Neural substrates of spontaneous musical improvisation.

Abstract

To investigate the neural substrates that underlie spontaneous musical performance, functional MRI was used to study improvisation in professional jazz pianists. The purpose of the study was to identify the neural substrates that give rise to spontaneous musical creativity, defined as the immediate, on‐line improvisation of novel melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic musical elements within a relevant musical context. It was hypothesized that spontaneous musical improvisation would be associated with discrete changes in prefrontal activity that provide a biological substrate for actions that are characterized by creative self‐expression in the absence of conscious self‐monitoring. By employing two paradigms that differed widely in musical complexity, it was found that improvisation (compared to production of over‐learned musical sequences) was consistently characterized by a dissociated pattern of activity in the prefrontal cortex: extensive deactivation of dorsolateral prefrontal and lateral orbital regions wi...