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Jazz is Dreamy, Dreaming is Jazzy
When a jazz musician
takes off on a riff of improvisation, what goes on in his brain is very
similar to what happens in dream sleep. In an enterprising new NIH study,
Charles Limb and Allen Braun used MRI technology to examine what happens in
the brain when jazz musicians improvise, as compared to brain activation
patterns when they stick to well rehearsed tunes.
They sat the musicians down at a metal-free keyboard that does not interfere
with the magnets of an MRI machine.
They found that when jazz players engage in improvisation –
as opposed to when they are following a playbook, performing well-rehearsed
numbers – there is “extensive
deactivation of dorsolateral prefrontal and lateral orbital regions.”
A similar dormancy of these areas in the prefrontal cortex is one of the
characteristics of REM-state sleep, associated with vivid dream imagery.
These areas of the brain are most active when we are self-monitoring and
exercising conscious control over our activities. When these control centers
are turned down or turned off, thinking becomes dreaming and we make
connections that escape the ordinary calculating mind.
The authors of the jazz study speculate that their findings have
implications for the larger field of creativity. “Such
a pattern may reflect a combination of psychological processes required for
spontaneous improvisation, in which internally motivated,
stimulus-independent behaviors unfold in the absence of central processes
that typically mediate self-monitoring and conscious volitional control of
ongoing performance.” The shift from the prefrontal control centers
accompanies and facilitates “the
innovative, internally motivated production of novel material…outside of
conscious awareness and beyond volitional control” that is vital to the
creative process.
Source: Charles J. Limb
and Allen R. Braun, “Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance:
an fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation” in The Public Library of
Science Journal, vol. 3 no. 2 (February 2008) pp. 1-9.
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Jazz Quintet by Miguel
Dominguez |
