Reaching a high level of skill within a domain, such as music, requires long periods of intense practice. However, research during the last decade has demonstrated that the acquisition of expertise is a complex process that depends on an interaction between practice and many other factors, which include traits of the individual as well as environmental variables. To increase our understanding of musical expertise and its neuropsychological underpinnings is a major research goal of our department. We are particularly interested in how the acquisition of expertise depends on an interplay between genetic and environmental factors.

Musical improvisation has turned out to be a highly useful model task in studies of creative cognition, by which we can study neural mechanisms controlling online generation of new, meaningful materials, using functional magnetic resonance imaging. Specific questions that we work on in this research include the functional roles of different brain regions for spontaneous music creation, the neural implementation of different improvisational strategies, and the effects on the brain of long-term musical training specifically in improvisation.

A comprehensive research literature provides indications that cultural activities, and interventions with cultural ingredients, may have beneficial effects on well-being in a  number of clinical conditions, such as pain, anxiety, and depression. At the same, large scale studies provide convincing evidence for that genetic factors implied in artistic creativity are also related to a higher risk for certain psychiatric disorders, such as bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. Relations between artistic engagement and psychological health are thus complex. In this research project, we study the nature of the associations between cultural engagement, psychological well-being and health closer, using large, genetically informative cohorts, which provide excellent possibilities to analyze causal mechanisms, and disentangle genetic effects from non-genetic influences.

Musical skills, such as playing a melody on a piano or some other musical instrument, have distributed representations in the brain, which involve both sensory and motor brain regions. There are many unresolved questions around how various properties of musical structures, such as their rhythm, melody, and expressive qualities, are represented and controlled by the brain. We study these problems using functional magnetic resonance imaging and state-of-the-art multivariate analyses of patterns of neural activity.

Humans differ widely in how much time and resources they invest in musical activities. Some individuals spend a lot of time practicing and performing music actively, and become amateur or professional musicians. Most people are not active performers, but are satisfied with enjoying music as listeners. At the other end of the spectrum we find people who do not find music rewarding, and spend little, if any, time on musical activities. Moreover, among musical-lovers we see interesting differences in preferences when it comes to styles, instruments and genres. We are interested in understanding the psychological and biological factors that underlie this conspicuous variability, and how it relates to other variables of interest, such as traits of the individual, environmental factors and level of musical expertise.

Just as expertise, creative achievement is a complex phenomenon that involves an interplay between the individual and the environment. The goal of this research line is to analyze how creative achievement in a particular domain is related to individual traits, genetic and environmental factors. Our primary focus is achievement in music, but we are also interested in artistic and scientific creativity more broadly. In order to cover a broad range of achievement, we combine psychological investigations in groups of high-achieving experts, with analyses of gene-environment interplay in large twin samples.