What I found when I scanned the brains of kids creating tunes on the piano

Research shows that improvisation and creativity are good for the brain. In an episode of the Greater Good Science Center’s “Science of Happiness” podcast, host Shuka Kalantari talked to Karen Barrett about what happens in the brain when people improvise music. Barrett is an assistant professor in the Institute for Health & Aging at the University of California, San Francisco who researches the effects of music on aging and health.

Shuka Kalantari:  What led you to improv?

Karen Barrett: My dad was a scientist and classical guitarist, and my mom played piano. So I actually started playing piano when I was 5 years old and ended up going to Wellesley College to double-major in music and neuroscience.

I did my master’s in piano performance and then found out about this Ph.D. in music cognition which could blend music and neuroscience. That’s how I got started on this career path.

Then, I started my postdoc at UCSF with Charles Limb, who’s a jazz musician. He was a big improviser and was already studying it. I found it a little bit magical and fascinating because it’s not something I do very easily.

 I think improv has made me less rigid. There’s no right or wrong way; there just is. If you make a mistake, do it over and over again, and it’s no longer a mistake. It can lead you to your next motive.

Kalantari:  What happens in the brain when a person is playing something memorized versus improvised?

Barrett:   Music is what we call multimodal. It activates all sorts of domains in the brain: the listening center, pattern perception, visual, emotional, motor and proprioception areas. It is biologically powerful that way.

Charles Limb’s original study from 2008 took expert jazz pianists and had them either improvise or play something that they had memorized. When they improvised, they deactivated a portion of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is like turning off self-judgment. They activated a portion of the brain called the medial prefrontal cortex, which is involved when you want to increase your own artistic voice.

We found that when you’re improvising, you have a different set of activities in your brain compared to when you’re playing. In other words, improvisation is a form of generative creativity. You’re suddenly on the spot, within a certain context, trying to create music. And so that’s why we have unique neural areas that are involved in improvisation.

Kalantari:  Recently you published research on musical improv with children. How did it come about that you went from studying trained professionals to children?

Barrett:  There’s all this work in creativity about expertise. These trained musicians have had years of practice. They have all these schemas and licks in their brain from having studied for so long that they can pull out when they’re playing. But what about the beginners? What about kids?

From a neuroplasticity and a brain activity perspective, we know that kids are highly able to learn new things, right? They don’t operate the same way adults do, and I wanted to see if I could capture the kind of raw creativity that kids have.

We prepped them a lot for the fMRI, a special type of MRI machine that allows us to image the brain. I had them play the “statue game” to show them how still they needed to be. And I had this little mini-keyboard hooked up to my laptop, and I kind of acted like their first piano teacher. First, I taught them a scale. Then, I had them play the notes in whatever order they wanted.

Kalantari: Tell us what you found, and how that affects the way that you think about creativity.

Barrett:  First off, like many of the other studies from our lab, we found that improvising was a very different process from playing the scale. That in itself shows that maybe there’s something innate about this creativity.

The main thing about their brains when they’re improvising as opposed to playing that scale is that it’s mostly about deactivation. When we plot this in brain maps, we use red to show activation and blue to show deactivation. Their brains were mostly blue.

The places that they were deactivating are all sensory hubs, meaning they’re not having some sort of artistic voice that’s coming out. Unlike the jazz musicians, where the medial prefrontal cortex just activates to show their own artistic voice, these kids are just kind of doing this activity, and they’re not doing it from this artistic place.

But then on top of that, those structures are actually all areas of the brain that are involved in creativity in adults. The kids haven’t had a chance to develop the way adults have, so maybe these areas are the beginning of the creativity network that we eventually see in adults.

The most surprising finding was that improvisation engages reward structures more than playing that scale. And that wasn’t found as easily in the jazz musicians. What does that tell us about creativity being something possibly built into how the brain works, rather than something that’s learned through training?

I think the fMRI scanning kind of captures the beginner’s mind and shows that we all have a capability to be creative without training at all.

Kalantari: What is your coolest takeaway from the study?

Barrett:  I think what I want people to realize is that doing the arts is inherently valuable, but also very good for the brain and health. We can leverage the fact that creativity and music uses these unique parts of your brain for our own health and benefit.

My biggest takeaway is that we need to get out of our own way, turn off that critic and be creative. Maybe it’s not music; maybe it’s coloring, painting or embroidery. Just doing it is rewarding for the brain, so I’m going to do it, and I don’t need to be good at it.

Knowing we all have the capacity to be creative has really taken off a lot of these shackles that I would normally put on myself. When you realize that improvisation is really fundamental to all our lives, that we’re doing it all the time, it makes it a little easier to do.