Science is Fun Fridays!
"Musical improvisation improves cognitive flexibility and increases inhibitory control."
Associate professor of music education, Martin Norgaard:
"In tonal jazz, improvisation is not 'free' - it's always tied to the chord structure that the melody is based on."
Norgaard is also a violinist:
"As a musician, you feel that there's something different about the way your brain is working when you improvise. You're tapping all your stored knowledge and adapting it to a chord structure in real time."
Improvisation is a defining element of jazz music, and players such as Louis Armstrong, Miles Davis, and John Coltrane have made the craft look effortless.
Norgaard and Mukesh Dhamala, associate professor of physics and astronomy, tested singing pre-learned and improvised music for fMRI.
They found decreased brain activity during improvisation. They believe this is due to immersion - "performing improvisation engages a smaller, more focused brain network, while other parts of the brain go quiet."
They specifically found that improvisation showed higher node activity in the Broca's area, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, lateral premotor cortex, supplementary motor area and cerebellum, and lower functional connectivity among these regions.
This means the networks were activated without showing correlations between them.
Broca's area is responsible for the expressive aspects of spoken and written language, such as the production of sentences. Interestingly, when a patient suffers damage to this area, their ability to speak is affected, but not their ability to sing.
Images via Google Search/Public Domain
Comments
Post a Comment