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Brain Scans of Rappers and Jazz Musicians Shed Light On Creativity
ananyo writes "Rappers making up rhymes on the fly while in a brain scanner have provided an insight into the creative process. Freestyle rapping — in which a performer improvises a song by stringing together unrehearsed lyrics — is a highly prized skill in hip hop. But instead of watching a performance in a club, Siyuan Liu and Allen Braun, neuroscientists at the U.S. National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders in Bethesda, Maryland, and their colleagues had 12 rappers freestyle in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine. The artists also recited a set of memorized lyrics chosen by the researchers. By comparing the brain scans from rappers taken during freestyling to those taken during the rote recitation, they were able to see which areas of the brain are used during improvisation. The rappers showed lower activity in part of their frontal lobes called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during improvisation, and increased activity in another area, called the medial prefrontal cortex. The areas that were found to be 'deactivated' are associated with regulating other brain functions. The results echo an earlier study of jazz musicians. The findings also suggest an explanation for why new music might seem to the artist to be created of its own accord. With less involvement by the lateral prefrontal regions of the brain, the performance could seem to its creator to have 'occurred outside of conscious awareness,' the authors write in the paper."
Bonus points for science rhymes; for anyone who has the time.
Rappers were the control group, I suppose?
That rhyme was terrible,
yes, completely unbearable.
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
cause one day it may matter
youtube regulating genes
I want to hear MRI'in while freestylin'.
I carry no props for the Blood or the Crips
Cuz I code Hello, World in fifty different scripts
I get money and cars and gigabytes of perks
Til I stand up in Scrum and say "Boss, it almost works"
How? By illustrating the lack of?
Lets be fair. Flavor Flav? Yea, you know which one I'm talking about.
Did you know he's actually a musical prodigy? He plays somewhere around 25 instruments. I mean -plays- too, not just makes noise.
(of course that doesn't speak for them all, but you can't just consider them all morons like that)
For large sets, this will be our guide even unto death, for the LORD will work for each type of data it is applied to...
"Bonus points for science rhymes; for anyone who has the time."
Is not a rhyme.
I'm sure this thread will have lots of blather about how hip hop lyrics are valid artistic expressions. I used to have the same prejudice, until I started studying epic poetry of Central Asia. Much of the Kyrgyz epic Manas, acclaimed by scholars in the West upon its discovery a century ago, is comparable to most hip hop artists: badly strung together recitations of how the hero has got lots of bling and bitches, and whoops the ass of his enemies.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=o66FUc61MvU - Rap News #15
Forward! -- Emperor Norton, 2012
Yo yo yo, it's MC AC. ...Okay, I give up now.
My rhymes are slick and my flow is quick.
I talk the tech I stack the deck
I jam some tunes (and slam the Zunes)
And when I see a smokin' babe
I lose my train of thought and can't think of anything else to say and oh frak that doesn't scan or rhyme
"Java Life" Rap
This ties in with the regular hallucinations of fully-arranged original music and songs I experience when I'm waking or falling off to sleep. While my consciousness stays suppressed, the music just flows, and I get a brief insight into how it must feel to be a great improviser. This ties into the concept of The Zone, where thoughts flow organically and associatively, instead of being marshalled by the frontal lobes.
I start to lose the flow as soon as my consciousness tries to direct things, which is unfortunately necessary to be able to recall the music when fully awake. I find it hard to capture more than a brief fragment or taste of what I've heard. Any recording I make of it using only my voice is even further removed.
I don't know if drugs can put you in such a creative state, or whether they just put you in a total dream-like state where you think you're being creative, but it's all just nonsense.
I just be chillin here on Slashdot reading me some stories,
And then I find this article that doesn't seem so boring.
Story bout freestyling rappers being brainscanned.
I be thinking "oh my gawd, I gotta comment bout it quick man!"....
The jazz people have been analyzed, when improvising. Pure creation.
A rapper, even if the result is terrible, is doing the same thing, except with words.
I do electronic music production. It's mostly configuration to be honest. But when you find the right sound and the right notes, there is a heavenly moment that is wonderful (atheist speaking here).
What they are actually examining is Flow, as described by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (http://www.amazon.com/Flow-The-Psychology-Optimal-Experience/dp/0061339202/), I haven't read TFA but I wouldn't be surprised to see him mentioned. Disappointed if they didn't...
BlameBillCosby.com
Ok. I will stipulate to the fact that ONLY the rapping part of flavor-flav is an expression of moronic character.
That's *really* fair.
Also, he hangs with skanky hos. Really, really disturbing, lowlife, low functioners.
WTF is a "musical prodigy" doing that for?
So apparently, his moronic character does extend outside of his tendency to rap.
a dead salmon.
Smart people do dumb things, news at 11. Seriously it's like my dog or the 911 hijacker's, smart beings are often motivated by dumb goals.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
And is the translation any good?
I speak and read Chinese, with a particular interest in classical characters. I've read, with considerable interest, the Tao te Ching in its near-original form, and also numerous English translations. I'm a martial artist, so such an expounding on "the way" is of great interest. I even suffered through a reading by Ursula Le Guin. Man, was that ever annoying. Then I had a few beers to try to forget. And I like her fiction. And I don't particularly like beer. Anyway...
In the translations, in an attempt to make the content lyrical in English terms, and sometimes to rhyme, and sometimes to map to a particular agenda, the meaning is badly mangled — to be kind about it. The original can say something entirely mundane, and the translation gets all spiritual and freaky. It's enough to make me turn a little green sometimes.
I wonder if these Kyrgz translations are more of the same.
In the case of English and Chinese, the languages don't have anything even remotely resembling a 1:1 map once you get any further into them than "Ni hao", and even then... Someone probably, somewhere, might have told you Ni hao means hello... that's a very common start. What it actually means, though, is "you good" as an implied question that they do NOT expect you to answer... but if you go for "Ni hao ma" that's actually asking "you good?" whereas the first form doesn't indicate a need for an answer (compare to asking someone "how ya doin?", and they start telling you, while you groan to yourself "it was RHETORICAL, please SHUT UP!") It's not hello and it doesn't mean hello, it's just used where we would use hello. Ni hao maps a lot closer to an uninflected (non-questioning) "how ya doin" and ni hao ma to an inflected "how ya DOIN?." But you rarely get taught that, you sort of figure it out later. Well, some do.
These mapping issues get much stronger as you get into any deeper meanings. In Chinese, that is. So... when I see translations of poetry and particularly when attempts are made to rhyme in another language... I get a little (more) cynical. :) Somehow I doubt that Kyrgyz ramblings make much sense at all in modern English, no matter what you do to 'em. That is to say, if you do enough to get them to make sense, they no longer map back to the original well.
I can guarantee that's the case for English translations of the Tao te Ching. If you actually want to understand it, you've got a whole culture to learn, and THEN you've got to come to grips with centuries of change.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Just think about it deeply, then forget itâ¦then an idea will jump up in your face.
Really, there's no brain that would have given them what the almighty Beardyman can give them. The absolute master of making creative things up on the spot. (I highly recommend checking out his live "DJ" shows, as well as his comedy shows, and small random bits.)
It's the devils weed at work.
Could explain the heavy cannabis usage among rappers. Oh yeah, psychedelics don't enhance creativity... wink wink, nudge nudge.
Nor should they be considered creative. Rappers are just rhythmic boasters, nothing more or less. Creativity has nothing to do with it. Neither does jazz improvisation, which is not creative but the result of grueling hours of muscle memory and transposing keys and rhythms of the basic melody. That's it. When you hear a jazz soloist improvising, he has to stick to the bass line laid down, and riff of the basic melody. Except Ornette Coleman who makes noise not music.
Real creativity is say, J,K. Rowling, or JRR Tolkein, or J Michael Straczynski creating their worlds, and laboriously refining, editing, and improving their characterization, plots, storylines, events, and so on. Or the meticulous planning and execution of a David Hockney painting. Or the patient experimentation and figuring out of the Wright Brothers.
Creativity is the spark, the idea of something, mixed with grueling hours of revisions, refinements, editing, and so on. It is mostly hard, laborious work.
lower brain activity, they must be high.
i anit no bill nye the science guy
but I put the mine in ya dopa
and make it mean like it was part of SOPA
Rap is gayer than AIDS.
Apparently a hot shower in the morning completely shuts down my dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Too bad it also shuts down my memory too.
Protons, neutrons, electrons and silicon
Make the digital world in this planet we live on
1s and 0s, they make US heros
But flip the wrongswitch
And we loose some dinero
But only the man really cares about the dollars
Patenting everything and making masses holler
It's all about open source, F O S S
Let's topple the balance and put the greed to rest
For anyone who has the time?
What if I told you son, that time curves like a bowl of fruit loops in the rain
Or thread a film backwards like masking tape stuck to the shower drain
time warps, motherfucker, like a whistle from World 1-3
and the landscape that once was will now forever be
science, like finance, survives reality, yet submits to fantasy
lifting up beyond the ranks of mode and range
to feed yon broken ticker-brain, like a grim jade sage
Rap = Crap.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
How about scanning Poetic writing creativity. Why was wrappers chosen? Was it because of Will Smith?
Where is the video of the guy freestyle rapping in a MRI?
I'm sure over years, rappers must accumulate word pairings that rhyme, and phrases that slot into rhythms, much the way a jazz player rehearses patterns. In both cases, the fact is that the brain isn't fast enough to both think and execute in real time. Some of the processing has to be done beforehand, and wired in to be executed on command. The trick is to be spontaneous and assemble things in novel ways in spite of the hard wired tendency to arrange them in friendly and familiar ways over and over.
How is the Riemann zeta function like Trump rallies? Both have an endless number of trivial zeros.
Jazz is the last refuge of the untalented.
To that I'd add that rap is the 2nd to last such refuge,
Music makes a man comfort and rubs up all his tensions.Rap and hip hop beats is also like it.It brings happinass. This blog represents an extended arm of my passion for British based. The online store retails UK rap and hip hop vinyl, cd's, downloads,clothing labels, magazine.
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I've been posting stories to Slashdot for about a year now. I'm regularly on the most accepted submitter list and I don't spam the site with submissions so I guess I'm doing something right.
I've been pretty impressed by the comments on all the stories - like many in this community I've got a PhD (protein crystallography) and/or a physical sciences background (Undergrad in physics). Like many, I'm also liberal/atheist. Comments are humorous, witty and often insightful. The level of debate is high, and move the story on or question it in interesting ways.
But I'm hugely disappointed at many of the comments left on this piece - dismissing an entire genre of music? That's narrow-minded redneck stuff. You might not like much that you hear - but then any genre that includes Public Enemy, Michael Franti (sorry - I'm out of touch since the 80s/early 90s) deserves respect.
There's a great deal of rock I do not like - it's misogynistic/derivative crap - but that's OK - I listen to the stuff that I like.
Few would think it ok to dismiss rock music in the way I'm seeing rap/hiphop dismissed here. Any thoughts on why?
I'm sorry, but there is a major difference between hip hop and rap. Hip hop artists don't talk about bitches and money. Also, freestyling is an art form if you have a story to tell.
*Ahem*
I write code for a company
Why you try to front on me?
"I'm awesome in C#"
I say as you start to run from me
I'm the best there's ever gonna be
I hit you with the 1,2,3
Then put on my thinkin cap n go back to living comfortably.
*crosses arms as if wearing hammer pants and sporting a high top fade*