1 Department of Physics and Astronomy, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia.
2 School of Music, Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia.
Brain Connect. 2019 Apr;9(3):296-309. doi: 10.1089/brain.2017.0566. Epub 2019 Mar 7.
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.
音乐即兴创作是最复杂的创造性行为形式之一，为实时创造力的研究提供了一个现实的任务范例，在这种研究中，不可能进行修改。尽管之前有一些关于音乐即兴创作和大脑活动的研究，但在音乐即兴创作过程中涉及到哪些脑区以及如何涉及这些脑区尚不清楚。在本文中，我们设计了一项新的功能磁共振成像（fMRI）研究，在这项研究中，高级爵士即兴演奏者在 MRI 扫描仪内进行即兴发声和意象作为主要任务，并进行预先学习的旋律作为控制任务。我们加入了一个音乐意象任务，以避免之前研究中混合运动和感知变量可能产生的混淆。我们发现，与预先学习的旋律相比，音乐即兴创作的特征是布罗卡区、背外侧前额叶皮层、外侧运动前皮层、辅助运动区和小脑的节点活动更高，以及这些区域之间的数量和强度的功能连接更低。我们讨论了对发散激活和连通性结果的各种解释。这些结果表明，在实时约束下进行的人类创造性行为是一种由额叶皮层中的较小脑网络主要控制的内部导向行为。
