Musical improvisation offers an excellent experimental paradigm for the study of real-time human creativity. It involves moment-to-moment decision-making, monitoring of one's performance, and utilizing external feedback to spontaneously create new melodies or variations on a melody. Recent neuroimaging studies have begun to study the brain activity during musical improvisation, aiming to unlock the mystery of human creativity. What brain resources come together and how these are utilized during musical improvisation are not well understood. To help answer these questions, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) signals from 19 experienced musicians while they played or imagined short isochronous learned melodies and improvised on those learned melodies. These four conditions (Play-Prelearned, Play-Improvised, Imagine-Prelearned, Imagine-Improvised) were randomly interspersed in a total of 300 trials per participant. From the sensor-level EEG, we found that there were power differences in the alpha (8–12 Hz) and beta (13–30 Hz) bands in separate clusters of frontal, parietal, temporal, and occipital electrodes. Using EEG source localization and dipole modeling methods for task-related signals, we identified the locations and network activities of five sources: the left superior frontal gyrus (L SFG), supplementary motor area (SMA), left inferior parietal lobule (L IPL), right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, and right superior temporal gyrus. During improvisation, the network activity between L SFG, SMA, and L IPL was significantly less than during the prelearned conditions. Our results support the general idea that attenuated cognitive control facilitates the production of creative output.

Despite rapid advances in the field of immunotherapy, the elimination of established tumors has not been achieved. Many promising new treatments such as adoptive cell therapy (ACT) fall short, primarily due to the loss of T cell effector function or the failure of long-term T cell persistence. With the availability of new tools and advancements in technology, our understanding of metabolic processes has increased enormously in the last decade. Redundancy in metabolic pathways and overlapping targets that could address the plasticity and heterogenous phenotypes of various T cell subsets have illuminated the need for understanding immunometabolism in the context of multiple disease states, including cancer immunology. Herein, we discuss the developing field of T cell immunometabolism and its crucial relevance to improving immunotherapeutic approaches. This in-depth review details the metabolic pathways and preferences of the antitumor immune system and the state of various metabolism-targeting therapeutic approaches.