Ikigai Daily
Menu
DriveMusic and mind fact

When jazz pianists improvised inside a brain scanner, an area at the front of the brain linked to self-monitoring grew quieter, while a nearby area linked to self-expression became more active.

PLOS ONE

MindScienceMusic

The story behind the card

Charles Limb, an ear surgeon and jazz saxophonist, and the neuroscientist Allen Braun ran the study at the US National Institutes of Health and published it in PLOS ONE in 2008. Six professional jazz pianists lay in an fMRI scanner, which maps brain activity by tracking changes in blood flow, and played a small keyboard built to work inside it. Each played memorised music, then improvised over the same backing. While they improvised, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, tied to planning and checking one's own actions, quietened, and the medial prefrontal cortex, tied to expressing oneself, became busier. With only six players it is a small study, and each brain region has many roles.

Türkçe oku
Caz piyanistleri beyin tarayıcısının içinde doğaçlama yaptığında, beynin ön bölümünde kendini denetlemeyle ilişkili bir alan sakinleşti; kendini ifade etmeyle ilişkili komşu bir alan ise daha etkin çalıştı.

Kulak cerrahı ve caz saksofoncusu Charles Limb ile sinirbilimci Allen Braun, çalışmayı ABD Ulusal Sağlık Enstitüleri'nde yürüttü ve 2008'de PLOS ONE dergisinde yayımladı. Altı profesyonel caz piyanisti, kan akışındaki değişimleri izleyerek beynin hangi bölgelerinin çalıştığını gösteren fMRI cihazına girdi ve cihazın içinde kullanılabilecek biçimde yapılmış küçük bir klavye çaldı. Her biri önce ezberlediği bir parçayı çaldı, sonra aynı eşlik üzerine doğaçlama yaptı. Doğaçlama sırasında plan yapma ve kişinin kendi davranışını denetlemesiyle ilişkili dorsolateral prefrontal korteks sakinleşti; kendini ifade etmeyle ilişkili medial prefrontal korteks ise hareketlendi. Yalnızca altı kişiyle yapılmış küçük bir çalışmadır; üstelik her beyin bölgesinin birçok görevi vardır.

Sources and further reading

Background reading: Jazz improvisation
Get the mobile appAbout our cards

Related cards

These cards share a subject or reading mode with the card above.

StillnessMind

Silence between pieces of music can relax the body more than the music itself. In a 2006 study of 24 people, fast music raised heart rate, blood pressure and breathing; during a two-minute pause all three fell, even below the levels measured before the music began.

Physician Luciano Bernardi of the University of Pavia in Italy, with Cesare Porta and Peter Sleight, tested 12 practising musicians and 12 people of the same age without musical training. Each listened to six styles in random order, including rap, techno, Indian raga and classical music, with a two-minute pause inserted at a random point. Tempo mattered more than style: faster music and simpler rhythms were the most stimulating, while slow or meditative music had a calming effect. The musicians' breathing followed the tempo more closely than the others'. The authors suggested that alternating music and pauses might help with stress, but a single small laboratory study is only a starting point.

Bernardi study, 2006Read card
WonderMind

The 'Mozart effect', the popular idea that listening to Mozart makes you cleverer, grew from a 1993 study of just 36 college students. After hearing a Mozart sonata, their scores on a spatial-reasoning task rose for only 10 to 15 minutes; later reviews found no lasting boost to intelligence.

Frances Rauscher, Gordon Shaw and Catherine Ky published the study in the journal Nature. Students listened to ten minutes of Mozart's Sonata for Two Pianos in D major, a relaxation recording or silence, then did paper-folding-and-cutting puzzles from the Stanford-Binet intelligence test. The Mozart group did better, but only briefly, and the study involved no babies, no children and no measure of general intelligence. Publicity turned it into a promise that classical music makes children smarter: in 1998 the governor of Georgia, Zell Miller, proposed $105,000 a year to give every newborn in the state a classical recording. Later analyses found at most small, short-lived effects, most likely because lively music lifts mood and alertness.

The Mozart effectRead card
WonderScience

Deliberately smiling can make people feel slightly happier. In 2022 a study of nearly 4,000 people in 19 countries found that posing a smile, or copying a smiling face, raised reported happiness a little; a subtler method, holding a pen between the teeth, gave less clear results.

The idea that the face can feed back into feelings, called the facial feedback hypothesis, goes back to Charles Darwin and William James. In a famous 1988 experiment, Fritz Strack and colleagues had people hold a pen in their teeth, which forces a smile, or between their lips, which prevents one, and those in the first group rated cartoons as funnier. In 2016, seventeen laboratories repeated that experiment exactly and found no effect. A 2019 review of 138 studies concluded that the effect is real but small and varies from study to study. The 2022 Many Smiles Collaboration, led by Nicholas Coles and designed jointly by supporters and sceptics of the idea, found that deliberate smiling could both strengthen and start feelings of happiness, while the pen method remained inconclusive.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderScience

Your gut and brain communicate through nerves, hormones, immune signals and microbes, which is why stress and digestion can affect each other.

Scientists call this link the gut–brain axis. The gut has its own network of about 500 million nerve cells, the enteric nervous system, sometimes called the “second brain”, which can run digestion largely by itself. It is connected to the brain mainly through the vagus nerve, a long nerve running from the brainstem down to the abdomen, and most of its fibres carry messages upwards, from the gut to the brain. More than 90 per cent of the body's serotonin, a chemical messenger, is found in the gut. Gut bacteria play a part too: in a 2004 Japanese study, mice raised entirely free of germs overreacted to stress. Stress can speed up or slow down the gut, one reason it often worsens irritable bowel syndrome, a common gut disorder. Most research on the microbes' role has been in animals, and human evidence is still limited.

Ikigai DailyRead card
WonderScience

A placebo is a dummy treatment, such as a sugar pill. In pain studies, placebos can reduce the pain people report and also dampen activity in the brain areas that process pain, even though they contain no active drug.

The word placebo is Latin for “I shall please”. One of the first clues that the effect is physical came in 1978, when Jon Levine and colleagues studied patients recovering from wisdom tooth removal. They gave them a placebo and naloxone, a drug that blocks the effect of endorphins, the body's own painkilling chemicals. In patients who had responded to the placebo, naloxone increased the pain, which suggested that the placebo relief came from endorphins. In 2004 Tor Wager and colleagues used brain scans to show that a placebo painkiller reduced activity in pain-processing regions during a painful stimulus. Expectation works the other way too: in the nocebo effect, from the Latin for “I shall harm”, expecting harm makes symptoms worse. None of this means the pain was imaginary, or that placebos can replace effective treatment.

Ikigai DailyRead card
Next card in the archiveWhen people sing together in a choir, their breathing falls into step with the music, and their heart rates can begin to rise and fall together too.Read next →