[JPL] Creativity Jazzes Your Brain

[Dr. Jazz]

  Creativity Jazzes Your Brain

By LAURAN NEERGAARD -- 9 hours ago

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 riff.

"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."

/EDITOR's NOTE _ Lauran Neergaard covers health and medical issues for 
The Associated Press in Washington./

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