Creativity in music is still very mysterious, almost all of us appreciate music at different levels and from different styles, but only few of us can create truly original music, and these gifted individuals belong to the rare species.
Scientists who study this creativity, are particularly interestedby jazz musicians, the John Coltrane and Keith Jarrett of the world, who are able to totally improvise in the moment. How do they do that?
Charles Limb, a surgeon at Johns Hopkins University Hospitalin Baltimore but also a musician, is trying to find some answers. If we are far from understanding what’s happening in the brain, Limb’s research has brought new data in this area, using functional brain imaging (fMRI), a technic which can measure the changes in blood flow within the brain and so the changes in brain activity.
He measured brain activity when musicians played something memorized and something improvised and found an interesting difference: one important part of the brain, the prefrontal lobe, is de-activated during improvisation. The prefrontal cortex, which expands as we age, plays an important role in our ability to focus and control our impulses. It makes us more mature, but also inhibits us and represses our errant thoughts,… a bad thing for creativity. These studies show that jazz musicians are able to de-activate this inhibitor part of the brain whilei mprovising!
And when musicians were interacting with each other, trading back and forth interactively, Limb discovered that the language area of the brain lit up, the one called the Broca’s area, involved in expressive communication, and this is a fantastic find, proving that music is really a language.
Limb also realized there were striking neurology similarities between jazz improvisation and free-style rap, something that didn’t surprise him.
I wonder whether we can all accomplish this, if creativity requires the shut down of inhibition, how do we find the way the turn this prefrontal off? And the more I think about it, the more I think I am in the wrong profession. Being a teacher is very often about telling students to ‘focus’, so to use their prefrontal lobe… So am I killing their creativity potential?
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