The other day, I got an automatic renewal notice for my domain name, which means MattSoniak.com is a year old. To celebrate, I’ll post some old stories from the blog’s previous incarnations that I didn’t move to the current version.

First up is a piece from March about a neurological study of jazz musicians that my co-Flosser Ransom Riggs just mentioned on the m_F blog…

“When jazz musicians improvise, they often play with eyes closed in a distinctive, personal style that transcends traditional rules of melody and rhythm,” says Dr. Charles Limb, a former research fellow with the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) and a gifted jazz saxophonist himself[1]. “It’s a remarkable frame of mind.”

If you’ve ever been in “the zone,” making it up as you go along, or even seen someone hitting that sweet spot, you know it’s more than remarkable. It’s spiritual, it’s transcendent and it’s addictive.

Now, we have a clearer picture of how the brain helps us do that, a cognitive context for creative improvisation.

Limb and his fellow researcher at NIDCD’s (which is part of The National Institutes of Health) Division of Intramural Research, Dr. Allen Braun, chief of the division’s Language Section, both assumed that, as mystical as a musician might look following their muse, creativity is a matter of firing neurons. It’s tangible. We can understand it, and even see in action. That’s what Limb and Braun wanted to do: view, in real time, the brain functions of musicians during improvisation. But how do you see what musical improv (and beyond that, improvisation of any sort, from problem solving to having a conversation) looks like from the inside out? How do you view a brain on jazz? [Read more]