WASHINGTON (AP) - Scientists inspired by the legendary improv of Miles Davis and John Coltrane are peering inside the brains of today's jazz musicians to learn where creativity comes from. Think dreaming.
This isn't just a curiosity for jazz fans but a bold experiment in the neuroscience of music, a field that's booming as researchers realize that music illuminates how the brain works. How we play and hear music provides a window into most everyday cognitive functions - from attention to emotion to memory - that in turn may help find treatments for brain disorders.
Creativity, though, has long been deemed too elusive to measure. Saxophonist-turned-hearing specialist Dr. Charles Limb thought jazz improvisation provided a perfect tool to do so - by comparing what happens in trained musicians' brains when they play by memory and when they riff.
“It's one thing to come up with a ditty. It's another thing entirely to come up with a masterpiece, an hourlong idea after idea," explains Limb, a Johns Hopkins University otolaryngologist whose ultimate goal is to help the deaf not only hear but hear music.
How do you watch a brain on jazz? Inside an MRI scanner that measures changes in oxygen use by different brain regions as they perform different tasks.
This isn't just a curiosity for jazz fans but a bold experiment in the neuroscience of music, a field that's booming as researchers realize that music illuminates how the brain works. How we play and hear music provides a window into most everyday cognitive functions - from attention to emotion to memory - that in turn may help find treatments for brain disorders.
Creativity, though, has long been deemed too elusive to measure. Saxophonist-turned-hearing specialist Dr. Charles Limb thought jazz improvisation provided a perfect tool to do so - by comparing what happens in trained musicians' brains when they play by memory and when they riff.
“It's one thing to come up with a ditty. It's another thing entirely to come up with a masterpiece, an hourlong idea after idea," explains Limb, a Johns Hopkins University otolaryngologist whose ultimate goal is to help the deaf not only hear but hear music.
How do you watch a brain on jazz? Inside an MRI scanner that measures changes in oxygen use by different brain regions as they perform different tasks.
For more information contact All About Jazz.
