bodies.
- Flow cuts the path to mastery (aka 10,000 hours) in half and accelerates performance up to 500%.
- People with the most flow in their lives are the happiest people on earth.”
“Harvard’s Teresa Amiable discovered that not only are people more creative in flow, they also report being more creative the day after a flow state—suggesting that flow doesn’t just heighten creativity in the moment, it heightens it over the long haul. In other words, being in flow actually trains us to be more creative.”
(Flow Genome Project)
“Nobel-Prize winning neuroscientist Eric Kandel says that the brain is a creative machine. It appears that the quantity and diversity of our ideas are mediated by the front lobes, right behind your forehead. Preliminary brain research by Charles Limb at John Hopkins University shows that the parts of your brain that are responsible for self-monitoring are literally turned off during creative endeavors. He uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) which detects metabolic activity in the different areas of the brain, to study brain activity in jazz musicians and rap artists. While they are in the scanner, he asks the musicians to compose an improvisational piece of music. While they are playing, Limb has found that a part of the brain’s frontal loves believed to be responsible for judgment shows much lower activities.
This implies that during this creative process the brain actively shuts off its normal inhabitation of new ideas. For many activities it is important to have high self-monitoring of your behavior so that you don’t say everything you think or do everything that you consider. But when you are generating new ideas, this function gets in the way.
Creative people have apparently mastered the art of turning off this part of their brains to let their ideas flow more smoothly, unleashing their imagination.” (Dr Tina Seelig: Ingenuis: A crash course on creativity)
In the world of constant busyness and achievement, it is becoming more challenging for us to be able to enter a state of flow. Creative Flow is a structured, replicable process that anyone can learn to nurture personal and group flow experiences.