What is Happening Inside A Rapper’s Brain?

Listening to freestyle rappers like Lil Wayne , Jay Z and Snoop Dogg, we are highly amazed at the ease with which they perform this challenging art form. It takes a lot of talent to improvise spontaneous and creative lyrics. Freestyling like any other sports or art form takes an insane amount of practice.

But how these rappers spit out rhymes on the spot incorporating things they see and hear such as objects, people, clothing, solutions and sounds with similes and metaphors that are the backbone of an advanced rapper is something that has puzzled people for long.

The researchers in the voice, speech and language branch of the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) at the National Institutes of Health have come up with a study that describes what's happening in the brain during this creative "flow" state.

"Our interests were in the neural correlates of creativity," Dr. Siyuan Liu, told Discovery News. Dr. Liu was lead researcher and one of the co-authors of the new study on the brain activity of freestyle rappers. "Previously we did a study on jazz musicians when they improvised the melodies. The other part of music is lyrics, so we thought it would be interesting to study the brain activity when the lyrics where improvised as well."

With the help of functional magnetic resonance imaging they studied the brain activity when a rapper slips into the freestyle mode.

According to the report, this form of vocal improvisation is linked to a unique functional reallocation of brain activity in the prefrontal cortex and offers an original neutral network that appears to be closely involved in improvisatory and creative endeavors.

Dr. Liu scanned the brains of 12 freestyle rap artists. They made sure that these rappers had at least five years of rapping experience. The scanning was done when they performed two tasks using an identical 8 bar musical track.

In the first task they improvised rhyming lyrics and rhythmic patterns guided only by the beat. During the second task they performed a well rehearsed set of lyrics.

"They talked a lot about their environment, about how they are in the scanner," Dr. Liu said to Live Science. "Or sometimes they talked about their careers, like how many albums they'd published."

While conducting these two tasks they noticed that during the freestyle rapping there was an increase in brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex.

The medial prefrontal cortex is responsible for motivation of thought and action.

They also noticed a decreased activity in dorsolateral prefrontal regions. This region normally plays a supervisory or monitoring role.

The authors stated, "Like an experienced parent who knows when to lay down the law and when to look the other way, these shifts in brain function may facilitate the free expression of thoughts and words without the usual neural constraints."

It was seen that freestyling increased brain activity in the perisylvian system that is involved in language production and in the amygdale that is a part of the brain linked to emotion and cingulated motor areas.

This indicates that improvisation engages the brain network that links motivation, language, mood and action. 

The researchers feel further studies of this network in other art forms which involve the innovative use of language, such as poetry and storytelling could offer more insights into the initial, improvisatory phase of the creative process.

The findings are published online in the Nov. 15 issue of the journal Scientific Reports.