The Mind of a Rapper

Many people give no respect to rappers or people of the urban culture in pop culture because they see them as dumb or ignorant when in fact they might be some of the more creative people in the world because of what they can do with an instrument or with words.  Neurologists have recently decided to study the creative flow that these people have due to their ability to come up with rhymes out of nowhere at any time.  They have used fMRI's (functional magnetic resonance images) on rappers while they are doing a freestyle to try to observe the blood flow and get a better understanding of where this creativity comes from.  Neurologists compared the fMRI results from freestyle rapping of 12 rappers with raps they had written down.

They found that during a freestyle the medial prefrontal cortex, which corresponds with self-motivation and initiation, as well as the emotional and and motor regions were more active during the freestyle raps more so than the written raps.  Siyuan Liu, the lead researcher said she believes that these different regions all become linked in a network when someone is doing a freestyle.  At the beginning of a phrase the they noticed the left side of the brain was more active but as they neared the end of the phrase the right side became more active.  This is odd but it is believed to be this way because they have to think about the words and language at the beginning (left brain) and think more and the music at the end (right brain).  These studies can be very important in helping to understand what factors in to creativity and trying to use those factors to everyone's advantage.