Why does it feel good to improvise?

Q. Why does it feel good to improvise?

A. A jazz musician posed this question, but a skier or a carpenter could well have asked the same thing. Improvisation is an essential element of creativity, both at work and at play. Certainly the hard work that leads to mastery of any skill is an important source of pride and esteem. But accomplished musicians and athletes (not to mention anyone who has invested time and energy in learning a trade or profession) cherish what such mastery enables: a state of mind of being in a "zone," or what the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi has called "flow."

Drs. Charles Limb and Allen Braun of the National Institutes of Health conducted an experiment to reveal what happens in the brain when a jazz pianist improvises. Dr. Limb, who is an otolaryngologist and plays jazz saxophone, is also on the faculty of the Peabody Institute, the music conservatory at Johns Hopkins University. Limb and Braun enlisted six professional jazz pianists and scanned their brains while they were improvising on a special keyboard that could be played in an MRI machine.

For the study, the pianists played a simple scale as well as a more complex original jazz composition. The researchers were particularly interested to observe how the patterns of brain activity while playing rehearsed music compared to the patterns that appeared as musicians improvised. There was a marked difference between the two conditions.

During improvisation, the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), which sits in the most forward part of the brain's frontal lobe, became very active. The MPFC is thought to integrate information in the service of complex goals that are also identified with a person's sense of self. At the same time, the sides of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) were relatively quiet. This part of the PFC is more involved with conforming to rules than promoting free expression -- it monitors and inhibits inappropriate behavior. It also tends to become more active (and therefore lights up on MRI scans) during problem solving and conscious planning.

So you feel good when you improvise, in part, because you've turned on the part of your brain that is most closely aligned with your aspirations, while quieting neural centers that would otherwise hold you back. But there's more. Structures such as the amygdala and hippocampus, areas of the brain located beneath the cortex that register emotions, especially anxiety, are also relatively quiet.

During improvisation, then, the brain stops being a slave to anxiety and rule-based inhibitions. Instead it is helping itself (that is, you) pursue cherished aims.

It is not so easy to find proficient jazz pianists eager to climb into an MRI scanner, so the number of subjects was too small for the study to be definitive. But the study design was clever enough -- and the images clear enough -- to paint a virtual picture of what the brain looks like when a person is being most inventive and spontaneous. In other words, this experiment provides a plausible depiction of the brain while in a state of "flow" or in the "zone."

This kind of high-order mental state is only available -- as far as we can tell -- to human beings. Implicit in the study results is support for parents who would admonish their children to practice! After all, great jazz players can compose music on the fly only because they have mastered their instruments. They do not need to devote much conscious effort to finding the notes -- their playing is as automatic as speech.

Based on one small study, it is too early to declare that the medial prefrontal cortex is the seat of jazz, let alone all human creativity. But Drs. Limb and Braun have helped demonstrate that meaningful human work and play result from highly evolved human biology rather than magic. -- Michael Craig Miller, M.D. Editor in Chief, Harvard Health Letters.

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