Neuroscience
In seeking to understand the brain processes underlying creative performance, researchers have already scanned opera singers and actors. Now they've invited rappers to undergo the same treatment. Siyuan Liu and her colleagues were specifically interested in the difference between freestyle rap, which requires the spontaneous generation of rhyming lyrics, and rehearsed rapping.
Twelve male professional rappers had their brains scanned while they engaged in freestyle rap and while they performed raps they'd learned earlier. Rappers usually like to gesticulate energetically as they perform, but this would have distorted the brain images so they had to keep still. No worry - "... debriefing indicated that participants' performance was not affected by the motion restraints," the researchers said. The fMRI brain scanner is effectively a powerful magnet so it would also have been imperative that the rappers remove all of their bling before the scan began.
The main finding was that freestyle rapping versus rehearsed rapping was associated with increased activation in medial (inner) areas at the front of the brain, especially on the left-hand side, and concomitant reductions in activity in dorsolateral frontal areas, especially on the right-hand side. These patterns of activation were anti-correlated - the greater the increases in left-medial areas, the more the reductions on the right lateral areas. Liu and her team think this reflects a kind of disinhibition, whereby supervisory attentional systems allowed creative areas of the brain to have free reign. The researchers said this fitted the possibility that the creative process of freestyle rap is experienced as largely occurring outside of conscious awareness. "This is is not inconsistent with the experience of many artists who describe the creative process as seemingly guided by an outside agency," they added.
Freestyle rapping also exercised language areas more powerfully than rehearsed rapping, likely indicative of the need to find appropriate rhyming words. The researchers also looked for other connectivity patterns by seeing how activity levels correlated across the brain. The medial frontal areas engaged by freestyle rap appeared to be connected to activity in prefrontal motor regions, the left amygdala and on to the right inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal lobes - what the researchers called a network integrating "motivation, language, emotion and motor function" and which they proposed could reflect the psychological state of "flow". Critics will likely wince at the excesses of reverse inference in this study - making assumptions about the role played by different brain areas during rapping based on the activity of those regions in other studies.
"We speculate that the neural mechanisms illustrated here could be generalised to explain the cognitive processes of other spontaneous artistic forms," the researchers concluded. Eminem was unavailable for comment.
_________________________________
Liu, S., Chow, H., Xu, Y., Erkkinen, M., Swett, K., Eagle, M., Rizik-Baer, D., and Braun, A. (2012). Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of Freestyle Rap. Scientific Reports, 2 DOI: 10.1038/srep00834
--Further reading--
Opera singing in the brain scanner
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
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Neuroscience
Rapping in the brain scanner
Twelve male professional rappers had their brains scanned while they engaged in freestyle rap and while they performed raps they'd learned earlier. Rappers usually like to gesticulate energetically as they perform, but this would have distorted the brain images so they had to keep still. No worry - "... debriefing indicated that participants' performance was not affected by the motion restraints," the researchers said. The fMRI brain scanner is effectively a powerful magnet so it would also have been imperative that the rappers remove all of their bling before the scan began.
The main finding was that freestyle rapping versus rehearsed rapping was associated with increased activation in medial (inner) areas at the front of the brain, especially on the left-hand side, and concomitant reductions in activity in dorsolateral frontal areas, especially on the right-hand side. These patterns of activation were anti-correlated - the greater the increases in left-medial areas, the more the reductions on the right lateral areas. Liu and her team think this reflects a kind of disinhibition, whereby supervisory attentional systems allowed creative areas of the brain to have free reign. The researchers said this fitted the possibility that the creative process of freestyle rap is experienced as largely occurring outside of conscious awareness. "This is is not inconsistent with the experience of many artists who describe the creative process as seemingly guided by an outside agency," they added.
Freestyle rapping also exercised language areas more powerfully than rehearsed rapping, likely indicative of the need to find appropriate rhyming words. The researchers also looked for other connectivity patterns by seeing how activity levels correlated across the brain. The medial frontal areas engaged by freestyle rap appeared to be connected to activity in prefrontal motor regions, the left amygdala and on to the right inferior frontal gyrus and inferior parietal lobes - what the researchers called a network integrating "motivation, language, emotion and motor function" and which they proposed could reflect the psychological state of "flow". Critics will likely wince at the excesses of reverse inference in this study - making assumptions about the role played by different brain areas during rapping based on the activity of those regions in other studies.
"We speculate that the neural mechanisms illustrated here could be generalised to explain the cognitive processes of other spontaneous artistic forms," the researchers concluded. Eminem was unavailable for comment.
_________________________________
Liu, S., Chow, H., Xu, Y., Erkkinen, M., Swett, K., Eagle, M., Rizik-Baer, D., and Braun, A. (2012). Neural Correlates of Lyrical Improvisation: An fMRI Study of Freestyle Rap. Scientific Reports, 2 DOI: 10.1038/srep00834
--Further reading--
Opera singing in the brain scanner
Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest.
- Talk To The Hand And Just Say No
A new fMRI paper (Grosbras et al., 2007) examined the hemodynamic response [an indirect reflection of neural activity] in 10 yr old children who were watching videos of angry faces and gestures (versus neutral faces and gestures and control stimuli,...
- Brain Scans And Lie Detection: True Or False?
Now this is a rapidly expanding area of research (and one that's quite well-funded by the DOD). Wired did a piece on this recently (Don't Even Think About Lying), and there's an AP story that appeared in papers around the country (e.g., the...
- Neuropsychology Abstract Of The Day: Mirror Neurons
Brain regions with mirror properties: A meta-analysis of 125 human fMRI studies Neuroscience Biobehavioral Rev. 2011 Jul 18. [Epub ahead of print] Molenberghs P, Cunnington R, Mattingley JB. Abstract Mirror neurons in macaque area F5 fire when an animal...
- Neuropsychology Abstract Of The Day: Fmri Study Of Digit Symbol Task
Usui N, Haji T, Maruyama M, Katsuyama N, Uchida S, Hozawa A, Omori K, Tsuji I, Kawashima R, & Taira M. (2009). Cortical areas related to performance of WAIS Digit Symbol Test: a functional imaging study. Neurosci Lett. Jul 21. Many neuropsychological...
- Abstract Of The Day: Frontal Lobe Functioning
Ardesheer Talati and Joy Hirsch. Functional Specialization within the Medial Frontal Gyrus for Perceptual Go/No-Go Decisions Based on "What," "When," and "Where" Related Information: An fMRI Study. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 2005; 17: 981-993....