Jazz Improvisation Changes Brain Functions

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Here’s something I never thought of: Put a jazz piano player in a brain scan tube with a plastic keyboard and compare his bran scans when he plays pre-determined music and when he improvises freely to a track.

That’s exactly what Dr. Charles Limb and Dr. Allen Braun at the National Institutes of Health did. And their findings are…..brain tickling.

Read the full article here:
http://www.wusa9.com/news/watercooler/story.aspx?storyid=69505 

EXCERPT:

Then they put six professional jazz pianists inside to measure brain activity while they played straight and when they improvised. They played, right-handed, both a simple C scale and a blues tune that Limb wrote, appropriately titled “Magnetism.” Through earphones, they listened to a prerecorded jazz quartet accompaniment, to simulate a real gig.

Getting creative uses the same brain circuitry that Braun has measured during dreaming: First, inhibition switched off. The scientists watched a brain region responsible for that self-monitoring, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, shut down.

Then self-expression switched on. A smaller area called the medial prefrontal cortex fired up, a key finding as Braun’s earlier research on how language forms linked that region to autobiographical storytelling. And jazz improvisation produces such individual styles that it’s often described as telling your own musical story.

More intriguing, the musicians also showed heightened sensory awareness. Regions involved with touch, hearing and sight revved up during improv even though no one touched or saw anything different, and the only new sounds were the ones they created.

That doesn’t necessarily mean this is the center of creativity. The brains of highly trained musicians might work differently than an amateur pianist’s, or a painter’s, or a writer’s, something Limb and Braun hope to test next.

One thought on “Jazz Improvisation Changes Brain Functions

  1. “First, inhibition switched off. The scientists watched a brain region responsible for that self-monitoring, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, shut down.”

    This must be why when I’m playing, I don’t care what kind of faces I make, and when I’m in photographer mode, I don’t care about the strange looks I get when I get on my belly to get “the perfect shot”

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