Brain scans tune in to personal nature of improvising music

[7/4]

Brain scans tune in to personal nature of improvising music

By Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

From Eric Clapton to Miles Davis to Yo-Yo Ma, we've long heard that when

musicians improvise, they're engaged in an intensely personal pursuit.

A pair of scientists have scanned musicians' brains and now say that's

true.More precisely, when musicians

improvise, they're using the same part of the brain that responds to a

simple request: Tell me about yourself.

In new findings, researchers at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and

the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders

say they have located the region of the brain — the medial prefrontal

cortex — that lights up when musicians improvise. It's the same area we

all use when we're talking about ourselves — who we are, what makes us

tick.

It makes perfect sense to Charles Limb,

a Hopkins researcher and jazz saxophonist who holds a joint faculty

appointment at Hopkins' music conservatory. "Because the person is

spontaneously composing, they really are revealing themselves

musically," he says. "It's like your own musical autobiography."

At the same time, he and a colleague found, improvising musicians turn off

the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a portion of the brain linked to

planning, careful actions and self-censoring.

Limb says most writing about jazz has traditionally stressed how great

musicians "find their own sound." Now, he says, we know what that means

in scientific terms: "It's basically sculpting your own identity, the

voice you're going to use."

And he has the brain scans to prove it.

Limb and a colleague, Allen Braun of the communication disorder center,

designed an unusual experiment. They recruited six jazz pianists to

play a specially designed keyboard while lying on their backs in a

functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine.

Subjects played scales, simple memorized pieces and improvisations on both.

During the improvisations, a recorded jazz group played in their

headphones.

When Limb and Braun examined the

scans produced during improvisation and stripped away evidence of brain

activity common to all playing, they were left with signals from the

medial prefrontal cortex.

Limb says the brain fires similarly when people improvise while speaking, improvise

solutions to problems and dream. Next up: brain scans of poets, visual

artists and "non-artists asked to improvise."

The findings were published Feb. 27 in Public Library of Science ONE.

Find this article at: http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2008-0...ain-scans_N.htm

[flat5]

Not sure how to use that data :-)

but

I'd rather have a free bottle in front of me that a prefrontal lobotomy.

Edited March 20, 2008 by flat5