Spring Break
Brain scans reveal signatures of musical creativity
Issue date: 3/6/08
The composer sits at his piano, an irked grimace on his face. He scribbles a few lines on some messy parchment. He stops, shakes his head and crosses out the lot of what he's written, the tip of his quill scratching angrily.
He appears to be in his own world, wholly ignorant of his surroundings.
Suddenly, a flash of inspiration flickers across his face. He excitedly pounds a few keys and then smiles to himself knowingly.
Exaggerated, perhaps, but is this caricature of the detached, eccentric genius at work so far from the truth?
Most original music is indeed created through a combination of spontaneity and creative inspiration.
Until recently, though, where that "creative inspiration" comes from was a subject of debate. Many musicians have noted the altered state of mind during which most of their spontaneous creativity takes place, a time when their actions lie outside their conscious awareness or control.
The Greco-Roman "muse" theory has long been debunked, but research hasn't progressed much further.
Now, a study by Hopkins scientist Charles Limb and his colleague Allen Braun, from the National Institutes of Health, has uncovered a specific pattern of brain activity that may underlie musical improvisation. "I think that many arts share the same intuitive, creative flash that is both deliberate but also completely spontaneous and random," Limb said.
Limb and Braun used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a popular and increasingly instructive method of imaging the brain's activation in real time, while test subjects are actually completing a task.
In this case, the researchers recruited six highly trained jazz pianists from the Peabody Institute, the music school at Hopkins, and put them inside an fMRI machine with a specially designed, non-magnetizable keyboard. An fMRI machine is essentially a hugely powerful magnet.
Jazz was chosen as a medium because, Limb said, "unlike any other musical genres, improvisation is the essence of jazz." Indeed, no two jazz solos are the same, but even the most "unscripted behavior" is based off the context of a given composition and occurs within a framework of musical rules.
He appears to be in his own world, wholly ignorant of his surroundings.
Suddenly, a flash of inspiration flickers across his face. He excitedly pounds a few keys and then smiles to himself knowingly.
Exaggerated, perhaps, but is this caricature of the detached, eccentric genius at work so far from the truth?
Most original music is indeed created through a combination of spontaneity and creative inspiration.
Until recently, though, where that "creative inspiration" comes from was a subject of debate. Many musicians have noted the altered state of mind during which most of their spontaneous creativity takes place, a time when their actions lie outside their conscious awareness or control.
The Greco-Roman "muse" theory has long been debunked, but research hasn't progressed much further.
Now, a study by Hopkins scientist Charles Limb and his colleague Allen Braun, from the National Institutes of Health, has uncovered a specific pattern of brain activity that may underlie musical improvisation. "I think that many arts share the same intuitive, creative flash that is both deliberate but also completely spontaneous and random," Limb said.
Limb and Braun used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), a popular and increasingly instructive method of imaging the brain's activation in real time, while test subjects are actually completing a task.
In this case, the researchers recruited six highly trained jazz pianists from the Peabody Institute, the music school at Hopkins, and put them inside an fMRI machine with a specially designed, non-magnetizable keyboard. An fMRI machine is essentially a hugely powerful magnet.
Jazz was chosen as a medium because, Limb said, "unlike any other musical genres, improvisation is the essence of jazz." Indeed, no two jazz solos are the same, but even the most "unscripted behavior" is based off the context of a given composition and occurs within a framework of musical rules.
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