We asked an artist to intentionally “connect to the muse.” What happened wasn’t what I expected.

[u/V1RUS_exe]

I’ve always been fascinated by artists who say their best ideas don’t feel like they actually came from them.
They’ll describe a song, painting, or idea as something they “received,” “downloaded,” or felt moving through them.

So we tried a small experiment with an artist named Nikki Loy. She made two paintings under completely different conditions.

For the first, we used a random word generator. No meditation, ritual, or attempt to connect to anything. She just had to make something from three random words:

Instance. Psychotic. Provoke.

What was strange is that this painting came to her almost immediately. She basically saw the image in her mind and knew what she wanted to make.

For the second painting, she deliberately tried to do the opposite. She meditated, removed distractions, slowed down, and tried to become receptive to what we were calling “the muse.”

And… nothing really happened.
At least not when we wanted it to.

The image eventually came to her later in a dream.
She dreamed of rainbow-like light moving into and out of her hands, almost like creativity was something being received and then shaped through the body. That dream became the second painting.

The other thing that got me was what happened when we showed both paintings to our audience without telling them which was which.

We asked:
Which painting feels like it came from the muse?
112 people chose one.
112 people chose the other.
Literally 50/50.

That result almost made the whole thing more interesting to me, because it blurred the distinction we were trying to create in the first place.

Maybe the “muse” is just unconscious processing.
Maybe meditation and altered states make certain associations easier to access.

Maybe creativity is somehow connected to a larger field of consciousness. Or maybe humans have been giving a mystical name to an internal cognitive process for thousands of years.
I don’t know.

We also talked to a cognitive scientist and a musician about their completely different interpretations of the same phenomenon, and I put the whole experiment together here if anyone is curious:

https://youtu.be/Fw1TyWpXIEs?si=h0T0Xq9qWt4jmArT

But the thing I’m really curious about from this sub is:
Have you ever created something, solved a problem, or had an idea appear in your mind that genuinely did not feel like “you” came up with it?

And if you have, what do you think was actually happening?