Dream Mode
A short-hand to the neuroscience of creative intelligence
In April I ran an event about creative intelligence. We explored creativity as a felt (somatic) and meditative experience, from the spiritual lens of the Vedic tradition, and from the perspective of neuroscience.
I love how spiritual and scientific perspectives, the somatic experience and artistic expression of things meet, not necessarily in the middle, but somewhere interstice.
We know and feel things with our brains, our spirits, hearts and bodies; all offer a language that cumulatively expresses the one whole thing.
The somatic practices we experienced at the event are here:
Now I’m sharing a short-hand to what neuroscience says about creative intelligence.
Modes
From a neuroscience perspective, creativity isn’t one thing in the brain. It’s the interaction between three systems.
The Default Mode Network — dream mode — is active when you’re daydreaming, remembering, imagining, making unexpected connections. It generates the raw, unfiltered material of ideas.
The Executive Control Network is the editor. Focusing, evaluating, refining, executing. It shapes raw material into something usable.
The Salience Network is the moderator. It detects what’s worth following, signalling the shift between the two. During creative thinking, the DMN and ECN stay on quick standby and the Salience Network keeps them ready.
Creativity is what happens when the brain can wander freely and focus sharply, and move agilely between the two. A lithe brain is a creative brain.
States
What interrupts this is almost always the same thing: stress, because it puts the system into prediction mode, which is the opposite of dream mode. When the brain scans for threat it runs the familiar scenarios, literally narrowing the visual field, discounting newness.
In this state the DMN is ruminating and replaying rather than generating or playing. The ECN isn’t refining ideas, it’s managing threat. This is why we shift into tunnel vision – our brain is stuck in rigid thinking and over-control.
For the mind to wander, the nervous system has to feel safe. Creativity runs on this condition. A dancer must warm-up before they can bring a piece to life with ultimate expressiveness.
Club Med, a twice-monthly group meditation collective for inner visionaries, runs here on Substack. Go here to join. Free for your first month.
Gardens
Nicole Vignola, a neuroscientist whose work I love, talks about the DMN as a garden that can become overgrown with weeds unless tended to through meditation. I went full-DMN on this and expanded the metaphor holographically.
The brain grows what you repeatedly plant. If thoughts are seeds, attention is water and whatever is tended to will cultivate. For most of us, without intervention, the DMN defaults to old conditioning, which means ‘survival’ mechanisms that are protective, looping and predictive - a garden that’s overgrown with weeds, perhaps even a graveyard of old ideas and ways of being. We must turn the soil, pull the weeds and plant new species - we must tend to it to have a garden we love.
The brain will grow whatever you practice. So if you’re unconsciously practicing rumination, the weeds will overgrow. If you consciously look at the garden, pull a weed, make space, and plant new things, you’ll have something spectacular to create from.
How intentional can we be with what we grow when we wander the prisms of our dreaming mind?
A lot of this depends on what state we are in when we wander.
You’re invited to Food Magic - a meditation, conversation and cook-up with Staple Store founder Catie Gett. Wed 10 June, 6pm in Melbourne. Tickets here. Sound-bite of what we might talk about here.
State Spell
The somatic sequence we moved through in April was deliberately cast as this kind of spell.
Orient and down-regulate to move the nervous system out of threat mode so the DMN can wander dreamily rather than loop on predictive text.
Tune into the channel via meditation to immerse in the state where original thinking - your garden - is available. Do this over and over until the brain knows how to find and feel it easily. Tend it enough and it becomes a holographic wilderness – luminous, layered, fecund.
Now plant and play deliberately and wildly. The post-meditation visualisation was an experiment in what creativity feels like as a pure feeling-state, when the body and brain are most receptive - safe, expansive and self-generative.
Creative intelligence is the ultimate bleed between states. An ombré of DMN in dream mode, the ECN unhurried, encouraging, and the nervous system in sweetness.
I teach a functional, creative meditation technique and coach people to build the habit of a daily practice. If you’d like to know more about the offerings, visit the Supermuse website here. I post on Insta here.