Improvised Jazz Puts Brain in Unique Groove

March 12, 2008
By Chris Gorski
ISNS Contributor

When a jazz soloist is deep in the groove, oblivious to everything but the music of that moment, flowing with the band, creating melodies that move the audience, it often seems that the artist’s consciousness must be vibrating in a realm inaccessible even to other musicians. Now there is science to support the notion that music can transport the human brain to a different reality.

New research by Johns Hopkins University and National Institutes of Health scientists found that the brains of improvising jazz musicians operate in a fundamentally different way than those of musicians playing a memorized, composed melody. While improvising, the part of the brain that governs self-censoring and inhibition shuts down and the part linked to creative behaviors becomes rambunctiously active.

The study of the link between jazz and brain function is a natural subject for Charles Limb to study. In addition to being a hearing specialist at Johns Hopkins Hospital, he is also a jazz saxophonist who holds an appointment at Johns Hopkins University’s Peabody Conservatory of Music. He teaches seminars on the neuroscience of music and studies music perception. One of his goals is to help deaf people “hear” music.

Watching the brain at work is difficult and designing effective experiments even more so, the researchers said. Limb and Allen Braun, who co-authored the paper published in the journal PLoS One, used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to look into their subject's brains. The device emits a strong magnetic field, which creates images based on the movement of blood through the brain. Interpreting the images is based on the idea that blood flows in larger amounts to active areas of the brain.

This is where the experimental design becomes a bit difficult, according to Limb. You can't just haul one of these machines down to a jazz club for the 9 o'clock set. In addition, he said, the intense magnetic field created by the machine could cause problems. If you took a saxophone into an fMRI, “you'd kill somebody," he laughed.

So the researchers first task was to find an instrument that would work inside the scanner. They eventually created a keyboard with no magnetic parts that could be linked to a computer outside the scanner. It plays like a piano, but when someone presses a key, it actually sends a signal to a computer, which then sends a sound sample from a real piano into the set of headphones worn by the musician in the scanner.

As if those challenges weren't enough, in order to run the tests, the musicians had to play inside the machine, where conditions are noisy and not at all spacious. Laying on their backs during scans, the musicians elevated their knees and placed the keyboard on their thighs. Limb said it took two years and twenty different attempts to get all the pieces working correctly before they could get solid data, "I will never forget when everything came together,” he said. “I looked up and said. ‘My God, it's actually working.’"

So what happened when the researchers sent jazz pianists into fMRI machines, armed with headphones and a plastic keyboard? Their brains became machines of creation.

While playing a musical scale or memorized melody, the part of the brain called the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex was active. This area is typically linked to self-monitoring activities and motor control.

When the researchers asked their subjects to improvise, this part of the brain slowed down markedly, which was accompanied by a dramatic increase in activity in an area called the medial prefrontal cortex. This part of the brain is instrumental to self-initiated thoughts and creative behaviors. The researchers had expected the increase in activity in the area associated with creativity, but were surprised at the inactivity of the self-monitoring area.

It would be wrong to suggest that any one part of the brain is the jazz center and totally responsible for improvisation or creativity, Limb indicated. It is strange, however, that the part of the brain that is normally active when a musician plays something composed, like a scale or melody, is much less active when a musician improvises. Even though the physical motions are the same, even though the rhythms may be the same, even though it's still music – the musician clearly thinks in a different way.

This research may spawn more studies about the nature of creativity and open the door for examining other artists in the midst of creation, from spontaneous poetry to coming up with an idea for a new home design.

While Limb anticipates more studies on the process of creativity in the brain, he noted that it is hard to conduct such research without control conditions. These experiments were constrained in a specific way to show the activity behind improvisation and more complex experiments might by their very design interfere with creativity.

"Unfortunately, the more musical you get the more variables you introduce," explains Limb. "The further and further you get from a constrained paradigm the further you get from science." And some of the best and most creative jazz embraces the freedom that a well-designed experiment might squash. The unconstrained energy of jazz may prove too elusive to be studied definitively, but Limb and Braun hope to use their own imaginations to design new experiments that will allow them to peer inside an artists’ brain during the moment of creative inspiration.

ISNS contributor Chris Gorski is with the American Institute of Physics’ Discoveries and Breakthroughs Inside Science program. He is a news researcher, writer and filmmaker who specializes in science.

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