Creativity = Chaos, Order, and the Salience Network

Creativity is in the bounce.

Creativity is all about triangulation. Connecting the dots. Three layers. A new perspective. Even Einstein was all about how combinatorial play — vacillating between the laws of physics and playing violin — was the key to his creative thinking.

And creativity researchers are finding that this is true inside our brains, as well. I hope these descriptions are neuroscience-y close enough to get my point across:

Default Mode Network (DMN) This is your brain when it seemingly drives itself home from work without your conscious knowledge. It’s the same network that’s activated when you daydream or your mind wanders.

Central Executive Network (CEN) This lights up when you’re trying to decide whether your stovetop is on fire, or that’s just some steam from the asparagus. It’s where you make decisions, parent, work, and where you spend most of your day.

Salience Network A layer deeper: This is where your brain decides how to perceive your sensory input, and how it affects you. It’s in the present moment, connected to insight, and controls the switch between the DMN and the CEN.

Creativity and the Salience Network

Creativity, so the current thinking goes, happens when the DMN passes its daydreamy, hippie ideas through the organized, get-shit-done CEN, and the Salience Network — where your intuition, insight, wisdom, and gut feelings live — decide which ones can stay and which ones need to go.

I wrote a blog post last year called Poetry vs Neuroscience: A Creativity Smackdown before I’d discovered these three networks and their creative collaboration. But I didn’t yet know about the Salience Network (SN; neuroscientists love their initialisms), which is where the DMN and the CEN get to triangulate their superpowers. The Salience Network gets activated in meditation, while viewing art, when thinking about your preferences, passions, and interests. It comes from the word ‘salient,’ as in noticing or noticeable. “That’s a salient point!” is the same thing as “That is a point that my intuition, insight, wisdom or gut feeling tells me I should notice.”

The three layers of the brain and creativity

If you’ve seen the Third Layer’s Creativity Pyramid (go to the home page), you’ll see that it’s also three layers, which I’ve just realized while writing this blog post is kinda related to these three networks: 1) Creative Safety (messiness, openness, the purview of the DMN, right?), 2) Creative Bravery (integration, action, aka, totally the CEN, yeah?), and 3) Aha! (insight, intuition, wisdom, experience — I mean, this is the Salience Network, right?).

Creativity is born in the mind-wandering, dreamy, procrastinating/marinating state of the DMN. It gets solidified into potential action in the CEN, and the SN decides whether to move forward based on knowledge and past experience. And creativity needs all three, and it needs to be able to know it can bounce between them at will.

The bounce between the DMN and the CEN

And that’s where this information becomes useful. Next time you get ‘caught’ (or catch yourself) daydreaming at work, tell yourself (or your boss) that you’re in the Default Mode Network. But, if you (or your employee) wants to stay a liiiittle too long there, let them (or your brain) know it’s, ahem, time to switch over to the Central Executive Network. The DMN loves saying things like, “Wouldn’t it be fun if we …” or “One day, I would love to …” but it’s the CEN that gets shit done.

This is why I have all my students, clients and workshop participants write everything down, whether they think it’s valuable or not. Creativity might require triangulation, or even quadrangulation. Your brain is great at holding up to seven pieces of information at a time. Many creative decisions require dozens, or even hundreds of data points. And when you have to write a thing down, your CEN automatically kicks in.

Marination, Procrastination, and Elongating Time

And, I’ll have to do more thinking on this, but I think what I call ‘introverted creativity’ is the Salience Network kicking in. Sometimes you need to take in what the DMN and the CEN give you, pause, and go a layer deeper. Give the two sides time to bubble around your Salience Network, with its intuition-y primordial soup and its wisdom- and insight-y building blocks.

If you need to call it procrastination, call it procrastination, but I’m a bigger fan of ‘marination.’ Let the thought bounce around between the three networks. The connect-the-dots bounce might just need a few minutes, or even a few seconds to take a good, deep breath to quiet both the DMN and CEN.

Or it might need a night, or a few weeks, months or decades. As you know and have been frustrated with your entire life, the process cannot be rushed. The Salience Network loves to come out in the shower, on a hiking trail, first thing in the morning, on a smoke break, while washing the dishes — anywhere but wherever the Central Executive Network is watching with its scary hyper-focus on productivity and competence. (Or where the Default Mode Network is choreographing an interpretative dance with scarves of the wildebeest migration … bless its DMN heart.)