In this program, we compare dreaming and improvisation focusing on creative synergies, experiential similarities, and the underlying neurophysiology. These states of mind are mutually illuminating. That is, learning about one provides insights into the other. A key insight here is that we can deepen our understanding of improvisation by exploring other states of mind that have overlapping experiential qualities or brain states. In his book Dreams of Awakening, Charlie Morley writes that “…there are many different ways to tell the difference between [different states of experience], but the easiest way to get to grips with these differences is to spend as much time as we can in these states.” I propose that this is the case for improvisation, as well. By paying more attention to our dreaming experiences, we may deepen our knowledge of the experience of improvisation.
References:
The Case of the Three-Sided Dream: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/the-case-of-the-three-sided-dream/umc.cmc.2no74bniyii0qtz63oc0wrmih
Bashwiner, D. (2018). The neuroscience of musical creativity. The Cambridge Handbook of the neuroscience of creativity, 51, 495-516.
Link to Albert Ayler’s New Grass liner notes: https://lavelleporter.com/2010/08/22/message-from-albert-ayler/
I Called Him Morgan documentary: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/i-called-him-morgan/umc.cmc.4cip1f47gqxk6qigg0mb1hiny
Arrows to Infinity documentary: https://tv.apple.com/us/movie/charles-lloyd-arrows-into-infinity/umc.cmc.3ldicyne96kj1hrewd9w3dmvj
Kansas City PBS documentary Bird: Not Out Of Nowhere | Charlie Parker’s Kansas City Legacy: https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx9Z02xiRacQxWEtx5eSmeucx-t6lB5kYZ
Zadra, A., & Stickgold, R. (2021). When brains dream: Understanding the science and mystery of our dreaming minds. WW Norton & Company.
Oliver Sach’s article about the jazz drummer with Tourette’s Syndrome: https://medhum.med.nyu.edu/view/12034
Hank Green of the SciShow Psych: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KwOhfmygHyM
Braun, A. R., Balkin, T. J., Wesenten, N. J., Carson, R. E., Varga, M., Baldwin, P., … & Herscovitch, P. (1997). Regional cerebral blood flow throughout the sleep-wake cycle. An H2 (15) O PET study. Brain: a journal of neurology, 120(7), 1173-1197.
Kraehenmann, R. (2017). Dreams and psychedelics: neurophenomenological comparison and therapeutic implications. Current neuropharmacology, 15(7), 1032-1042.
Limb, C. J., & Braun, A. R. (2008). Neural substrates of spontaneous musical performance: An fMRI study of jazz improvisation. PLoS one, 3(2), e1679.
Liu, S., Chow, H. M., Xu, Y., Erkkinen, M. G., Swett, K. E., Eagle, M. W., … & Braun, A. R. (2012). Neural correlates of lyrical improvisation: an fMRI study of freestyle rap. Scientific reports, 2(1), 834.
Rosen, D. S., Oh, Y., Erickson, B., Zhang, F. Z., Kim, Y. E., & Kounios, J. (2020). Dual-process contributions to creativity in jazz improvisations: An SPM-EEG study. NeuroImage, 213, 116632.
Walker, M. P., & van Der Helm, E. (2009). Overnight therapy? The role of sleep in emotional brain processing. Psychological bulletin, 135(5), 731.
Trehub, S. E., Ghazban, N., & Corbeil, M. (2015). Musical affect regulation in infancy. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences, 1337(1), 186-192.
Shenfield, T., Trehub, S. E., & Nakata, T. (2003). Maternal singing modulates infant arousal. Psychology of music, 31(4), 365-375.
Terry, P. C., Karageorghis, C. I., Curran, M. L., Martin, O. V., & Parsons-Smith, R. L. (2020). Effects of music in exercise and sport: A meta-analytic review. Psychological bulletin, 146(2), 91.
Seppälä, E., Bradley, C., & Goldstein, M. R. (2020). Research: Why breathing is so effective at reducing stress. Harvard Business Review. Diakses dari https://hbr. org/2020/09/research-why-breathing-is-so-effective-at-reducing-stress. https://hbr.org/2020/09/research-why-breathing-is-so-effective-at-reducing-stress
Unedited Otter.ai transcription:
Bradley Vines 0:00
Greetings, and welcome to the neuroscience of improvisation. I am your host Bradley vines. In this program, we’ll be comparing dreaming and improvisation in terms of creative synergies, experiential similarities and the underlying neurophysiology. These states of mind are mutually illuminating. That is, if you learn about one, it will provide insight into the other. I think that a key takeaway here is that we can deepen our understanding of improvisation by exploring other states of mind that have overlapping experiential qualities or brain states. In his book, dreams of awakening, Charlie Morley writes that there are many different ways to tell the difference between different states of experience or consciousness. But the easiest way to get to grips with these differences is to spend as much time as we can in the States. I agree with this. And I propose that this is the case for improvisation as well. Pay more attention to your dreaming experiences. And I believe that you will become more knowledgeable about the experience of improvisation.
Bradley Vines 1:30
So what about dreaming starting with comparing improvisation and dreaming? I’m going to talk about synergies, and then phenomenological, or experiential similarities, and then neurological contrasts. So starting with dreaming and looking at synergies. So across the art world, there have been so many examples of dreams influencing art, think Salvador Dali, and just the endless examples in science and throughout human history and human endeavors. But certainly in music, we have Rahsaan, Roland Kirk, he actually, his wife said his religion was the religion of dreams. And here’s an Here’s a little clip showing, or with audio of him speaking about how he developed the idea to play multiple instruments if you don’t if you’re not familiar with his work. He was a great innovator in jazz and, and provident jazz music in general. And it wasn’t a gimmick, he was a real expression of his mind to add, playing multiple saxophones and other horns at one time. So here’s how he describes how he came to this idea.
Rahsaan Roland Kirk 2:50
Well, I just came from a whole lot of different dreams that I was having. And I was the sort of frustrated after practice day in and day out, and I’d lay down I have these dreams, I’d hear different instruments simultaneously and one of the dreams is quite clear, because it showed me plan to instrument simultaneously. So after that, I set out to have fun instruments that I heard in my dreams by looking in antique shops, different type of music shops.
Bradley Vines 3:29
Yeah, so he saw this in a dream and then brought it into reality. Albert Eiler wrote that through meditation, dreams and visions, I have been made a universal man. And then there are examples of composers talking about their experience like Brahms, saying that he enters into a semi trance condition, when the conscious mind is in temporary abeyance and the subconscious mind is in control. And that’s when these gems, these uncut diamonds, so to speak, emerge for him the core ideas behind compositions, Mozart similarly said that his ideas come, this that is, this inventing, this producing takes place in a pleasing and lively dream. So, this kind of liminal state of dreaminess seems to be the origin of many creative insights and idea. So how are the experiences of dreaming and, and improvisation similar so if we look at the phenomenology that means by that I mean, the experience of improvisation and dreaming, what are they like? Well, they both have this narrative quality, don’t they? They kind of flow And this unfolding, so to speak. And there’s a wonderful clip from I called him Morgan, Lee Morgan, the Lee Morgan, documentary.
Wayne Shorter 5:14
And sometimes we were playing, and he was playing a solo. And art will be yelling Philly. Talk to the people to talk to the people to tell them your story told me a story that he knew how to tell a story musically.
Bradley Vines 5:35
Okay, that was went shorter talking. And what does it mean to tell a story? Charles Lloyd has talked about communicating through music. So he talked about, well, let me let him speak for himself. Here’s a little clip of him speaking.
Charles Lloyd 5:55
If I can articulate it, I guess I wouldn’t have a need to play it.
Bradley Vines 6:01
So his his basically saying he has something to say, and he can’t say it in words. So he’s going to say it in music. And this is from another wonderful documentary about him called arrows to infinity, if you want to take a look at that one. So that’s narrative qualities, you’ve got this kind of the sense of a narrative that’s forming over the course of an improvisation and through a dream, then there’s the loss of agency. So when you’re dreaming, you’re not in conscious control. It’s happening to you, unless it’s a lucid dream. And then there’s some conscious control. Anyway, that’s a different discussion. Normal dreams are basically just unfolding, and they’re not really within your control, at least the main elements where you are what’s happening. So similarly, the experience of improvisers can be like this. There can be a loss of agents as well, Billy Higgins said, We are not playing this music, we are instruments of what he called the Most High, or Charles Lloyd again, the the tenor player, said the music is not my music, I’m a conduit, it comes through me I am in service. And then this idea, or this experience of the movement via adjacency. So what does that mean? It just means that you move through things that are tangentially connected to where you are now. So in a dream, you’re, it’s no problem to jump to a fully different kind of scene, as long as there’s some link connecting you with from one scene to the next in the dream, you might see some very unusual leaps in your dream progression. The same thing can happen with, with improvisation, of course. So these researchers, zodra and sickled. They said the dream stitches, a series of memories, and network explorations, that means your memory network together, keeping a principle of adjacency and operations, so these connections via via tangents, that kind of bridge between different disparate ideas. And this happens, for example, in improvisation when someone inserts a quote, so you’re playing one song, but suddenly the improviser here’s another song and in, creates that, so here’s kind of a description of how Charlie Parker did this. In relation to the Stravinsky piece, ba ba, ba,
Kansas City PBS documentary Bird: Not Out Of Nowhere | Charlie Parker’s Kansas City Legacy 8:52
ba ba. Okay, in the middle of this fast song, Charlie Parker, his jump jumps in his solo and is going at this breakneck speed. And then, at the beginning of his second course, he inserted the opening of Stravinsky’s Firebird Suite. Stravinsky is in the audience. Immediately, Stravinsky stopped pounding the table, he went to you this jazz musician that he’d been hearing about. And now to hear him live sitting up there, he’s sitting out here, and now all of a sudden at this breakneck speed in the middle of his improvisation, he plays one of his compositions, spots, spontaneously, I
Bradley Vines 9:36
forgot to mention the context that Charlie Parker notice that Stravinsky was there. And so that would have been the adjacency there. So it led to this connection with another piece of music that normally wouldn’t go in that piece. And you can find infinite or many examples of inserting quotes from other people. Cities are taking from other solos and improvisation, of course. And then you have these unexpected twists and turns and improvisation, perhaps most clearly communicated in this story by Oliver Sacks about a patient of his who had Tourette Syndrome. This patient Ray was a jazz drummer. And Tourette’s, of course, leads to these sudden movements that are unexpected and uncontrolled. And he would, as a jazz drummer simply let those become the kernel of a new direction for his improvisation. So suddenly, it’s a new idea that takes them off in a new direction. And we’re all doing this when we’re improvising. But our surprising moments are coming from these unexpected places, perhaps. Okay, so that’s experiential. experientially, that similarity between dreaming and improvisation. What about neurological similarities? So it turns out that rapid eye movement dreaming, and I’ll say high quality improvisation. So this is like experts or people very comfortable with a particular setting. And they feel like it was a good improvisation. They both involve a decrease in activity in the frontal lobes. And these are areas that we’ve been talking about as being important for executive functioning. So you might think that there would be more involvement of these high level areas in improvisation, where you have to come up with new stuff. But actually, there’s a decrease when we let our guard down, so to speak, we stopped judging ourselves, it allows these non conscious procedural memories we’ve developed to express themselves. And this change, this decrease in frontal activity is found both in dreaming and improvisation. So this shows how you’re entering into a state of mind that has something like dreaming in it. And they both interestingly, involve a decrease in the stress response. Dreaming is kind of, from what I understand, it’s it’s kind of our built in psychological therapist. So when you dream about something traumatic, the degree of trauma that you experienced in relation to that idea or or experience actually reduces after your dream, normally, for normally functioning dreams. And it’s actually a, a sign of a problem when dreaming doesn’t lead to a decrease in trauma. And it’s actually one of the criteria that they use to determine if someone has PTSD. If their dreams are not helping them to process that event, then something is broken down, we need to find some other way to to fill in for that natural process. But for most, most of the time, dreaming is helping to have a therapeutic effect. And interestingly, music does something very similar. So music reduces stress, it is shown to reduce stress hormones do release oxytocin, as I mentioned. So it may be inducing a state that’s like dreaming. Now, I’ve just realized I forgot to mention that dreaming not only decreases frontal activity, but it’s associated with a decrease in stress related hormones. So that’s the complete equation. So both dreaming, and music, are associated with a well at least improvisation, a decrease in activity in the frontal cortex, the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex in particular, and a decrease in stress related hormones. So that may be why improvisation is especially therapeutic. Here’s a little description of from Hank Green on the same show about the relationship between improvisation and dreaming. In
Hank Green 14:30
fact, the same patterns of activity we see in improvising musicians also show up during REM sleep, the phase of sleep that lets us dream and this kind of makes sense, right? Dreaming is all about strange, unplanned associations, and a lack of control. So it’s easy to see why those same traits produced by those same brain areas produce that same feeling of other worldly inspiration that musicians report while they improvise.
THE NEUROSCIENCE OF IMPROVISATION 
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