In 2008, a neuroscientist called Dr. Charles Limb had a question about creativity.

He wanted to know:

“What actually happens in the brain when we innovate?”

So he did something brilliantly odd.

He designed a special plastic piano keyboard that could fit inside an MRI scanner and invited professional jazz musicians to lie down in it and play.

First, he had them play memorised scales (the boring stuff).

Then, he told them to improvise (pure, unfiltered creativity).

When he looked at the scans, he saw something remarkable.

When the musicians started improvising, the part of the brain responsible for self-monitoring - the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex - showed ‘significantly reduced’ activity. It had effectively dimmed right down.

This is the part of your brain that says:

“Don’t make a mistake. Look professional. Follow the rules.”

Meanwhile, the medial prefrontal cortex (the bit tied to self-expression) lit up like a Christmas tree.

Limb proved something important:

You cannot be fully creative and fully critical at the same time. Your brain has to pick a mode. To have a breakthrough, you have to biologically turn down your “Inner Critic.

This is why so many corporate brainstorming sessions are utterly useless (let’s be honest).

We try to generate “wild ideas” whilst simultaneously worrying about budget, feasibility, and what our boss thinks.

If you want to do work that’s genuinely creative, you have to be brave enough to look stupid for a while.

You have to separate divergent thinking (idea generation) from convergent thinking (idea evaluation) by allowing yourself to be embarrassingly ambitious and have ideas that make you feel exposed.

In other words, don’t edit the idea before you’ve even had it.