NEW YORK — While jazz musician Vijay Iyer played a piece on the piano, he wore an expression of intense concentration. Afterward, everyone wanted to know: What was going on in his head?

The way this music is often taught, "they tell you, you must not be thinking when you are playing," Iyer said after finishing his performance of John Coltrane's "Giant Steps," a piece that requires improvisation. "I think that is an impoverished view of what thought is. … Thought is distributed through all of our actions."

Iyer's performance opened a panel discussion on music and the mind at the New York Academy of Sciences on Wednesday (Dec. 13).

Music elicits "a splash" of activity in many parts of the brain, said panelist Jamshed Bharucha, a neuroscientist and musician, after moderator Steve Paulson of the public radio program "To the Best of Our Knowledge" asked about the brain's response to music.

"I think you are asking a question we can only scratch the surface of in terms of what goes on in the brain," Bharucha said. [Why Music Moves Us]

Creativity in the brain scanner

Charles Limb, a surgeon who studies the neuroscience of music, is attempting to better understand creativity by putting jazz musicians and rappers in a brain-imaging scanner called a functional MRI, which measures blood flow in the brain, and asking them to create music or rap once in there.

The set-up is awkward, he said, comparing the confines of an fMRI machine with a coffin. And Limb cautioned how much creativity, like that on display during Iyer's performance, can be reproduced in the lab as part of an experiment. [10 Strange Facts About the Brain]

"I can't help but realize there is a biology to everything we do musically," Limb said. 'While it's comfortable as a listener and admirer and an artist to say 'Let's not delve deeper.' … There is something missing if you don't try to search, to find out what’s going on."

Images of creative brains reveal complicated activity, but one theme has emerged: Some decline in activity in the prefrontal cortex, a region sometimes called the "CEO of the brain" and associated with cognitive analysis and abstract thought. This area of the brain isn't turning off; instead, certain processes that are typically prominent recede into the background — for instance, conscious self-monitoring, which produces concerns about doing something correctly, Limb said.   

Later, when an audience member pointed out that creativity, like that Iyer displayed while improvising within the structure of Coltrane's piece, is not a random process and requires work, Limb clarified, saying the complexity of brain activity and its implications are difficult to distill into a few sentences. The prefrontal cortex is involved in a long list of activities, he said.

He noted that a part of the brain associated with autobiographical self and self-reflection becomes more active in musicians when they are performing.

Musicians offer a conduit to study the larger realm of creativity, said Limb. Improvisation can take place at different levels, but expert musicians have the skill set to improvise at a profound level in a way others cannot, he said.

"For me, I don't see how human society could have survived if we hadn't been creative," he said.

A social purpose

1 Comments

1. 1. Willimek 06:08 AM 3/23/13

   Music and Emotions
   
   The most difficult problem in answering the question of how music creates emotions is likely to be the fact that assignments of musical elements and emotions can never be defined clearly. The solution of this problem is the Strebetendenz-Theory. It says that music can't convey any emotion at all, but merely volitional processes, with which the music listener identifies himself. Then in the process of identifying the volitional processes are colored with emotions. The same happens when we watch an exciting film and identify ourselves with the volitional processes of our favorite figures. Here, too, just the process of identification generates emotions.
   
   Because this detour of emotions via volitional processes was not detected, also all music psychological and neurological experiments, to answer the question of the origin of the emotions in the music, failed.
   
   But how music can convey volitional processes? These volitional processes have something to do with the phenomena which early music theorists called "lead", "leading tone" or "striving effects". If we reverse this musical phenomena in imagination into its opposite (the sound wants to change - I want that the sound stays unchanged), then we have found the contents of will, with which the music listener identifies himself. In practice, everything becomes a bit more complicated, so that even more sophisticated volitional processes can be represented musically.
   
   Further information is available via the free download the e-books "Vibrating Molecules and the Secret of their feelings": http://www.willimekmusic.homepage.t-online.de/homepage/Striving/Striving.
   
   Enjoy reading
   
   

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