In an artist who experiences vivid visual imagery during meditation, occipital gamma power (30-70 Hz) increased during the deepest meditation stages and was higher during visions than during non-vision periods. Alpha-frequency brain stimulation made her images sharper, shorter, and more frequent, but the sharpened images were too detailed for her art. Gamma and sham stimulation had no effect on imagery content. These findings suggest occipital gamma may be a neural marker of spontaneous visual imagery in experienced meditators.
The flow state, a concept originally observed in experts absorbed in intrinsically rewarding activities, is now frequently studied in neurophysiology using constrained, unfamiliar tasks. This perspective article proposes an activity-autonomy framework with testable hypotheses to induce flow, expanding beyond the traditional challenge-skill balance. It reviews and synthesizes best methodological practices from neurophysiological flow studies into a 24-item checklist. The checklist provides guidelines for consistent reporting, personalizing and testing isolated challenge types, accounting for participant skills, motivation, and individual differences, and processing self-report data. The authors argue for a cohesive approach to capture a consistent representation of flow states in neurophysiological research.
Creativity, central to human innovation and culture, remains poorly understood scientifically, partly because it has been viewed as a mysterious puzzle. Recent neuroscience has begun exploring its neural correlates, but the field still relies on popular notions like right-brain thinking and divergent thinking. This article presents a computational framework for creativity grounded in Baars' Global Workspace Theory, enhanced with information-theoretic mechanisms. It proposes a neurocognitive architecture emphasizing unconscious and pre-conscious brain processes—such as unconscious thought theory, mind wandering, and spontaneous brain states. The central argument is that pre-conscious creativity precedes conscious creativity, and the model offers a mechanism for this transition, aiming to guide future neuroscientific research.