This report from Scientific Blogging, summarizes the results from the study, “Prefrontal Cortex In Jazz Musicians Winds Down When Improvising.”
It sheds light on the creative process by comparing MRI scans of professional jazz pianists playing on a piano keyboard. Several images of the subjects’ brains were taken as they were doing tasks of varying complexity, from simple scales up through riffing on a memorized melody with a pre-recorded jazz quartet.
Brain scans were nearly identical for both the low-level and high-level forms of improvisation. This supports the initial hypothesis that the change in neural activity was due to creativity and not merely the complexity of the task.
Curiously, researchers found that improvisation and memorization occurred in the prefrontal cortex; the region of the frontal lobe of the brain that helps us think and problem-solve and that provides a sense of self. The large portion of the brain that is responsible for monitoring one’s performance shuts down completely during improvisation, while the much smaller, centrally located region at the foremost part of the brain increases in activity. This pattern is also similar to what is found in the brains of dreaming people. Significantly, both emotional and sensory systems are engaged and heighten the experience.
“One important thing we can conclude from this study is that there is no single creative area of the brain—no focal activation of a single area,” said Braun. “Rather, when you move from either of the control tasks to improvisation, you see a strong and consistent pattern of activity throughout the brain that enables creativity.”
