DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT IT

Creativity is one of the great mysteries of the human mind. Brain scientists love to peer into the brain while it is working for hints about what the neurons are doing, and functional MRI can reveal which part of the brain is active during different tasks. I was fascinated by an interview in a recent Scientific American magazine in which Charles J. Limb, neuroscientist and musician, discusses using fMRI to study the brain during jazz improvisation. Dr. Limb is a hearing specialist, surgeon, brain researcher, and alto saxophonist, and his experience as a jazz musician drew him to study what happens in the brain during the creative process. Because musical improvisation provides immediate access to the creative process, it is an ideal window into the brain's ability to generate new ideas. Dr. Limb rigged up a keyboard that musicians could play while their head and torso rested in the circular tunnel of an fMRI machine.
While the musicians were creating jazz improvisation, Dr. Limb noted that activity was generated in many different areas of the brain; music is known to be a "whole brain" activity. He found that an area called the Medial Prefrontal Cortex became particularly active during improvisation, but the most interesting finding was that another area, the Lateral Prefrontal Region, turned off during these periods of musical imagination.
The function of these areas hints at the nature of creativity. The Medial Prefrontal Cortex is involved in self-expression and narrative, while the Lateral Prefrontal Region is involved with editing and evaluating. It appears that creativity relies on taking the brain's internal critic out of the game, allowing ideas to flow without interruption.
These findings provide a neurologic explanation for a variety of creative exercises. A standard writing exercise is the "timed writing", in which a person is required to write rapidly and continuously without pausing to think, preventing the brain's editor from evaluating what is being written. Only after the writing process has generated a lengthy torrent of words is the person allowed to go back to organize and edit what he has written. In an influential book called Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain, artists are told to copy figures that have been turned upside down so that they are less recognizable. The common theme is that creativity requires temporary suspension of the conscious thinking process.
I have struggled for years to become a competent jazz improvisor, with only occasional success. When I have had opportunities to talk to good jazz musicians, I always ask them "what do you think about while you are playing?" Most musicians are at a loss to explain their creative process, but in general they respond that they don't think, they just listen. Somehow they must learn how to turn off their Lateral Prefrontal Cortex and allow their musical creativity to flow without thinking about it. This leaves unanswered the question of how musicians learn not to think.
Doug Miller, one of the premier jazz bassists in Seattle, told me a story that sheds some light on this process. When he was younger, Doug made the obligatory journey to play in New York City, a rite of passage for most professional jazz musicians. At one club in the big city, tenor saxophone legend Sonny Rollins hosts a weekly jam session. Saxophonists line up around the block for a chance to sit in and show off their chops by improvising 6 or 7 choruses over the chord changes of some up-tempo jazz standard. With as many as 30 horn players waiting to be heard a single tune like Oleo might go on for 2 or 3 hours, a case of what Doug called "rhythm section abuse". For the first 15 minutes the hard-working bass player concentrates to play the right notes, outlining each chord clearly despite the ridiculously fast tempo. Eventually fatigue sets in and the bassist starts to simplify, using repeated notes and open strings to make the playing easier. After another 30 minutes of struggle, a transformation takes place. Doug reports that a zen-like state takes over, in which the bass player is too tired to think or concentrate. The bass line suddenly creates itself effortlessly, without conscious awareness. This state of non-thinking is the nirvana of creativity for which jazz musicians strive.
Learning how to turn off the brain's critic in the Lateral Prefrontal Cortex may take years of artistic struggle, so any shortcut in this process would be welcome. Too many jazz musicians in the past have abused chemical substances in an effort to stop thinking. Meditation has replaced medication for many contemporary improvising musicians who use ancient Zen techniques to calm the overactive "monkey mind" that obstructs the flow of creativity. The new brain studies suggest the possibility of using biofeedback or transcranial electromagnetic devices to retrain the brain, but somehow that seems like cheating. Eventually, musicians just need to relax, keep playing and stop thinking about it.