Brain stays cool as jazz man jams

May 1, 2008 Diagnostic Imaging. Brain stays cool as jazz man jams -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- To the listener, jazz improvisation is an aural flight of fancy, borne aloft by a musician's on-the-spot skill and imagination. But functional MRI results show the brain actually follows a grounded process of activation and deactivation during these spontaneous musical riffs, according to researchers from the National Institutes of Health and Johns Hopkins University. "During a jazz performance, musicians utilize a composition's underlying chord structure and melody as the contextual framework and basis upon which a novel solo is extemporaneously improvised," wrote Dr. Charles Limb and Dr. Allen Braun in the online journal of the Public Library of Science (PLoS ONE 2008 Feb 27;3(2):e1679).

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