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Oh to have the brain of a baby
Ran across a fascinating article about how young brains work that really sheds light on the ideal performance state of mind. It's not every day I read an article that pulls together and explains so many of my pet topics, like being in the moment, creativity, and flow!
Here's the first quote:
A recent brain scanning experiment by researchers at Johns Hopkins University found that jazz musicians in the midst of improvisation - they were playing a specially designed keyboard in a brain scanner - showed dramatically reduced activity in the prefrontal cortex. It was only by "deactivating" this brain area that the musicians were able to spontaneously invent new melodies. The scientists compare this unwound state of mind with that of dreaming during REM sleep, meditation, and other creative pursuits, such as the composition of poetry. But it also resembles the thought process of a young child, albeit one with musical talent. Baudelaire was right: "Genius is nothing more nor less than childhood recovered at will."
There you have it, scientific proof that creativity requires letting go! If you can stop monitoring yourself, a.k.a. loosening the grip of your conscious mind, you'll be at your most creative. This has implications far beyond jazz improvisation!
And there's more:
The immaturity of the baby brain comes with another advantage: utter absorption in the moment. The best evidence for this comes from brain scans of adult subjects as they watched an engrossing Clint Eastwood movie. The experiment, led by Rafael Malach at Hebrew University, found that when adults were watching the film their brains showed a peculiar pattern of activity, as their prefrontal areas were suppressed. At the same time, areas in the back of the brain associated with visual perception were turned on. As Gopnik notes, this mental state - the experience of being captivated by entertainment - is, in many respects, a fleeting reminder of what it feels like to be a young child. "You are incredibly aware of what's happening - your experiences are very vivid - and yet you're not self-conscious at all," she says. "You're not thinking about anything but what's on the screen."
So another thing we've learned as adults is to be out of the Now! Eckhart Tolle himself may not realize the connection with the young brain. But it means that being in the Now, either in performance or more generally in life, is recapturing your youth. Maybe it also means you can be more open-minded, and see new possibilities. If we could all do that for a few minutes each day, imagine the problems we could solve!
Moving on:
If people could never regress into this babylike consciousness, then we'd struggle with the kind of tasks that require us to stop being self-conscious and lose ourselves in the job. Such moments are often described as "flow" activities, and can occur whenever we're completely captivated by what we're doing, be it stirring a risotto or solving a crossword puzzle. The Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki referred to such modes as "beginner's mind," since people are able to think like a baby, open to possibility and free of errant preconceptions.
Babies are constantly in flow! So once again we adults are our own worst enemy - we've learned the skill of focus and analysis, and we value those skills because they help us get certain things done, and because our whole culture puts these skills on a pedestal. But so many of us fail to take advantage of the other half of our capacity.
I just know that as this article sinks into my head, I will discover new ways to apply this as a performer and a coach.
