The Neural Substrates of Expertise and Flow among Jazz Guitarists

While the link between flow and creativity is often assumed, there is a dearth of evidence supporting this claim. Flow is the mental state one enters when fully immersed in an activity, accompanied by the loss of reflective self-consciousness and the merging of action and awareness. The neurocognitive mechanisms of flow are poorly understood; however, theories of flow suggest that it may be characterized by transient hypofrontality, an inhibition of executive systems as implicit, automatic, Type 1 processes are engaged. Similar processes and mechanisms have been proposed for creativity, particularly artistic creativity. We examine the neural basis of flow and its impact on the quality of creative products within the domain of jazz improvisation. Jazz guitarists (N = 32) improvised to novel chord sequences while 64-channel EEG was recorded. Jazz experts rated each improvisation. Behaviorally, musicians’ expertise, flow state scores, and genre preference predict the quality ratings of the improvisations. Additionally, genre, stimulus order and familiarity with the chord changes significantly predict musicians’ flow scores. We report electrophysiological signatures for novices and experts and high- and low-flow state performances, such that novices and low-flow are characterized by increased frontal brain activity, while experts and high-flow reveal increases of activity in posterior and central regions. These results offer the first quantitative evidence of flow enhancing individual creativity among professionals in an ecologically valid musical domain. We interpret our neural data as support for the transient hypofrontality hypothesis, whereby decreasing executive, top-down control and increasing recruitment of posterior, associative, bottom- up processes underlies enhanced levels of flow and domain-expertise in jazz improvisation.Ph.D., Psychology -- Drexel University, 201