The way those objects feel in your hands have a significant influence on the judgments you form about them. Past research has shown that shoppers understand and form impressions more readily about products with which they can physically interact and that tactile sensations can influence their perceptions and opinions of products’ quality. This happens even when touching a product doesn’t give any clues about its quality, like when shoppers said that water from a firm bottle seemed to taste better than water from a flimsy bottle. Findings like this have led psychologists to suggest that touch experiences might create a “scaffold” for the development of conceptual knowledge. In other words, mental action may be grounded in physical action, and sensory and motor processes are fundamental to some aspects of cognition.

In a study recently published in Science, researchers tested how three tactile sensations – weight, texture and hardness – influence perceptions, judgments and decisions of and about unrelated situations, people and objects. They found that touching objects can trigger a “haptic [relating to or based on the sense of touch] mindset” and cause people to apply concepts related to those sensations (texture and someone being “rough around the edges,” for example) to interpersonal interactions.

Joshua Ackerman, Christopher Nocera and John Bargh (from MIT, Harvard and Yale, respectively) conducted six experiments to see how weight, texture and hardness affected decision making and the formation of social impressions in people they met on the street. In one of the weight-related experiments, 54 passersby were asked to evaluate a job candidate by reviewing resumes on either light (3/4 lb) or heavy (4 1/2 lb) clipboards. Weight is associated seriousness and importance, a la “weighty matters” and the “gravity of the situation.” Sure enough, the people who reviewed the resume on the heavy clipboard 1) rated the the candidate as better suited for the position 2) said the candidate displayed more serious interest and 3) rated their own accuracy on the task as more important than the participants using the light clipboard did.

In the texture experiment, 64 people read a description of an ambiguous social interaction and were asked about the nature of the interaction, specifically, whether it was adversarial or friendly. Before they read the story, though, the participants completed a puzzle, the pieces of which were covered either with sandpaper or left bare. The participants who completed the sandpaper-covered puzzle rated the interaction as more adversarial and harsh than the participants who completed the smooth puzzle, consistent with rough textures’ metaphorical relationship harshness and difficulty (“a rough day,” “coarse language”).

To see if texture affected people’s social decisions, 42 participants first completed either the smooth or rough puzzle and then played an Ultimatum game where they received 10 tickets for a $50 lottery and could choose any of the tickets to an anonymous participant. If the other person accepted the ticket offer, great; if not, all the tickets were forfeited. Participants who completed the rough puzzle offered more lottery tickets than those who did the smooth puzzle, suggesting that they were primed for difficult social interaction and hence used compensatory bargaining behavior.

The last two experiments focused on hardness, which is associated with stability and rigidity (“he’s my rock” and “hard-hearted”). In one experiment, 49 people were asked to watch a magic act and then guess the secret. First, though, they got to examine the object to be used – either a soft piece of blanket or a hard block of wood – and verify that there wasn’t anything odd unusual about them. The act was then postponed indefinitely while the participants read a description of an interaction between a boss and an employee and evaluated the employee’s rigidity/strictness. Those who felt the wooden block rated the employee as more rigid/strict than those who felt the blanket.

The final experiment tested whether or not passive touch experiences could affect decision-making like active manipulation of objects had. Eighty-six participants were “primed by the seat of their pants” and sat in either hard wooden chairs or soft cushioned one while completing an impression formation task similar to the previous experiment and a negotiation task. This negotiation had participants pretending to shop for a new car (sticker price $16,500) and making two offers on the car (the second assuming that the dealer rejected the first offer). Comparable to the previous experiment, people who sat in the hard chairs said the employee was more stable than did participants who sat in the soft chairs. In the negotiation, hard chair participants changed their price between the two offers by a lesser amount than the soft chair participants did, suggesting that a haptic mindset can be triggered even when touch occur in body parts beside the hands and even when an object is not being actively manipulated.

It’s sort of the opposite of what Funkadelic would have you believe: free your ass and your mind will follow. While the idea of your butt or your hands or your feet having such power over your brain might seem a little odd, researchers in the field of embodied cognition have spent decades chipping away at the idea that mind and body are so separate from each other. Past studies have demonstrated that kids who use their hands while solving math problems have an easier time of it, that actors can remember lines more easily when moving and that holding a warm cup of coffee makes you more generous.

If physical sensation and movement has such a strong influence on our thoughts, though, is manipulating the mind as easy as buying heavier clipboards and upholstering the furniture? While the study might provide some lessons for job candidates, pollsters and car salesmen on manipulating their environment to bend social interactions in their favor, the authors note that this sort of exploitation is only easy when people are distracted and that paying attention to your surroundings diminishes the effects of these tactile cues. In other words, you’d do well to watch where you sit.

Reference: Ackerman JM, Nocera CC, & Bargh JA (2010). Incidental haptic sensations influence social judgments and decisions. Science (New York, N.Y.), 328 (5986), 1712-5 PMID: 20576894

Image: Anthony Redmile Carved Armchair with Malachite Bone and Horn via Boing Boing

“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?

The World’s Smallest Jazz Club

Laying on your back in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine, unable to move your head, see your hands or hear much of anything over the drone of the machine is not the ideal situation in which to show of your musical skills. Until we invent X-ray goggles, though, functional MRI (which shows the amount of blood traveling to various parts of the brain so we can measure the amount of neural activity in those areas) is our best bet, so Limb and Braun had to turn the scanner into a tiny concert hall.

Six trained jazz pianists, three from the Peabody Institute and three who heard about the study through gossip in the local jazz community, lay down in the machine with their knees bent and were given some special equipment for their performance. A keyboard specially designed for the experiment (it was shortened to fit inside the machine tube and had its metal parts removed so the machine’s powerful magnets wouldn’t attract them) was rested on the pianists’ knees and a mirror was placed over their eyes so they could see the keys. The pianists also wore fMRI-compatible headphones so their music wouldn’t be drowned out by the din inside the tube.

And then, they played.

“We all do ‘do, re, mi,’ but you have got to find the other notes yourself.

“Because musical improvisation incorporates a broad range of melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic invention that is intrinsically difficult to control,” says Limb in his paper, Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation, “we designed two paradigms, one that was relatively low and one that was high in musical complexity.” In the “low” paradigm, named Scale, the musicians were asked to play an ascending or descending scale, and were allowed to improvise in the “high” paradigm, named Jazz. This allowed the researchers to compare brain activity during the performance of a simple task to that during the performance of a more complex, creatively demanding one.

The Scale paradigm was based on the C major scale. The musicians first played the scale up and down in quarter notes along with a metronome, something most any accomplished musician has done countless times while practicing. They were then asked to improvise, but were limited to playing those same quarter notes within the C major scale. “Although the musicians were indeed improvising, it was a relatively low-level form of improvisation, musically speaking,” Limb said in a NIH press release.

In second paradigm, Jazz, the researchers aimed to “reproduce the high degree of musical richness of a jazz performance.” First, the musicians played a blues melody, written by Limb, that they memorized in the days before the experiment. They were accompanied, via the headphones, by a pre-recorded backing band. They then improvised again, using the chord structure of Limb’s composition as a guide and the backing band as inspiration.

That’s What Jazz Looks like to Me

Once things quieted down, Limb and Braun analyzed the brain scans. All six musicians showed similar brain activity patterns, and the researchers found that, during improvisation, certain parts of the brain were consistently activated while others were consistently turned deactivated.

The prefrontal cortex, the region of the brain’s frontal lobe that controls many of our higher mental abilities, is where the majority of changes happened. The dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, which is involved in intellectual function and action, and lateral orbifrontal cortex, which monitors and blocks out inappropriate behavior, acting as our self-censor, displayed a pattern of deactivation, almost to the point of shutdown.

On the other hand, the medial prefrontal cortex, which hasn’t been fully explored but is suggested to be involved in self-initiated thoughts and behaviors, became highly activated. Other brain scan studies have shown that this same region is very active when people tell anecdotes or make up stories.

The researchers say that the suppression of the musicians’ self-monitoring mechanisms and firing up of the “story telling” part of our brain makes sense given the notion that improvisation is an outlet for a musician to express their individual musical voice.

The brain scans also show that, during improvisation, there was increased neural activity in the sensory areas responsible for touch, hearing and vision, despite the fact that there was no significant change in what the musicians were touching, hearing or seeing when they switched from the Scale paradigm to the Jazz paradigm. Limb thinks that brain might “ramp up its sensorimotor processing in order to be in a creative state.”

The most interesting finding is that the brain scans from the two improv sessions were nearly identical, the same pattern of activation and deactivation described above occurred whether the musicians were improvising within the one-octave scale or had free reign to do whatever they wanted over Limb’s tune. This lends some support to the idea that, basically, this is what creativity looks like. If the difference in neural activity between the memorized and improvisational paradigms was the result of increasing complexity, then there should have been a greater difference between the two improvisation sessions, also, since the Jazz paradigm improvisation was more complex than its Scale counterpart. Braun concludes that “there is no single creative area of the brain—no focal activation of a single area. Rather, when you move from either of the control tasks to improvisation, you see a strong and consistent pattern of activity throughout the brain that enables creativity.”

Limb says that this pattern of brain activity may also be present during other types of improvisational behavior. He and Braun plan to use similar experiments to see if the brain activity they have found also occurs when other artists, like writers or painters, and non-artists are asked to improvise.

On that note,further experiments with musicians wouldn’t be a bad idea, either. This experiment overlooks an important element of improvised music, especially in jazz: the social factor. Jazz improvisation is about more than just the soloist and their instrument, the musicians play off of each other and the musical relationships unfolding during each measure affect the output of every person in the group. Designing an experiment that accounts for the social dimension of musical improvisation would be nearly impossible with the equipment we have now, though. Even if we could line up four or five fMRI machines and make sure the musicians could hear each other clearly, it would be no small feat to play the saxophone, much less the drums, inside the scanner.

***

Limb and Braun’s study was published in the February 27^th issue of Public Library of Science (PLoS) One, an open-access journal. The full paper is available to read in its entirety on the web.

Reference: Limb, C.J., Braun, A.R., Greene, E. (2008). Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation. PLoS ONE, 3(2), e1679. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0001679

Image Credit: Bob Garas, via Stockvault