Improvisation and Creativity

      On January 28^th, 2010, Jonah Lehrer and Holly Sidford discussed neuroscience and art after Jonah’s talk at the San Francisco Dynamic Adaptability Conference in one of my favorite neuroscience interviews. Jonah was on the way towards writing his third book, Imagine, which has recently been pulled off shelves due to some fabricated quotes, though can still be found in second hand stores and such (I would not let this deter you from reading Jonah’s work. Even if there is some fabrication, his main ideas are still valid, and his writing style lets non-scientists ponder these great concepts. I will refer to him often in this blog). In his talk, he discussed the connection between neuroscience, art and creativity (the basis for Imagine).

          Jonah starts off with an amazing study on arguably the most creative act humans can manage, improvisation. This study was done by Bengtsson et al at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm, Sweden as well as Charles Limb at the University of Southern California. Professional jazz pianists were put into an fMRI (functional MRI, a machine that captures someone’s brain activity while they are doing a task). They were given a piano, and first asked to play a previously learned jazz piece. Then they were asked to make up a similar type of piece. Comparing the brains, the researchers found that improvising brains showed a decrease in activity in the Dorsolateral Prefrontal Cortex and an increase in the activity of the Medial Frontal Cortex (see image below). 

According to a previous study by Ridderinkhof and his team at the University of Amsterdam, “medial frontal cortex is found to be involved in performance monitoring: evaluating outcome vis-a-vis expectancy, and detecting performance errors or conflicting response tendencies.” It would make sense that this part of the brain is more active during improvisation. When creating a new piece of music, the medial frontal cortex listens to the music coming out, compares it to what it knows it wants to hear, and adjusts its commands to the fingers accordingly.

          The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex on the other hand was somewhat of a mystery before these experiments. It is believed it have something to do with self monitoring, acting as a filter. If this is correct, the experiment shows that to improvise, pianists turn off their filter, inhibit their inhibitory area, “silence the silencer”.

          This does not only apply to jazz improvisation. Liu et al at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders showed the same results for free style rappers, meaning that these same areas are activated/deactivated for language.

          The key to creativity is not grandiose moments of insight or great muses. It is training yourself not to worry about doing something wrong, and trust yourself. This is not something given to only a select few. It is something that can be learned and taught. This is how Jonah ends his discussion, with a call to teach these ideas of creativity in school. Let kids go off on their own, improvise, create something new. Creativity will get you farther than any type of algebra could, even if not measurable on a standardized test.

Jonah and Holly’s full interview can be found at this link (it is broken into 4 parts, but well worth a watch):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BP9-VjOBwDE

Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of Freestyle Rap. Siyuan Liu,   Ho Ming Chow, Yisheng Xu,      Michael G. Erkkinen, Katherine E. Swett, Michael W. Eagle,         Daniel A. Rizik-Baer & Allen R. Braun. Scientific Reports 2, Article number: 834 doi:10.1038/srep00834. Received 20 June 2012 Accepted 19 October 2012 Published 15 November 2012

Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation. Charles J. Limb, Allen R. Braun. PLoS One

Cortical regions involved in the generation of musical structures during improvisation in pianists. Bengtsson SL, Csíkszentmihályi M, Ullén F. Karolinska Institutet, Stockholm, Sweden. 2007 May;19(5):830-42.

Neurocognitive mechanisms of cognitive control: The role of prefrontal cortex in action selection, response inhibition, performance monitoring, and reward-based learning. K. Richard Ridderinkhof, Wery P.M. van den Wildenberga,c, Sidney J. Segalowitzd, Cameron S. Carter. Brain and Cognition.