What makes us have especially productive sessions — those minutes or hours when you’re so immersed in what you’re doing that everything melts away? What exactly is going on in our brains to make us feel so focused?

These are exactly the questions that drive Dr. Heather Berlin, a cognitive neuroscientist at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai in New York. She studies the neuroscience of imagination, creativity and improvisation and explains what exactly goes on in our brains when we’re being creative.

(Originally aired March 17, 2016)