解谜爵士乐手大脑的创造性灵感

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Study: Creativity jazzes your brain
By LAURAN NEERGAARD, AP Medical Writer
Mon Mar 10, 6:06 PM ET

WASHINGTON - Scientists inspired by the legendary improv of Miles Davis and John Coltrane are peering inside the brains of today's jazz musicians to learn where creativity comes from. Think dreaming.

This isn't just a curiosity for jazz fans but a bold experiment in the neuroscience of music, a field that's booming as researchers realize that music illuminates how the brain works. How we play and hear music provides a window into most everyday cognitive functions — from attention to emotion to memory — that in turn may help find treatments for brain disorders.

华盛顿——科学家受到Miles Davis和 John Coltrane两位爵士乐手传奇般即兴表演的启发，开始探索当今爵士乐手的大脑内部结构，以了解他们的创意从何而来。

这不是爵士乐迷的一种好奇，而是音乐神经科学的一个大胆实验，随着研究人员逐渐认识到音乐可以透露大脑的运行机制，音乐神经科学领域开始蓬勃发展。我们如何演奏和欣赏音乐是反映日常认知功能的一个窗口——从注意力到情绪再到记忆——这可能有助于寻找治疗脑部疾病的新方法。

Creativity, though, has long been deemed too elusive to measure. Saxophonist-turned-hearing specialist Dr. Charles Limb thought jazz improvisation provided a perfect tool to do so — by comparing what happens in trained musicians' brains when they play by memory and when they riff.
虽然，创造力长久以来被视为是非常难以捉摸无法测量的。曾经是萨克斯演奏家的耳科医生Charles Limb博士认为，与训练有素的音乐家利用记忆演奏和翻阅乐谱演奏相比，爵士乐即兴创作是研究创造力的一个完美的工具。

\"It's one thing to come up with a ditty. It's another thing entirely to come up with a masterpiece, an hourlong idea after idea,\" explains Limb, a Johns Hopkins University otolaryngologist whose ultimate goal is to help the deaf not only hear but hear music.

How do you watch a brain on jazz? Inside an MRI scanner that measures changes in oxygen use by different brain regions as they perform different tasks.

\"一个小时的思考后，一方拿出一个小调，而另一方则创造了一个名作，\"约翰霍普金斯大学耳鼻喉科医生Limb解释，他的最终目标不仅是让聋人能够听到，而且还要让他们听到音乐。

你怎么看大脑在爵士乐演奏时的变化？磁共振扫描可以检测到大脑不同区域在执行不同任务时耗氧量的变化。

You can't play trumpet or sax inside the giant magnet that is an MRI machine. So Limb and Dr. Allen Braun at the National Institutes of Health hired a company to make a special plastic keyboard that would fit inside the cramped MRI with no metal to bother the magnet.

Then they put six professional jazz pianists inside to measure brain activity while they played straight and when they improvised. They played, right-handed, both a simple C scale and a blues tune that Limb wrote, appropriately titled \"Magnetism.\" Through earphones, they listened to a prerecorded jazz quartet accompaniment, to simulate a real gig.

在MRI机器的大型磁场中无法吹奏小号或萨克斯管。所以Limb和国立卫生研究所的Allen Braun博士聘请了一家公司专门制作特殊的塑料键盘放置到空间狭小的MRI中，这样就不会干扰磁场。

然后他们让6个专业爵士乐钢琴家进入，在他们常规演奏和即兴演奏时，分别测量大脑活动。他们惯用右手演奏，包括简单的C调和布鲁斯(美国南部黑人之爵士音乐及舞步)，Limb称其为\"磁性\" 。通过耳机，他们听取了事先录制好的爵士四重奏伴奏，以模拟真实公演。

Getting creative uses the same brain circuitry that Braun has measured during dreaming: First, inhibition switched off. The scientists watched a brain region responsible for that self-monitoring, the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, shut down.

Then self-expression switched on. A smaller area called the medial prefrontal cortex fired up, a key finding as Braun's earlier research on how language forms linked that region to autobiographical storytelling. And jazz improvisation produces such individual styles that it's often described as telling your own musical story.

为了使用相同的大脑环路获得创造力，Braun检测了梦中的一些情况：第一，抑制作用关掉。科学家们观察到有一个负责自我监控的区域即前额叶皮层背外侧区停止活动。

然后自我表达开始运行。前额叶皮层内侧区的较小区域活跃起来，这是Braun早期关于语言形式如何与自传故事区域相联系的关键发现。爵士乐即兴创作产生了这样一种个体风格，它常被形容为在讲自己的音乐故事。

More intriguing, the musicians also showed heightened sensory awareness. Regions involved with touch, hearing and sight revved up during improv even though no one touched or saw anything different, and the only new sounds were the ones they created.

That doesn't necessarily mean this is the center of creativity. The brains of highly trained musicians might work differently than an amateur pianist's, or a painter's, or a writer's, something Limb and Braun hope to test next.

更有趣的是，音乐家的感官意识也有所提高。触觉、听觉和视觉区域即使没有人触到或看到什么差异，在即兴演奏时也会改变运转速度，唯一新的声音是他们自身创造的。

这并不一定意味着这里就是创造力的中心。训练有素的音乐家的大脑工作起来与业余钢琴家或画家、作家的大脑有所不同，这也是Limb和Braun希望下次测试的内容。

\"We're all creative every day. Are our brains doing the same things?\" asks Braun, who studies the relationship of language and music at NIH's National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders.

The study's biggest significance isn't what it found but that it could be performed at all, opening new avenues of brain research.

“我们每天都在产生创意，我们的大脑每天都在做同样的事情吗？“Braun提出疑问，他在美国国立卫生研究院耳聋与其他沟通障碍疾病研究所从事语言和音乐的相关性研究。

这项研究的最大意义在于，不是发现了什么，而在于它完全可执行，将开辟大脑研究的新途径。

\"Improvisation always has a sort of magical quality associated with it. People think when you're improvising you have some sort of inspiration that's not measurable,\" says Dr. Robert Zatorre of the Montreal Neurological Institute, a pioneer in the neuroscience of music and himself a classical organist. \"They went forward where everyone else feared to tread.\"

\"即兴创作始终有一种神奇的素质与此相关，人们认为当你即兴创作时你有某种不可测量的灵感， \"蒙特利尔神经病学研究所Robert Zatorre博士说，他率先开辟了音乐神经科学领域，他还是一位古典风琴演奏者。 \"别人害怕前进的地方，他们继续前行\" 。

Neuroscientists call the brain plastic, meaning it has remarkable flexibility to rewire itself. Unraveling how those circuits get modified in turn helps researchers hunt treatments for brain disorders — and the same circuits that process music show strong relationships with other key brain regions. Studies show that patients learning to speak again after a stroke may improve faster if they sing rather than recite, for example. Zatorre's team is finding parallels between tone-deafness and the reading disability dyslexia.

神经学家称大脑具有可塑性，即它具有显着的适应性和重塑性。阐明如何使这些环路得到改良，从而有助于研究人员寻找治疗脑部疾患的方法——与处理音乐的环路相同，显示了与其他关键脑功能区的强烈相关性。研究显示，患者中风后如果不仅仅朗读，还练习唱，那么他再次学会讲话的速度将提高得更快。 Zatorre的研究小组正在寻找音乐聋和阅读障碍之间的平行关系。

\"What we're doing is not necessarily trying to say, 'Well, if we use music it will help Parkinson's patients walk.' It might, yes, and there is some evidence it does so,\" says Zatorre, whose institute this summer hosts an international conference on music and the brain.

Instead, the quest is to \"understand the rules by which the brain changes its organization. That's what we need to know,\" he adds.

\"我们所做的不是尽量去说，‘我们将用音乐帮助帕金森氏症病患者走路。’应该是可以的，因为已经有一些这样做的证据， \" Zatorre说 ，其研究所在今年夏天举办一次关于音乐和大脑的国际会议。

相反，追求的是\"了解大脑改变组织的规则，这是我们需要知道的， \"他补充道。

Creativity comes in because its root is the spontaneity that defines everyday life. Consider conversation: Hopkins' Limb wants to image the brains of jazz musicians \"trading fours,\" where one improvises four bars and the next answers back with four new bars — a musical conversation he believes comparable to the talking kind.

And no, Limb doesn't think he's diminishing the magic of music by finding its cerebral underpinnings.

\"It's like knowing how an airplane flies. It's still pretty magical.\"

创造力来源于自发性，它存在于每个人的日常生活中。把它比作一次谈话：霍普金斯Limb想描绘爵士乐手“四个交易区”的大脑，在四个区域中一个人即兴创作了四个音节，反馈给他的是另外四个新的音节——他认为一次音乐的交流相当于一次谈话。

然而，Limb认为他在发现创造力的大脑基础后并没有缩减这种音乐的魔力。

“这就像知道了飞机为什么在天上飞，但它仍然很神奇 。”