Creativity, Time & the Brain
Time is such a wild concept. We only have a short time on earth or time flies by when you are having fun or seeing kids growing up. If you doing tasks you don’t like, it can seem forever to pass.
Confession: Whenever I fly, I constantly check my watch and count down the minutes because I’m a nervous flyer and wish I could apparate to places instead of feeling the uncomfortable sensations during flights.
The concept of creativity
Do you remember the feeling of being in the flow and you are happily unconscious of time? It’s when the creative juices are flowing!
CREATIVITY - the use of imagination or original ideas to create something; inventiveness.
The theory goes that the right brain is the creative part, whilst the left brain is analytical and logical. Creativity does not involve a single brain region though. According to Wendy Suzuki, Professor of Neuro Science & Psychological Behaviour New York University, the most creative use both the left and right side of the brain together.
And it’s the networks that count.
Creativity involves the interaction of 3 networks as explained by Barry Kaufman, a humanistic psychologist,NY*:
1.Executive Attention Network: This network is active when you’re concentrating on a challenging lecture, or engaging in complex problem solving and reasoning that puts heavy demands on working memory.
2. Imagination Network: It’s about daydreaming, future goals and compassion. It’s also involved in social cognition. For instance, when we are imagining what someone else is thinking, this brain network is active.
3. Salience Network: It constantly monitors both external events and the internal stream of consciousness. What is most interesting to us? It either feeds it to the imagination network or not.
Unlike animals, humans also have a bigger prefrontal cortex behind the forehead. Animals act usually there and then. But the bigger space in the human brain allows input to come in and trickle around. Information might be stored, thought about and eventually might get an output or maybe not.
Time & Creativity
Everyone has their time where the brain works on an optimum in the creative zone.
It is different for everyone.
For me, it’s in the morning up until late lunchtime where visual design and thinking comes easiest to me. That doesn’t mean that I have no creativity for the rest of the day. I just try to do emails or admin tasks after lunch and any creative work might take a bit longer because the brain has less energy. That might be the lunch or distraction but that is another big topic entirely!
Some people have creative thoughts whilst showering, running or doing any other exercise or whilst listening to music.
For some people the creative flow strikes late at night, when everything is quiet.
Original illustration from unblast.com
One thing is for sure, the optimum of creativity comes when we are relaxed, not from fear.
Admittedly, it’s getting more challenging to fully relax in a daily stream of impressions from our surroundings, relationships, news, social media, the state of the planet…
And although technology has advanced for humans phenomenally, our brains are still reacting as if we were in the stone age.
So the brain still thinks we are being attacked by a sabre toothed tiger. The fight or flight response leads to an increased heart rate, blood pressure, breathing, and muscles are pumped whilst we feel less hungry in that moment.
In cave times this was a necessary brain response to survive. These days we are usually sitting down and are overwhelmed by many emails or getting FOMO from scrolling through social media. Yet, it triggers our brain to feel threatened. Immediately, the freeze, fight or flight action sets in just like at cave times.
What we can do about it?
We are told to go inwards to ground ourselves so we are often in a relaxed state. Yep, still working on this challenge…
Creativity & Time in the work place
Putting time on creativity is an interesting discussion.
As a current freelancer, the request for an hourly rate is still strong.
Having previously worked in the corporate world as a PA, admin & data analyst as well now in the creative industry, I think there is a difference in time vs output value for creative services.
In one admin job which was paid on an hourly basis, one part was dealing with invoices – categorising them, adding extra notes, deciding to forward on to the account manager or putting them on hold if there was an issue. There was a huge amount to go through which were dealt with speedy action because I love efficiency and a clean inbox. But creativity wasn’t involved.
The same goes for example a law firm might make money by giving advice an hour at a time. What they are selling is time.
However, if you understand how inspiration and ideas work, they don’t follow the clock.
The below creativity time budget model below shows the relationship between time and money for creative services.
As a creative if you worked per hour with a quick turnaround on a logo, you would get punished for being efficient. Of course most businesses do value time, because we heard the saying time is money.
At the end of the day it’s a two-way business.
If time is of the highest value for a project, then a designer should charges a higher project fee for the time constraint to deliver a quality logo in less time.***
Whatever the campaign’s goal is, putting a time on creativity changes the price value.
References
*Creativity: The science behind the madness, Big Think, 2020, explained by Barry Kaufman; https://blogs.scientificamerican.com/beautiful-minds/the-real-neuroscience-of-creativity/
**https://www.psychologytools.com/resource/your-stone-age-brain/
***Chris Do
Disclaimer
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