the right key, he believed, and science
could one day unlock the secret to any
kind of creativity, whether it’s artistic
or something more ordinary, such
as a better solution for organizing
your day.
To see whether he could quan-
tify the seemingly ineffable way the
brain creates, Limb asked jazz musi-
cians to play a memorized song while
their brains were scanned with func-
tional MRI. Then the musicians werescanned while they were riffing to
compare the differences. The results,
published in 2008, were fascinating.
While the musicians improvised,
the part of the brain that allows hu-
mans to express ourselves—the me-
dial prefrontal cortex—became more
active. At the same time, the part of the
brain responsible for self-inhibition
and control, the dorsolateral prefron-
tal cortex, became dormant.
In other words, in order to improvise
successfully, the musicians needed to
turn off the part of their brains respon-
sible for self-monitoring, Limb says. “If
you’re too self-conscious, it’s very hard
to be free creatively.”IMPROVISATION IS
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN
THE BRAIN IS FREED
FROM RULES AND
SIMPLY INVENTS.F
ingers graze a keyboard,
poised to play. A trumpet
rises to the lips. Drum-
sticks perch in the air. What
comes next? No one knows.
The beauty of jazz is the way impro-
visation is entwined with art, each
instrument capable of hijacking the
melody and reinventing it in ways
even the musician doesn’t under-
stand. Or as trumpeter Miles Davis
put it, “I’ll play it and tell you what
it is later.”
Charles Limb has a far more scien-
tific description: “That’s not just phe-
nomenal music. That’s phenomenal
neurobiology.”
A neuroscientist at the University of
California, San Francisco, and an ac-
complished jazz musician, Limb has
long been fascinated by the genesis
of creativity. Improvisational jazz, he
believes, is essentially pure creation
in action. It’s what can happen when
the brain is freed from having to fol-
low rules and simply invents. “I had
always intuitively understood that
the creative process in jazz improvi-
sation is very different from the pro-
cess of memorization,” he explains.
“When you hear great jazz, like John
Coltrane or Miles Davis, it has this
jaw-dropping quality to it, and what’s
been described as ‘a sound of sur-
prise’ takes place. And you think to
yourself, ‘Wow.’”
So Limb looked for a way to study
what happens in the brain when it
turns inspiration into creation. Findrd.com 117leigh prather/shutterstock
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