Your brain on improv Charles Limb
so I am a surgeon who studies creativity
and I have never had a patient tell me
that I really want you to be creative
during surgery and so I guess there’s a
little bit of irony to it I will say
though that after having done surgery a
lot it’s um it’s somewhat similar
playing a musical instrument and for me
it’s sort of deep and enduring
fascination with sound is what led me to
both be a surgeon and also to study the
science of sound particularly music and
so I’m going to try to talk to you over
the next few minutes about about my
career in terms of how I’m able to
actually try to study music and really
try to grap all these questions of how
is the brain able to be creative I’ve
done most this work at Johns Hopkins
University but also at the National
Institutes of Health where I was
previously I’m going to go over some
science experiments to try to cover
three musical experiments let’s start
off by playing a video for you and this
video is a video of Keith Jarrett who’s
a well-known jazz improviser and
probably the most well known iconic
example of someone who takes
improvisation to a really higher level
and he’ll improvise entire concerts off
the top of his head and he’ll never play
it exactly the same way again and so as
a form of intense creativity I think
this is a great example and so why don’t
we go ahead and click the video
I’ve always just as a listener as just a
fan I listed that I’m just astounded I
think how can this possibly be how can
the brain generate that much information
that much music spontaneously and so I
set out with this concept scientifically
that artistic creativity is its magical
but it’s not magic meaning that it’s a
product from the brain there’s not too
many brain-dead people creating art and
so with this notion that artistic
creativity is in fact a neurologic
product I took this thesis that we could
study it just like we study any other
complex neurologic process I think
there’s some sub questions that I put
there is it truly possible to study
creativity scientifically and that’s a
good question I’ll tell you that most
scientific studies of music they’re very
dense and when you actually go through
them it’s very hard to recognize the
music in it in fact they seem to be very
unmusical entirely to miss the whole
point of the music and so it brings the
sin question why should scientists study
creativity maybe we’re not the right
people to do it well it may be but I
will say that from a scientific
perspective we talked a lot about
innovation today the science of
innovation how how much we understand
about how the brain is able to innovate
is in its infancy and truly we know very
little about how we are able to be
creative and so I think that we’re going
to see over the next 10 20 30 years a
real science of creativity that’s
burgeoning and is going to flourish
because we now have new methods that can
enable us to take this process of
something like this complex jazz
improvisation and study it rigorously
and so it gets down to the brain and so
all of us have this remarkable brain
which is poorly understood to say the
least I think that neuroscientists have
much more questions and answers and I
myself I’m not going to give you many
answers to just ask a lot of questions
and fundamentally that’s what I do in my
lab I ask questions about what is this
brain doing to enable us to do this this
is the main method that I use this is
called functional MRI if you’ve been in
an MRI scanner it’s very much the same
but this one is outfitted in a special
way to not just take pictures of your
brain but to also take pictures of
active areas of the brain now the way
that’s done is by the following there’s
something called bold imaging which is
blood oxygen level dependent imaging now
when you’re in an fMRI scanner you’re in
a big magnet that’s aligning your
molecules in certain areas when an area
of the brain is active meaning
areas act if it gets blood flow shunted
to that area that blood flow causes an
increase in local blood to that area
with a deoxyhemoglobin change in
concentration deoxyhemoglobin can be
detected by MRI whereas oxygen woven
can’t sew through this sort of method of
inference and we’re measuring blood flow
not neural activity we say that an area
of the brain is getting more blood was
active during a particular task and
that’s sort of the crux of how fMRI
works and it’s been used since the 90s
to study really complex processes now
I’m going to review a study that I did
which was really jazz in an fMRI scanner
and this was done with a colleague of
mine Alan brown at the NIH this is a
short video of how we did this project
this is a plastic mini camo keyword that
we use for the jazz experiments
is designed to fit both inside the
scanner magnetically safe and minimal
interference that would contribute to
any artifact and have this cushions that
it can rest on requires legs while
they’re lying down scanner like on their
back
and it works like this this doesn’t
actually produce any sound it sends out
what’s called a MIDI signal or ocean
with digital interface through these
wires into the box in the computer which
then trigger high quality panel samples
like this
okay so it works and so through this
piano keyboard we now have the means to
actually take a musical process and
study it so what do you do now that you
have this cool piano keyboard you can’t
just sort of you know it’s great we got
this keyboard we actually have to come
with a scientific experiment and so the
experiment really rests on the following
what happens in the brain during
something that’s memorized and over
learned and what happens in the brain
during something that is spontaneously
generator improvised in a way that’s
matched motorically and in terms of
lower lower level sensory motor features
and so I have here what we call the
paradigms there’s a scale paradigm which
is just playing a scale up and down
memorized and then there’s improvising
on a scale quarter notes metronome right
hand scientifically very safe but
musically really boring and then there’s
the bottom one which is called the jazz
paradigm and so we did was he brought
professional jazz players to the NIH and
we had them memorize this piece of music
on the left the lower left which is what
you heard me playing and then we had
them improvise to the same exact chord
changes and if you can hit that lower
right sound icon that’s an example of
what was recorded in the scanner
so in the end you know it’s not the most
natural environment but they’re able to
play real music and you know I’ve listed
that solo 200 times and I still like it
and so and the musicians were they were
comfortable in the end and so we first
measured the number of notes where they
in fact just playing a lot of more notes
when they were improvising that was not
what was going on and then we looked at
the brain activity I’m going to try to
condense this for you
these are contrast maps that are showing
subtractions between what changes when
you’re improvising versus when you’re
doing something memorized in red is area
that’s active in the prefrontal cortex
frontal lobe of the brain and in blue
this area that was deactivated and so we
had this focal area called the medial
prefrontal cortex that went way up in
activity we had this broad patch of area
called the lateral prefrontal cortex
that went way down in activity I’ll
summarize that for you here now these
are multifunctional areas of the brain
as I like to say these are not the Jazz
areas of the brain okay they do a whole
host of things that have to do with
self-reflection introspection working
memory and so forth really consciousness
is it seated in the frontal lobe but we
have this combination of an area that’s
thought to be involved in
self-monitoring turning off in this area
that’s thought to be autobiographical or
self expressive turning on and we think
at least in this preliminary you know
it’s one study so it’s probably wrong
but it’s one study we think that at
least a reasonable hypothesis is that to
be creative you have to have this weird
dissociation in your frontal lobe one
area turns on and a big area shuts off
so that you’re not inhibited so that
you’re willing to make a stake so that
you’re not constantly shutting down all
of these new generative impulses now a
lot of people know that music is not
always a solo activity sometimes it’s
done communicatively and so the next
question was what happens when musicians
are trading back and forth something
called trading fours which is something
that they do normally in a jazz
experiment so this is a 12 bar blues and
I’ve broken it down into four bar groups
here so you would know how you would
trade now what we did was we brought our
musician into the scanner same way had
them memorize this melody and then had
another musician out in the control-room
trading back and forth interactively
musician Mike Kroeger the world’s best
bassist and a fantastic counter player
now playing the piece that you just saw
just by coming in I may before dude lets
you pop a great night huh nothing for my
father okay
you have to have the right attitude to
agree to it it’s kind of fun actually
so now we’re playing back and forth he’s
in there you could see his legs up there
and then I’m control room here going
back and forth okay that’s a pretty good
representation of what it’s like um it’s
good that it’s not too quick you know
the fact that you do it over and over
again lets you acclimate you know to
your surroundings so the hardest thing
for me was the kinesthetic thing you
know I’m just you know looking at my
hands through two mirrors laying on my
back and not able to move at all except
that was that was a challenging but
again you know it was there were there
were there were moments for sure you
know
you’ll honest-to-god musical interplay
for sure so at this point I’ll take a
few moments and so what you’re seeing
here and I’m doing a cardinal sin in
science versus to show you preliminary
data okay this is one subjects data this
is in fact Mike Pope’s data so what am i
showing you here when he was trading
fours with me improvising verses
memorized his language areas lit up his
Broca’s area which was inferior frontal
gyrus on the left he actually had it
also homologous on the right and this is
an area thought to be involved in
expressive communication this whole
notion that music is a language well
maybe there’s a neurologic basis to it
in fact after all and we can see it when
two musicians are having a musical
conversation and so we’ve done actually
this on eight subjects now and we’re
just getting all the data together so
hopefully we’ll have something to say
about them meaningfully now when I think
about improv improvisation in the
language well what’s next
rap of course that freestyle and so I’ve
always been fascinated by freestyle and
let’s go ahead and play this video here
around skin of Easton and boxers I’m
stocking it when I be in your vicinity
whole style synergy recognize symmetry
go to the end Jimmy broke them down
chemically Nathan Overton MC talk about
Hobby Lobby started like Indy late like
a 10-degree we’re not saying will not be
girls safe and Nike good and so there’s
a lot of analogy between what takes
place in freestyle rap and jazz there in
fact a lot of correlates between the two
forms of music I think in different time
periods and a lot of ways rap serves the
same social function that jazz used to
serve so study rap scientifically and my
colleagues kind of think I’m crazy but I
think it’s a very viable and so this is
what you do you have a freestyle artist
come in and memorize a rap that you
write for them they’ve never heard
before and then you have them freestyle
so I told my lab members that I would
rap for Ted and they said yo you won’t
so and then I thought
no I guess not but here’s the thing with
this big screen you can all rap with me
okay
so what we had them do was memorize this
lower-left sound icon please this is the
control condition okay this is what they
memorized memory thump thump of the beat
in a known repeat rhythm and rhyme make
me complete the climb is sublime when
I’m on the mic spitting rhymes that hit
you like a lightning search a search for
the truth in this eternal quest my
passion sound passion you can see how
I’m dressed
psychopathic words in my head appear
whisper these lyrics only I can heart
the art of discover and that would just
hover in inside the mind of those
unconfined all these words keep pouring
out like rain
I need a mad scientist to check my brain
stop
I guarantee you that will never happen
again
so now what’s great about these
freestylers they will get cute different
words they don’t know what’s coming but
they’ll hear something off-the-cuff
going to hit that right sound outcome
they’re going to be cue these three
square words like not and had freestyle
doesn’t know what’s coming
like stop so again it’s an incredible
thing that’s taking place is doing
something that neurologically is
remarkable whether or not you like the
music’s are relevant creatively speaking
it’s just a phenomenal thing this is a
short video of how we actually do this
in a scanner manual that was recorded in
the scanner by the way that’s a manual
in the scanner so he he’s just memorized
a rhyme for us
Mike spinning rocks that I hit you I
know lighting strategy search for intro
finish user Louis you see on dress
so I’m going to stop that there so what
do we see in his brain well this is
actually for rappers brains and what we
see if we do see languages lighting up
but then eyes closed when you are
freestyling versus memorizing you’ve got
major visual areas lighting up you’ve
got major cerebellar activity which is
involved in motor coordination you have
heightened brain activity when you’re
doing a comparable task when that one
task is creative and the other task is
memorized
it’s very pointed but I think it’s kind
of cool and so just to conclude we’ve
got a lot of questions to ask and like I
said well ask questions you’re not
answer them but we want to get at the
root of what is creative genius
neurologically and I think what these
methods were we’re getting close to
being there and I think hopefully in the
next 10 20 years you’ll actually see
real meaningful studies that say art and
you know science has to catch up to art
and maybe we’re starting now to get
there and so I want to thank you for
your time
you