Freestyle Rap: A Root of Inspiration and a Seed for Creativity

Freestyle rapping. The invigorating, unique, and often unbelievable talent that only a few possess….it’s a skill that should only be recited and versed by the certain few who have the correct mixture of talent, confidence, and creativity to make the flow truly go, right?

Wrong.

Freestyle rapping, in my own opinion, is an underutilized holistic technique for unlocking and training the creative side of the brain. This art form potentially has huge benefit for nearly anyone looking to discover new layers of their creative mindset. A Nature.com Scientific Reports 2 Study described freestyle rap perfectly:

“Freestyle rap provides a unique opportunity to study spontaneous lyrical improvisation, a multidimensional form of creativity at the interface of music and language.”

Scientists at The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services found that during freestyle rapping, there are some exceptional increases that occur with the mind’s activity. This is mostly concentrated in the medial prefrontal cortex, a brain region responsible for motivation of thought and action, but is paired with decreased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal regions that normally play a “supervisory or monitoring” role.

Harry Mack showing how flowing can be mildly controlled, yet still never planned.

In other words, when someone isn’t improvising, the brain is fully reliant on regions typically responsible for executive control, “the rules and laws”, and shuts down areas associated with free-thinking and language. However, during improvisation the roles become switched. Executive control and self-monitoring shut down letting the scrambling mind free.

These surprisingly common, and useful, shifts in brain function may be the main facilitator to gaining free expression of thoughts and words without the neural constraints most possess, unknowingly. It’s a level of free expression unlike anything most have ever experienced, it’s a neural release. Once you enter into a flow the prefrontal cortex can control thoughts that produce stress, anxiety, and caution.

Personally, when I first “freestyle rapped” I was so scared, so nervous, so frozen that I couldn’t even make it past a few lines. Even while I was by my lonesome, but after gaining the right courage I started messing around with it and finding courage. The first time you actually switch off your “give-a-shit switch”, it opens an entire new highway of thinking.

The switch had to be flipped off for any truly authentic inspiration to come alive and be directly tapped into. Once this occurred, my creative self burst through my mind’s door, kicking it wide open and shutting my inner critic down. Researchers even believe that when one is in a freestyle “flow”, one can actually be occupying an altered state of mind←(This shit is for real)

A closer look at brain activity when flowing reveals that an entire brain network emerges during the process. A process in which motivation, language, emotion, motor function, sensory processing and the representation of the artists’ subject experience all interact in unusual ways. All of this is used to create the flow state.

In the absence of self-editing, researchers have further noted on the freestyle experience:

“ongoing actions, moment to moment decisions, and adjustments in performance may be experienced as having occurred outside of conscious awareness.”

This, they suggest, could explain why artists sometimes claim their is some guiding influence of an outside agency within their creative process. A certain feeling and emotion that is inexplicable, a high, in which the purest form of creativity is born from.

“the process is neither mysterious nor obscure, but is instead predicated on novel combinations of ordinary mental processes.”

Which is why the wonder we experience during a burst of creative expression, or our appreciation of seeing (or, more accurately, hearing) it occur in others is oddly familiar, yet powerfully extraordinary. The changes in brain activity are so clear that it only confirms the beautiful make-up and nature of the creative mind.

Become your own “Rap God”

This is my experience, short personal research, and opinion on this art form. Like I stated from the start, it’s intimidating, especially in front of others…but when you have the chance to be a part of this creative outlet it can help open and explore parts of yourself and personality that you never knew existed.

So, get out there…throw on an instrumental…and rip it.

Cheers,

J. Robert Fallon III