Creativity involves a transition from divergent thinking (high dopamine) to convergent thinking (low dopamine).

“In other words, there's a sweet spot of elevated dopamine for divergent thinking. And again, divergent thinking is critical for the creativity process, because creativity by definition is taking a novel set of ideas and arranging them in a particular way, or taking existing ideas and arranging them in a novel way that then you eventually converge on some new product, new idea, new song, et cetera.”

“Now, convergent thinking follows a very different pattern. When dopamine levels are high, convergent thinking is not very likely. And when dopamine levels are low, convergent thinking is very likely.”

“But the point is this, dopamine levels strongly relate to the probability that you can engage in convergent and divergent thinking, and they do so in the following way.”

“The creative process involves going into a state where you're willing to consider a lot of options, many of which seem distantly or not even connected to one another, and dopamine facilitates that divergent thinking state in which you are perfectly happy and in fact, experience a joy, or elation, a comfort and a pleasure in organizing all these different ideas that to anyone else might seem not that related. But when your dopamine levels are elevated, these all seem like great ideas and that maybe there are connections there. You're not accepting all of them as true and valid and interesting in combining them, but there's this idea that it's worth entertaining the possibility, at least for moments. And then, as dopamine levels drop, there is the process of convergent thinking, which is taking options down off the wall saying, "No, no, that doesn't fit with that, "that doesn't fit with that, "but ah, that fits with that, and that can work. "That feels right or sounds right or looks right."”

“When dopamine levels are high, divergent thinking is more likely. That is, when people have a lot of dopamine circulating in their system, they tend to be very expansive with their ideas, they tend to brainstorm a lot, they tend to be comfortable and even want to, or reflexively throw out a lot of ideas so that sometimes even seem a little disconnected.”

“However, they tend to do this in an inverted U-shape way. For those of you either watching on YouTube, I'm just drawing a hump, obviously, and for those of you listening, just imagine a U, the shape of a letter U, and then just flip it upside down, so it looks like a bump. Turns out that when dopamine levels are very low, there's a low probability of divergent thinking. When dopamine levels are high, as I mentioned before, there's a high level or probability of divergent thinking. But when dopamine levels go very, very high, then there's again, a reduction in divergent thinking.”

“Brain states are not, as we would say, a square wave function. You don't just drop into a trench of creativity. Creativity is not an event, it's a process. And what I'm telling you is that it's a process that involves divergent thinking and consideration of a lot of different ideas. That's correlated with high but not too high dopamine. And then, one has to transition into a state of convergent thinking, which is really honing in on the ideas that seem to have validity or that could have validity and getting rid of everything else, and that's associated with low dopamine.”

“So divergent thinking is favored by having elevated levels of dopamine but not too high.”

“Now, that's a very nature based explanation for why some people are better at divergent thinking and other people are better at convergent thinking.”