Improv Update - Your Improv Brain Podcast & Show
Articles and episodes about learning, coaching, and performing improv and comedy. Some of these articles will specifically consider the cognitive aspects of performing improv & comedy (stage or digital).
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Hello improviser friends, This episode gave me an excuse to read brain science stuff! Which is always fun. But the science relates to something that many of us neurodivergent improvisers experience: issues with sensory overload and executive function while doing scenes. So if this is something that you experience, this episode and the exercises that I mention might help out. This episode also mentions a PDF resource with six new exercises, and this will will be available mid-August 2025 on the site - so watch out for that. How Forgetting Can Help in ImprovYou've probably done an improv exercise that trains you to remember details in a scene. For example, redo a scene you did and try to recall every sentence. Or associate words in a list and everyone tries to regenerate the word association list around a circle. And we all want to win, right? That makes us good at improv. But eventually this approach - holding on to specific details - might start to get in our way. And this idea is supported by how our brains are actually built. The skill we might need to practice is actually... forgetting. This might sound weird, because forgetting feels like a failure (what we talked about last week!) Cognitive neuroscience suggests forgetting can be a deliberate, adaptive process that our brains use to work more efficiently. When we intentionally let go of details that are no longer serving the scene, we reduce our cognitive load. This frees up mental space. That helps us listen better, and remember... more! This is the key to getting out of our heads, I think, or one of them. When you are on stage forcing yourself to remember the name of your scene partner's third cousin mentioned twenty minutes ago, you are not present. You are in your head, managing data (because of the forcing bit). The opposite of holding on is letting go. When you stop trying so hard to remember, you start trusting your brain to do its job. The truly important details, the ones that matter for the relationship and the scene right now, will be there when you need them. You might have even noticed that the harder you try to recall something, the more it slips away. That effort is the obstacle. Trusting yourself to forget is really about trusting yourself to remember what counts and let your brain automate the process. So how do you practice this? One good technique is what some call cognitive offloading, or a brain dump. It could be useful as a pre-show ritual. I describe a specific version author Mo Gawdat uses near the end of the episode linked below. This process helps your brain feel heard, clearing out the mental chatter. By doing a form of cognitive offloading, you are emptying your active memory so you can walk on stage with a clearer, more open, and more responsive improv brain. Listen:
Watch:The resources mentioned in this episode:
The Secret to Improv = 10000 Fails?Failure is another great way to learn new skills (this is scientific research again, not just me talking). Duration, or number of hours practicing a thing, is not as great. So when you accumulate failures, and learn from them (due to immediate feedback), you are growing a lot faster than you would have been if you did an okay scene. The podcast and the youtube episode contains all seven “scene hacks” that you can try when you feel yourself going blank, messing up, or freezing because you have no idea what’s going on (yeah, that’s probably me without an idea). Listen or Watch
For a random fact. In the 70's, NASA took a bunch of seeds into space to see how being in orbit might affect seed germination and growth. You can find a list of all the trees that were planted in the late 70s on this page. NASA did not do any study of the moon trees though, and seeds seem to have grown pretty normally according to other online sources anyway. Take it easy, Jen. |
Improv Update - Your Improv Brain Podcast & Show
Articles and episodes about learning, coaching, and performing improv and comedy. Some of these articles will specifically consider the cognitive aspects of performing improv & comedy (stage or digital).