Thankfully I’ve resisted the temptation to dedicate this morning’s Welcome to the opening day of the Summer Olympics in Beijing. I say thankfully because I know less about the Olympics than my sheep, which means that what ever I’d have written would have been mostly fluff and another of my customarily droll attempts at humor, which, as I’ve been reminded by a virtual army of friends in recent days, is not my strong suit.
So let me instead focus my Welcome on a topic about which, though, like the Olympics, I know very little, the musicians in the group may find interesting, and that’s what’s happening in your brain when you make music. A while back I told you about a book I’d recently read called ‘Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain: Oliver Sacks: Books’. Here’s a snippet of a web review that got me interested enough to buy and read the book…..
Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does–humans are a musical species.
Oliver Sacks’s compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people–from a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire group of children with Williams syndrome who are hypermusical from birth; from people with “amusia,” to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only seven seconds–for everything but music.
I enjoyed Sacks’s book and there were parts of it I could relate to my own experience playing bluegrass on the fiddle. Then, a couple of days ago, I received an e-mail from Beth Weil with an article pasted in which had an even greater resonance for me. See if it does for you…..
Jamming and the brain
A Johns Hopkins surgeon who says he is ‘totally obsessed’ with music studied what happens during the creative process when professional pianists improvise jazz riffs.
By Chris Emery
Sun Reporter
June 29, 2008
What happens in a jazz musician’s brain during an improv session? Where does all that creativity come from? That’s what Dr. Charles Limb, a Johns Hopkins surgeon with a passion for music, wanted to find out. Limb’s medical specialty as an otolaryngologist is restoring deaf people’s hearing with the use of cochlear implants, electronic devices that translate sounds for people with damaged ears. But in his research, Limb studies the effects of jazz on the brain.
In a study published this year in the Public Library of Science ONE, Limb reported results of an experiment in which he had professional jazz pianists improvise riffs as an MRI machine scanned their brain waves. The experience offered a peek in the regions of the brain responsible for spontaneous creativity. While they improvised, regions of their brains linked to inhibition turned off, while areas linked to creativity turned on.
How did an ear surgeon get involved studying how the brain processes music?
I’ve always played music. Truthfully, I’m totally obsessed with music. I play a lot of instruments but mainly saxophone. I decided because of my interest in music to become a hearing specialist. I take patients who have deafness and I put devices inside their head and thread them into their inner ear to restore their hearing or give them hearing for the first time. That’s my clinical life. My research focuses on how we hear complex sounds such as music. When somebody is playing music or listening to music, what is going on in the brain?
Why explore improvisational jazz?
As a jazz player, you often speculate about someone like John Coltrane, and you say, ‘How did they come up with that? How did somebody just play that right on the spot?’ If you listen to jazz over and over, you realize these people are geniuses. They are generating idea after idea after idea. … They never played the same way before and they’ll never play the same way again. That to me is what’s so unique about jazz [Not]. It’s spontaneous, immediate composition.
A lot of the music studies have dealt with music perception, what’s going on when we hear something. What I wanted to study is what’s going on in the brain of a musician that’s jamming, just improvising on the spot. It’s a relevant question to humanity on a level that has nothing to do with music. What in the brain allows us to be creative? Jazz is my model to get at that question.
Did your results correlate well with other experiments on creativity?
There are not a lot of experiments on creativity that have been done. So I didn’t have a lot of pre-existing literature to compare it to. There are some analogies to being in ‘the zone’ creatively and altered states of consciousness like meditation.
In jazz, when you watch somebody play, say, bass, they look very much like they are no longer aware of their surroundings; they’re kind of in some zone. That zone is probably the same zone as skeet shooters when they’re going ‘bang, bang, bang,’ hitting target after target or free throw shooters who can make 100 free throws in a row. The moment you tell them, ‘I’ll pay you a million dollars if you make the next one,’ they choke. Why do they choke? Because they get out of the zone. You’re taking this free flow state, and you’re interrupting it by putting in inhibitory mechanisms.
What we found is that those inhibitory mechanisms in the brain shut way off during improvisation. People have suggested that in altered states of consciousness that there might be something called ‘hypofrontality’ where the front of the brain kind of shuts down. And it does, but another part goes way up.
Have you experienced what you’re talking about yourself?
Absolutely. And that’s in no way trying to say I’m a fantastic musician. When you are improvising, to get comfortable with it you can’t be too self-conscious. You’ll never really feel like your improvising. You’ll always feel like you’re thinking. With improvisation, a lot of it is saying I’m going to be a vessel for the notes. The notes are going to come out, and if they’re wrong, they’re wrong, if they’re great, they’re great. I’m going to take a chance on sounding bad. That’s how I think real musicians fully engage in improvisation. You can be really safe, but you’ll never come up with anything novel.
What’s next now that you’ve figured this part out?
If you ever watched musicians play together, sometimes they do this thing called trading fours. It’s a kind of call and answer period. One person will play four bars, and another person will respond back. In some ways, what’s happening is a kind of musical conversation. I’d like to image that using the MRI scanner. I’d like to image them not just improvising on their own, but responding to something they’ve just heard.
Also, a lot of people ask me how this stuff might pertain to other art domains. That’s a great question. What is taking place in the brain when an artist does an abstract house versus copies a house from a picture? There’s got to be something totally different taking place in the brain. So I’d like to see if we could use some other art mediums. Freestyle rap is another example. Rap and jazz have a lot of analogies socially. Freestyle rappers, if they’re good, improvise their raps on the spot. That’s very much like a jazz improvisation. It would be neat for me to bring some rappers into a scanner and see what’s going on with their free- styling.
Did you ever think about becoming a professional saxophonist?
At some point in my li