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Explore the neuroscience behind improvisation—and what it reveals about our natural capacity for creativity.
Summary: Creativity may be more natural than we think. Research on musicians and children improvising at the piano suggests that improvisation can quiet the brain’s inner critic while engaging networks linked to exploration, play, and reward. In this episode of The Science of Happiness, we look at the neuroscience of improvisation—and what a “beginner’s mind” can teach us about opening up creativity in everyday life.
How To Do This Practice:
- Choose a simple starting point: Begin with something familiar—a simple melody, rhythm, phrase, movement, or creative prompt. It could be notes on a keyboard, a beat you tap on the table, a few lines of writing, or even a movement with your body.
- Change one small thing: Experiment by altering a single element, like the speed, mood, rhythm, or key. Small changes help spark creativity without feeling overwhelming.
- Let go of judgment: Remind yourself there are no mistakes in improvisation, only possibilities. If something sounds unexpected, treat it as part of the exploration rather than something to fix.
- Follow your curiosity: Notice what sounds, patterns, or ideas interest you and build on them. Let each moment guide the next instead of planning too far ahead.
- Treat it like play: Approach improvisation with a playful mindset, the way kids experiment and explore. The goal isn’t perfection—it’s discovery and enjoyment.
- Reflect on how it felt: Afterward, take a moment to notice how the experience affected your mood or mindset. Many people find that improvising helps them feel more relaxed, creative, and open.
Today’s Guests:
DR. KAREN CHAN BARRETT is an Assistant Professor with a joint appointment in the Institute for Health & Aging at the UCSF School of Nursing.
Learn more about Dr. Karen Chan Barrett here: https://karenchanbarrett.com/
Related The Science of Happiness episodes:
The Science of Singing Along: https://tinyurl.com/4nbb3v76
The Science of Humming: https://tinyurl.com/4esyy6nd
How Music Can Hold and Heal Us: https://tinyurl.com/49svzn4v
Related Happiness Breaks:
Music to Inspire Kindness in Kids: https://tinyurl.com/yjk344rd
A Humming Technique to Calm Your Nerves: https://tinyurl.com/mr42rzad
A Walking Meditation: https://tinyurl.com/mwbsen7a
Tell us about your experience with this practice. Email us at happinesspod@berkeley.edu or follow on Instagram @HappinessPod.
Help us share The Science of Happiness! Leave us a 5-star review on Apple Podcasts and share this link with someone who might like the show: https://tinyurl.com/2p9h5aap
Transcription:
KAREN BARRETT: I'm gonna improvise based on Mozart's Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star, also known as Ah! Vous dirai-je, maman.
TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR STARTS, FADES
KAREN BARRETT: I thought you had to be really good at something and that I couldn't improvise. And then during the study I'm like, the kids don't know how to do this either, and it doesn't stop them. By studying kids the way we did, we essentially got to look at what is the neuroscience of the beginner's mind. And that's what our FMRI scanning captures.
SFX of FMRI SCANNING, MACHINE SAYS “IMPROVISE”, MUSIC starts
KAREN BARRETT: In this study, kids were improvising melodies with no training whatsoever. One of the hallmarks of their creativity is that they're not sitting there judging themselves. It's very raw and unfiltered. We could be raw and unfiltered if we let ourselves be.
INTRO MUSIC
SHUKA KALANTARI: Welcome to the Science of Happiness. I'm Shuka Kalantari. Today we're exploring the science of musical improvisation. What happens when music is created on the spot spontaneously and without judgment? Studies of jazz musicians and rappers show that when people create freely, brain regions involved in self-monitoring and criticism quiet down, while networks tied to imagination and reward, activate.
Our guest today studies improv from both sides. As a musician AND as a neuroscientist.
KAREN BARRETT: I think there's part of me that wants to judge whatever comes out, but I think what I've learned through our neuroscience research is that there are no mistakes.
SHUKA KALANTARI: More on the science of improv music after this break.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Welcome back to the Science of Happiness, I'm Shuka Kalantari. This episode is about something we all do often without realizing it: improvising.
KAREN BARRETT: Technically, we actually improvise every day of our lives. Like right now, I don't have a script, so I am improvising 'cause I'm speaking to you. And so we actually are better at improvising than we realize.
SHUKA KALANTARI: That's Dr. Karen Chan Barrett. She trained as a concert pianist at the Peabody Institute. And studied auditory neuroscience at UC San Francisco. Karen joins us today to share her research on how improvisation can quiet the brain's inner critic and tap into neural networks that hint creativity is innate. Karen, thank you for joining us on the Science of Happiness.
KAREN BARRETT: Thank you for having me. I'm so excited to be here.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Tell us about your relationship with music growing up. Was it something that you were always drawn to?
KAREN BARRETT: I actually started playing piano when I was five years old, and the reason why is that I did grow up in a household that always had music going on.
PIANO, Arabesque No. 1, Debussy
My dad was a scientist, but also a classical guitarist, and so he was always listening and had such a love of classical music. And then my mom was at the time playing piano, and so I ended up, you know, playing piano pretty seriously. I went to Wellesley College and then I double majored in music and neuroscience and I loved it, but it was really hard.
You know, I'd go from practicing Beethoven violin and piano sonatas really seriously, and then running to lab and then it just always felt very split brain in many ways. So after I finished Wellesley, I went to the Peabody Institute of Music at Johns Hopkins University, and it was awesome. I did my master's there in piano performance and it was 12 hours a day playing.
But you know, we were always playing at night. And I'm a morning person, so I very quickly realized, I'm like, I don't think this lifestyle's gonna work. And then I found out that there was this PhD in music cognition, so it was actually gonna blend both music and neuroscience, and that's how I got started on this career path.
SHUKA KALANTARI: So you have this background in classical music playing Beethoven 12 hours a day, and yet the type of music you study is quite different than that. You study the science behind improvisational music, just making up music as you go. You've shared that improv plays a big role in your musical life now, but that hasn't always been the case.
What led you to improv?
KAREN BARRETT: The reason I was drawn to improv is honestly because I'm bad at it. When I finished my PhD and started my postdoc with Charles Lim at UCSF, he's a jazz musician, and so he was the big improviser, and so I was really drawn to it because Charles was already studying it. But on top of it was like, I found it a little bit magical and fascinating because it's not something I do very easily.
SHUKA KALANTARI: First, tell me how you go about improvising. I mean, you sit down at the piano and then what, is there something you like? Tell yourself before you begin, hype yourself up or let yourself go.
KAREN BARRETT: Because I'm not an experienced improviser, I kind of draw on something I know already. So one of the most common ways to improvise for me as a classical pianist is theme and variations. So I take something like Twinkle Twinkle Little Star.
TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR PLAYS
Very simple piece. It was actually written by Mozart. It's a piece I know really, really well. I know the harmonies really well. And so I sit down and play with it, and then I just tell myself, okay, what are some things I could change? Should I play it faster?
Should I move it to a minor key?
TWINKLE TWINKLE LITTLE STAR CHANGES TO MINOR KEY
Should I add some ornamentation? So trills and things like that. And so that's kind of my process. I think there's part of me that wants to judge whatever comes out, but I think what I've learned through our neuroscience research is that there are no mistakes.
You know, if you make a mistake, do it over and over again, and it's a longer mistake, it can lead you to your next motive. And so now I just learned to just kind of lean into it and just see where it goes. Instead of trying to control where it's gonna go, then I relax. Like there may be a lot of anxiety, and maybe I'm a little nervous at the beginning, but by the time I'm really in the zone, I feel like it's fun. Like it's like throwing pain at a wall. Okay, well this is a little nerve wracking, but I know this part, and what if I try this and what if I try that? And it feels like play time. So I find it very relaxing after a while. Now, of course, that's me improvising for myself. I'm doing it in a way that's for me personally, and that feels fun and satisfying for me.
MUSIC ENDS
SHUKA KALANTARI: How has improvising changed the way that you approach music and creativity?
KAREN BARRETT: I think it's actually made me less rigid. There's no right way. There's no wrong way. There just is. It's a very kind of mindful thing. It's more fun for me. It lets my own voice come out. Like I just feel like I'm stepping outta my own way and lets me tap deeper into like my own creativity. Like if I can just silence everything else and just let it bubble up.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Your team at UCSF has studied the brains of some pretty famous musicians, like two time Grammy winner, Fantastic Negrito and Venezuelan pianist, Gabriela Montero. You measured their brain activity when they played songs they knew versus improvising music.
What happens in the brain when they're playing something memorized versus improvised?
KAREN BARRETT: I think what we're seeing is there's a certain pattern, a distinct neuroactivity that's shown when you are improvising. But at the same time, some of these genius musicians are unique as case studies.
Charles's original study from 2008 took expert jazz pianists, professionals basically, and had them improvise or play some 12 bar blues that they had memorized.
And basically what happened is when they improvise, they deactivate a portion of the brain called the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex, but they activate a portion of their brain called the medial prefrontal cortex. So the dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex turning off is a kind of a way of turning off that self-judgment.
You know, the kind of monitoring, right? But the medial prefrontal cortex activation, that area is involved when you want to increase your own artistic voice. Now that's in jazz improvisers who do this all the time. Those are jazz improvisers who can hit flow even in an FMRI scanner.
MUSIC STOPS
So one thing that I proposed to Charles is that we should do case studies.
We're gonna treat each musician as a creativity outlier. So let's treat them as a case study and we're gonna design paradigms that are to their strengths, right? So Gabriela Montero, she's amazing because she's like a classically trained musician, but ever since she was little, she was always improvising too.
So when you went to a concert, half the concert would be standard classical repertoire that you would expect from a recital. And then the other half she would take volunteer prompts and be like, what do you wanna hear?
Scene: Gabriela Montero concert
GABRIELA MONTERO: Who would like to be the first brave person to sing?
AUDIENCE MEMBER: Duh duh duh duh duh duh duh
KAREN BARRETT: And then she would just improvise.
GABRIELA IMPROVISING
And for her, her brain was very unique. It was really about deactivating the brain, but all over the brain, you know? And so she didn't quite look like our jazz musicians.
SHUKA KALANTARI: The results of your studies with Gabriela Montero was that improvisation recruits broad brain coordination and communication between systems in the brain linked to creativity and perception. Can you unpack that for us?
KAREN BARRETT: Why we find music to be so fascinating is it's what we call multimodal. It activates all sorts of domains in the brain. So you have listening, you have pattern perception, you have visual. You're trying to take in a score. You have the limbic system being involved in emotion.
You have motor playing, right? And proprioception, matching down to movement, right? So what's really cool is that music is biologically powerful that way. It activates all these centers of the brain, and that's why people are trying to leverage music for all sorts of different purposes in health. So it's interesting in these experiments, our control condition is playing a piece of music you have memorized or you learned already, whereas the experimental condition is improvising.
What we think is very cool is that when you're improvising, you have even a different set of activities that's happening when you are improvising compared to just playing. In other words, improvisation is a form of generative creativity. You're suddenly on the spot, you know, within a certain context trying to create music. And so that's why we have unique neural areas that are involved in improvisation.
SHUKA KALANTARI: And you say it involves all these regions of the brain? What does that mean?
KAREN BARRETT: So with an FMRI, you get this kind of map of the brain. We say it lights up, but it's not really lighting up in your brain. What really happens is that there are parts of the brain that are more active or deactivated compared to the control condition. And so when I say that improvisation involves these neuro substrates, it means that there's higher activity in these brain areas compared to if you were just playing the control condition.
SHUKA KALANTARI: So far, we've been talking about the research that you've done, looking at how the brain is affected with professional musicians when they do improv. People who do this for a living do this really well. But recently you published research on musical improv with children without any training at all. And I love this because, um, both of my kids play piano, and my youngest would love to improv on the piano. And I was just wondering like, what is happening?
What is going on? And so how did it come about that you went from studying trained professionals to children?
KAREN BARRETT: Well, so there's all this work in creativity about expertise. These changed musicians. They've had years and years of practice. They have all these schemas and licks in their brain from having studied for so long and they kinda just pull it out when they're playing all at the moment. And I was like, but for most of us we're not like that. What about the beginners? What about kids?
KIDS MUSIC IMPROVE SCENE AMBI
SHUKA KALANTARI: Karen’s team at UCSF trained nine to 11 year olds. With little to no musical experience to play a simple piano scale.
KAREN BARRETT: I had this little MIDI keyboard hooked up to my laptop, and I kind of acted like their first piano teacher.
SHUKA KALANTARI: She also had them improvise music all while lying still in an FMRI scanner.
KAREN BARRETT: You're gonna hear some sounds. It's gonna be loud, it's gonna be a little noisy, but pretend you're a little astronaut, you're taking off into space and you know you're just gonna cuddle up in there.
SHUKA KALANTARI: More after this quick break.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Welcome back to The Science of Happiness. I'm Shuka Kalantari. We're continuing our conversation with musician and neuroscientist Karen Barrett on improvisation and what she learned about the innate workings of creativity after having a bunch of kids play music in an FMRI machine.
KAREN BARRETT: We know from a neuroplasticity and a brain activity perspective that kids are highly able to learn new things, right? They have these very, very plastic flexible brains. They don't operate the same way adults do, and I wanted to see if I could capture that, like that kind of raw kids' creativity that's very different from adults. They don't care that they're not a master gardener or a master baker or a master pianist. They'll still do the creative activity anyway, so I thought this was a really interesting way to look at what happens in beginners.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Here's where I just was shocked.
KAREN BARRETT: Yeah.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Because I've been in an FMI scanner and you do have to be still, and it does have to be loud.
KAREN BARRETT: Yes.
SHUKA KALANTARI: And as someone who can't get her kids just to sit still at the dinner table.
KAREN BARRETT: Yeah.
SHUKA KALANTARI: How in the world were you able to train these kids
KAREN BARRETT: To sit still?
SHUKA KALANTARI: To sit still, let alone play piano while sitting still?
MUSIC
KAREN BARRETT: This was the hard part. You know, first we prepped them a lot about the FMRI and I said, we're gonna play a game to show you how still you need to be. So I call it the statue game.
I put one Lego on their forehead as they're lying down on the floor, and then every 30 seconds I add a new Lego. So it's pretty hard 'cause by the end they're balancing three to four Legos on their forehead. And if they got through the statue game, they got a little toy (laughs). And then the other thing I did pre scanning is I had this little midi keyboard hooked up to my laptop and I kind of acted like their first piano teacher.
I was like, okay, hold your hand like this, you know, curve your fingers. You are gonna put them on the keys. And I was like, okay, now just do 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1. So I taught them, great, that's a scale. That's what you're gonna do. When they say:
MACHINE: Scale.
SCALE STARTS
KAREN BARRETT: Then I said, okay, now, now let's play them in whatever order you want. And I had the backtrack going.
MACHINE: Improvise.
KAREN BARRETT: Then after that, we took them into the scanner and getting some, what we call structural scans. The whole thing would probably take 45 minutes or so, so an adult could sit there and bang it out 45 minutes in the scanner. These little kids were really cute. We were like, do you need snacks? Do you need snackies? Do you need a potty break? They have a little bell on their tummy so they can call me if they need me. They're like, Ms. Karen, I need a potty break. So we just were very flexible about how to do it, but I think it's all that practice outside the scanner that really made it feel comfortable in the scanner.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Can you describe how they would play music in the..
KAREN BARRETT: Yeah! In the scanners, when you're in the scanner, it's like this big tube and you go in on your back and you're lying on your back and you have this, we called it the Darth Vader mask for the kids. It's like this huge face coil that goes over your face with a little mirror and you can adjust the mirror so you can see your hands, so you're lying on your back.
And I give you our special non feral magnetic keyboard and you hold it on your lap while playing. And some things that I also did is that once they were in the scanner. They can look through the window into the control room and see me, and they know that I'm there, but we often had their parents come and sit with them too, and they could see their parents through the window too.
SHUKA KALANTARI: So you, with a lot of patience, were able to scan the brains of these children playing improv music. Tell us what you found and how that affects the way that you think about creativity.
KAREN BARRETT: Oh, I thought this was so cool. So first off, like many of the other studies from our lab, we found that improvising was a very different process from playing the scale.
So that in itself shows that maybe there's something innate about this creativity. But then what was really cool is that. For kids. The main thing about their brains when they're improvising as opposed to playing that scale is that it's mostly about deactivation. So like when we plot this in brain maps, we use red to show activation and blue to show deactivation.
It's mostly blue, and the places that they were deactivating are all sensory hubs and they're also sensory hubs used for self-referential processing. Like when you're trying to understand yourself. And so I was like, well, that's really cool. They're deactivating these sensory hubs, so they're not having some sort of artistic voice that's coming out.
So unlike the jazz musicians where the media prefrontal cord just activates to show your own artistic voice, these kids are just kind of doing this activity and they're not doing that from this artistic place. But then on top of that, those structures, the cingulate cortex. The precuneus, the angular gyrus, the post cuus, those are actually all areas of the brain that are involved in creativity in adults.
So it made me realize, well, if they're have it in kids, and these kids have no training and they're really little, maybe these are like the innate kind of structures that are used for creativity. They haven't had a chance to develop and live the way adults have. But if it's here already, maybe this is the roots.
This is the beginning of the creativity network that we eventually get with adults. But I think what was most surprising was that actually improvisation, engages, reward structures more than playing that scale. So that was really cool 'cause that wasn't so much found as easily in the jazz musicians.
'cause I have always wondered, I'm like, how can, my kid wants to play with that stuff and they want to do these creative arts and well, if it feels rewarding to them, then maybe that's why they want to be creative. And I thought that was really cool. What does that tell us about creativity being something possibly built into how the brain works rather than something that's learned through training?
So I kind of think of kids' creativity as this more raw, unfiltered creativity, and that's what our FMI scanning kind of captures. It captures the beginner's mind. The fact that these kids had little to no musical training and could improvise already. That means that we all have a capability to be creative without training at all.
But I really like this idea of looking at the beginner's mind. It's taken from meditation, and so if you read the books about the beginner's mind from Suzuki, he says that the beginner's mind is this very flexible client. You know, you don't have all the experts' preconceived notions about things. You’re just there. And so what I think is that by studying kids the way we did, we essentially got to look at what is the neuroscience of the beginner's mind?
TRANSITION MUSIC
SHUKA KALANTARI: What is like the coolest thing that you think was your takeaway from the study?
KAREN BARRETT: Like my biggest takeaway is that if kids can do this with like no training, you know, very little life knowledge, but they can be creative then as adults.
We just need to get out of our own way, turn off that critic and be creative. And if our research shows that it's rewarding, well then it kind of makes me feel like we should all be creative every day. And I know in my own life, that's something I do like, I find that I take joy every day in playing and doing something artistic.
So maybe it's not music, maybe it's coloring or painting, or stitching an embroidery. And I take a lot of joy in doing that. And so that's been my takeaway that I've changed in my own life's like, well, I can be creative even if I'm not good at it. It doesn't matter. Just like doing it is rewarding for the brain, so I'm gonna do it and I don't need to be good at it.
That's the takeaway I've been talking to with all my friends who are adults. You can start and there's nothing to stop you from being creative. And so it's really taken off a lot of these shackles that I would normally put on myself and say, no, we all have the capability to be creative.
SHUKA KALANTARI: So really what I'm hearing is that anything can be an improvisation in our daily lives.
KAREN BARRETT: Yeah. Technically, we actually improvise every day of our lives. Like right now, I don't have a script, so I am improvising 'cause I'm speaking to you. Or this morning I was trying to get here to the studio and there was like, you know, construction and I had to find a new way–that's improvising. We actually improvise every day. We just don't know it. And so we actually are better at improvising than we realize. When you realize that improvisation is really fundamental to all our lives, that we're doing it all the time, it makes it a little easier to do it. And I just think that right now, and maybe always actually, the arts have always been a little bit undervalued. Public education is cutting the arts and things like this.
I think what I wanna see is that people realize that creativity in doing the arts is inherently valuable, but also very good for the brain and the health, and that we can leverage the fact that creativity and music uses these unique parts of your brain for our own health and benefit. If you're gonna think of it from a more pragmatic standpoint, if we don't have creative abilities, we can't innovate, we can't invent, and then society can't function. We do need to fund the arts and the sciences because this is how society evolves and continues to evolve. It is actually very fundamental to the human condition.
SHUKA KALANTARI: Anytime I talk about creativity in the arts, it really inspires me both as an individual and as a mother to let go of that rigidity of draw within the lines and do X, Y, Z. So thank you for all the work that you do.
KAREN BARRETT: Thank you for having me. I've been a long time fan of the Science of Happiness Podcast, so it's a dream come true to be here and talking with you today. Thank you.
SHUKA KALANTARI: What can become possible when we choose interdependence over hierarchy?
NILOUFAR KHONSARI: Better decisions and outcomes come about when more insight and more expertise is brought in.
SHUKA KALANTARI: We consider the power of collective leadership next time on The Science of Happiness.
Our associate producers are Emily Brower, Tarini Kakkar, and Anna Zou. Our producer is Truc Nguyen. Our sound designer is Jennie Cataldo of Accompany Studios. I'm Shuka Kalantari, the Executive Producer. Thank you for listening to The Science of Happiness. Have a great day.
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