Land of Gregs

I found this bit of research quite interesting for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I’ve always been interested in how the brain performs certain tasks, being a neuroscience bod. Secondly, my partner is a freestyle lyricist (although she’s not a rapper), and being of a more traditional singing persuasion myself, I’ve always wondered how she did it so easily.
Now I know, and it’s beautifully simple – she switches off the parts of her brain that limit creativity into a sensible and manageable flow. This allows the brain to increase bloodflow into the thought and language areas themselves, and thus allowing words to travel out straight from there, rather than being constrained in the same way they would be normally.
In fact, in the case of singing freestyle lyricists, there would be one more stage. As well as following a rhythm, they also have to follow the music, and either sing along with it, or harmonize with any existing singing.
I have heard my partner perform some very complex harmonies without having heard the track she was freestyling over. This means that some of the supervisory areas of her brain were still in play, to allow her to improvise in such a way.
The human brain is a wonderful thing.
The paper is here.