Your Brain on Jazz

An older article in Science Daily called This Is Your Brain On Jazz: Researchers Use MRI To Study Spontaneity, Creativity caught my attention for a number of reasons.

The article provides a layman's interpretation of how the creative act affects the operation of the brain.

The scientists found that a region of the brain known as the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, a broad portion of the front of the brain that extends to the sides, showed a slowdown in activity during improvisation. This area has been linked to planned actions and self-censoring, such as carefully deciding what words you might say at a job interview. Shutting down this area could lead to lowered inhibitions, Limb suggests.

The researchers also saw increased activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, which sits in the center of the brain’s frontal lobe. This area has been linked with self-expression and activities that convey individuality, such as telling a story about yourself.

“Jazz is often described as being an extremely individualistic art form. You can figure out which jazz musician is playing because one person’s improvisation sounds only like him or her,” says Limb. “What we think is happening is when you’re telling your own musical story, you’re shutting down impulses that might impede the flow of novel ideas.”

Limb notes that this type of brain activity may also be present during other types of improvisational behavior that are integral parts of life for artists and non-artists alike. For example, he notes, people are continually improvising words in conversations and improvising solutions to problems on the spot. “Without this type of creativity, humans wouldn’t have advanced as a species. It’s an integral part of who we are,” Limb says.

He and Braun plan to use similar techniques to see whether the improvisational brain activity they identified matches that in other types of artists, such as poets or visual artists, as well as non-artists asked to improvise.

The study is published in the Feb. 27 issue of the journal Public Library of Science (PLoS) One. http://www.plosone.org/article/fetchArticle.action?articleURI=info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0001679

What's interesting here is that the very thing that enables the creative juices to flow are the very thing that we in this society must consciously attempt to suppress.

In school, in job interviews, and in the presence of individuals who interpret everything literally, a creative or intelligent individual must be on guard. These days an over-active imagination gets even elementary schoolchildren in trouble. Pictures of guns in art class, fictional stories about murder, or free-association dialogs can and are misinterpreted these days of sure evidence that the individual who drew, imagined, or exercised the speech is crazy, dangerous, or deranged.

For artists this is nothing new. An artist who turns off inhibitions must be high or psychologically imbalanced. Yet, we are told, this is the essential feature of creativity.

So, whenever I hear about the government or parents, or some degree-certified expert assert that creativity can and should be taught I'm amused. Public schools are dangerous places for teachers and students to be creative.

And even businesses who claim to recruit out-of-the-box employees would fire one on the spot because they don't fit the ever-fearful, careerist, don't-rock-the-boat lemmings.

Creativity is a lonely exercise and best practiced in private unless you're in a niche like jazz that celebrates with appreciation the altered state that art demands. And the gifted student must learn early to hide their gift because it can be misunderstood or snuffed out by institutions that have no use for the one that sticks out or fails standardized memorization tests.

The education industrial complex (EIC) has some tried and true formulas. Household income = superior intelligence = entitlement to superior EIC destination that confers official diplomas of intelligence. It's a closed society and the creative need not apply.

American Public Schools and the Needham Question

I read a fascinating article the other day that documented the work of Joseph Needham who studied and wrote about something that interested him all his life; why, in the middle of the 15th century, did Chinese civilization suddenly cease its superior progress?

Needham never fully worked out why China’s inventiveness dried up. Other academics have made their own suggestions: the stultifying pursuit of bureaucratic rank in the Middle Kingdom and the absence of a mercantile class to foster competition and self-improvement; the sheer size of China compared with the smaller states of Europe whose fierce rivalries fostered technological competition; its totalitarianism.

With its unreformed one-party system, its rote-learning in schools and state control of big businesses, “new China” is hardly a haven for innovative thinking. Yet the Chinese continue to fret about the Needham question. A Communist Party chief of a middle school in central China recently said that it deserved deep thought and that the answer lay in an education system that fails to emphasise improving “character”. A former government minister also referred to Needham’s lament that China had produced no idea or invention of global impact for more than 500 years. Its contribution henceforth, the official said, should be “harmony”.

In the United States we have a shrinking middle-class, a government hell-bent on becoming more and more totalitarian every day, and finally a school system driven by rote-memorization, stultifying state-control, and an intolerance of creativity from teacher or student.

The signs all point to trouble. Does anyone care?

Okay Class, Let's Be "Creative"

Something every parent encounters routinely are the number of inane ways that certain teachers think they're encouraging creative activities.

There's the ubiquitous choose your own font meme, the go to Staples - buy a giant display poster and posterize a book report meme, the colorize a map, create a chart, graph, picture meme, or put-it-in-your-own-words scramble meme, and on and on.

The uncreative ways teachers think about creative minds is symptomatic of the school methodology and that can only be NCLB under the current dictatorship.

A few months ago, an article, Innovative Minds Don’t Think Alike by Janet Rae-Dupree appeared in the New York Times about creativity that's worth reading.

IT’S a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience.

Andrew S. Grove, the co-founder of Intel, put it well in 2005 when he told an interviewer from Fortune, “When everybody knows that something is so, it means that nobody knows nothin’.” In other words, it becomes nearly impossible to look beyond what you know and think outside the box you’ve built around yourself.

This so-called curse of knowledge, a phrase used in a 1989 paper in The Journal of Political Economy, means that once you’ve become an expert in a particular subject, it’s hard to imagine not knowing what you do. Your conversations with others in the field are peppered with catch phrases and jargon that are foreign to the uninitiated. When it’s time to accomplish a task — open a store, build a house, buy new cash registers, sell insurance — those in the know get it done the way it has always been done, stifling innovation as they barrel along the well-worn path.

The remedy?

To innovate, Mr. Heath says, you have to bring together people with a variety of skills. If those people can’t communicate clearly with one another, innovation gets bogged down in the abstract language of specialization and expertise. “It’s kind of like the ugly American tourist trying to get across an idea in another country by speaking English slowly and more loudly,” he says. “You’ve got to find the common connections.”

In her 2006 book, “Innovation Killer: How What We Know Limits What We Can Imagine — and What Smart Companies Are Doing About It,” Cynthia Barton Rabe proposes bringing in outsiders whom she calls zero-gravity thinkers to keep creativity and innovation on track.

When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, she says, “it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems.”

So why are schools insisting on narrowly defined specialists to teach?

Just another example of the unintended consequences of black and white thinking.