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In a remarkable study conducted at Johns Hopkins University, two professors - Charles Limb and Alan Braun - discovered which part of the brain is used when jazz musicians are improvising:

Curious about his own "brain on jazz," Limb and Braun devised a plan to view in real time the brain functions of musicians improvising.

For the study, they recruited six trained jazz pianists, three from the Peabody Institute, a music conservatory where Limb holds a joint faculty appointment. Other volunteers learned about the study by word of mouth through the local jazz community.

The researchers designed a special keyboard to allow the pianists to play inside a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, a brain-scanner that illuminates areas of the brain responding to various stimuli, identifying which areas are active while a person is involved in some mental task, for example.

Because fMRI uses powerful magnets, the researchers designed the unconventional keyboard with no iron-containing metal parts that the magnet could attract. They also used fMRI-compatible headphones that would allow musicians to hear the music they generate while they're playing it.

What they found was that the part of the brain used for planned actions and self-censoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview, were shutting down during the act of making music. Shutting down this area could lead to lowered inhibitions, Limb suggests.

The researchers also saw increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the center of the brain's frontal lobe. This area has been linked with self-expression and activities that convey individuality, such as telling a story about yourself.

"Jazz is often described as being an extremely individualistic art form. You can figure out which jazz musician is playing because one person's improvisation sounds only like him or her," says Limb. "What we think is happening is when you're telling your own musical story, you're shutting down impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas."

This study pretty much confirms what we all feel when performing. That is, the act of getting in the "zone" means, pretty much, losing yourself as far as possible from everyday thoughts and desires, anxieties and distractions, and concentrating on the here and now while responding to the swirl of ideas and sounds happening on the bandstand. It's quite complicated, and yet simple at the same time.

Check out the study...

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