Music's effects on the mind remains mysterious

By Wynne Parry, LiveScience
NEW YORK — While jazz musician Vijay Iyer played a piece on the piano, he wore an expression of intense concentration. Afterward, everyone wanted to know: What was going on in his head?
The way this music is often taught, "they tell you, you must not be thinking when you are playing," Iyer said after finishing his performance of John Coltrane's "Giant Steps," a piece that requires improvisation. "I think that is an impoverished view of what thought is. … Thought is distributed through all of our actions."

Iyer's performance opened a panel discussion on music and the mind at the New York Academy of Sciences on Wednesday (Dec. 13).

Music elicits "a splash" of activity in many parts  of the brain, said panelist Jamshed Bharucha, a neuroscientist and musician, after moderator Steve Paulson of the public radio program "To the Best of Our Knowledge" asked about the brain's response to music.

"I think you are asking a question we can only scratch the surface of in terms of what goes on in the brain," Bharucha said. [ Why Music Moves Us ]

Charles Limb, a surgeon who studies the neuroscience of music, is attempting to better understand creativity by putting jazz musicians and rappers in a brain-imaging scanner called a functional MRI, which measures blood flow in the brain, and asking them to create music or rap once in there.

The set-up is awkward, he said, comparing the confines of an fMRI machine with a coffin. And Limb cautioned how much creativity, like that on display during Iyer's performance, can be reproduced in the lab as part of an experiment. [ 10 Strange Facts About the Brain ]

"I can't help but realize there is a biology to everything we do musically," Limb said. 'While it's comfortable as a listener and admirer and an artist to say 'Let's not delve deeper.' … There is something missing if you don't try to search, to find out what’s going on."

Images of creative brains reveal complicated activity, but one theme has emerged: Some decline in activity in the prefrontal cortex, a region sometimes called the "CEO of the brain" and associated with cognitive analysis and abstract thought. This area of the brain isn't turning off; instead, certain processes that are typically prominent recede into the background — for instance, conscious self-monitoring, which produces concerns about doing something correctly, Limb said.

Read more: http://bodyodd.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/12/18/15996928-musics-effects-on-the-mind-remains-mysterious?lite