I have spent years researching creativity, but lately I have been looking at some of my familiar ideas through a different lens. I am currently taking MIT’s Neuroscience for Business course, and our recent discussion of neuroplasticity had me thinking about what happens in the brain when we decide to learn something completely new. We often talk about learning in terms of acquiring knowledge or becoming more competent at a particular task, but learning also changes the brain itself. As we practice unfamiliar skills, neural connections and networks adapt, and repeated practice can strengthen and make those pathways more efficient. That makes me think differently about something I have advocated for a long time: adults need opportunities to be creative, especially when there is no expectation that they will be particularly good at what they are doing.

There is an important scientific distinction here because it is easy for discussions of neuroplasticity to drift into oversimplification. You may sometimes hear that learning new things creates new neurons throughout the brain. Adult neurogenesis is actually a much more complicated and still-debated area of neuroscience, particularly in humans. What we can say with much greater confidence is that the adult brain remains plastic. Experiences and learning can alter connections among neurons, reorganize networks, and, with repeated practice, make certain neural pathways more efficient. That means learning watercolor, playing an instrument, experimenting with pottery, trying a new recipe, sewing, woodworking, photography, or another unfamiliar creative skill is asking your brain to do something different from simply repeating something you already know how to do.

Think about how much is involved when you are a beginner. If you are learning to paint, you are paying attention to color, shape, pressure, movement, proportion, and the relationship between what you see and what your hand is doing. If you are learning to cook something unfamiliar, you may be coordinating timing, smell, texture, temperature, memory, and multiple steps while constantly adjusting based on what is happening in front of you. An experienced person has already developed patterns that make many of these decisions easier, but a beginner has to pay attention because there is no established script to follow. That combination of novelty, attention, problem solving, sensory information, and practice gives the brain something genuinely new to work with.

This is where I see a particularly interesting connection to creativity. Creativity is often treated as a product: the painting, the story, the quilt, the photograph, or the finished project. My own work has led me to think much more about creativity as a process. Creative activity requires us to notice, experiment, make connections, respond to unexpected results, and adjust what we are doing. When we learn something unfamiliar, we get to practice those behaviors in a relatively low-risk environment. A watercolor that does not turn out the way we imagined is disappointing, perhaps, but it is not an organizational crisis. A loaf of bread that refuses to rise gives us a problem to investigate without our professional reputation depending on the answer. These small experiences give us opportunities to become more comfortable with uncertainty and experimentation, both of which are important for creativity well beyond the activity itself.

There is another reason I have long encouraged creative activities that has less to do with what we produce and more to do with how we feel while producing it. Creative activities can be useful tools for stress reduction. When an activity is absorbing enough to hold our attention, it can interrupt some of the repetitive thinking that accompanies stress and give our attention somewhere else to go. Many creative activities also involve sensory or repetitive elements—the movement of knitting, working with clay, drawing, coloring, gardening, baking, or playing music—that can make the experience feel restorative. Research on art-making and other forms of creative engagement has also found associations with reduced stress and improved well-being, although, as with most things involving the brain and behavior, the effects depend on the person, the activity, and the circumstances.

That last part matters because a creative activity stops being particularly restorative when we turn it into another obligation. Adults are remarkably good at doing this. We decide to try photography and immediately compare our pictures with those of people who have been practicing for twenty years. We learn to crochet and start thinking about whether we could open an Etsy shop. We begin writing and decide we should publish something. Even hobbies can become another arena in which we measure productivity, achievement, and competence. If part of the benefit comes from exploration, attention, enjoyment, and relief from stress, constantly evaluating the quality of the outcome can undermine exactly what made the activity valuable in the first place.

This is also why I think being a beginner has value that we tend to underestimate. Expertise allows the brain to become efficient, which is generally a very good thing. Beginners, however, cannot rely on that efficiency yet. They have to notice more, ask questions, make mistakes, seek feedback, and experiment with possibilities. They experience the uncomfortable space between not knowing and eventually knowing, and they discover that making mistakes is simply part of getting there. Those are useful experiences for anyone who wants to become more creative, adaptable, and comfortable navigating uncertainty.

For organizations, there may be a lesson here as well. If we want employees to be innovative, adaptable, curious, and willing to experiment, professional development does not always have to focus exclusively on skills directly connected to someone’s job description. There can be value in giving people opportunities to learn, make, play, and experiment simply because those experiences exercise curiosity and remind adults what it feels like to be beginners. They can also provide a welcome counterbalance to workplace stress, particularly when participation is genuinely optional and the activity is not turned into another performance measure.

For individuals, the takeaway may be even simpler. Learning something creative does not have to result in mastery to be worthwhile. The watercolor can be muddy, the first song can be recognizable only to you, and the cake can look nothing like the photograph. You can spend six months learning pottery and never make anything anyone would want to buy. None of that means the time was wasted. Your brain was learning, your attention was engaged, you were experimenting and solving problems, and you may have given yourself some much-needed distance from the stressors occupying the rest of your day.

The more I learn about neuroscience, the more it reinforces something I have believed about creativity for a long time. Creativity is not an indulgence that we earn after the important work is finished. Making space to learn, experiment, and create can support how we think, how we respond to uncertainty, and how we manage stress. Perhaps we need to stop asking whether we are talented enough to pursue a creative activity and start asking a much more interesting question: What would I enjoy being a beginner at?