2008 Woodie Awards
Scientists analyze new studies of brain creativity in jazz musicians
By: THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Issue date: 3/11/08 Section: Campus
WASHINGTON - 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.
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.
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