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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...
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"
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
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.
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
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.
Could explain the heavy cannabis usage among rappers. Oh yeah, psychedelics don't enhance creativity... wink wink, nudge nudge.
What a terribly limited and narrow definition of jazz improv. Grueling hours of practice, study and refinement in preparation for the spark to hit *in the moment* during a performance doesn't count as creativity in your books?
Rap = Crap.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
...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...
...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.
First you say something is not creative, but the result of "grueling hours". Then you go on to say that once you take a "spark" and mix it with "grueling hours", now you got creativity. Somehow you don't believe that creative musicians have any sparks?
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
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.
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?