Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Curious about his own brain on jazz, he and a colleague, Allen R. Braun, M.D., of NIDCD,
devised a plan to view in real time the brain functions of musicians improvising.
For the study, they recruited six trained jazz pianists, three from the Peabody Institute, a
music conservatory where Limb holds a joint faculty appointment. Other volunteers
learned about the study by word of mouth through the local jazz community.
The researchers designed a special keyboard to allow the pianists to play inside a functional
magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a brain-scanner that illuminates areas of the
brain responding to various stimuli, identifying which areas are active while a person is
involved in some mental task, for example.
Because fMRI uses powerful magnets, the researchers designed the unconventional
keyboard with no iron-containing metal parts that the magnet could attract. They also used
fMRI-compatible headphones that would allow musicians to hear the music they generate
while theyre playing it.
Each musician first took part in four different exercises designed to separate out the brain
activity involved in playing simple memorized piano pieces and activity while improvising
their music. While lying in the fMRI machine with the special keyboard propped on their
C-major scale, a well-memorized order of notes that every beginner learns. With the sound
of a metronome playing over the headphones, the musicians were instructed to play the
scale, making sure that each volunteer played the same notes with the same timing.
In the second exercise, the pianists were asked to improvise in time with the metronome.
They were asked to use quarter notes on the C-major scale, but could play any of these
notes that they wanted.
Next, the musicians were asked to play an original blues melody that they all memorized in
advance, while a recorded jazz quartet that complemented the tune played in the
background. In the last exercise, the musicians were told to improvise their own tunes with
the same recorded jazz quartet.
Limb and Braun then analyzed the brain scans. Since the brain areas activated during
memorized playing are parts that tend to be active during any kind of piano playing, the
researchers subtracted those images from ones taken during improvisation. Left only with
brain activity unique to improvisation, the scientists saw strikingly similar patterns,
regardless of whether the musicians were doing simple improvisation on the C-major scale
or playing more complex tunes with the jazz quartet.
The scientists found that a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a
broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides, showed a slowdown in
activity during improvisation. This area has been linked to planned actions and selfcensoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview. Shutting
down this area could lead to lowered inhibitions, Limb suggests.
The researchers also saw increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the
center of the brains frontal lobe. This area has been linked with self-expression and
activities that convey individuality, such as telling a story about yourself.
Jazz is often described as being an extremely individualistic art form. You ca
He and Braun plan to use similar techniques to see whether the improvisational brain
activity they identified matches that in other types of artists, such as poets or visual artists,
as well as non-artists asked to improvise.
This research was funded by the Division of Intramural Research, National Institute on
Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, National Institutes of Health.
Article from the Johns Hopkins website
Thanks to Bill (Monk's Dream) for the link to this article
No comments:
Post a Comment