What Mood Is Your Imagination In?

Some days my imagination seems to be in a very good mood.

It is curious. Easily entertained. One idea introduces me to another. Something lying on the worktable suggests something I hadn't planned. A mistake becomes interesting.

Other days, my imagination apparently gets up on the wrong side of the bed.

Nothing interests it.

The same materials are there. The same person is there. Presumably the same brain is there.

So what changed?

We tend to say, I'm just not feeling creative today.

But lately I've been wondering whether creativity comes and goes quite as much as we think it does.

Maybe our imagination has moods.

That raises another question.

Where exactly is my imagination?

I assume it's somewhere in my brain. Perhaps there's a little place behind my left ear where it lives. I've checked. Nothing obvious.

Science is no help if we're hoping to point to one small place and say, There it is.

Imagination seems to involve several things working together: memory, perception, attention and emotion. The networks that help us drift inward also help us remember, anticipate, invent scenes and generate possibilities.

Imagination, apparently, is less like a room in the brain and more like a conversation.

That makes sense to me.

Sometimes an idea arrives as an image. Sometimes it begins with something I remember or a feeling I can't quite name. And sometimes my hands seem to know what they want to do before the rest of me has caught up.

We talk about imagination as though it were something we possess.

She has a wonderful imagination.

Use your imagination.

I've lost my imagination.

But where would it go?

Maybe when we say we've lost our imagination, nothing has actually disappeared.

Maybe something changed the conversation.

Emotion appears to be one of the things capable of doing that.

Researchers who study creativity have found that the relationship between mood and creative thinking is more complicated than simply feeling good makes us creative and feeling bad doesn't.

Some emotional states seem to encourage cognitive flexibility, the ability to make broader associations, move among possibilities and see connections we might otherwise miss.

Other states can narrow our attention.

That sounds undesirable until we realize that creative work doesn't require only expansiveness. It also requires persistence. Sometimes we need to wander. Sometimes we need to stay with one thing long enough to discover what it can become.

What if different emotional states make different kinds of creative thinking available to us?

That interests me because I have often assumed that when ideas aren't coming easily, something is wrong.

I've lost it.

I'm not creative today.

Nothing is happening.

But something may be happening.

My attention may have narrowed. I may be more inclined to repeat than explore. I may have less tolerance for uncertainty. Or I may be willing to sit with one small problem much longer than I would on a day when my mind is happily bouncing from one possibility to another.

The imagination hasn't necessarily left the building.

It may simply be working differently.

On one day, that may mean seeing five possible ways to begin a piece. On another, it may mean noticing that one blue tile is wrong and staying with that small question until the whole arrangement begins to change.

And there is another interesting possibility.

The relationship between emotion and creativity doesn't travel in only one direction.

Our emotional state can affect how we think creatively, but engaging in creative thinking and making can also affect how we feel. Anyone who has become absorbed in making something may recognize this. We begin in one state and, sometime later, notice that something has shifted.

We didn't necessarily set out to improve our mood.

We were making something.

Perhaps this is why the question What mood is my imagination in? appeals to me more than Am I creative today?

The second question feels like a verdict.

The first makes me curious.

What kind of mind have I brought to the work today?

Is it playful? Restless? Worried? Tired? Persistent? Looking everywhere at once, or unwilling to look anywhere except right here?

And what might this imagination notice?

I don't think the goal is to get our imagination into the correct mood before we begin.

I'm not sure there is one.

Maybe the more interesting possibility is that creativity doesn't require us to arrive in a particular state.

Perhaps we begin with the mind we have.

And see what it can imagine.