[Dixielandjazz] This is your brain on Improvisation

[Stephen G Barbone]

Given the recent thread on improvisation, some may find this long  
article interesting. Bottom line? Improvisation seems to work best  
when inhibitions disappear.  Perhaps like making love? <grin>  No  
wonder Xaviera Hollander (The Happy Hooker 1970s) recommended Jazz  
Musicians as ideal boy toy targets for newly liberated women

More to come on this subject in future, no doubt.

Cheers, Steve Barbone

www.myspace.com/barbonestreetjazzband



Bold Look at the Brian on Jazz Finds Creativity Soars When Inhibition  
Takes 5.

Associated Press. Released March 10, 2008

WASHINGTON (AP) - Scientists inspired by the legendary improv of Miles  
Davis and John Coltrane are peering inside the brains of today's jazz  
musicians to learn where creativity comes from. Think dreaming.

This isn't just a curiosity for jazz fans but a bold experiment in the  
neuroscience of music, a field that's booming as researchers realize  
that music illuminates how the brain works. How we play and hear music  
provides a window into most everyday cognitive functions - from  
attention to emotion to memory - that in turn may help find treatments  
for brain disorders.

Creativity, though, has long been deemed too elusive to measure.  
Saxophonist-turned-hearing specialist Dr. Charles Limb thought jazz  
improvisation provided a perfect tool to do so - by comparing what  
happens in trained musicians' brains when they play by memory and when  
they improvise.

"It's one thing to come up with a ditty. It's another thing entirely  
to come up with a masterpiece, an hourlong idea after idea," explains  
Limb, a Johns Hopkins University otolaryngologist whose ultimate goal  
is to help the deaf not only hear but hear music.

How do you watch a brain on jazz? Inside an MRI scanner that measures  
changes in oxygen use by different brain regions as they perform  
different tasks.

You can't play trumpet or sax inside the giant magnet that is an MRI  
machine. So Limb and Dr. Allen Braun at the National Institutes of  
Health hired a company to make a special plastic keyboard that would  
fit inside the cramped MRI with no metal to bother the magnet.

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.

"We're all creative every day. Are our brains doing the same things?"  
asks Braun, who studies the relationship of language and music at  
NIH's National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication  
Disorders. The study's biggest significance isn't what it found but  
that it could be performed at all, opening new avenues of brain  
research.

"Improvisation always has a sort of magical quality associated with  
it. People think when you're improvising you have some sort of  
inspiration that's not measurable," says Dr. Robert Zatorre of the  
Montreal Neurological Institute, a pioneer in the neuroscience of  
music and himself a classical organist. "They went forward where  
everyone else feared to tread."

Neuroscientists call the brain plastic, meaning it has remarkable  
flexibility to rewire itself. Unraveling how those circuits get  
modified in turn helps researchers hunt treatments for brain disorders  
- and the same circuits that process music show strong relationships  
with other key brain regions. Studies show that patients learning to  
speak again after a stroke may improve faster if they sing rather than  
recite, for example. Zatorre's team is finding parallels between tone- 
deafness and the reading disability dyslexia.

"What we're doing is not necessarily trying to say, 'Well, if we use  
music it will help Parkinson's patients walk.' It might, yes, and  
there is some evidence it does so," says Zatorre, whose institute this  
summer hosts an international conference on music and the brain.  
Instead, the quest is to "understand the rules by which the brain  
changes its organization. That's what we need to know," he adds.

Creativity comes in because its root is the spontaneity that defines  
everyday life. Consider conversation: Hopkins' Limb wants to image the  
brains of jazz musicians "trading fours," where one improvises four  
bars and the next answers back with four new bars - a musical  
conversation he believes comparable to the talking kind.

And no, Limb doesn't think he's diminishing the magic of music by  
finding its cerebral underpinnings. "It's like knowing how an airplane  
flies. It's still pretty magical."