On stage, a jazz pianist continues improvisations as if each idea was born at his fingertips. Behind the scenes of neuroscience, the same scene is replayed but this time in an MRI tunnel, with a mini keyboard on the knees. The objective is to unravel the mysteries of creativity through musical improvisation.
Why jazz improvisation is of so much interest to brain neuroscientists
For researchers, the musical creativity
corresponds to the ability to produce new but adapted ideas. Everything depends on a fragile balance between constraints and freedom, between predictable and surprising. Improvised jazz offers this ideal mix: a fixed chord grid and tempo, but an infinite number of possible paths between two notes.
An international team from the Center for Music in the Brain in Aarhus therefore monitored the brain activity of 16 jazz pianists playing the standard Days of Wine and Roses in a functional MRI. During the experiment, each of the musicians played the same piece for 45 seconds with three degrees of freedom of improvisation: 1) playing the melody from memory; (2) improvise on the melody; and (3) improvise freely on chord changes.
When freedom increased, solos contained more notes, a less predictable melody and shorter intervals, a sign of dense and surprising speech.
In MRI, how jazz improvisation reconfigures brain networks
Thanks to functional MRI and a dynamic analysis method called LEiDA, the team was able to delve into the brains of these virtuosos. They then identified increased activity of the reward system in all conditions compared to rest, particularly in the orbitofrontal cortex. This state appeared more often during play than during rest, a sign that playing music, improvised or not, strongly stimulates the pleasure circuit.
Both forms of improvisation increased the probability of a state dominated by the auditory and motor networks and the salience network or sorting of important information, essential for listening, predicting and coordinating complex gestures in real time. The highest level of free improvisation (was characterized by a higher frequency of a specific brain substate, including the default mode network (normally active brain regions when an individual is not focused on the outside world, and when the brain is at rest), the executive control network (the seat of cognitive functions), and the language network.
What these works say about creativity and musical learning
This work shows that theimprovisation in jazz reconfigures the neural networks according to the degree of freedom left to the musician.
“These findings expand existing models of improvisation by emphasizing the dynamic reconfiguration of specific and general networks, and also highlighting the importance of interaction between networks over time rather than isolated static activation.“, notes Henrique Fernandes of Aarhus University/Royal Academy of Music.
Clearly, the creativity is not a gift lodged in a specific area, but to an ability of the brain to make rapid transitions between multiple brain networks, including those involved in movement, hearing, reward, attention and introspection, depending on the improvisation task. Several networks cooperate according to the improvisation task.
For musicians but not only, these data suggest improving your creativity by training your brain toimprovisation by alternating constrained phases and free passages, keeping in mind that the study concerns a small group of pianists.