OPTIMIZING THE TRANCE
The sight of an improviser is an easy one to conjure. Their eyes are often closed in thought, they are swaying in a trance to their performance, and at the highest level they seem completely at one with their art. Why should improvisation evoke such a trancelike state? Recent research shows that by shutting down parts of the brain that determine inhibitions and turning up parts that facilitate creativity, improvisers reach a state that allows them to be optimally creative and free.
A Johns Hopkins study called “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation” used functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) machines to scan jazz musicians’ brains while improvising and not improvising. While playing back a previously memorized passage, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which controls self-inhibition and consciousness, was highly active. Such areas of the brain would be activated in a job interview or awkward social situation. Interestingly, while improvising, these inhibitory parts of the brain were nearly shut down in the musicians. This absence of activity in this self-conscious brain region was coupled with increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, a region connected with expressions of personality, such as storytelling. This result was the same whether the musician was told to improvise alone on just a simple C major scale or whether he was allowed to improvise freely in any key with a full jazz quartet. The conclusion is startling: even the slightest modicum of improvisation shuts down inhibitions and amps up creativity.
An video on the website of the British science and art organization the Welcome Collection, “The Science of Improvisation,” shows that the levels of activity in the inhibitory regions of the brain are identical while dreaming and improvising. This fact explains both an improviser’s apparent dream-like state and his or her ability to perform with such uninhibited freedom. This creativity also manifests itself in daily life. “A lot of musicians improvise outside of their instruments” says Katzenstein. “Improv is a way of life, not just a music thing. It comes across in how they talk to people.”
MINDFUL MANNER
The improvisational lifestyle, if adopted, can have numerous positive benefits for the breadth and utility of our imaginations. “For the past 40 years I’ve been studying the mindlessness of actions,” says Langer. “The research makes it clear that mostly all of us are mindless nearly all the time.” By using the word “mindless,” Langer implies that most people go through the world without the sense of presence that allows for them to notice or create new things. To Langer, improvisers seek and perform the novel rather than repeat trite, overdone combinations.
To Alfonso Montouri, author of the “The Complexity of Improvisation and the Improvisation of Complexity,” an article published in the journal Human Relations, the avoidance of such repetition is really what drives creativity. “Creativity involves constant organizing, disorganizing, and reorganizing,” he writes in the article. “It involves actively breaking down assumptions, givens, traditions, pushing boundaries and moving out of comfort zones.” For Montouri, then, all creative ventures are inherently improvisational.
Langer once did a study with an orchestra to learn whether or not being “mindful”—defined earlier as choosing new combinations—made the performers and audiences happier. On one run members of the orchestra was told to play a passage mindlessly by “remembering a time you played a performance extremely well and replicating it.” On the second run the musicians were told to play the passage mindfully by “playing it inventively in a way you would do best.” When the recordings were played back to test listeners, the listeners overwhelmingly favored the mindfully played recordings. The musicians also said they preferred playing mindfully.
The search for fresh perspectives not only increases happiness but also mental stability and problem solving. “According to the research, creative persons score higher both on measures of pathology and of psychological health,” says Montouri. “In other words, they have access to a much broader range of human experience.” “Science of Improvisation” also finds that improvisation has a positive impact on problem-solving abilities and improvisers in all art forms often have heightened verbal and spatial abilities directly after a performance. Most research on the effects of improvisation on the mind can be summarized simply: even small amounts of creative thinking and improvisation makes people smarter and happier.
We often go through our lives “mindlessly,” seeking only to get through the day. But what if every lesson, every conversation, every experience was as original and novel as an improv performance, a policy debate, or a jazz solo? The musicians Katzenstein knows live this ideal: “they push themselves and try not to repeat themselves; they try to be fresh as musicians and as people.”
—Staff writer Siddarth Viswanathan can be reached at viswan@college.harvard.edu.