Charles Limb: Your Brain on Improv

An excellent video exploring what happens in the brain during improvisation versus memorized performance. Charles Limb puts jazz musicians and free style rappers in an FMRI and shares his preliminary results of what happened. What’s great is that Limb is both a neurosurgeon and a jazz aficionado, so he has strong roots in both worlds, actually playing piano and rapping in his experiments. 

One of the more interesting results was this:

“Really consciousness is seated in the frontal lobe. But we have this combination of an area that’s thought to be involved in self-monitoring, turning off, and this area that’s thought to be autobiographical, or self-expressive, turning on. And we think, at least in this preliminary — It’s one study. It’s probably wrong. But it’s one study. We think that at least a reasonable hypothesis is that, to be creative, you have to have this weird dissociation in your frontal lobe. One area turns on, and a big area shuts off, so that you’re not inhibited, so that you’re willing to make mistakes, so that you’re not constantly shutting down all of these new generative impulses.”

It would be so cool to see some improv comedians doing a scene in there!

About Shana Merlin

Merlin Works is the brainchild of Shana Merlin: improviser, teacher, and performer. Since 1996, she’s been leading classes that stretch people’s imaginations, push them out of their comfort zones, and make them laugh out loud for hours at a time.
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