Jazz guitarists help researchers study creativity, improvisation

Jazz guitarists helped researchers show that inexperienced musicians rely on their brain’s right hemisphere, but experienced musicians can improvise almost automatically while primarily using their brain's left hemisphere. 

Drexel University’s Creativity Research Lab conducted a brain-imaging study to shed light on the popular views that the right brain hemisphere is for innovative people and left-brain thinkers are logical and analytical.

The study showed that the right hemisphere drives creativity for inexperienced musicians when improvising. But experienced musicians rely on their left hemisphere for improvisation. The study also revealed that the creativity used by a person dealing with an unfamiliar situation comes from the right hemisphere. A person experienced at a task appears to call on well-learned routines from the left hemisphere.

"If creativity is defined in terms of the quality of a product, such as a song, invention, poem or painting, then the left hemisphere plays a key role," Drexel's John Kounios, who led the study with David Rosen, told the National Science Foundation (NSF). "However, if creativity is understood as a person's ability to deal with novel, unfamiliar situations, as is the case for novice improvisers, then the right hemisphere plays the leading role."

New methods of training people for creativity in their field may develop from this research. An expert produces a performance by those unconscious, automatic processes that a person can’t easily alter – but are easy to disrupt, such as a person who “chokes” when they get self-conscious, according to NSF. 

Novices tend to follow deliberate, conscious control. That enables them to more easily make adjustments under instruction by a teacher or coach. Letting go of conscious control too soon could lock-in bad habits, according to NSF. Recording brain activity also might show at what point a performer is ready to rely on well-learned routines.

The study was published in the journal NeuroImage and funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation.