Science of productivity: Creativity (From Jazz to Mozart)

In this post, I want to provide you with a humbling perspective on the relationship of our brains with music. As a musician, I have always been fascinated by how a person (a musician) can develop and master an instrument. They say that your instrument is an extension of your body. Certainly, it is. Our brains orchestrate the learning, rehearsal, performance and the never-ending sharpening of skill and mastery of this craft.

You are not a musician? The aspects discussed in this post are relevant not only for musicians, but for everyone who deals with problem-solving, facing new challenges and acquiring experience in any activity.

Brain and improvisation to create music

The human brain hosts all of our emotions, skills, habits and circuitry to process stimuli from our environment to integrate knowledge and movement. If we want to dance, our brain has to integrate many aspects of music, such as beat, tempo, pitch, and rythm and non-musical aspects, such as muscle memory. All these, factor into our action of “wanting to dance”. Many people just “go with the flow” and do not necessarily reason all these details individually (let’s call them junior improvisators), other people may be experienced in the dance floor and may be a bit more critical on the way they develop their dance and eventually include new steps or sequences in the routine they have worked on (let’s call them senior improvisators).

When it comes to music and arts, the dogma was: “creative people use their right brain hemisphere much more than academically-trained analytical individuals, who rely on their left hemisphere function”. Science has no problems with self-updating. Is this dogma immutable?

In a 2020 study by Rosen and colleagues, this dogma was challenged. Briefly, jazz guitarists were recruited for a study in which they improvised over a musical track while their brain activity was recorded via EEG (electroencephalogram). EEG is a powerful tool because it provides a map of the electrical activity of the brain over time. Additionally, the performances were rated in a standardized manner that would deliver a ranking on their quality.

So, naturally we would have expected that when it comes to creativity, the right brain of these individuals would spark with a high amount of electrical activity! In fact, it did, mainly in the musicians who were new and inexperienced at improvisation (junior improvisers who had a small number of public performances)… Surprisingly, the left hemisphere of the “senior improvisers”(people that had many public performances over decades) was sparking during improvisation. Additionally, the overall quality of improvisation of the senior improvisers was higher than their junior counterparts.

The results of this study strongly suggest that and I quote:
“If creativity is defined in terms of the quality of a product, such as a song, invention, poem or painting, then the left hemisphere plays a key role […] if creativity is understood as a person’s ability to deal with novel, unfamiliar situations, as is the case for novice improvisers, then the right hemisphere plays the leading role”

Findings like these imply that creativity is not an aptitude hosted in the right hemisphere. Creativity is not just an artistic aspect, but it is more related to how our brain deals with a “new task” or “new problem”. This was true for the junior improvisators, who were “fresh” to improvisation. But when it is about polishing a craft, analytical aspects from the left hemisphere come to surface and take over.

Will these findings be the same in a standard problem-solving exercise? Other than musical improvisation? What do you think? This is a point that the authors address in their paper. They mention that the pre-existing, implicit knowledge (also known as experience and training), will shape the way the subject addresses the task in question. It is likely that these findings can be reproduced in another setting. However, it has not been done, or at least I could not find it so far!

The most important takeaway from this study is that the neural substrate of creativity will depend on what we are dealing with, what are we assessing as creativity? The ability to deal with a task for the first time, or the ability to deliver a high-quality product. It makes you think, huh?

Listening to Mozart to tackle epilepsy

Mozart was a creative freak! When you need to define creativity and prodigy, you may need to refer to him. When he was six, he was already a famous improviser. Maybe his left brain took over at a young age, we will never know…

The famous “Mozart effect” states that listening to Mozart’s music boosts intellectual ability. Actually, my mother told me she played Mozart music for me when I was in her womb because already by then, this fad was circulating. Aside from “intellectual boosting”, Mozart’s music has been explored as a modulator (something with the capacity of modifying or influencing) of epilepsy.

One of the most-studied pieces is the Sonata for two pianos in D major K. 448

Here it is if you feel like listening to it

In a recent study by Štillová and colleagues, researchers asked themselves “What makes Mozart’s music so good for epilepsy”. Researchers analyzed many aspects of his music, such as rhythm, melody and harmony and compared it to another composer from the same musical period (Symphony No. 94 by Joseph Haydn). They hypothesized that there had to be something in common due to the period, but also that there was something special to Mozart’s music.

They studied 18 resistant-to-treatment epilepsy patients and recorded their brain electrical activity with EEG before, during and after music exposure. Whether they listened to Mozart’s or Haydn’s music was random. They observed that Mozart’s music decreased the frequency of Epileptiform Discharges (ED) around 30% from the pre-exposure period but Haydn’s even increased it 45%. Now the question remained: What causes this decrease with Mozart’s music?

Researchers thought of interrogating one of the most investigated pathways: the dopamine reward system (which is in charge of pleasurable experiences), as it has been demonstrated that dopamine can be released upon music stimulation. However, the Mozart effect has been shown also in patients in vegetative states. Additionally, patients from the study reported emotional indifference to both Mozart’s and Haydn’s pieces. So another mechanism may be driving the inhibitory effect of Mozart’s music.

Then, authors decided to analyze acoustic properties of Mozart’s music and correlated them to their effect on EDs and compare it to Haydn’s. It was shown that for music to have a positive effect on EDs, it needed: lower dissonances (unpleasant/uncomfortable to hear sounds), a bigger harmonic spectrum (variety of harmonies), and no abrupt changes within the harmonies with slower tempo. They demonstrated that these musical features were more present in Mozart’s music than in Haydn’s. Exactly which organic mechanism drives the anti-epileptic effect of Mozart’s music remains to be determined. More work has to be done, no surprise!

Until here, I hope I provided you with a small snapshot of how creativity comes (improvisation) and goes (anti-epileptic music) to our brain. Do you have any thoughts on creativity and how can we get to know it better to try to understand the machinery we handle inside our skulls? Please leave a comment or send a message!

References:

David S. Rosen, Yongtaek Oh, Brian Erickson, Fengqing (Zoe) Zhang, Youngmoo E. Kim, John Kounios 2020. Dual-process contributions to creativity in jazz improvisations: An SPM-EEG study. NeuroImage. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2020.116632

Štillová, K., Kiska, T., Koriťáková, E., Strýček, O., Mekyska, J., Chrastina, J., & Rektor, I. (2021). Mozart effect in epilepsy: why is mozart better than haydn? acoustic qualities-based analysis of stereoelectroencephalography. European Journal of Neurology. https://doi.org/10.1111/ene.14758