Higher Node Activity with Less Functional Connectivity During Musical Improvisation

Abstract

Musical improvisation is one of the most complex forms of creative behavior, which offers a realistic task paradigm for the investigation of real-time creativity where revision is not possible. Despite some previous studies on musical improvisation and brain activity, what and how brain areas are involved during musical improvisation are not clearly understood. In this article, we designed a new functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, in which, while being in the MRI scanner, advanced jazz improvisers performed improvisatory vocalization and imagery as main tasks and performed a prelearned melody as a control task. We incorporated a musical imagery task to avoid possible confounds of mixed motor and perceptual variables in previous studies. We found that musical improvisation compared with prelearned melody is characterized by higher node activity in the Broca's area, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, lateral premotor cortex, supplementary motor area and cerebellum, and lower functional connectivity in number and strength among these regions. We discuss various explanations for the divergent activation and connectivity results. These results point to the notion that a human creative behavior performed under real-time constraints is an internally directed behavior controlled primarily by a smaller brain network in the frontal cortex.