[JPL] Creativity Jazzes Your Brain

Thu Mar 20 17:45:54 EDT 2008

Hi Al,
  Cleaning up my backlog...
  your shared thoughts caused me to think of Jill Bolte Taylor
  http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/229  
- Kate.

Al Karia <jctrane at gmail.com> wrote:  This week's sponsor: THE PIERS LAWRENCE QUARTET - 'STOLEN MOMENTS' 

Features the exceptional musicality of guitarist, Piers Lawrence, bassist Jim Hankins, Sir Earl Grice on drums and Chuk Fowler on piano.

A return to classic sound - ''a warm slice of straight ahead Jazz'' ejazz online,

The quality of emotion that first brought you into Jazz - ''Along with the excellent soloing, this quartet captures the character of a late night jazz scene.''
- All about Jazz LA.

Well chosen songs - ''great standards such as ''Pent-up House,'' ''Stolen Moments,'' ''Donna Lee'' and the gem, ''Secret Love''

''Soulful, melodic guitar playing and prolific songwriting makes this CD a masterful offering'' 
- All About Jazz

Thanks to Jim Eigo at Jazz Promo Services &amp; Mike Hurzon at The Tracking Station

for interviews and additional info, www.JazzNetMedia.com or Tionna Smalls - 917-583-4164

++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

JPLers...It has been known for some time that musical training does seem to
'modify' the way the brain processes music. Some 20+ years ago it was
determined that when musicians listened to music, their left cerebral
hemispheres 'lit up' to a greater degree than when non-musicians processed
music. The usual explanation for this was that musicians were accessing the
particular processing strengths of the left hemisphere...simply
put, strength in pattern recognition or awareness of structural
regularities.
You might think of it this way: If, when listening to improvised music,
you find yourself searching for the chordal structure that underlies a tune,
it's probably your left brain doing the work. (I remember the first time I
heard Monk play 'Bright Mississippi' and suddenly recognized 'Sweet Georgia
Brown'' lurking underneath)
Here's a favorite 'game' I play (similar to the thrust of Gary Smulyan's
CD from a year or two back): I tune in to an improvisation in mid-stream, so
to speak, and see how long it takes me to determine, from the chordal
progressions in the solo, what the song is. Obviously, the game isn't much
fun when it's a 'free jazz' musician playing.
Gene Abkarian KRFC

On 3/10/08, Dr. Jazz wrote:
>
> This week's sponsor: THE PIERS LAWRENCE QUARTET - 'STOLEN MOMENTS'
>
> Features the exceptional musicality of guitarist, Piers Lawrence, bassist
> Jim Hankins, Sir Earl Grice on drums and Chuk Fowler on piano.
>
> A return to classic sound - ''a warm slice of straight ahead Jazz'' ejazz
> online,
>
> The quality of emotion that first brought you into Jazz - ''Along with the
> excellent soloing, this quartet captures the character of a late night jazz
> scene.''
> - All about Jazz LA.
>
> Well chosen songs - ''great standards such as ''Pent-up House,'' ''Stolen
> Moments,'' ''Donna Lee'' and the gem, ''Secret Love''
>
> ''Soulful, melodic guitar playing and prolific songwriting makes this CD a
> masterful offering''
> - All About Jazz
>
> Thanks to Jim Eigo at Jazz Promo Services &amp; Mike Hurzon at The
> Tracking Station
>
> for interviews and additional info, www.JazzNetMedia.com or Tionna Smalls
> - 917-583-4164
>
> ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>
>
> 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./
>
> --
> Dr. Jazz
> Dr. Jazz Operations
> 24270 Eastwood
> Oak Park, MI 48237
> (248) 542-7888
> http://www.drjazz.com
> SKYPE: drjazz99
>
> --
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