One standard piece of advice to novice writers is to try to separate the production and editing phases of writing. In other words, when you’re creating new material, try to put your inner critic on hold and let the words come together in your mind and flow out onto the page or the screen, saving the review and editing for another time. Otherwise, you can wind up unintentionally blocking your own writing process. A study of jazz musicians has revealed what the brain looks like when the inner critic is turned off.
The musicians were scanned with fMRI while they performed two distinct musical tasks, the very familiar task of playing a scale, or the more creative activity of improvising on a tune. (Given the constraints of fMRI, by the way, it’s fairly impressive that the researchers were able to devise a setup that allowed this to work.)
When the musicians were improvising, activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, an area of the frontal lobes that is important in self-monitoring of performance, dropped, while another part of the frontal lobes, the medial prefrontal cortex, became more active. The medial prefrontal cortex is important for self-initiated behaviors. Another finding, odd but interesting, is that sensory areas of the brain also ramped up their activity during improvisation, even though there was no major difference in the sensory input for, e.g., touch and sight. All in all, researchers got a very interesting look at the creative brain in action. I thought it was pretty cool that they could see so clearly the way the self-monitoring part of the brain turned off when the musicians started to improvise.
