Amateur Neuroscience meets Actual Neuroscience
Learning (and teaching) the flute can be quite a creative challenge sometimes because so much of the important action (the use of the diaphragm, position of the tongue, etc) happens inside the body, where you can’t see it. This challenge is found with all instruments when dealing with the cognitive aspects of music—you can’t see how you think!
Or can you?
One of my favorite events at the National Flute Association’s Annual Convention was a lecture by Peter Westbrook entitled “Brain Function during Improvisation.” Peter Westbrook is a flutist, saxophonist, musicologist and member of the NFA’s Jazz Committee. His lecture brought together a recent study on brain function during music performance from Johns Hopkins University, an older study on brain function during meditation, and his own ideas and considerable knowledge of those topics.
In the Johns Hopkins study, the researchers did functional MRI’s of jazz pianists as they performed a number of tasks. A functional MRI tracks the amount of blood flow to the different parts of the brain, and neuroscientists believe that this demonstrates which parts of the brain are being used. While that didn’t allow the scientists to see how the musicians were thinking, they were able to see where they were thinking.
They found that while playing a memorized jazz tune, the lateral cortex was used. This is the part of the brain that monitors and judges activity while learning a task. It’s the part that says things like, “Now make sure you are keeping your fingers nicely curved, and that your wrist is relaxed, and don’t forget about that B-flat in the next bar!”
By contrast, during improvisation, the prefrontal cortex was most active (and the judging lateral cortex was virtually shut down). The pre-frontal cortex is the part of the brain that handles the free flow of information, tasks of creativity, the integration of diverse elements, and, get this, autobiographical storytelling. So, a jazz solo is like a musical autobiography of the performer.
The study did not include any classical musicians, so I don’t think it would be scientifically appropriate (even by the low standards of amateur neuroscience) to draw any conclusions about classical music from it, or even to use it as the basis of a comparison between classical music and jazz.
This study is useful because it makes a previously intangible aspect of music-making into something more concrete. It gives us an image and a description of a vital cognitive process.
It seems to me that the study’s description of brain activity during improvisation is also a description of what it feels like to perform classical music (from a score or from memory) at a high level. Have you ever had a great performance experience? It sure feels like ‘the free flow of information,’ ‘autobiographical storytelling,’ and the ‘integration of diverse elements.’ In fact, this was a big topic of audience discussion at Westbrook’s lecture.
Westbrook posed several questions.
- What does this study imply for “the curriculum?”
- Would it be beneficial to teach jazz and classical to all musicians, rather than separating them?
- Is there a way to teach music that gets the student to use her brain in this free, non-judgemental way?
I have a few questions of my own:
- Do you need to go so far as to learn the skill of improvisation to experience that pre-frontal cortex flow in classical (i.e. non-improvised) performance?
- Is there a way to bring that approach, that sense of freedom, into the study of classical music that you are already doing?
- Does just knowing that cognitive goal get you a little closer to it?
- Is using your pre-frontal cortex a skill you can practice?
What do you think? Have you had experiences like this? Have you incorporated any improvisation into your classical practice?
I’d like to know! Please leave comments below, or email me at zara@zaralawler.com. And stay tuned for later articles incorporating reader comments, and the second study Westbrook cited, about brain function during meditation.
Photo credits: MRI by erat, Jazz Attack by evoo73
Zara Lawler is a flutist, interdisciplinary performer and coach based in New York City. Contact her for information on performances, coachings, and lessons (including via Skype) at zara [at] zaralawler.com.
