"Your Brain on Improv" by Charles Limb gives a fascinating insight into the brain and improvisation.
There’s two main areas of scientific research into creativity. Cognitive Psychology and NeuroScience. Both have made attempts at understanding where creativity comes from and where in our heads it is located.
Updates in scanning technology are allowing new information to be found. the use of fRMI scans in particular is giving an insight into what’s happening in our brain during the creative process. The fMRI works by basically photographing the blood flow in the brain. Where a surge of blood flow appears during an activity there is a correlation to the about of activity that part of the brain is doing.
Charles Limb is a Head and Neck Surgeon. Earlier this year he conducted research into creativity with Jazz musicians using fMRI.
He got some of the best Jazz musicians in America to lie inside an MRI scanner with a modified MIDI keyboard on their laps. the participants memorized a piece of pre-written music and played it. Limb took scans of their brain while they were playing. Then he asked them to play the same piece but at certain points to improvise.
Limb discovered that during these points of improvisation self-monitoring went down and self-expression went up. Interestingly the part of the active part of the brain was the same part which connects to auto-biographical information. Limb replicated this experiment with the participation of freestyle rappers. the artist would rap to a pre-written lyrics and then at a specific moment interject with freestyle lyrics. the scan results shown an infusion of blood to the same area of the brain as the Jazz musicians. So there’s a belief that there is a neurological basis for creative.
What I want to connect here is the idea that production artists use different creative methodologies to produce a constructive improvisation which essentially tricks their brain into shutting down these self-monitoring, more analytical, portions of the brain and open up the self-expressive creative parts of the brain.
