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A fascinating interview of Dr. Charles Limb, a John's Hopkins surgeon, addresses the following questions:

What happens in a jazz musician's brain during an improv session? Where does all that creativity come from? That's what Dr. Charles Limb, a Johns Hopkins surgeon with a passion for music, wanted to find out.

In a study published this year in the Public Library of Science ONE, Limb reported results of an experiment in which he had professional jazz pianists improvise riffs as an MRI machine scanned their brain waves. The experience offered a peek in the regions of the brain responsible for spontaneous creativity. While they improvised, regions of their brains linked to inhibition turned off, while areas linked to creativity turned on.

Indeed, Dr. Limb is a smart man:

As a jazz player, you often speculate about someone like John Coltrane, and you say, "How did they come up with that? 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. That to me is what's so unique about jazz. It's spontaneous, immediate composition.

As I bolded above, Dr. Limb is a very smart man...

The interview goes on, though, and attempts to answer a more fundamental question about creativity:

A lot of the music studies have dealt with music perception, what's going on when we hear something. What I wanted to study is what's going on in the brain of a musician that's jamming, just improvising on the spot. It's a relevant question to humanity on a level that has nothing to do with music. What in the brain allows us to be creative? Jazz is my model to get at that question.

Check it out!

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