When a musician is jamming, what’s going on in his or her brain?
Apparently an enormous number of creative ideas that will never be repeated, according to a surgeon that studies the brains of jazz musicians.
This is from a recent interview in the Baltimore Sun with Dr. Charles Limb, a Johns Hopkins surgeon. A guy that obviously loves music as well.
Spontaneous creativity
He wanted to know what happens during the creative process when a pianist improvises a jazz riff.
Dr. Limb hooked the pianists up to an MRI machine to take a look at their brain waves while they were jamming.
A loss of inhibition
What he found was the regions of the brain that control inhibition were turned off and the creativity regions were turned on. (And I thought it was the reefer.)
The study was published in Public Library of Science ONE.
Dr. Limb says he was thinking about musicians like John Coltrane and how they improvise.
He said “How did somebody just play that right on the spot? If you listen to jazz over and over, you realize these people are geniuses. They are generating idea after idea after idea. They never played the same way before and they’ll never play the same way again.”
Fundamentally he’s looking at what the brain does that allows us to be creative.
He thinks that creativity is associated with being in “the zone” in which you are not so connected to your surroundings but in another, perhaps more meditative state. Your inhibitions are low.
It happens in sports too. Does your tennis of golf game improve when you remove outside distractions and get into your zone?
Dr. Limb described these in altered states of consciousness as “hypofrontality” where the front of the brain shuts down.
He would like to experiment with more creative processes. For example, he says, freestyle rappers, if they’re good, improvise their raps on the spot. He’s planning on running some MRI’s on rappers too.
Sometimes when you’re playing a video game you can get into the zone as well. Check out the zone-inducing casual games on our web site – Brain Games Software.
Share this article
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
:: 
neat article. thanks for sharing
I happen to be a jazz flutist in the New England area and have done a lot of jamming in my time, and I would like to add a few comments.
1) It depends on what music you are jamming to. For instance, if it is a blues jam, then you really need to get down and dirty with the music and hope that the guitar player doesn’t over play you or do those riffs that everyone has heard before.
2) It depends on the musicians that are playing with you. The better the musicians are, the better the jamming will be. Unless you are one of those shower singers that show up, even the best of the best can’t make you sound good.
3) It depends on the environment. If it’s a loud bar that you can barely hear yourself in, then good luck. If it’s a small intimate party, then you might have better luck.
For me, jamming is always a way for me to express myself and how I feel. Sometimes I forget tunes, but then forgiven after I pull off the improv of the piece.
I think it’s interesting to get the psychology involved with it, and to meet other people that love jazz and want to promote it.
Thanks for letting me post, I certainly appreciate the venting.
Thanks for your comments, from the point of view of a musician. I think it’s interesting to hear that you might jam at times when you forget the tune. That would be a pretty high level of creativity.
I admire free style rapper. They need to be intelligent enough to create words, in fact not just words, but sentences with structures, meaning and most of all it should rhyme.
About musicians, I admire the most those who learned to play by ears, how they can play a song without reading a note but by just listening to it. Those musicians are just genius.