I try to argue better. During an improvisation, the frontal areas involved in the conscious control are not entirely ‘turned-off’. Some of them are, in fact, very active. Although the brain does not pay attention to everything that emerges spontaneously, ideas, thoughts and images are continuously monitored, assessed and selected for the action. This critical function inevitably requires the intervention of the frontal lobes (above all prefrontal) that exert control over the motor actions. It would explain why those areas are not entirely ‘turned-off’. This sort of internal generator of thoughts and ideas, memories and images, which crop up spontaneously in the consciousness – attributed to the so-called Default Mode Network – tends to hinder the ‘turning-off’ of conscious control, in favour of a partial or almost total focus on the emerging spontaneous thought characterised by a an intense concentration on the task in progress and by the elimination of chronological time. Now, having established that competence is a necessary condition for efficient improvisation – without experience, indeed, there are no automatisms, contacts with the involuntary memory and space for mind games – it is seen that expert performers show a more marked capacity for the deactivation of the selective attention compared to budding musicians and non-musicians. The cerebral area called upon for such modulation is the temporoparietal junction, which can screen, filter or inhibit information, allowing the performers to integrate the ordinary activities of the mind with the current ones, thus maintaining attention and filtering potentially disturbing external thoughts, ideas and perceptions.

'The most interesting evidence was the widespread ‘turning-off’ of the prefrontal areas, which are generally correlated to the conscious control of the activities in progress and responsible for interference in the capacity to concentrate.' Is it possible perhaps that this switching relates to simplifying the cognitive task by off-loading it to real-time motor actions, so that conscious decisions are progressively suppressed by experts? An important factor might be the speed (i.e. musical tempo) at which these decisions need to be taken. For instance, Charlie Parker is reputed to have rehearsed his melodic lines several times before actually choosing which one to execute. While this is highly anecdotal evidence, as much about mythologising his genius as about real capabilities, this seems worth noting, in other words to ascertain whether the switiching depends on how complex and speedy the executing task might be. A fascinating topic and dear to my improviser's heart.

If at the basis of creativity there is a plurality of cerebral structures and functions what can one say about musical improvisation? - ResearchGate. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/post/If_at_the_basis_of_creativity_there_is_a_plurality_of_cerebral_structures_and_functions_what_can_one_say_about_musical_improvisation [accessed Aug 4, 2016].

The question also depends on how one defines creativity i.e. as a domain-specific or more general phenomenon. There is much mythologising about creativity in improvisation (like CP above) with some arguing that it involves new material being spontaneously invented on the spot and others that it's merely a resynthesis of existing motoric patterns. I think that it includes aspects of both actually, that improvisers may well draw from a store of encoded favourite patterns as well as invent new material on the spot. The truly great ones (pioneers) seem to favour and demonstrate staggering capacities for invention (Jaco Pastorius, Parker, Anthony Braxton, and others) while the rest of us ordinary mortals resynthesise away. Once again, a fascinating topic. Please keep me in the loop as to how it develops.

with great pleasure and thank you for your observations. I think there are two levels to consider. About creativity: years ago Csikszentmihalyi (1996) hypothesised about the existence of the flow, an under-excited and almost automatic state of mind, linked to reduced prefrontal activity, characterised by the absence of tension, which recurs in mental or physical activities with a high level of concentration. This is a sort of direct contact with a primary reality, ordinarily masked by rationality, unpredictable and in continuous evolution, which draws on cues, associations of unused ideas, intuitions and movements, recombining them with different ‘emotional sets’. Such activity (unconscious) would call into question the implicit cognitive systems depending on the basal ganglia, in which the prefrontal cortex is entirely inconsequential. With their implicit strategies and memories, the basal ganglia give rise continuously to new events, while the prefrontal cortex transforms the new events into creative behaviours. In this sense, the rich associative network that allows the striatum to integrate the motivational, cognitive and emotional information, originating from different cortical areas and to transmit them to the prefrontal cortex, represents a generative instrument able to explain both the transformation of the motor and explorative experiences into cognitive skills, and the production of analogies at the basis of creative discoveries.
 The flow may also be considered a temporal interval during which a routine ability or a cognitive function takes place without the interference of the explicit system: a state of lesser activity of the prefrontal lobe that would temporarily “turn off” the analytical capacities of the explicit system. As we shall see below, to be persistent, the flow requires attention and, therefore, the activation of the frontal nerve network. Within certain limits it is compatible with a decrease in the prefrontal function that weakens self-awareness. Indeed, it is viewed as a lower level of frontal activity that allows the mind to focus on a target causing the stand-by of the other executive and cognitive abilities of the prefrontal cortex. Now, if the focussing of attention on the current activity allows the implicit system to function at the maximum level of efficiency, creativity emerges from the involvement of different cerebral circuits: as we have already maintained, the new event is first generated within the implicit system (ventral striatum) and then analysed and processed by the prefrontal cortex, which transforms the new event into responses to critical variables and into creative behaviors ...

About improvisation. The variability of action, decisive in improvisation, occurs in all performances by experts, unlike the musical repetition of a musician who plays on the basis of his/her inner ear. For the performers of scores the instrument actually assumes relative importance, unlike a jazz player whose mind is deeply rooted in his/her own instrument. In any case, the expressive capacity of a performer is fostered by access to their own ‘productive’ (creative) or ‘reproductive’ (mnestic) tonal imagery: a field of consciousness that includes experiences, images that are internal, combined, distorted, associated or in competition between themselves. In the highly original form of life that is jazz, narrating means directing time: a time of epiphanies and introversions, of intuitions and revelations, of syncopated rhythms and aesthetic insights, which appear and disappear on the edges of interference between consciousness and the unconscious. The performing urgency of gestures, voices and sounds, though arranged in the same scene, highlights the difference in individual time. In this intense activity of opposition and resolution the experience becomes an unstable territory that rests on the capacity of the body to remember, decide, anticipate and invent. The ego reveals itself to be an emerging representation of our nerve structures and, even if conscious organisation continues to be attributed to it, its role is not at all crucial. Unity, if anything, means coordination. The conscious ego is the expression of the body. In its ultimate form its unity is a biological problem.

This is a beautiful expression of why I play jazz.

I'm particularly non-visual myself so tend to look a bit askance at the whole idea of 'imagery' and the oxymoron 'auditory imagery.' Acknowledging multi-modal possibilities, images are seen and not heard, to my mind, so how does one then 'see' a set of vibrations?

'For the performers of scores the instrument actually assumes relative importance, unlike a jazz player whose mind is deeply rooted in his/her own instrument.'

To play an instrument at expert level requires deep rooting in embodied experience I think but if I understand this rightly you're saying that it becomes less of a primary focus when an external mnemonic (such as a score) is introduced into the environment. Agreed 100%. One has to regulate one's focus quite carefully in those circumstances. Jokingly a bit, I think the 'classical' players like their Strads, like the rock people their Fenders. They are in one sense merely tools with all the phenomenological complications that that idea introduces (perhaps).

If I may say so, 'The predictive brain' is a very readable and intellectually rewarding book. Thanks to you for that, and this correspondence.

If at the basis of creativity there is a plurality of cerebral structures and functions what can one say about musical improvisation? - ResearchGate. Available from: https://www.researchgate.net/post/If_at_the_basis_of_creativity_there_is_a_plurality_of_cerebral_structures_and_functions_what_can_one_say_about_musical_improvisation [accessed Aug 4, 2016].

Thanks a lot, Marc! I think another important issue of our discussion concerns the group improvisation. What happens, here? Obviously the practical constraints in the use of brain imaging make the experimental tasks even more arduous. With respect to solo improvisation, a lesser activation of the Default Mode Network in group situations has recently been reported. There is reason to believe that the necessary harmonisation of emerging materials, typical of a group performance, hinders the ’turning-off’ of the prefrontal structures and, on the contrary, raises attention levels. Moreover, the unexpected variations require significant voluntary modulations and a minimum tempo of about 300-500 ms, during which the musicians react to the change introduced by other performers. This is a continuous self-hetero-monitoring, a temporo-spatial parametric control that reintroduces expressive and compositional decision-making control. In the overall production the decision-making improvisational procedures derive from the efficiency of the perceptive transformation and from the insertion of information that is increasingly better selected. The need for this efficiency is demanded by the individual skill of the performers to process musical material and make it react with the set of emerging sensory inputs. We find similar phenomena in team sports, where the levels of performance are enormously more complex that in individual ones. The greater ability in the directing of attention and the more refined capacity to ‘read’ of the vertical space of volleyball players or the constant control and monitoring of every technical-tactical sequence, the rapid skills of anticipation and adaptation of talented football players (though the discourse may be broadened to all other group sports) inevitably entail an intensification of the executive and decision-making control and, therefore, the restarting of prefrontal activity.

Improvisational skills of a higher order require an increasingly more efficient use of information, which occurs with the reduction of the redundant and the exaltation of what is more relevant. In music it is the focus of attention that marks the difference between a performance using a score and another that is improvised. In the latter the dynamics evolve towards minimum attention. The musician has ceased to reflect. The automatisms have liberated him/her from any obstacle to expression resulting from their own personality. Besides: he/she has by that point automated their own execution so as to enable the partial abandonment of focussed attention. Involuntary memory, intensified by emotional and cognitive processes, furthermore, allows him/her to generate and instantly evaluate every emerging harmonic and rhythmic theme. Each arrangement is subject to continuous atemporal influences. Also for this reason improvisation is not a property of time (chronological), but a movement in time (corporeal) made of poly-rhythms and dissonances, pauses and syncopated, continuous changes in pitches and scale, in many ways unexpected and unpredictable.

I´m not sure how it´d correlate to evidence on the ‘turning-off’ of the prefrontal areas, but I know from personal experience that improvisation requires mastery of shutting down the "internal editor".

It´s a bit of a letting go process as I´m not sure that entering creative flow does leave much time or space to worry, judgment or evaluation (unless the piece goes through really calm events based on repetition, through which one can definitely take some other kind of perspective that is more self-referential).

Perhaps it´s a combination of various "states" but creation of new material seems somehow more linked to curiosity and fearlessness to me than it is to musical mastery. It´s a type of resonance (synchronising with the creative force, the instrument, the piece and the present moment, other musicians if it´s a group improvisation... etc) and it can be learnt and practised.   

Also, I imagine there are many other variables involved than brain structures that could be "measured" such as heart coherence (HRV), galvanic skin response (GSR), biofield...

Dear Javi, I absolutely agree with your observations. There is another important question to ask about, without which our reflection would seem partial to me, the group improvisation. Here obviously the practical constraints in the use of brain imaging make the experimental tasks even more arduous. With respect to solo improvisation, a lesser activation of the Default Mode Network in group situations has recently been reported. There is reason to believe that the necessary harmonisation of emerging materials, typical of a group performance, hinders the ’turning-off’ of the prefrontal structures and, on the contrary, raises attention levels. Moreover, the unexpected variations require significant voluntary modulations and a minimum tempo of about 300-500 ms, during which the musicians react to the change introduced by other performers. This is a continuous self-hetero-monitoring, a temporo-spatial parametric control that reintroduces expressive and compositional decision-making control. In the overall production the decision-making improvisational procedures derive from the efficiency of the perceptive transformation and from the insertion of information that is increasingly better selected. The need for this efficiency is demanded by the individual skill of the performers to process musical material and make it react with the set of emerging sensory inputs. We find similar phenomena in team sports, where the levels of performance are enormously more complex that in individual ones. The greater ability in the directing of attention and the more refined capacity to ‘read’ of the vertical space of volleyball players or the constant control and monitoring of every technical-tactical sequence, the rapid skills of anticipation and adaptation of talented football players (though the discourse may be broadened to all other group sports) inevitably entail an intensification of the executive and decision-making control and, therefore, the restarting of prefrontal activity.

Improvisational skills of a higher order require an increasingly more efficient use of information, which occurs with the reduction of the redundant and the exaltation of what is more relevant. In music it is the focus of attention that marks the difference between a performance using a score and another that is improvised. In the latter the dynamics evolve towards minimum attention. The musician has ceased to reflect. The automatisms have liberated him/her from any obstacle to expression resulting from their own personality. Besides: he/she has by that point automated their own execution so as to enable the partial abandonment of focussed attention. Involuntary memory, intensified by emotional and cognitive processes, furthermore, allows him/her to generate and instantly evaluate every emerging harmonic and rhythmic theme. Each arrangement is subject to continuous atemporal influences. Also for this reason improvisation is not a property of time (chronological), but a movement in time (corporeal) made of poly-rhythms and dissonances, pauses and syncopated, continuous changes in pitches and scale, in many ways unexpected and unpredictable.

In sport, as in musical improvisation, intuition, invention and creativity function as vanguards of the mind, enabling one to grasp what remains invisible to ordinary perception. For this reason, a new perception is needed, such as that of great sports champions who see things that others do not and imagine moves or pieces of skill that other players can’t even conceive of. The performance of a sport champion is much more effective as less aware he is. Their performances are unconscious for the most part. Of course, in sport, as in other spheres of human action, inventions and creations are some of the highest expressions of the human mind. But the mind cannot be reduced to awareness and, above all, the latter has no primacy in the life of the mind.

This wonderful discussion reminds me of Bob Snyder's book "Music and Memory". Does your work address questions about how jazz musicians ways of describing their improvisations as unconscious are related to the way long term memory is built, and how practice establishes long term memory to form a context for current awareness?

I was thinking about the possibility of relating their ways of describing improvisation with Snyder's definitions of "recognition",( when we see or hear what is familiar coming from the environment entering STM through activation of LTM) "identification" (when we, besides recognizing something, are able to connect it with memories of its name  and associated with its concept)  and "conscious recollection" (when we purposefully try to retrieve something from LTM).

Dear Ubirajara,

thanks for your suggestion. Unfortunately I don't know the Bob Snyder's book "Music and Memory", but I'll try it. In my opinion, our brain, more than a reactive machine (as yet it was stated for a long time), it is a predictive machine, that formulates hypotheses, provides the consequences of actions and plays in advance. The evolution of motor schemes of behaviour has given rise to an natural logic underpinning prediction and action. In his long adaptive challenge, the human brain not only tuned systems for fast action reshaping, but also molded the entire musculoskeletal architecture and redefined the internal models of the body. 

In the original form of life that is jazz, narrating means directing time: a time of epiphanies and introversions, of intuitions and revelations, of syncopated rhythms and aesthetic insights, which appear and disappear on the edges of interference between consciousness and the unconscious.

Dear Mauro,

Thanks for your reply. Would you recommend a book or article about creativity? It is such an important term but so loosely defined.

https://www.amazon.com/Music-Memory-Introduction-MIT-Press-ebook/dp/B00MHAUYY8/ref=sr_1_1_twi_kin_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1481212808&sr=1-1&keywords=9780262692373

Thanks a lot, dear Ubirajara. I'll buy it!!

Mauro, in regards to your comment about performance of sport champions being largely unconscious (and hence, highly effective), please see the link below. I think you´ll really like it :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nhRPVWM9A0

Dear Javi, thank you, indeed. Very interesting video!

Wonderful question!

To my thinking, two key areas of investigation and theorizing that seem most plausible for accounting for music-improvisation - ie., spontaneous, creative generating of musical constructs, perhaps wilfully comprising novel, previously untried juxtapositions of component sounds - are research into mind-wandering and into the default mode network (DMN) which evidently mediates the selecting of thoughts and mental imagery alighted on during mind-wandering.

Both mind-wandering and the DMN are most usually associated with mental states that are not engaged in attending to aspects of a particular task or intent. Yet - in my own daily experiencing of it - improvising is a thoroughly intentional, attentively focused state, psychological set, or mode of performance in which musical mind-wandering is nevertheless free to occur. The mind is specifically engaged in a "meta-task" level of activity that implies a particular "global workspace" but whose components' content has not yet been formulated.  This suggests that the default mode network is hierarchically deployable -  music improvising engaging a default sub-mode network - and demonstrates still further hierarchical sub-modes that permit improvisatory mind-wandering in the idiom of a particular composer or genre, and at even more finely-grained levels, on the features of a particular melodic motif,  harmonic sequence, and/or rhythmic pattern. 

Clearly the kind of mind-wandering involved here is not randomly controlled. Selection of immediately forthcoming ideas continually draws on long-term cognitive representations of categorized musical entities and relies on auditory and sensorimotor feedback for choosing what to play next from within a range of stochastically suggested possibilities. Implicit, concrete or abstract syntactic formulae are cognitive determinants here, too. However, I believe a crucial propellant of the mind-wandering flow involves the default mode/sub-mode network making reference -to emotionally mediated "somatic markers" (cf. A. Damasio) that accord contextual valence to any given cognitive entity, allowing its instantaneous re-activation and possible relaying to conscious working memory. Indeed I would propose that it's crucial for the spontaneous creating of successive ideas that the DMN subjugates itself to the influence of such emotional markers.

Music-improvisation has been the target of a considerable amount of recent neuroscientific research. Here is just one paper offering insights:

Beaty, R. E. (2015). The neuroscience of musical improvisation. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews, 51, 108-117.

It's available here on RG. I also include the link to its PubMed abstract page, as the page includes links to other articles of relevance:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25601088

Excellent post, Richard!

In musical improvisation there is a continuous self-hetero-monitoring, a temporo-spatial parametric control that reintroduces expressive and compositional decision-making control. In the overall production the decision-making improvisational procedures derive from the efficiency of the perceptive transformation and from the accurate selection of information. The need for this efficiency is demanded by the individual skill of the performers to process musical material and make it react with the set of emerging sensory inputs. We find similar phenomena in team sports, where the levels of performance are enormously more complex that in individual ones. The greater ability in the directing of attention and the more refined capacity to ‘read’ of the vertical space of volleyball players, as well as the constant control and monitoring of every technical-tactical sequence, the rapid skills of anticipation and adaptation of talented football players (though the discourse may be broadened to all other group sports) inevitably entail an intensification of the executive and decision-making control and, therefore, the restarting of prefrontal activity.

The musician and team sportman share similarity in task.  Both are trying to change their augmented body (biological body + instrument/ball and sporting space structure) and both do it cooperatively and thus forming  a larger body  (orchestra/team) of which they are a part engaging into a total performance (the team's performance, the orchestra's performance).  This is typically mammalian herd behavior: individual behavior coordinate into collective behavior.  In the case of football , it is easy to understand that the goal of the team behavior is to bring a ball into the other's team goal.  But music is not a doing so easily described.  Football and orchestra behavior (music) are both enjoyed by an audience when done artfully.  Empathy is central to the players and to the audience, is sine qua none to the cooperation and the anticipation.  Both have also assimilated sport/musical culture through an enculturation into the sport or musical style that involved a long transformational history of their bodies allowing them to improvise within a thick body interface narrative of these behavior. Improvisation for a footballer has more to do with anticipating a possibility whose anticipation by the adversaries is difficult.  Improvisation for the solo musician is also about anticipation of a musical narrative that is not too obvious which even counter-intuitive.  Enjoyment of music is not possible when the music (or sport performance) become too familiar and when the music/play is too easily anticipated. But musical composition could be done offline by a composer within his own body musical interface while offline composition in sport is limited to the preparation of basic play but a match cannot be composed offline given that they are two teams while in music there is only one.  So the sport total performance has three levels: individual play, team play, match while the musical total performance has two levels: individual play, orchestra play.

Improvisational skills of a higher order require an increasingly more efficient use of information, which occurs with the reduction of the redundant and the exaltation of the relevant ones. In music it is the focus of attention that marks the difference between a performance using a score and another that is improvised. In the latter the dynamics evolve towards minimum attention. The musician has ceased to reflect. The automatisms have liberated him/her from any obstacle to expression resulting from their own personality. Besides: he/she has by that point automated their own execution so as to enable the partial abandonment of focused attention. Involuntary memory, intensified by emotional and cognitive processes, furthermore, allows him/her to generate and instantly evaluate every emerging harmonic and rhythmic theme. Each arrangement is subject to continuous atemporal influences. Also for this reason improvisation is not a property of time (chronological), but a movement in time (corporeal) made of poly-rhythms and dissonances, pauses and syncopated, continuous changes in pitches and scale, in many ways unexpected and unpredictable.

In sport, as in musical improvisation, intuition, invention and creativity function as vanguards of the mind, enabling one to grasp what remains invisible to ordinary perception. For this reason, a new perception is needed, such as that of great sports champions who see things that others do not and imagine moves or pieces of skill that other players can’t even conceive of. The performance of a sport champion is much more effective as less aware he is. Their performances are unconscious for the most part. Of course, in sport, as in other spheres of human action, inventions and creations are some of the highest expressions of the human mind. But the mind cannot be reduced to awareness and, above all, the latter has no primacy in the life of the mind.