Many people know the feeling of being "in the zone": As they're fully immersed in a task, the background noise of the world fades and they may not notice time passing. Gymnasts may enter this ...

Effortless, enjoyable productivity is a state of consciousness prized and sought after by people in business, the arts, research, education and anyone else who wants to produce a stream of creative ...

In one of Don Draper’s more memorable bits of wisdom, the fictional ad exec advised a creatively blocked colleague: “Just think about it. Deeply. Then forget it. And an idea will jump up in your face.

Ludwig van Beethoven’s notebooks show that he spent countless hours laboriously developing and revising the musical ideas on which his great compositions were based. It was a torturous and ...

Neuroscientists have attempted to uncover the "chemistry of happiness" by scanning the brains of jazz musicians as they improvised. In the field of positive psychology, there is a concept called "flow ...

Creative flow states are defined as moments of deep immersion and focus where we lose track of time and become fully absorbed in the task at hand. These states allow for heightened productivity and ...

In the half-century since Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi first introduced the concept of flow in his seminal 1975 book, Beyond Boredom and Anxiety: Experiencing Flow in Work and Play, two distinct theories ...

Figure 1: Drexel University postdoctoral researcher Yongtaek Oh playing the guitar while his electroencephalograms (EEGs) are recorded in Drexel University’s Creativity Research Laboratory. The study ...

A new neuroimaging study reveals how the brain gets to the creative flow state. Effortless, enjoyable productivity is a state of consciousness prized and sought after by people in business, the arts, ...