This Is Your Brain on Creativity
It doesn’t hit all at once. It seeps in — like a whisper in a thunderstorm or a siren in slow motion. One minute you’re sipping coffee. The next you’re spiraling into a color theory rabbit hole with Nina Simone in one ear and an idea crawling through your brain. This is inspiration. It’s intoxication. It’s the hit. The jolt. The drug. Welcome to creativity!
Creativity doesn’t care about your deadlines, your sleep, your so-called balance. Creativity doesn’t want to be managed. It wants to be worshipped. It will ruin your dinner plans. It will make you feel like God. Then it will ghost you for weeks.
At RIOT, we dose creativity. Micro and macro. A slow-release drip when the project is precision. A full-on psychotropic vision quest when the brief is warpaint. Because when creativity hits — really hits — it alters everything: perception, purpose, even personality.
Creativity is productivity and prophecy. This is your brain on creativity.
The First Hit
It always starts with a flicker.
A sound. A sentence. A smear of light across the kitchen floor. You’re not even looking for it — but there it is. Waiting like it’s been watching you. You pause. Something shifts in the air. That’s when the first creative hit lands. Not as a thought, but as a feeling.
This is the moment every creative chases — the raw, unscripted encounter with possibility. It’s what makes musicians abandon sleep, what turns designers into obsessives, what sends filmmakers into fever dreams. It’s the whisper of the universe saying, “Here. Make this real.”
Science calls it novelty detection. Dopamine floods the brain when we stumble upon something new, something that challenges our patterns. But we call it magic. The opening of the third eye. The creative Big Bang. Once you’ve felt that rush, there’s no going back.
For me, this hit often came riding the train from the Lower East Side to the edge of what would eventually become Hudson Yards — long before the towers rose. I was heading to the original Coach HQ, perched on the top floor of a building that no longer exists, demolished as the first chess move in Manhattan’s next megaproject. It was a time of transition — of raw ambition and untamed spaces. That playlist above? It comes from those early days, when I was soundtracking a future still under construction.
Back then, I used a service called MOG — a platform so ahead of its time it let you download entire music libraries, encrypted for streaming. The real magic? You could shuffle everything. Not just a playlist, but your entire curated universe of sound. Total creative randomness at your fingertips. That same future-first instinct is in RIOT’s DNA. MOG was eventually sold to Beats, and Beats Beats Music, evolved into Apple Music.
From that spark, I started a series on Spotify called My Morning Journey — a daily ritual born from infinite shuffle. Whatever combination played on that morning train became my looped soundtrack for the day. And everything I created that day — every cut, every concept, every color decision — was filtered through that audio randomness.
That’s what the first hit does. It flips the switch. Turns a normal Tuesday into a portal. Turns noise into vision.
At RIOT, we live for this hit. It’s why our cameras are always ready, our sketchbooks worn to the spine, our playlists full of songs we’ve carefully curated to help others create. Because we know the first hit can come from anywhere — a subway ad, a torn photograph, a line from a stranger at the deli. Inspiration ambushes you. That’s what makes it pure.
It isn’t planning. It isn’t process. It’s ignition.
The High
When it hits, it hits all the way through you.
Your hands start moving before your mind can explain. The air around you thickens, hums. Shapes begin to speak. Sounds turn into colors. The idea is no longer something you’re chasing — it’s something you’re becoming.
Time doesn’t pass in this place. It dissolves. One minute you’re sketching out thumbnails, the next it’s dark outside and you’ve forgotten to eat. You’re not tired. You’re electric. You don’t even feel like yourself — you feel like the channel. The vessel. The storm.
This is what psychologists call flow state. Neural pathways light up like a galaxy. The prefrontal cortex quiets down. You stop questioning and start creating. Everything clicks — not because you’re forcing it, but because you’re letting go.
And it’s not always clean. Sometimes the work spills out in a roar, messy and unedited. Sometimes it’s a trance — repetitive, precise, like tracing ancient symbols with trembling fingers. But when you’re in it, you know. You feel it in your gut.
Destroy – an original digital artwork by MUG5, reflecting themes of decay, destruction, and rebirth. A visual dialogue with Dylan Thomas’ poetry, which often wrestles with the cycle of life and death.
At RIOT, we treat this moment like sacred ground. When a team member disappears into a soundproof room or spirals into a whiteboard session that looks more like automatic writing — we know what’s happening. The high has taken hold. This is when our best work is born. The type of work that feels like it’s always existed — we just had to excavate it from the static noise.
Creativity at this level isn’t just a skill. It’s a chemical event. A controlled burn. A beautiful hallucination you get to call your life’s purpose.
The Side Effects
Every high has its hauntings.
When the storm clears, what’s left is the echo. The silence. The second-guessing. The adrenaline fades, but the idea still hums — just out of reach. It’s not gone. It’s ghosting you.
This is the part no one talks about in the glossy behind-the-scenes videos. The hangover. The hollow. The strange ache of having brought something into the world… and feeling emptier for it.
Creativity takes. It takes your sleep. Your appetite. Sometimes your sanity. It asks you to give so much of yourself that you forget what’s left. It blurs the lines between personal and professional, between who you are and what you make.
You start to measure your worth by what you’re producing. And if you’re not creating? You start to vanish. Imposter syndrome creeps in — soft at first, then sharp. Suddenly, you’re wondering if the last thing you made was your last good thing. You refresh. You rewrite. You spiral.
And yet… you’d still do it again. Because the only thing worse than the silence is not creating at all.
At RIOT, we honor this part of the cycle. We talk about it. We protect each other in it. When the muse disappears, we don’t chase — we pause. Regenerate. This is the price of devotion. The side effects of seeing too much beauty in too many broken things. And it’s worth it. Every time.
Tolerance & Withdrawal
The danger of the high is thinking it will last forever.
At first, the hits are pure. Clean. Effortless. The ideas arrive like old friends, familiar and electric. But over time, something shifts. The buzz begins to dull. The colors desaturate. You reach for the usual triggers — the playlist, the late-night edit, the ritual sketch — but it doesn’t click.
You’ve built a tolerance. And the muse? She’s getting harder to summon.
You keep working, but it starts to feel mechanical. You mimic your own past breakthroughs. You remake the same idea in new packaging. You fake flow. It looks like creation from the outside — but inside, you’re starving.
And when you stop? When you step away, even for a moment? That’s when the withdrawal begins. The emptiness creeps in. The doubt. The itch. The panic of stillness. You try to remember how to be without constantly building.
But here’s the truth: this phase isn’t failure. It’s evolution. The silence is sacred. The disconnection is necessary. Because the next version of you — the one who’s bolder, stranger, freer — needs space to arrive. You can’t summon the next wave by clinging to the last one.
At RIOT, we’ve learned how to honor this stretch. We don’t fear the stillness. We sit with it. We sharpen tools. We study weirdness. We chase inspiration like it’s oxygen. That’s why we built AltSounds.TV — a creative adrenaline shot, made to keep the creative edge sharp. It’s our daily hit of genius: a place to see, hear, and feel incredible work across music, visuals, and culture. AltSounds is a creative trigger. A reminder that creativity breaks through.
Because when the next hit comes — and it always comes — you’re ready to make something you’ve never made before.
Microdosing the Muse
You can’t live inside the high forever. But you can learn how to sip from it.
Not every creative moment needs to be a supernova. Sometimes, it’s a spark. A glance. A half-finished sentence that lingers in your notes app. These small moments — barely noticeable, often private — are how we microdose the muse.
At RIOT, we build our days around this idea. It’s not about waiting for divine downloads. It’s about rituals. Triggers. Creative nutrition. A short film over lunch. A weird vintage catalog from the 70s. A playlist you’ve never heard before, played on shuffle in the studio just loud enough to make someone say, “Wait — what’s that?”
And sometimes, it’s the hiss of a cassette tape clicking into place.
A pile of tapes captured a decade ago on the rooftop of my friend Boogie’s Lower East Side apartment. We’d sit up there drinking, smoking, and feeding tapes into the boombox while New York hummed below.
We’ve got a deep archive of analog inspiration — from an ever-growing record collection to a vast library of cassettes. Every morning, we feed our six-tape player with random selections. It plays both sides of a tape, flips it, then rolls onto the next. Six tapes. Twelve sides. Hours of music — completely uncurated, completely unrepeatable. We’ve done entire shoots soundtracked by this analog shuffle. And you know what? That music dictated the mood. It shaped the pacing. It changed the output. You can’t fake that kind of energy.
These micro-hits add up. They keep the system warm. They sharpen instinct. They make sure the next big idea has a place to land when it finally shows up.
We believe creativity isn’t a faucet you turn on. It’s a garden you tend — every day, in small and intentional ways. That’s why AltSounds.TV is our ritual. A hit of sound and vision every morning before we touch a project. A living reminder that inspiration is everywhere — you just need to stay open to it.
And in this space between chaos and control, high and hangover, idea and execution — is where RIOT lives. Not just chasing the muse. Becoming it.
Creativity as a Controlled Substance
They say creativity can’t be measured. We disagree.
It can be tracked in blood pressure spikes. In dopamine hits. In sleep lost. In ideas scribbled on napkins at 2AM.
Creativity is a controlled substance — one with no dosage instructions, no warning labels, and no antidote.
It’s addictive. It’s unpredictable. It can change your life. Or ruin your day. But once you’ve had it — really had it — you can’t go back to beige. You’ll crave the color, the chaos, the possibility. You’ll quit your job and start a Creative Agency. You’ll rearrange your life just to get closer to the source.
At RIOT, we don’t chase that feeling. We build for it.
Every space we design. Every pitch we write. Every tool we touch. We run our agency like a laboratory of vision — equal parts discipline and delirium.
Our new HQ in Hudson Yards is one of those moves — a tactical decision to put ourselves physically where the future is forming. A creative engine sitting atop the bones of Manhattan’s next evolution. Surrounded by velocity, elevated by perspective. It’s not just where we create — it’s how we keep our creative edge razor-sharp.
Creativity is our drug. Creativity is our hit.
This is your brain on creativity.
Abe Blazed — an unapologetic remix of history, style, and smoke. A MUG5 original born from the intersection of revolution and rhythm.
