Mike Eagle might be in the car or the shower or on stage when it hits him. A thought evolves into a freestyle rap and the rapper, better known as Open Mike Eagle, follows the lyrical trail. Freestyle, a spontaneous rap either in the middle of a written rap or on its own, remains one of the few unscripted lyrical art forms. While freestyle allows rappers to show off skills and entertain, it is also helping researchers understand how creativity works in the brain.

“Freestyle is highly prized in the hip-hop community and it is not that common and takes particular skill,” says Dr. Allen Braun, a senior investigator at the National Institutes of Health. “The main goal … is to understand the creative process and the brain mechanism underlying it.”

Braun and his colleagues at the NIH asked 12 rappers, who had experience freestyling, to rap in an fMRI machine. Each rapper memorized a few lines of a rap written by a friend of Eagle’s, N/A, and performed it for about a minute. Then they freestyle rapped for a minute. The researchers compared the brain activity between the freestyle and conventional performances. Eagle and his friend Daniel Rizik-Baer, a producer, participated in a pilot trail, helping researchers modify the fMRI to accommodate performances. Eagle admits it was tough rapping in the narrow tube because he normally moves when he raps; also, MRIs make a lot of loud noises. 

“It was challenging,” Eagle says. “One thing I learned in the course of doing this study [is that] freestyle rapping is a body intensive and there is movement restriction in [the fMRI].”

And freestyle rappers often rap about their surroundings so the researchers listened to quite a few rhymes about fMRI machines.

Restrictions aside, the researchers discovered important information about creativity. When the rappers freestyle rapped, activity in the medial prefrontal cortex (which is responsible for self-interested behavior) increased, while activity in the dorsolateral cortex (which regulates executive function), decreased. Also, while the rappers freestyled, the medial prefrontal cortex networked with other areas, including regions responsible for language and the amygdala, which plays a role emotions. And even though Eagle associates movement with freestyling, the brain did not show any increased activity in areas responsible for motor activity.

“We think there is a stronger coupling between motivation, action, language, and emotion,” Braun explains.

The researchers also looked at brain activity at the beginning of the eight bar freestyle and the end. They found that the dorsolateral cortex works more at the end, indicating that executive functioning is needed when someone tries to complete a creative work.

The researchers also asked Eagle and Rizik-Baer to rate the freestyle raps. The two evaluated each performance on lyrical creativity and rhythmic complexity. The more innovative rappers showed more activity in the language areas of the brain.  

“The innovative quality was strongly correlated with the left temporal areas, which is the lexicon areas. But also the quality is strongly correlated with the medial prefrontal cortex,” Braun says.   

While the study, which appears in the journal Scientific Reports, focuses on freestyle rapping, Braun believes neurological activity will look the same in other artists.  

“We think that this might generalize to all forms of artistic creativity and even some scientific creativity.”

Below, check out a video of Eagle in action. 

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.

Getty Images stock

A quick glimpse of the color green appears to get a person's creative juices flowing, suggests a new study.

German researchers found that when people glanced at the color green for two seconds before doing a creative task, it boosted their creative output compared to briefly looking at other colors, including white, grey, red, and blue.

In the study, which is published in the journal Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, scientists gave 69 men and women two minutes to write down as many uses as possible for a tin can. Then a coder rated each idea for its creativity and cleverness.

Before beginning the creativity test, half were shown a green rectangle and the other half saw a white rectangle.

Participants who saw green before the task produced more creative ideas than those who saw white. The "green effect" as the researchers dubbed it, was also observed in creativity challenges that pitted the color against those seeing a quick flash of grey, red, or blue.

Does seeing green fuel creativity because it reminds starving artists, musicians, and writers of cash and the need to pay their bills, so the wheels in their head start turning?

That's not how study author Dr. Stephanie Lichtenfeld explains it. She suggests the link between green and creativity is that it's a signal of growth. Not only physical growth as in growing plants, but also psychological growth.

"Green may serve as a cue that evokes the motivation to strive for improvement and task mastery, which in turn may facilitate growth," says Lichtenfeld, an assistant professor of psychology at Ludwig-Maximilians-University in Munich, Germany.

So, if a writer has writer's block should that person fix their eyes on something green for a few seconds, and then get back to work? "The effect seems to be subtle," points out Lichtenfeld. The intentional use of green as a means of being creative remains an open question, she explains.

The green shown in the experiments matched the shade seen in nature, in growing plants or in a meadow. Since this was the first study to find a link between green and creativity, it's unclear whether lime green or blue-green, for instance, may also fuel inventiveness.

And it's not yet known if seeing green for a longer time than two seconds makes the creativity boost stronger or weaker.

For now, studies have shown that other colors have been linked with psychological function. Red has been suggestive of romance, caution, and anger, while blue has been connected with calmness. 

Perhaps a quick flash of green reminds the brain to "go" or suggests success in our minds.

"Even very subtle stimuli, such as color, can influence our motivation, cognition, and behavior," says Lichtenfeld. 

Related:

Watching Jon Stewart might make you more creative

Creative types are full of themselves

That weird urge to jump off a bridge, explained

Want more weird health news? Find The Body Odd on Facebook.