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Your brain on improv
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Vytvořeno 16. 11. 2017
Napsal www.ted.com
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Musician and researcher Charles Limb wondered how the brain works during musical improvisation -- so he put jazz musicians and rappers in an fMRI to find out. What he and his team found has deep implications for our understanding of creativity of all kinds.
Charles Limb at TEDxMidAtlantic
Your brain on improv
Improvisation and Brain? It would work ;o))
Transcript of presentation:
It's really a remarkable thing that happens there. I've always as a listener, as a fan, I listen to that, and I'm astounded. I think -- how can this possibly be? How can the brain generate that much information, that much music, spontaneously? And so I set out with this concept, scientifically, that artistic creativity, it's magical, but it's not magic, meaning that it's a product of the brain. There's not too many brain-dead people creating art. With this notion that artistic creativity is in fact a neurologic product, I took this thesis that we could study it just like we study any other complex neurologic process, and there are subquestions that I put there. Is it possible to study creativity scientifically?And I think that's a good question. And I'll tell you that most scientific studies of music, they're very dense, and when you go through them, it's very hard to recognize the music in it. In fact, they seem to be unmusical entirely and to miss the point of the music.
Well it may be, but I will say that, from a scientific perspective,we talked a lot about innovation today, the science of innovation, how much we understand about how the brain is able to innovate is in its infancy, and truly, we know very little about how we are able to be creative. I think that we're going to see, over the next 10, 20, 30 years, a real science of creativity that's burgeoning and is going to flourish, Because we now have new methods that can enable us to take this process like complex jazz improvisation, and study it rigorously. So it gets down to the brain. All of us have this remarkable brain, which is poorly understood, to say the least. I think that neuroscientists have more questions than answers, and I'm not going to give you answers today, just ask a lot of questions.
And that's what I do in my lab. I ask questions about what is the brain doing to enable us to do this. This is the main method that I use. This is functional MRI. If you've been in an MRI scanner, it's very much the same, but this one is outfitted in a special way to not just take pictures of your brain, but to also take pictures of active areas of the brain. The way that's done is by the following: There's something called BOLD imaging, which is Blood Oxygen Level Dependent imaging. When you're in an fMRI scanner, you're in a big magnet that's aligning your molecules in certain areas. When an area of the brain is active, meaning a neural area is active, it gets blood flow shunted to that area. That blood flow causes an increase in local blood to that area with a deoxyhemoglobin change in concentration.Deoxyhemoglobin can be detected by MRI, whereas oxyhemoglobin can't. So through this method of inference --and we're measuring blood flow, not neural activity -- we say that an area of the brain that's getting more blood was active during a particular task, and that's the crux of how fMRI works.And it's been used since the '90s to study really complex processes.
I have here what we call the paradigms. There's a scale paradigm, which is playing a scale up and down, memorized,then there's improvising on a scale, quarter notes, metronome, right hand -- scientifically very safe, but musically really boring.Then there's the bottom one, which is called the jazz paradigm.So we brought professional jazz players to the NIH, and we had them memorize this piece of music on the lower-left, which is what you heard me playing -- and we had them improvise to the same chord changes. And if you can hit that lower-right sound icon, that's an example of what was recorded in the scanner.
These are multifunctional areas of the brain, these are not the jazz areas of the brain. They do a whole host of things that have to do with self-reflection, introspection, working memory etc.Really, consciousness is seated in the frontal lobe. But we have this combination of an area that's thought to be involved in self-monitoring, turning off, and this area that's thought to be autobiographical, or self-expressive, turning on. We think, at least in this preliminary -- it's one study; it's probably wrong, but it's one study --
CL: At this point, I'll take a few moments. So what you're seeing here -- and I'm doing a cardinal sin in science, which is to show you preliminary data. This is one subject's data. This is, in fact, Mike Pope's data. So what am I showing you here? When he was trading fours with me, improvising vs. memorized, his language areas lit up, his Broca's area, in the inferior frontal gyrus on the left. He had it also homologous on the right. This is an area thought to be involved in expressive communication.This whole notion that music is a language -- maybe there's a neurologic basis to it after all, and we can see it when two musicians are having a musical conversation. So we've done this on eight subjects now, and we're getting all the data together, hopefully we'll have something to say about it meaningfully.
CL: So there's a lot of analogy between what takes place in freestyle rap and jazz. There are a lot of correlates between the two forms of music, I think, in different time periods, in lot of ways, rap serves the same social function that jazz used to serve. So how do you study rap scientifically? And my colleagues think I'm crazy, but I think it's very viable. This is what you do: You have a freestyle artist come and memorize a rap that you write for them, that they've never heard before, and then you have them freestyle. So I told my lab members that I would rap for TED, and they said, "No, you won't." And then I thought --
To conclude, we've got a lot of questions to ask, and like I said, we'll ask questions here, not answer them. But we want to get at the root of what is creative genius neurologically, and I think, with these methods, we're getting close. And I think, hopefully in the next 10, 20 years, you'll see real, meaningful studies that say science has to catch up to art, and maybe we're starting now to get there.
Thank you for your time, I appreciate it.
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