The Trust Factor

Why you have to turn off part of
your brain in order to improvise.

 
If you’ve ever improvised, you know that it goes by in a flash. Each moment is intense, but you can’t really describe what you’re thinking. I come out of most shows with strong impressions, but no clear memory of anything I did.
 
Do you ever wish you could get a play-by-play of what’s going on in your head when you improvise?

 

Aaron Berkowitz and Daniel Ansari can tell you.

 
Berkowitz (a cognitive musicologist) and Ansari (a neuroscientist) put 13 classically-trained pianists in an fMRI machine, and watched what happened in their brains while they improvised.
 
They saw a lot of things happening. But one of the most interesting things was the suppression of the medial prefrontal region. That’s the area of your brain related to judgment and inhibition.
 
Judgment and inhibition are really important: they keep you from running a red light or saying something embarrassing at a party.
 
But in order to improvise, your brain has to suppress those functions.

 

Why shut down the inhibition center?

 
Because inhibition kills improv. It’s like a dam that stops the free flow of ideas. When you’re in the moment, there just isn’t time to come up with ideas and judge them too.
 
If you can’t suppress your inhibition, you draw a blank and freeze up. Or the ideas come out, but you choke them off before you complete your thought, and anxiously jump from idea to idea.
 
So inhibition leaves you stuck or scribbling.

 

So how do you stop inhibiting yourself?

 
Berkowitz and Ansari’s work only tells us what they saw happen in the brain, not how to make it to happen. But I have some ideas.
 
I think that suppressing your inhibition requires trust.
 
You need to trust that you won’t make a fool of yourself if you stop judging your ideas. And that’s tricky, because trust is earned.
 
You need to demonstrate to yourself again and again that you won’t crash and burn.
 
In short, you need a safety net.
 
If you’ve read my work before, you know that I recommend making friends with your safety moves. These are the three moves that come to you easily in the moment. Once you really trust that you can dance well using just those moves, your inhibition center doesn’t have to be on “high alert”.
 
That’s not the only kind of safety net, but I like this one because it’s straight-forward, it’s versatile, and it works with your natural tendency to remember those moves.

 

But I want to STOP using the same three moves!

 
Most of my clients complain that they can only remember a few moves in the heat of the moment. But that’s not actually the problem.
 
You’re not having trouble improvising because you’re remembering those three moves.
 
You’re having trouble improvising because you’re worrying about them.
 
You’re firing up your inhibition center, when you should be suppressing it.

 

Summary

 
Berkowitz and Ansari discovered that the medial prefrontal region of the brain is suppressed when musicians improvise. This shows us that part of improvisation is the ability to stop judging your ideas as they arise.
 
I believe that in order to do that, you have to build trust in your ability to dance without that judgment. To earn that trust, you need a safety net, such as safety moves, that you can rely on in the moment.
 
You may not want to use your safety moves, but trying to overrule them fires up your inhibition center, just when when you need to suppress it.

 

Next Steps

 
Establishing that trust isn’t complicated, but it takes a lot of practice.
Here are a few resources to get you started:
 
Article: Why you should make friends with your safety moves
DVD: Improvisation Toolkit Vol. 1: Movement Recall
Coaching program: The Improvisation Safety Net

 
The article will get you going right away. The DVD takes you more in-depth, and includes drills to help you practice. The coaching program digs really deep, with individual coaching and support from me.

 
Once you’ve established that trust, you still won’t get a play-by-play of what’s happening in your head. But you will know what’s not happening in your inhibition center.

 

Hat Tips:

 
I read about Berkowitz and Ansari’s work in The Improvisational Brain by Amanda Rose Martinez.
 
Today’s image is courtesy of return the sun via flickr.

 

Your Turn

 
Do you feel inhibited on stage?
 
Does it cause you to freeze up, or to scribble?
 
Do you have any tips or techniques to share on building trust?
 
Share your thoughts in the comments.