Here’s What’s Happening in the Brain When You’re Improvising

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IImprovisation is often compared to magic. The artist can seem less like an author and more like an intermediary, as if the music is coming from somewhere out of sight. Creativity researchers have long sought to understand what fuels this imaginative process: what is really happening in the brain when inspiration strikes?

To sort the signal from the noise, Henrique Fernandes of the Royal Academy of Music and the University of Aarhus, in collaboration with jazz musician and neuroscientist Peter Vuust, asked 16 jazz pianists to play a famous jazz standard, “Days of Wine and Roses,” while their brains were scanned. Each pianist performed the song three times: from memory; improvise around the melody; and improvise freely around the chord changes that underpin the song.

The results suggest that improvisation is more than a flash of inspiration. This corresponds to distinct, dynamic and identifiable changes in music and in the brain. The more creative freedom artists had, the more notes they played and the less predictable their playing was. Entropy, or variation and surprise in musical patterns, has increased. This confirmed to scientists that the creative freedom they were trying to measure in brain scans was something real, as opposed to something abstract.

Read more: “What time does it look like when you improvise”

The biggest surprise came when the researchers analyzed which brain networks were involved. Compared to rest, improvisation activated networks related to hearing, movement, coordination and reward, a configuration the team described as “improvisation” mode. In this state, the brain tightly couples what the musician hears, feels, and plays from one moment to the next.

But as improvisation became freer, brain activity subtly changed. Networks long considered crucial for creativity have become less dominant, including the default mode network associated with spontaneous thought and the executive control network, involved in planning and self-monitoring. Rather than think more, the brain loosened its grip, falling back on fast, well-trained auditory and motor networks.

“These results expand existing models of improvisation by emphasizing the dynamic reconfiguration of specific and general networks,” explained Henrique Fernandes in a press release. The team published its findings in the Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences.

The authors of the study compare jazz improvisation to a conversation. Musicians rely on a shared vocabulary, respond to dynamic signals in real time, anticipate responses, construct phrases on the fly. Brain data supports this interpretation: In the brain, improvisation feels less like planning and more like fluid, embodied communication, like talking to a loved one.

The scientists say their research framework could be used to study other forms of real-time creativity: dancing, writing, conversation, scientific insight. Ultimately, the results suggest that creativity is not monolithic. Depending on the circumstances, it is based on different balances between perception and action, between emotion and control.

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Main image: Koldunov / Shutterstock

• Kristen French

  Published on December 30, 2025

  Kristen French is an associate editor at Nautilus. She has worked in science journalism since 2013, reporting and writing articles and news for publications such as Wired, Backchannel, The Verge, And New York Review. She holds a master’s degree in science journalism from Columbia University.