The Brain and Musical Creativity: TED Talk of Charles Limb

Here are my notes from an intriguing TED presentation looking at musical creativity and functional MRI.

Charles Limb MD is a  surgeon who also studies creativity

A key research focus is to define the mechanisms of brain creativity

Work related to this production took place at Johns Hopkins and NIH

Musical creativity occurs across a variety of genre: ie. jazz musicians and rappers

Video is shown demonstrating creativity in a jazz pianist

How can the brain generate so much artist creativity?

Artistic creativity is a neurologic process that can be examined using rigorous scientific experiments

What do we understand about the science of innovation?  We are only beginning to understand the science of creativity.

There are many questions left unanswered

Functional MRI is used in his lab to study creativity

BOLD imaging--blood oxygen level dependent imaging a tool to study brain activation

More blood flow equals more activation

Video demonstrates musician playing keyboard while brain is imaged using fMRI

Experiment:  What happens in the brain in memorized versus improvised music production?

When you contrast improv with memorized jazz you find:

• Medial prefrontal cortical activity increases
• Lateral prefrontal cortical activity decreases

We think, to be creative you have to dissociate two areas of the frontal cortex--activating one and deactivating another

What happens when more than one musician work together in music improv?

Preliminary data (one case): Broca's area lights up with more than one musician

This area is key to communication suggesting a different area recruited in mutual improvisation

What about rap?

Rap has a function similar in many ways to jazz

A rap creativity experiment was designed similar to that of the jazz experiment

A memorized rap task was compared to an improvised rap task

Improvised rap requires activation of visual cortex and cerebellum of the brain

This pattern is different than the activation pattern in jazz

These experiments suggest multiple areas of brain involved in creativity depending on the type of output and whether on is working alone or with others

This is an exciting area where science is catching up to art.  Expect to see more research in this area.  Dr. Limb's research on jazz musicians is summarized in the Plos one research paper below.  The manuscript is free full text and includes some excellent graphics of the fMRI findings of the jazz experiment described in the video. 

Limb CJ, & Braun AR (2008). Neural substrates of spontaneous musical performance: an FMRI study of jazz improvisation. PloS one, 3 (2) PMID: 18301756