Many of us know of someone who can sit down at the piano and create a brilliant piece of music off the cuff.
Psychology professor Daniel Ansari’s latest research has sparked new curiosity’s with the brain.
But what is the brain up to during such improvisation? Could that be the root of creativity?
Western Psychology professor Daniel Ansari and Harvard University ethnomusicology graduate student Aaron Berkowitz were curious enough about this question to seek the help of a dozen classically trained pianists, then began tickling the ‘ivories of the brain’ to find some answers.
Through a Harvard Mind/Brain/Behaviour Initiative award, the pair set out to find, with the help of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) technology, how the brain ‘does’ music and what it can tell us about the brain.
While studies have been done what listening to music – for example, classical – can do for the developing brain, this study was the first to look at the process of music improvisation.
“It’s a real cross-disciplinary study,” says Ansari. He was still at Dartmouth College in the United States when the study began, and has been analyzing the data ever since.
“It was a nice area to branch out into something new. He (Aaron) would come with the big ideas and I would fit them into a package that was experimentally viable, to get some interpretive results.
“I didn’t really have a good idea of what the outcome would be. I knew it was going to be interesting, but also challenging at the same time to isolate the area of the brain involved in improvisation.”
To isolate what is unique around brain activity during improvisation, or novel action sequences, four activities were set up: play pre-learned patterns both with and without a metronome (a device that marks time for musicians at a selected rate); and improvise melodies with and without a metronome.
“What we found is that there are areas of the brain that are more modulated when you have rhythmic and melodic freedom than when you don’t,” says Ansari.
“To make up a melody and determine the timing – the most free conditions – that was when we saw a whole host of regions in the left hemisphere exhibit high levels of activation. That’s our way of saying you’re improvising, you’re creating novel sequences.”
The interesting part is they feel these findings are not necessarily specific to music.
“It has more to do with sequencing and generating novel sequences across domains,” says Ansari, whose study was published in the journal NeuroImage and won the 2008 Editor’s Choice Award in Systems Neuroscience.
“So you can imagine the same idea with a painter or a dancer.”
So have we now discovered the origins of creativity? Not quite, says Ansari.
“Everyone is interested in what is the seed of creativity. How do we become creative? It’s given us a deeper understanding of some of the fundamental aspects of what makes us human, but creativity is such a loose concept,” says Ansari. “It’s so hard to pin down. I think with some of this neuroscientific data, we’re going to be able to operationalize creativity a bit better and strip it down to its bare bones and analyze what are the constituent parts of creativity.”
But a definite answer?
“It’s like asking the question: what is intelligence? It’s too hard to define.”
The pair continue to pore through data from their original study. One of the areas they’re interested in studying is the relationship between music and language. In language we are always generating novel sequences (in this case, words) to assemble coherent and grammatically correct sentences.
They will also review the same study with non-musicians, using data collected in the initial work.
For Ansari, thinking outside the box with this latest research has again sparked his curiosity with the brain.
“You have to be willing to take a risk. It was a risk for me because it branches out of my major research area, a topic area I’m not really familiar with, but it was a great opportunity for me to work inter-disciplinary and to get some new ideas,” he says.
“There are so many puzzles you could solve. As a researcher you can only pick a few, but this has been a really interesting experience for me.”