Musicians have been used extensively to study neural correlates of long-term practice, but no studies have investigated the specific effects of training musical creativity. Here, we used human functional MRI to measure brain activity during improvisation in a sample of 39 professional pianists with varying backgrounds in classical and jazz piano playing. We found total hours of improvisation experience to be negatively associated with activity in frontoparietal executive cortical areas. In contrast, improvisation training was positively associated with functional connectivity of the bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortices, dorsal premotor cortices, and presupplementary areas. The effects were significant when controlling for hours of classical piano practice and age. These results indicate that even neural mechanisms involved in creative behaviors, which require a flexible online generation of novel and meaningful output, can be automated by training. Second, improvisational musical training can influence functional brain properties at a network level. We show that the greater functional connectivity seen in experienced improvisers may reflect a more efficient exchange of information within associative networks of importance for musical creativity.

Neuroimaging studies of internally generated behaviors have shown seemingly paradoxical results regarding the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which has been found to activate, not activate or even deactivate relative to control conditions. On the one hand, the DLPFC has been argued to exert top-down control over generative thought by inhibiting habitual responses; on the other hand, a deactivation and concomitant decrease in monitoring and focused attention has been suggested to facilitate spontaneous associations and novel insights. Here, we demonstrate that prefrontal engagement in creative cognition depends dramatically on experimental conditions, that is, the goal of the task. We instructed professional pianists to perform improvisations on a piano keyboard during fMRI and play, either with a certain emotional content (happy/fearful), or using certain keys (tonal/atonal pitch-sets). We found lower activity in primarily the right DLPFC, dorsal premotor cortex and inferior parietal cortex during emotional conditions compared with pitch-set conditions. Furthermore, the DLPFC was functionally connected to the default mode network during emotional conditions and to the premotor network during pitch-set conditions. The results thus support the notion of two broad cognitive strategies for creative problem solving, relying on extrospective and introspective neural circuits, respectively.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) has furthered brain mapping on perceptual, motor, as well as higher-level cognitive functions. However, to date, no data collection has systematically addressed the functional mapping of cognitive mechanisms at a fine spatial scale. The Individual Brain Charting (IBC) project stands for a high-resolution multi-task fMRI dataset that intends to provide the objective basis toward a comprehensive functional atlas of the human brain. The data refer to a cohort of 12 participants performing many different tasks. The large amount of task-fMRI data on the same subjects yields a precise mapping of the underlying functions, free from both inter-subject and inter-site variability. The present article gives a detailed description of the first release of the IBC dataset. It comprises a dozen of tasks, addressing both low- and high- level cognitive functions. This openly available dataset is thus intended to become a reference for cognitive brain mapping.

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