Andrew Huberman· PhD
Open Monitoring Meditation & Creativity
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The evidence is convergent. Multiple independent sources reach the same conclusion, the underlying mechanism is well-characterized, and even the field's most cautious voices treat it as worth doing.
Open Monitoring Meditation & Creativity
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open monitoring meditation can be an extremely valuable tool for accessing your creative abilities. Because of the ways that it allows you to tap into specific circuits within the frontal networks of your brain, so these are networks of the brain that include the areas just behind your forehead and that allow you to evaluate new and novel rule sets in a very unconstrained way.
if you are somebody who wants to get better at divergent thinking and convergent thinking, the two elements of creativity. That is, I would encourage you to do a dual meditation. That is, a meditation that starts with open monitoring for maybe 5 to 10 minutes and then transitions to focused attention for maybe 5 to 10 minutes.
And then there's also this type of meditation called open observer meditation where you purposefully don't include a target in your mind, or in your vision, or in your hearing. And you just sit there, eyes closed, your eyes open, and you go into a place of whatever comes up, but you don't hover there too long. The goal is to not hover on any one thing, which sounds like deliberate attention deficit disorder. But it's actually a pretty cool method it turns out for restoring our ability to engage in focus but also for one particular thing that you mentioned earlier, which is creativity and creative problem solving, which of course, requires accessing, let's just say, more colors on the palette than your vision might be on.
But you still recommend it if people want to increase their creativity. Yes, I do. Because this is one of those things where there's essentially no downside to it.
And I do think that open monitoring meditation uh can really boost creativity primarily by helping people become more aware of the associative thoughts that they have.