Emotional Intent Modulates The Neural Substrates Of Creativity: An fMRI Study of Emotionally Targeted Improvisation in Jazz Musicians

Lower thresholds and stronger adaptation to pain in musicians reflect occupational-specific adaptations to contact heat stimulation

BACKGROUND

Extensive audio-motor training and psychological stress can cause professional musicians acute overstrain-injury and chronic pain, resulting in damaged careers and diminished quality of life. It has also been previously shown that musicians might perceive pain differently than non-musicians. Therefore, the aim of our study was to quantify differences between musicians and non-musicians regarding their subjective responses to painful contact heat stimuli and assess how emotional traits might influence these responses.

METHODS

Upon completing the StateTrait-Anxiety-Depression Inventory, 15 healthy musicians and 15 healthy non-musicians from German universities received 15 noxious contact heat stimuli at the dorsal side of each hand and foot. After each stimulation, participants were asked to provide a pain rating from 0 to 10.

RESULTS

Musicians not only reported significantly higher pain ratings after the first stimulation but also showed a significantly higher degree of habituation compared to non-musicians. Additionally, musicians showed a significantly less pronounced difference regarding the pain rating of the hands compared to the feet than non-musicians. Trait anxiety and trait depression scores had no effect on the pain rating or the habituation.

CONCLUSION

The more pronounced habituation of musicians might hint at a neuroplastic nociceptive alteration in musicians. The lack of significance between the psychological traits and their effect on the pain ratings is surprising but could be a result of both participant groups having stressful careers.

SIGNIFICANCE

The findings of this report justify musicians' repetitive sensorimotor training as an important model for plasticity and contribute to a better understanding of pain perception in musicians.

How the arts heal: a review of the neural mechanisms behind the therapeutic effects of creative arts on mental and physical health

Background

The creative arts have long been known for their therapeutic potential. These modalities, which include dance, painting, and music, among others, appear to be effective in enhancing emotional expression and alleviating adverse physiological and psychological effects. Engagement in creative arts can be pursued as a personal hobby, in a classroom setting, or through a formal therapeutic intervention with a qualified therapist. Engagement can be active (i.e., creating) or passive (i.e., viewing, listening). Regardless of the modality and manner of engagement, the mechanisms explaining the therapeutic efficacy of creative arts remain poorly understood.

Objective

This study aims to systematically review research investigating the neurological mechanisms activated during active or passive engagement in creative arts, with a specific emphasis on the roles of the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and the amygdala in emotional regulation (ER) and creative behaviors. The review seeks to provide preliminary evidence for the possible existence of common neural mechanisms underlying both phenomena, which could inform the development of targeted therapeutic interventions leveraging creative arts for ER.

Methods

A systematic review was conducted following the Cochrane Collaboration guideline and PRISMA standards to identify studies examining the neurological mechanisms underlying creative activities.

Results

A total of six out of 85 records meet the inclusion criteria, with all being basic research studies. Preliminary findings suggest that active and passive engagement with creative arts consistently activate neural circuits implicated in adaptive emotional regulation, including the mPFC and amygdala. These activations mirror the neural pathways engaged in effective ER strategies, suggesting the possible existence of shared mechanisms between creative expression and emotional processing.

Conclusion

The evidence underscores the potential of creative arts as a complementary therapeutic strategy alongside conventional care and other evidence-based mind-body modalities. By elucidating the shared neural mechanisms between creative arts engagement and ER, this review contributes to the theoretical and practical understanding of the role of creative arts in mental health. Future research is recommended to further explore these neural correlations and their implications for therapeutic practice.

Event-related prefrontal activations during online video game playing are modulated by game mechanics, physiological arousal and the amount of daily playing

There is a trend to study human brain functions in ecological contexts and in relation to human factors. In this study, functional near-infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) was used to record real-time prefrontal activities in 42 male university student habitual video game players when they played a round of multiplayer online battle arena game, League of Legends. A content-based event coding approach was used to analyze regional activations in relation to event type, physiological arousal indexed by heart rate (HR) change, and individual characteristics of the player. Game events Slay and Slain were found to be associated with similar HR and prefrontal responses before the event onset, but differential responses after the event onset. Ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) activation preceding the Slay onset correlated positively with HR change, whereas activations in dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and rostral frontal pole area (FPAr) preceding the Slain onset were predicted by self-reported hours of weekly playing (HoWP). Together, these results provide empirical evidence to support the notion that event-related regional prefrontal activations during online video game playing are shaped by game mechanics, in-game dynamics of physiological arousal and individual characteristics the players.

Creative tempo: Spatiotemporal dynamics of the default mode network in improvisational musicians

The intrinsic dynamics of human brain activity display a recurring pattern of anti-correlated activity between the default mode network (DMN), associated with internal processing and mentation, and task positive regions, associated with externally directed attention. In human functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data, this anti-correlated pattern is detectable on the infraslow timescale (<0.1 Hz) as a quasi-periodic pattern (QPP). While the DMN is implicated in creativity and musicality in traditional time-averaged functional connectivity studies, no one has yet explored how creative training may alter dynamic spatiotemporal patterns involving the DMN such as QPPs. In the present study, we compare the outputs of two QPP detection approaches, sliding window algorithm and complex principal components analysis (cPCA). We apply both methods to an existing dataset of musicians captured with resting state fMRI, grouped as either classical, improvisational, or minimally trained non-musicians. The original time-averaged functional connectivity (FC) analysis of this dataset used improvisation as a proxy for creative thinking and found that the DMN and visual networks (VIS) display higher connectivity in improvisational musicians. We expand upon this dataset's original study and find that QPP analysis detects convergent results at the group level with both methods. In improvisational musicians, dynamic functional correlation in the group-averaged QPP was found to be increased between the DMN-VIS and DMN-FPN for both the QPP algorithm and complex principal components analysis (cPCA) methods. Additionally, we found an unexpected increase in FC in the group-averaged QPP between the dorsal attention network and amygdala in improvisational musicians; this result was not reported in the original seed-based study of this dataset. The current study represents a novel application of two dynamic FC detection methods with results that replicate and expand upon previous seed-based FC findings. The results show the robustness of both the QPP phenomenon and its detection methods. This study also demonstrates the value of dynamic FC methods in reproducing seed-based findings and their promise in detecting group-wise or individual differences that may be missed by traditional seed-based resting state fMRI studies.

Exploring Spatio-Spectral Electroencephalogram Modulations of Imbuing Emotional Intent During Active Piano Playing

Imbuing emotional intent serves as a crucial modulator of music improvisation during active musical instrument playing. However, most improvisation-related neural endeavors have been gained without considering the emotional context. This study attempts to exploit reproducible spatio-spectral electroencephalogram (EEG) oscillations of emotional intent using a data-driven independent component analysis framework in an ecological multiday piano playing experiment. Through the four-day 32-ch EEG dataset of 10 professional players, we showed that EEG patterns were substantially affected by both intra- and inter-individual variability underlying the emotional intent of the dichotomized valence (positive vs. negative) and arousal (high vs. low) categories. Less than half (3-4) of the 10 participants analogously exhibited day-reproducible ( ≥ three days) spectral modulations at the right frontal beta in response to the valence contrast as well as the frontal central gamma and the superior parietal alpha to the arousal counterpart. In particular, the frontal engagement facilitates a better understanding of the frontal cortex (e.g., dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and anterior cingulate cortex) and its role in intervening emotional processes and expressing spectral signatures that are relatively resistant to natural EEG variability. Such ecologically vivid EEG findings may lead to better understanding of the development of a brain-computer music interface infrastructure capable of guiding the training, performance, and appreciation for emotional improvisatory status or actuating music interaction via emotional context.

Intraoperative cortical localization of music and language reveals signatures of structural complexity in posterior temporal cortex

Language and music involve the productive combination of basic units into structures. It remains unclear whether brain regions sensitive to linguistic and musical structure are co-localized. We report an intraoperative awake craniotomy in which a left-hemispheric language-dominant professional musician underwent cortical stimulation mapping (CSM) and electrocorticography of music and language perception and production during repetition tasks. Musical sequences were melodic or amelodic, and differed in algorithmic compressibility (Lempel-Ziv complexity). Auditory recordings of sentences differed in syntactic complexity (single vs. multiple phrasal embeddings). CSM of posterior superior temporal gyrus (pSTG) disrupted music perception and production, along with speech production. pSTG and posterior middle temporal gyrus (pMTG) activated for language and music (broadband gamma; 70-150 Hz). pMTG activity was modulated by musical complexity, while pSTG activity was modulated by syntactic complexity. This points to shared resources for music and language comprehension, but distinct neural signatures for the processing of domain-specific structural features.

Unlocking the musical brain: A proof-of-concept study on playing the piano in MRI scanner with naturalistic stimuli

Music is a universal human phenomenon, and can be studied for itself or as a window into the understanding of the brain. Few neuroimaging studies investigate actual playing in the MRI scanner, likely because of the lack of available experimental hardware and analysis tools. Here, we offer an innovative paradigm that addresses this issue in neuromusicology using naturalistic, polyphonic musical stimuli, presents a commercially available MRI-compatible piano, and a flexible approach to quantify participant's performance. We show how making errors while playing can be investigated using an altered auditory feedback paradigm. In the spirit of open science, we make our experimental paradigms and analysis tools available to other researchers studying pianists in MRI. Altogether, we present a proof-of-concept study which shows the feasibility of playing the novel piano in MRI, and a step towards using more naturalistic stimuli.

A Supervised Machine Learning Approach to Classify Brain Morphology of Professional Visual Artists versus Non-Artists

This study aimed to investigate whether there are structural differences in the brains of professional artists who received formal training in the visual arts and non-artists who did not have any formal training or professional experience in the visual arts, and whether these differences can be used to accurately classify individuals as being an artist or not. Previous research using functional MRI has suggested that general creativity involves a balance between the default mode network and the executive control network. However, it is not known whether there are structural differences between the brains of artists and non-artists. In this study, a machine learning method called Multi-Kernel Learning (MKL) was applied to gray matter images of 12 artists and 12 non-artists matched for age and gender. The results showed that the predictive model was able to correctly classify artists from non-artists with an accuracy of 79.17% (AUC 88%), and had the ability to predict new cases with an accuracy of 81.82%. The brain regions most important for this classification were the Heschl area, amygdala, cingulate, thalamus, and parts of the parietal and occipital lobes as well as the temporal pole. These regions may be related to the enhanced emotional and visuospatial abilities that professional artists possess compared to non-artists. Additionally, the reliability of this circuit was assessed using two different classifiers, which confirmed the findings. There was also a trend towards significance between the circuit and a measure of vividness of imagery, further supporting the idea that these brain regions may be related to the imagery abilities involved in the artistic process.

Assessment of Different Feature Extraction Methods for Discriminating Expressed Emotions during Music Performance towards BCMI Application

A Brain-Computer Music Interface (BCMI) system may be designed to harness electroencephalography (EEG) signals for control over musical outputs in the context of emotionally expressive performance. To develop a real-time BCMI system, accurate and computationally efficient emotional biomarkers should first be identified. In the current study, we evaluated the ability of various features to discriminate between emotions expressed during music performance with the aim of developing a BCMI system. EEG data was recorded while subjects performed simple piano music with contrasting emotional cues and rated their success in communicating the intended emotion. Power spectra and connectivity features (Magnitude Square Coherence (MSC) and Granger Causality (GC)) were extracted from the signals. Two different approaches of feature selection were used to assess the contribution of neutral baselines in detection accuracies; 1- utilizing the baselines to normalize the features, 2- not taking them into account (non-normalized features). Finally, the Support Vector Machine (SVM) has been used to evaluate and compare the capability of various features for emotion detection. Best detection accuracies were obtained from the non-normalized MSC-based features equal to 85.57 ± 2.34, 84.93 ± 1.67, and 87.16 ± 0.55 for arousal, valence, and emotional conditions respectively, while the power-based features had the lowest accuracies. Both connectivity features show acceptable accuracy while requiring short processing time and thus are potential candidates for the development of a real-time BCMI system.

Construction and analysis of functional brain network based on emotional electroencephalogram

Networks play an important role in studying structure or functional connection of various brain areas, and explaining mechanism of emotion. However, there is a lack of comprehensive analysis among different construction methods nowadays. Therefore, this paper studies the impact of different emotions on connection of functional brain networks (FBNs) based on electroencephalogram (EEG). Firstly, we defined electrode node as brain area of vicinity of electrode to construct 32-node small-scale FBN. Pearson correlation coefficient (PCC) was used to construct correlation-based FBNs. Phase locking value (PLV) and phase synchronization index (PSI) were utilized to construct synchrony-based FBNs. Next, global properties and effects of emotion of different networks were compared. The difference of synchrony-based FBN concentrates in alpha band, and the number of differences is less than that of correlation-based FBN. Node properties of different small-scale FBNs have significant differences, offering a new basis for feature extraction of recognition regions in emotional FBNs. Later, we made partition of electrode nodes and 10 new brain areas were defined as regional nodes to construct 10-node large-scale FBN. Results show the impact of emotion on network clusters on the right forehead, and high valence enhances information processing efficiency of FBN by promoting connections in brain areas.

The Creative Drummer: An EEG-Based Pilot Study on the Correlates of Emotions and Creative Drum Playing

It is reasonable to assume that emotional processes are involved in creative tasks and the generation of creative ideas. In this pilot study, we investigate the emotional correlates in professional drummers during different degrees of creative music playing. Ten participants performed three tasks: repetitive rhythmic drum playing, pattern-based improvisation, and attention-intensive free improvisation, while their EEG activity was recorded. Arousal and valence levels were estimated from the EEG data at baseline and for the three tasks. Results show significantly increased levels of valence (i.e., increased prefrontal right alpha power compared to prefrontal left alpha power) during pattern-based and free improvisation relative to baseline, and significantly increased levels of valence during free improvisation relative to pattern-based improvisation. These results seem to indicate that positive emotion (characterized as increased valence) is associated with the creation of original ideas in drum playing and that the freer the creative process, the greater the positive effect. The implication of these results may be of particular relevance in the fields of music-based therapeutic interventions and music pedagogy.

EEG Connectivity during Active Emotional Musical Performance

The neural correlates of intentional emotion transfer by the music performer are not well investigated as the present-day research mainly focuses on the assessment of emotions evoked by music. In this study, we aim to determine whether EEG connectivity patterns can reflect differences in information exchange during emotional playing. The EEG data were recorded while subjects were performing a simple piano score with contrasting emotional intentions and evaluated the subjectively experienced success of emotion transfer. The brain connectivity patterns were assessed from the EEG data using the Granger Causality approach. The effective connectivity was analyzed in different frequency bands—delta, theta, alpha, beta, and gamma. The features that (1) were able to discriminate between the neutral baseline and the emotional playing and (2) were shared across conditions, were used for further comparison. The low frequency bands—delta, theta, alpha—showed a limited number of connections (4 to 6) contributing to the discrimination between the emotional playing conditions. In contrast, a dense pattern of connections between regions that was able to discriminate between conditions (30 to 38) was observed in beta and gamma frequency ranges. The current study demonstrates that EEG-based connectivity in beta and gamma frequency ranges can effectively reflect the state of the networks involved in the emotional transfer through musical performance, whereas utility of the low frequency bands (delta, theta, alpha) remains questionable.

The neural basis of creative production: A cross-modal ALE meta-analysis

One of the central questions about the cognitive neuroscience of creativity is the extent to which creativity depends on either domain-specific or domain-general mechanisms. To address this question, we carried out two parallel activation likelihood estimation meta-analyses of creativity: 1) a motoric analysis that combined studies across five domains of creative production (verbalizing, music, movement, writing, and drawing), and 2) an analysis of the standard ideational task used to study divergent thinking, the Alternate Uses task. All experiments contained a contrast between a creative task and a matched non-creative or less-creative task that controlled for the sensorimotor demands of task performance. The activation profiles of the two meta-analyses were non-overlapping, but both pointed to a domain-specific interpretation in which creative production is, at least in part, an enhancement of sensorimotor brain areas involved in non-creative production. The most concordant areas of activation in the motoric meta-analysis were high-level motor areas such as the pre-supplementary motor area and inferior frontal gyrus that interface motor planning and executive control, suggesting a means of uniting domain-specificity and -generality in creative production.

Spectral Characteristics of EEG during Active Emotional Musical Performance

The research on neural correlates of intentional emotion communication by the music performer is still limited. In this study, we attempted to evaluate EEG patterns recorded from musicians who were instructed to perform a simple piano score while manipulating their manner of play to express specific contrasting emotions and self-rate the emotion they reflected on the scales of arousal and valence. In the emotional playing task, participants were instructed to improvise variations in a manner by which the targeted emotion is communicated. In contrast, in the neutral playing task, participants were asked to play the same piece precisely as written to obtain data for control over general patterns of motor and sensory activation during playing. The spectral analysis of the signal was applied as an initial step to be able to connect findings to the wider field of music-emotion research. The experimental contrast of emotional playing vs. neutral playing was employed to probe brain activity patterns differentially involved in distinct emotional states. The tasks of emotional and neutral playing differed considerably with respect to the state of intended-to-transfer emotion arousal and valence levels. The EEG activity differences were observed between distressed/excited and neutral/depressed/relaxed playing.

In search of the emotional experience of innovative products across categories

Although the innovative designs deliver, superior customer value has long been noted. However, the emotional experience of innovative products brings remains mostly unknown. This work focuses on two kinds of innovative products: function innovation (FI) and design innovation (DI), to uncover the mystery of the emotional experience, these two types of innovative designs bring. Participants in Study 1 were required to subjectively report their practical, emotional experience of the two kinds of innovative designs. The result showed that the emotional experience of innovation products might be a mixture of emotionality. Also, FI and DI products may cause different emotional experiences performance. Multidimensional scaling was employed in Study 2 to simplify the dimensions of these reported emotions to investigate the difference of emotion dimensions distribution that FI and DI brings. The results showed that DI products mainly reflected strong arouse than FI in positive emotions. However, DI product brings more negative emotions than positive emotions. Whereas, FI product did not show the quantitative differences between positive and negative emotions. In Study 3, the difference between FI and DI in emotion intensity was investigated, and the result indicates that both FI and DI products can bring high-intensity positive emotion. However, the DI brings higher intensity negative emotion and lower intensity positive emotion than FI. These studies demonstrate the first direct evidence of the essence of the difference between FI and DI emotion experience and suggest possible guidance for consumers to avoid the effect of the emotions when choosing innovative products.

Impact of music-based intervention on verbal memory: an experimental behavioral study with older adults

Normal age-related declines have been reported in different cognitive functions, such as episodic memory. Some environmental factors have the potential to reduce cognitive decline and promote healthy aging. In this research, we employed musical improvisation as a focal music-based intervention to explore its effects as a modulator of verbal memory. We evaluated two types of verbal memory: a neutral one, employing the Rey Auditory Verbal Learning Test (Study 1), and an emotional one, implementing the Spanish version of Affective Norms for English Words (Study 2) in a volunteer group of older adults. After the acquisition of neutral (Study 1) or emotional (Study 2) verbal information, the participants were exposed to musical improvisation (experimental condition) or two control conditions (rhythmic reproduction as a musically active control condition or a rest condition as a passive control condition) for 3 min. Then, memory was evaluated through two memory tasks (immediate and deferred free-recall and recognition tests). In both studies, we compared memory performance among musicians (with five or more years of music training) and non-musicians. We found a significant improvement in neutral verbal memory among participants involved in musical improvisation, who remembered more words than those in the control conditions. Differences were also found according to the musical experience of the sample, with musicians outperforming non-musicians. The current research supports the late-life cognitive benefits of music-based intervention and music training.

A coordinate-based meta-analysis of music-evoked emotions

Since the publication of the first neuroscience study investigating emotion with music about two decades ago, the number of functional neuroimaging studies published on this topic has increased each year. This research interest is in part due to the ubiquity of music across cultures, and to music's power to evoke a diverse range of intensely felt emotions. To support a better understanding of the brain correlates of music-evoked emotions this article reports a coordinate-based meta-analysis of neuroimaging studies (n = 47 studies with n = 944 subjects). The studies employed a range of diverse experimental approaches (e.g., using music to evoke joy, sadness, fear, tension, frissons, surprise, unpleasantness, or feelings of beauty). The results of an activation likelihood estimation (ALE) indicate large clusters in a range of structures, including amygdala, anterior hippocampus, auditory cortex, and numerous structures of the reward network (ventral and dorsal striatum, anterior cingulate cortex, orbitofrontal cortex, secondary somatosensory cortex). The results underline the rewarding nature of music, the role of the auditory cortex as an emotional hub, and the role of the hippocampus in attachment-related emotions and social bonding.

“Just the Way You Are”: Linking Music Listening on Spotify and Personality

Advances in digital technology have put music libraries at people’s fingertips, giving them immediate access to more music than ever before. Here we overcome limitations of prior research by leveraging ecologically valid streaming data: 17.6 million songs and over 662,000 hr of music listened to by 5,808 Spotify users spanning a 3-month period. Building on interactionist theories, we investigated the link between personality traits and music listening behavior, described by an extensive set of 211 mood, genre, demographic, and behavioral metrics. Findings from machine learning showed that the Big Five personality traits are predicted by musical preferences and habitual listening behaviors with moderate to high accuracy. Importantly, our work contrasts a recent self-report-based meta-analysis, which suggested that personality traits play only a small role in musical preferences; rather, we show with big data and advanced machine learning methods that personality is indeed important and warrants continued rigorous investigation.

Mapping the artistic brain: Common and distinct neural activations associated with musical, drawing, and literary creativity

Whether creativity is a domain‐general or domain‐specific ability has been a topic of intense speculation. Although previous studies have examined domain‐specific mechanisms of creative performance, little is known about commonalities and distinctions in neural correlates across different domains. We applied activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta‐analysis to identify the brain activation of domain‐mechanisms by synthesizing functional neuroimaging studies across three forms of artistic creativity: music improvisation, drawing, and literary creativity. ALE meta‐analysis yielded a domain‐general pattern across three artistic forms, with overlapping clusters in the presupplementary motor area (pre‐SMA), left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and right inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Regarding domain‐specificity, musical creativity was associated with recruitment of the SMA‐proper, bilateral IFG, left precentral gyrus, and left middle frontal gyrus (MFG) compared to the other two artistic forms; drawing creativity recruited the left fusiform gyrus, left precuneus, right parahippocampal gyrus, and right MFG compared to musical creativity; and literary creativity recruited the left angular gyrus and right lingual gyrus compared to musical creativity. Contrasting drawing and literary creativity revealed no significant differences in neural activation, suggesting that these domains may rely on a common neurocognitive system. Overall, these findings reveal a central, domain‐general system for artistic creativity, but with each domain relying to some degree on domain‐specific neural circuits.

Resting state functional connectivity underlying musical creativity

While the behavior of "being musically creative"- improvising, composing, songwriting, etc.-is undoubtedly a complex and highly variable one, recent neuroscientific investigation has offered significant insight into the neural underpinnings of many of the creative processes contributing to such behavior. A previous study from our research group (Bashwiner et al., 2016), which examined two aspects of brain structure as a function of creative musical experience, found significantly increased cortical surface area or subcortical volume in regions of the default-mode network, a motor planning network, and a "limbic" network. The present study sought to determine how these regions coordinate with one another and with other regions of the brain in a large number of participants (n ​= ​218) during a task-neutral period, i.e., during the "resting state." Deriving from the previous study's results a set of eleven regions of interest (ROIs), the present study analyzed the resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) from each of these seed regions as a function of creative musical experience (assessed via our Musical Creativity Questionnaire). Of the eleven ROIs investigated, nine showed significant correlations with a total of 22 clusters throughout the brain, the most significant being located in bilateral cerebellum, right inferior frontal gyrus, midline thalamus (particularly the mediodorsal nucleus), and medial premotor regions. These results support prior reports (by ourselves and others) implicating regions of the default-mode, executive, and motor-planning networks in musical creativity, while additionally-and somewhat unanticipatedly-including a potentially much larger role for the salience network than has been previously reported in studies of musical creativity.

EasyMEG: An easy-to-use toolbox for MEG analysis

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVE

Magnetoencephalography (MEG) is an advanced magnetic source imaging technology that measures the magnetic fields produced by neural activities. It has been extensively used in scientific research and clinical diagnosis due to its high temporal and spatial resolution. Considering the special nature of MEG data, it needs to perform a series of processes and analysis to obtain valuable information. Therefore, the identification of data processing is a key point of MEG studies. At present, the software for MEG analysis such as FieldTrip has no Graphic User Interface (GUI) and users must write their own script to perform concrete analysis. It brings the difficulties to researchers like the doctors without experience in programming or newcomers to MEG. Thus, an open-sourced software-EasyMEG was developed. It has friendly interface with highly functions-integration.

METHODS

The functions of EasyMEG are developed based on MATLAB language to ensure the consistency of the user interface under different operating systems. EasyMEG is a highly integrated software that contains a set of functions for preprocessing, time-lock analysis, time-frequency analysis, source analysis, and plotting. EasyMEG provides a friendly GUI and allows users to complete analyses through a simple and clean interface.

RESULTS

This toolbox has been released as an open-source software on GitHub under the GNU General Public License: https://tonywu2018.github.io/EasyMEG/.

CONCLUSIONS

We hope to improve this toolbox by the power of community and wish to make EasyMEG a simple and powerful toolbox for further MEG studies.

Dynamic intersubject neural synchronization reflects affective responses to sad music

Psychological theories of emotion often highlight the dynamic quality of the affective experience, yet neuroimaging studies of affect have traditionally relied on static stimuli that lack ecological validity. Consequently, the brain regions that represent emotions and feelings as they unfold remain unclear. Recently, dynamic, model-free analytical techniques have been employed with naturalistic stimuli to better capture time-varying patterns of activity in the brain; yet, few studies have focused on relating these patterns to changes in subjective feelings. Here, we address this gap, using intersubject correlation and phase synchronization to assess how stimulus-driven changes in brain activity and connectivity are related to two aspects of emotional experience: emotional intensity and enjoyment. During fMRI scanning, healthy volunteers listened to a full-length piece of music selected to induce sadness. After scanning, participants listened to the piece twice while simultaneously rating the intensity of felt sadness or felt enjoyment. Activity in the auditory cortex, insula, and inferior frontal gyrus was significantly synchronized across participants. Synchronization in auditory, visual, and prefrontal regions was significantly greater in participants with higher measures of a subscale of trait empathy related to feeling emotions in response to music. When assessed dynamically, continuous enjoyment ratings positively predicted a moment-to-moment measure of intersubject synchronization in auditory, default mode, and striatal networks, as well as the orbitofrontal cortex, whereas sadness predicted intersubject synchronization in limbic and striatal networks. The results suggest that stimulus-driven patterns of neural communication in emotional processing and high-level cortical regions carry meaningful information with regards to our feeling in response to a naturalistic stimulus.

Neuroanatomy of creative achievement

Very few studies have investigated neuroanatomical correlates of "everyday" creative achievement in cohorts of normal subjects. In previous research, we first showed that scores on the Creative Achievement Questionnaire (CAQ) were associated with lower cortical thickness within the left lateral orbitofrontal gyrus (LOFG), and increased thickness of the right angular gyrus (AG) (Jung et al., 2010). Newer studies found the CAQ to be associated with decreased volume of the rostral anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and that artistic and scientific creativity was associated with increased and decreased volumes within the executive control network and salience network (Shi et al., 2017). We desired to replicate and extend our previous study in a larger cohort (N ​= ​248), comprised of subjects studying and working in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). Subjects were young (Range ​= ​16-32; Mean age ​= ​21.8; s.d. ​= ​3.5) all of whom were administered the CAQ, from which we derived artistic and scientific creativity factors. All subjects underwent structural MRI on a 3 ​T scanner from which cortical thickness, area, and volume measures were obtained using FreeSurfer. Our results showed mostly cortical thinning in relation to total, scientific, and artistic creative achievement encompassing many regions involved in the cognitive control network (CCN) and default mode network (DMN).

Music Improvisation Is Characterized by Increase EEG Spectral Power in Prefrontal and Perceptual Motor Cortical Sources and Can be Reliably Classified From Non-improvisatory Performance

This study expores neural activity underlying creative processes through the investigation of music improvisation. Fourteen guitar players with a high level of improvisation skill participated in this experiment. The experimental task involved playing 32-s alternating blocks of improvisation and scales on guitar. electroencephalography (EEG) data was measured continuously throughout the experiment. In order to remove potential artifacts and extract brain-related activity the following signal processing techniques were employed: bandpass filtering, Artifact Subspace Reconstruction, and Independent Component Analysis (ICA). For each participant, artifact related independent components (ICs) were removed from the EEG data and only ICs found to be from brain activity were retained. Source localization using this brain-related activity was carried out using sLORETA. Greater activity for improvisation over scale was found in multiple frequency bands (theta, alpha, and beta) localized primarily in the medial frontal cortex (MFC), Middle frontal gyrus (MFG), anterior cingulate, polar medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), premotor cortex (PMC), pre and postcentral gyrus (PreCG and PostCG), superior temporal gyrus (STG), inferior parietal lobule (IPL), and the temporal-parietal junction. Together this collection of brain regions suggests that improvisation was mediated by processes involved in coordinating planned sequences of movement that are modulated in response to ongoing environmental context through monitoring and feedback of sensory states in relation to internal plans and goals. Machine-learning using Common Spatial Patterns (CSP) for EEG feature extraction attained a mean of over 75% classification performance for improvisation vs. scale conditions across participants. These machine-learning results are a step towards the development of a brain-computer interface that could be used for neurofeedback training to improve creativity.

Poetic Science: Bidirectional Reflection in Science and Medicine

The arts are making their mark in science, technology, engineering, arts, and mathematics/medicine (STEAM). Integrating creative expression-poetry and other visual and performing arts-can help clinicians, scientists, and others use familiar social constructs to embody science and medicine, in what may be termed poetic science. Poetic science imbues bidirectional reflections of science and medicine on the clinician or scientist or other inquisitor, creatively engaging the learner's brain cells as mirrors. This ultimately leads to a subjective perspective on the understanding or the proposition of underlying principles. Such an approach is encouraged here with poignant examples that can be accessed publicly online and used widely by readers, teachers, learners, clinicians, scientists, students, and others.

Gray Matter Correlates of Creativity in Musical Improvisation

Creativity has been defined as requiring both novelty and effectiveness, but little is known about how this standard definition applies in music. Here, we present results from a pilot study in which we combine behavioral testing in musical improvisation and structural neuroimaging to relate brain structure to performance in a creative musical improvisation task. Thirty-eight subjects completed a novel improvisation continuation task and underwent T1 MRI. Recorded performances were rated by expert jazz instructors for creativity. Voxel-based morphometric analyses on T1 data showed that creativity ratings were negatively associated with gray matter volume in the right inferior temporal gyrus and bilateral hippocampus. The duration of improvisation training, which was significantly correlated with creativity ratings, was negatively associated with gray matter volume in the rolandic operculum. Together, results show that musical improvisation ability and training are associated with gray matter volume in regions that are previously linked to learning and memory formation, perceptual categorization, and sensory integration. The present study takes a first step towards understanding the neuroanatomical basis of musical creativity by relating creative musical improvisation to individual differences in gray matter structure.

Large-scale brain network associated with creative insight: combined voxel-based morphometry and resting-state functional connectivity analyses

Creative insight occurs with an “Aha!” experience when solving a difficult problem. Here, we investigated large-scale networks associated with insight problem solving. We recruited 232 healthy participants aged 21–69 years old. Participants completed a magnetic resonance imaging study (MRI; structural imaging and a 10 min resting-state functional MRI) and an insight test battery (ITB) consisting of written questionnaires (matchstick arithmetic task, remote associates test, and insight problem solving task). To identify the resting-state functional connectivity (RSFC) associated with individual creative insight, we conducted an exploratory voxel-based morphometry (VBM)-constrained RSFC analysis. We identified positive correlations between ITB score and grey matter volume (GMV) in the right insula and middle cingulate cortex/precuneus, and a negative correlation between ITB score and GMV in the left cerebellum crus 1 and right supplementary motor area. We applied seed-based RSFC analysis to whole brain voxels using the seeds obtained from the VBM and identified insight-positive/negative connections, i.e. a positive/negative correlation between the ITB score and individual RSFCs between two brain regions. Insight-specific connections included motor-related regions whereas creative-common connections included a default mode network. Our results indicate that creative insight requires a coupling of multiple networks, such as the default mode, semantic and cerebral-cerebellum networks.

Experimental effects of acute exercise and music listening on cognitive creativity

OBJECTIVE

The purpose of this study was to extend previous experimental work suggesting that both exercise and music-based interventions may influence creativity processes, by investigating the independent influences of exercise or music stimuli on verbal creative performances in the laboratory environment.

METHODS

32 students at the University of Mississippi participated in this within-subject intervention, which included three laboratory visits per participant. Individuals participated in three 15-min, randomized experimental conditions: Treadmill walking, self-selected music, or a seated control period, and subsequently completed four creativity assessments during each visit (three tests of divergent thinking, and one test of convergent thinking), with the order of divergent thinking tasks counterbalanced. Creativity task performance was independently scored across four dependent parameters, which included fluency (i.e., total number of ideas), flexibility (i.e., total number of categories), originality (i.e., responses thought of by <5% of the sample), and elaboration (i.e., degree of supplementary detail included per idea).

RESULTS

Repeated Measures ANOVAs indicated that creativity scores for fluency (F(2, 60) = 0.63, p = 0.94), flexibility (F(2, 60) = 0.64, p = 0.53), originality (F(2, 60 = 0.23, p = 0.78), and elaboration (F(2, 60) = 2.74, p = 0.07), were not statistically significant across the visits.

CONCLUSIONS

These findings add to the equivocal body of creativity research, uniquely assessing the effects of exercise and music on verbal creativity performance. The present study further highlights the critical need for improvement in the assessment and evaluation of laboratory-assessed cognitive creativity. Methodological strategies must be examined and refined for the meaningful and credible measurement and interpretation of experimental creativity.

Hierarchical dynamics of informational patterns and decision-making

Traditional studies on the interaction of cognitive functions in healthy and disordered brains have used the analyses of the connectivity of several specialized brain networks-the functional connectome. However, emerging evidence suggests that both brain networks and functional spontaneous brain-wide network communication are intrinsically dynamic. In the light of studies investigating the cooperation between different cognitive functions, we consider here the dynamics of hierarchical networks in cognitive space. We show, using an example of behavioural decision-making based on sequential episodic memory, how the description of metastable pattern dynamics underlying basic cognitive processes helps to understand and predict complex processes like sequential episodic memory recall and competition among decision strategies. The mathematical images of the discussed phenomena in the phase space of the corresponding cognitive model are hierarchical heteroclinic networks. One of the most important features of such networks is the robustness of their dynamics. Different kinds of instabilities of these dynamics can be related to 'dynamical signatures' of creativity and different psychiatric disorders. The suggested approach can also be useful for the understanding of the dynamical processes that are the basis of consciousness.

Emotion-related brain structures associated with trait creativity in middle children

Middle childhood is an important period for individual trait shaping, during which children are likely to generate and own their distinct neuromechanism of creative-related traits. This study used voxel-based morphometry (VBM) to identify the brain structures that underlie trait creativity (as measured by the Williams Creativity Aptitude Test) in a sample of typical developing children (aged 9-12, n=64). The results indicated that several emotion-related regions may relate to trait creativity in middle children. Specifically, the regional gray matter volume (rGMV) in the amygdala and hippocampus was negatively related to creative traits of challenge and risk-taking, which indicates that children with increased trait creativity may be more impulsive when they engage in creative activities. An increased rGMV in the orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) was related to an increased trait of imagination, which may be associated with stronger sensation-seeking in children. These findings are the first to demonstrate the brain structures that underlie trait creativity in middle children, and indicated that, driven by a relatively stronger effect of sensation-seeking (via recruitment of the OFC), children with increased trait creativity may exhibit more risk-taking and challenging behaviors (via recruitment of the amygdala and hippocampus) when they practice their creativity.

Trait-based food-cravings are encoded by regional homogeneity in the parahippocampal gyrus

Food cravings can reflect an intense trait-like emotional-motivational desire to eat palatable food, often resulting in the failure of weight loss efforts. Studies have linked trait-based food-cravings to increased risk of overeating. However, little is known about resting-state neural mechanisms that underlie food cravings. We investigated this issue using resting-state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test the extent to which spontaneous neural activity occurs in regions implicated in emotional memory and reward motivation associated with food cravings. Spontaneous regional activity patterns correlating to food cravings were assessed among 65 young healthy women using regional homogeneity analysis to assess temporal synchronization of spontaneous activity. Analyses indicated that women with higher scores on the Food Cravings Questionnaire displayed increased local functional homogeneity in brain regions involved in emotional memory and visual attention processing (i.e., parahippocampal gyrus and fusiform gyrus) but not reward. In view of parahippocampal gyrus involvement in hedonic learning and incentive memory encoding, this study suggests that trait-based food cravings are encoded by emotional memory circuits.

IMAGING OF BRAIN FUNCTION BASED ON THE ANALYSIS OF FUNCTIONAL CONNECTIVITY - IMAGING ANALYSIS OF BRAIN FUNCTION BY FMRI AFTER ACUPUNCTURE AT LR3 IN HEALTHY INDIVIDUALS

Objective:

This Study observed the relevant brain areas activated by acupuncture at the Taichong acupoint (LR3) and analyzed the functional connectivity among brain areas using resting state functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to explore the acupoint specificity of the Taichong acupoint.

Methods:

A total of 45 healthy subjects were randomly divided into the Taichong (LR3) group, sham acupuncture group and sham acupoint group. Subjects received resting state fMRI before acupuncture, after true (sham) acupuncture in each group. Analysis of changes in connectivity among the brain areas was performed using the brain functional connectivity method.

Results:

The right cerebrum temporal lobe was selected as the seed point to analyze the functional connectivity. It had a functional connectivity with right cerebrum superior frontal gyrus, limbic lobe cingulate gyrus and left cerebrum inferior temporal gyrus (BA 37), inferior parietal lobule compared by before vs. after acupuncture at LR3, and right cerebrum sub-lobar insula and left cerebrum middle frontal gyrus, medial frontal gyrus compared by true vs. sham acupuncture at LR3, and right cerebrum occipital lobe cuneus, occipital lobe sub-gyral, parietal lobe precuneus and left cerebellum anterior lobe culmen by acupuncture at LR3 vs. sham acupoint.

Conclusion:

Acupuncture at LR3 mainly specifically activated the brain functional network that participates in visual function, associative function, and emotion cognition, which are similar to the features on LR3 in tradition Chinese medicine. These brain areas constituted a neural network structure with specific functions that had specific reference values for the interpretation of the acupoint specificity of the Taichong acupoint.

Early auditory processing in musicians and dancers during a contemporary dance piece

The neural responses to simple tones and short sound sequences have been studied extensively. However, in reality the sounds surrounding us are spectrally and temporally complex, dynamic and overlapping. Thus, research using natural sounds is crucial in understanding the operation of the brain in its natural environment. Music is an excellent example of natural stimulation which, in addition to sensory responses, elicits vast cognitive and emotional processes in the brain. Here we show that the preattentive P50 response evoked by rapid increases in timbral brightness during continuous music is enhanced in dancers when compared to musicians and laymen. In dance, fast changes in brightness are often emphasized with a significant change in movement. In addition, the auditory N100 and P200 responses are suppressed and sped up in dancers, musicians and laymen when music is accompanied with a dance choreography. These results were obtained with a novel event-related potential (ERP) method for natural music. They suggest that we can begin studying the brain with long pieces of natural music using the ERP method of electroencephalography (EEG) as has already been done with functional magnetic resonance (fMRI), these two brain imaging methods complementing each other.