If in the musical world there are styles that stand out for their improvisation, those are jazz and rap . We imagine a jazz band in which apparently everyone goes their own way and yet produces a sound that the slightly more expert ears experience as harmonic. At another level we find rap singers, who improvise lyrics faster than we are capable of processing and we wonder how they are capable of doing it. We know that music stimulates our brain and benefits it in different ways, but what is the brain of a good musical improviser like?
Roger E. Beaty, from the University of North Carolina in Greensboro (United States) has reviewed the most recent scientific works and has found that certainly in order to improvise in music, different structures in the brain need to be activated .
The summary of the reviewed research has been recently published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews (2015), where Beaty presents the available knowledge about the relationships between improvisation and other more general cognitive processes, as well as about the role that experience or made to collaborate with other musicians in improvisation.
More specifically, studies that have used functional mangetic resonance imaging have shown the relevance of different structures located in prefrontal areas of the brain. These include the supplementary motor area, the medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, the inferior frontal gyrus, and the dorsal premotor cortex. As explained by the author of the review, it seems that mental processes such as cognitive control or motor planning could be conducive to less restrictive behavior in music. Furthermore, it seems that the default neural network could play a role as part of spontaneous mental processes.
What is the role of experience? According to the findings, more experienced musicians could dedicate part of their processing resources to improvisation, creating new musical sequences and not using them en masse in the musical act itself.
You don’t have to become a rapper, but you can get a more creative brain capable of improvising by training your cognitive abilities. Don’t improvise your brain health.
Marisa Fernández, Senior Neuropsychologist, Unobrain
