Study of Jazz Pianists Finds ‘Happy’ and ‘Sad’
Music Evoke Different Neural Patterns
Newswise January
11, 2016 — The workings of neural circuits associated with creativity are
significantly altered when artists are actively attempting to express emotions,
according to a new brain-scanning study of jazz pianists.
Over the
past decade, a collection of neuroimaging studies has begun to identify
components of a neural circuit that operates across various domains of
creativity.
But the
new research suggests that creativity cannot be fully explained in terms of the
activation or deactivation of a fixed network of brain regions.
Rather,
the researchers said, when creative acts engage brain areas involved in
emotional expression, activity in these regions strongly influences which parts
of the brain’s creativity network are activated, and to what extent.
“The
bottom line is that emotion matters,” said senior author Charles Limb, MD. “It
can’t just be a binary situation in which your brain is one way when you’re
being creative and another way when you’re not. Instead, there are greater and
lesser degrees of creative states, and different versions. And emotion plays a
crucially important role in these differences.”
Most of
the new research, which appears in the January 4, 2016 issue of Scientific
Reports, was conducted in Limb’s laboratory at Johns Hopkins School of
Medicine before his move to UC San Francisco in 2015. In his surgical practice,
Limb, now the Francis A. Sooy Professor of Otolaryngology at UCSF and an
accomplished jazz saxophonist, inserts cochlear implants to restore hearing.
Previous
research by Limb and others using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI)
to study musical improvisation, freestyle rapping, and the rendering of
caricatures—creative acts that unfold in real time and are therefore more
amenable to laboratory studies than, say, painting—deactivate a brain region
known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), which is involved in
planning and monitoring behavior.
This
DLPFC deactivation has been taken to be a neural signature of the “flow state”
artists may enter to free up creative impulses.
But in
the new study, led by first author Malinda McPherson, the researchers found
that DLPFC deactivation was significantly greater when the jazz musicians, who
played a small keyboard while in the fMRI scanner, improvised melodies intended
to convey the emotion expressed in a “positive” image (a photograph of a woman
smiling) than when they aimed to capture the emotions in a “negative” image (a
photograph of the same woman in a mildly distressed state).
On the
other hand, improvisations targeted at expressing the emotion in the negative
image were associated with greater activation of the brain’s reward regions,
which reinforce behaviors that lead to pleasurable outcomes, and a greater
connectivity of these regions to the DLPFC.
“There’s
more deactivation of the DLPFC during happy improvisations, perhaps indicating
that people are getting into more of a ‘groove’ or ‘zone,’ but during sad
improvisations there’s more recruitment of areas of the brain related to
reward,” said McPherson, a classical violist and first-year graduate student in
the Harvard-MIT Program in Speech and Hearing Bioscience and Technology.
“This indicates there may be different
mechanisms for why it’s pleasurable to create happy versus sad music.”
Because
the images themselves might induce an emotional response in the musicians, in
addition to the brain scans made while the musicians improvised, each scanning
session also included a time period in which the musicians passively viewed the
images.
For each
musician, any brain activity data generated during these passive viewing
periods, including emotional responses, were subtracted from that elicited
during their musical performances.
This
allowed the researchers to determine which components of brain activity in
emotional regions were strongly associated with creating the improvisations.
Moreover,
Limb said, the research team avoided biasing the musicians’ performances with
words like “sad” or “happy” when instructing the musicians before the
experiments.
“The
notion that we can study complex creativity in artists and musicians from a
neuroscientific perspective is an audacious one, but it’s one that we’re
increasingly comfortable with,” Limb said.
“Not that
we’re going to answer all the questions, but that we have the right to ask them
and to design experiments that try to shed some light on this fascinating human
process.”
The
research was funded by the Dana Foundation and by the Brain Science Institute
of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine. Co-authors were Frederick S. Barrett,
PhD; Monica Lopez-Gonzalez, PhD; and Patpong Jiradejvong.
About UCSF: UC San Francisco
(UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through
advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and
health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top-ranked
graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy, a graduate
division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, translational
and population sciences, as well as a preeminent biomedical research
enterpriseand UCSF Health, which includes two top-ranked hospitals, UCSF
Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital San Francisco, as well as
other partner and affiliated hospitals and healthcare providers throughout the
Bay Area. Please visit www.ucsf.edu/news.
No comments:
Post a Comment