Hip Hop lovers have always been blown by the ability of gifted emcees to riff a verse on the fly. It’s poetry without preparation, but where does it come from? Do freestyle rappers have an ability to thread words that the rest of us just don’t have? Sure, rappers make it look easy, but just give it one shot, and you’ll quickly discover just how hard it is. So what gives?

Researchers at the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD)  embarked on the journey of determining what happens to a rapper’s brain when he’s fluidly threading together words and sentences.Here’s what they found when they brought together 12 freestyle hip-hop artists from the Washington D.C. and Baltimore areas and hooked them up to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines:

  • The rapper’s brains “activated differently” during freestyle flows:  ”When subjects were freestyling, the medial prefrontal cortex — an area associated with organizing and integrating information — showed an increase an activity.”
  • The areas of the rapper’s brains associated with self-control and self -monitoring showed decreased activity duirng freestyles.
  • The area’s of the rapper’s braisn associated with language and motor control lit up during the freestyles

What does that tell us? That Eminem was right: You tend to “Lose Yourself” when you freestyle. Rappers pay much less conscious attention to the world around them when they’re freestyling, but this is the opposite of what happens to their brains when they’re just reciting memorized lyrics. So if you want to get creative and play around with your brain, freestyle for awhile.