Brain Scans of Rappers Show How Creativity Works

In a surprising collision of improvisational art and neuroscience, a pair of researchers in Bethesda imaged the brains of rappers in the throes of freestyles to get a glimpse into the mind’s creative process.

Freestyle rapping provides a unique kind of language-based cerebral spontaneity that could be useful in shedding light on the “poorly understood” nature of creativity, the scientists say in their new article. Leading theories lay out a two-part process that begins with a burst of “novel material” in the prefrontal cortex, followed by “focused re-evaluation and revision.” Working from that premise, the scientists set out to learn more about the first part: What does spontaneity look like?

Rather than rock a club or a concert hall, the study’s 12 subjects took turns hopping inside an fMRI machine and letting loose with lyrics from the top of their heads while scientists monitored their brain activity. As a kind of control, the rhyme sayers also recited lyrics they already knew. (Talk about dropping science!)

The scans indicated that rap improvisation produces “dissociated activity” in parts of the prefrontal cortex, suggesting that there’s a network in our brains linking “motivation, language, affect and movement.”

Cerebral calisthenics

Rather interesting is that rappers and scientists think of that spontaneous improvisation in the same term: flow.

When a rapper’s flow gets going, the scientists noticed that the medial cortex activated and the dorsolateral cortex deactivated, which “may provide a context in which self-generated action is freed from the conventional constraints of supervisory attention and executive control, facilitating the generation of novel ideas.”

“We think what we see is a relaxation of executive functions to allow more natural de-focused attention and uncensored processes to occur that might be the hallmark of creativity,” said Allen Braun, one of two neuroscientists at the U.S. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, in Bethesda, who performed the experiment.

Sounds to me like science talk for freeing one’s mind.

“That’s kind of the nature of that type of improvisation,” said Michael Eagle, who co-authored the study and raps under the moniker Open Mike Eagle. “Even as people who do it, we’re not 100% sure of where we’re getting improvisation from.”

This isn’t the first time Braun has stuck freestylers in a brain scanner and watched what happens. In 2008, he published results from an experiment involving jazz musicians improvising under the microscope that reinforce the new freestyle rap results: They showed lower activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and higher activity in the medial prefrontal cortex of their frontal lobes.