Charles Limb loved music as a child—Mahler, the Beatles, Miles Davis, whatever. And he heard things most of us don't. "I was fascinated by this question of how sound can make you feel something," says the Johns Hopkins otolaryngologist. "If you think about it from a kind of abstract philosophical level, it's unusual that acoustic vibrations in the air can make you feel deep emotion, something that can affect your life."

As his mouthful of a medical specialization might hint, Limb didn't end up becoming a professional musician, although he is a proficient amateur player (saxophone, piano, and bass) and composer with a joint appointment at the Peabody Institute, the music school affiliated with Hopkins. Instead, he approached music from another angle, becoming a hearing specialist and surgeon who performs cochlear implantations on patients who have lost their hearing. In search of a better understanding of how the mind perceives complex auditory stimuli such as music, Limb got a research fellowship at the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to study the brain using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), a technique that can measure the changes in blood flow within the brain that indicate neural activity. It was there that Limb and a co-author conceived and undertook a curious study, published in 2008, that shed a glimmer of light on a very fundamental mystery: What is creativity, and how does the mind generate new ideas? 




Q You devised an experiment in which you placed jazz musicians inside an fMRI machine and had them improvise music on a small keyboard while the scanner measured their neural activity. Did you have a set of specific expectations of what you'd see?

A Scientifically, I'm very modest in my goals. I'm only spending half of my time doing science—I take care of patients with ear disorders—so to a certain extent I have to scale back my ambitions. What I wanted to do was try to understand how we perceive and produce music. I'm cutting right to the chase of what I feel matters most, musically. That's how creativity comes in, because to me there is no more fundamental process in music than creativity.

Essentially, this experiment was me asking a question that I've always wondered about: What's taking place in the brain when a jazz musician improvises? I'm a saxophonist and I've improvised a lot in my life, and it always has a certain automaticity to it. As it's taking place, you can stop and question yourself. "Wow, how am I doing this? Where's this music coming from?" When you listen to recordings of the great players, the questions are even more astounding. How did John Coltrane do that?

At the time, there was really no literature in the field to base a hypothesis on. We had certain theories, but they weren't based on creativity; they were based on things like altered states of consciousness and automatic behavior. I was mostly at first just trying to see if I could pull it off technically. For example, the piano keyboard that we used in there took two years to design and get working. It has to be magnetically safe. It's a little plastic thing that has thirty-seven keys; it sits on your lap while you're on your back playing in the scanner. I recall very clearly when I had my first jazz musician [do the experiment]. I took a step back and thought, "My God, this really might work."


Q Where did you find the musicians?

A It wasn't an easy study group to find. I wanted only piano players that were right-handed, that had normal hearing, and that had no neurological history. We advertised, and I had contacts through the Peabody Institute. In the end I found six subjects. That's low for a scientific study, and the follow-up study should have more.


Q Did you try it on yourself?

A Whenever I was trying to get the experiment to work, I would have somebody turn on the scanner while I was in there, so, yeah, I scanned myself. I was the main prototype to figure out that it could work and that it would be comfortable enough to play. After a while you weren't thinking about the fact that you're in a scanner playing. You're just thinking about playing music. Based on the debriefing we did with [the subjects] later, none of them felt that the apparatus or the setting was so bizarre that it took them a long time to get used to it. They would hop in the scanner, adjust their headphones, and within about ten seconds they were just playing amazing music on this dinky little plastic keyboard. It was pretty remarkable.


Q And what did you see on the scans?

A In our study, the jazz musicians started playing a memorized twelve-bar blues in C-minor and then used the same exact auditory accompaniment to improvise on it. What we found is that when they went from playing something memorized to improvising, the prefrontal cortex of the brain did this really interesting thing. The [activity in the] medial prefrontal area went up—that's this autobiographical, self-referential, self-expressive area. And the lateral prefrontal regions went down—those are self-inhibitory, self-censoring, self-monitoring regions of the brain. That's a pattern of activity that is not commonly seen. The way we interpreted it—and this is with a lot of caveats—is that this might be one of the neural signatures of spontaneous creativity.


Q How could you further refine this hypothesis?
 
A We are designing a lot of follow-up experiments that pertain to this notion of studying neural substrates of creativity. One study [involves] having two different musicians playing back and forth in a kind of musical conversation. I'm literally going to do that in the scanner—have musicians "trade fours." Another will look at non-jazz forms of spontaneous creativity. Right now I'm designing a study of freestyle hip-hop rapping. I'm going to have rappers come in and either recite memorized verses or come up with stuff on the spot.

I can also look at other artistic domains. Pretty much every art form has its parallels to music. What about visual arts? We could look at what it's like for someone to copy a painting versus doing an abstract rendition of it out of their heads with no reference point. There are a lot of ways to get at creativity in an fMRI setting.


Q Is there a possible sort of application for this new understanding of creativity, not just for musicians but also people in everyday life?

A When I did my studies, I didn't intend for them to be pedagogical at all. I didn't have an agenda. Now that the studies are done, a lot of emerging interests have blended together from various fields that really focus on the fact that creativity is an essential feature not just of music or just of art but of human behavior, and of adaptation and learning and progress. Meaning that human civilization would not be what it is today without creativity. There is no field of human pursuit to which creativity hasn't been essential.

If we step back and take it as an axiom that creativity matters, all of a sudden this research goes from a neat study of jazz to something more fundamental. The explicit, tangible target, I think, has to do with education. There is something at the Johns Hopkins University called the Neuro-Education Initiative [a collaboration between JHU's School of Education and Brain Science Institute]. Essentially what we are trying to realize, educators and scientists together, is that we share a common goal, and that's the brain. Educators are trying to mold the brain; neuroscientists are trying to study the brain. So maybe we can pool our resources and our skills to ask, How can we understand how the brain learns best and revise our methods of education so that they are more effective? Maybe we can come up with a training paradigm that has the added insight of knowing how the brain is responding to it. You can see that there is a lot of overlapping. There is a lot of good theory behind mixing those two fields of neuroscience and education. That's what we are trying to do. It's in its infancy now. But in fifty years or a hundred years, this might just be how it's done.


Q The thing about learning via music and musical improvisation is that after all the training and all the practice, you need to be able to throw away the rules.

A That's exactly right. You have to be a master of your craft to be comfortable enough to say, well, let's forget that for a little while. It's like Miles Davis' introduction to "It Never Entered My Mind," one of his Prestige recordings. He hits this B-flat, and it's not what he meant to hit. Afterward, he was interviewed about it—you know, what's with that B-flat? He said, "Oh, it was a mistake, but it sounded good, so I did it again."


Q I've read that there's a parallel between some of the brain activity associated with creativity and dreaming.

A My co-author in the jazz study, Allen Braun at the NIH, did some studies of dreaming using PET scanning. He found this similar increase in medial-prefrontal activity. Dreaming is de-focused, random associations, and the decreased lateral peripheral activity that he saw during dreaming he interpreted as turning off the barriers of rationality that normally link our thoughts together. So what does that imply? Well, maybe dreaming and improvisation do overlap cognitively. You can understand that qualitatively, but to prove that definitively is hard.


Q Did it take a scientist who was also a musician to come up with this idea for a study?

A Most of the scientists that study music are very musical; they are intrinsically interested and have a background in it, so musical discussions and inquiry are familiar and comfortable. Maybe that helps me when I do my science because it increases this thing that we call "ecological validity," which is that I really want to study something that matters musically and I want to study it in a way that doesn't strip it of its musicality. That's very important to me. A lot of musical studies are so scientifically rigid that it is very hard to tell that they are musical studies. Some of my studies are like that, too. You lose the music in it. With something like jazz and improvisation, you have to be careful because once you destroy the soul of a jazz improvisation solo, you wonder what are you actually studying anymore.


Q Do you worry that in trying to peer into this process by which art is created, you're demystifying it?
 
A That might be a little philosophical. It depends on your view about acquiring knowledge about things we don't understand. If anyone is going to be demystified by this it would be me, because I'm doing this all the time. But I just find it intriguing. Music is music; art is art. It will outlast all of us scientists. I personally think that the more we understand about the brain's function in every complex activity, the more chance we have of really one day entering into this science-fiction future of medicine, where we can really understand the brain at the highest cognitive levels.

The simple analogy I always use is this: So, flying in an airplane is a pretty magical idea. You've probably flown a hundred times, but every time you take off, you are sort of like, "Oh, I'm flying." Is studying aerodynamics demystifying it? I don't know. In the same way, [my study] doesn't strip music of its beauty or its meaning. It provides a layer of explanation about how these things could occur. In my mind, that doesn't diminish or threaten any of the beauty or the majesty of it all. When I'm listening to music right now, I don't do it from the perspective of a fMRI experiment. I listen to it from the perspective of beauty. I still think, "Wow, did you hear that?"

—David Dudley is Urbanite's editor-in-chief.