Improvisation is often likened to magic. The artist can seem less like the author than a conduit, as if the music were piped in from somewhere just out of view. Creativity researchers have long sought to pin down what fuels this imaginative process: What is really happening in the brain when inspiration strikes?
To sort signal from noise, Henrique Fernandes of the Royal Academy of Music and Aarhus University together with jazz musician and neuroscientist Peter Vuust asked 16 jazz pianists to play a famous jazz standard, “Days of Wine and Roses,” while their brains were scanned. Each pianist performed the song three times: from memory; improvising around the melody; and improvising freely around the chord changes underpinning the song.
The results suggest that improvisation is more than a flash of inspiration. It corresponds with distinct, dynamic, and identifiable changes in the music and in the brain. The more creative freedom the artists had, the more notes they played and the less predictable their playing. Entropy, or variation and surprise in musical patterns, increased. This confirmed for the scientists that creative freedom they were trying to measure in the brain scans was something real, as opposed to abstract.
Read more: “What Time Feels Like When You’re Improvising”
The biggest surprise showed up when the researchers analyzed which brain networks were involved. Compared with rest, improvisation activated networks related to hearing, movement, coordination and reward, a configuration the team described as “improv” mode. In this state, the brain tightly couples what the musician hears, feels, and plays from one instant to the next.
But as improvisation became freer, brain activity subtly shifted. Networks long thought to be crucial for creativity became less dominant—including the default mode network associated with spontaneous thought, and the executive control network, involved in planning and self-monitoring. Rather than thinking harder, the brain loosened its grip, falling back instead on fast, well-trained auditory and motor networks.
“These results expand existing models of improvisation by emphasizing the dynamic reconfiguration of specific and general networks,” explained Henrique Fernandes in a statement. The team published their findings in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.
The study authors liken jazz improvisation to a conversation. The musicians rely on a shared vocabulary, respond to dynamic cues in real time, anticipate replies, build phrases on the fly. The brain data supports this interpretation: In the brain, improvisation looks less like planning and more like fluent, embodied communication, like speaking to a loved one.
The scientists say their research framework could be used to study other forms of creativity in real time: dance, writing, conversation, scientific insight. Ultimately, the findings suggest that creativity isn’t monolithic. Under different circumstances, it relies on different balances of perception and action, of emotion and control. 
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Lead image: Koldunov / Shutterstock
