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“Highly creative individuals often display more divergent thinking than their less creative counterparts.”
This assertion relating to a study of the way musicians’ think struck me as at once self-evident and worth some thought itself. Divergent thinking is the ability to come up with innovative solutions to open-ended, complex problems. It seems to speak to a common trait of the creative mind with the divergent thinking mind.
The first experiment sounds very subjective: “In the first experiment, the researchers showed the research subjects a variety of household objects and asked them to make up new functions for them, and also gave them a written word association test. The musicians gave more correct responses than non-musicians on the word association test, which the researchers believe may be attributed to enhanced verbal ability among musicians. The musicians also suggested more novel uses for the household objects than their non-musical counterparts.”
The second less so: “In the second experiment, the two groups again were asked to identify new uses for everyday objects as well as to perform a basic control task while the activity in their prefrontal lobes was monitored using a brain scanning technique called near-infrared spectroscopy, or NIRS. NIRS measures changes in blood oxygenation in the cortex while an individual is performing a cognitive task.”
The results showed that the trained musicians had greater activity in both sides of their frontal lobes than non-musicians while working on the alternate use task.
Now, a question not addressed by the study is the one that leaps to my mind: Does musical training alter our brain through neuroplasticity to generate more interactivity between the brain hemispheres, or are talented musicians simply predisposed to musical success because of this ability?
(I’d guess a bit of both.)
Another interesting aspect of the study: the researchers found that the musicians scored higher IQs than the non-musicians…
Related posts from around the web:
Musicians And Brain Fitness Training - How may this finding be connected to the benefits of brain training for musicians…
Musicians use both sides of brain – The study, scheduled to be published in the journal Brain and Cognition, found trained musicians more effectively used a creative technique called divergent thinking, and also used both the left and the right sides of their frontal …
Politics and Musicians – Group the discussion has turned to whether or not – and when – it’s appropriate for a musician to bring politics to the stage. The really funny thing is that all three lists are primarily about FOLK music. Say it with me… DUH! …
Norman Doidge: The Brain That Changes Itself
I’m reading “The Brain That Changes Itself” by Norman Doidge.
In the first section Doidge describes the case of a woman who has entirely (98%) lost her sense of balance after being over-prescribed the antibiotic gentamicin. (This is a known problem with gentamicin, but it’s still prescribed because it’s cheap. The loss of balance is irreversible.) She feels constantly as though she’s falling.
But the woman has been fortunate enough to find or be found by Paul Bach-y-Rita, a pioneer in treatment for her kind of problem. Bach-y-Rita has designed equipment that provides balance sense data through sensations on the tongue. Wearing a helmet and with a thin electrode strip on her tongue, both attached to a computer that processes the balance data, the woman’s brain quickly learns to reroute signals from her sensory cortex (the tongue tingling) to the region of the brain that is usually fired by the vestibulatory apparatus — the balance region.
Her brain does this without prompting and she learns to balance again. (There’s also a residual effect once the electrode is removed; she can balance without any apparent balance input!)
Related posts:
Building a Better Brain — in the second case study Doidge focuses on Barbara Arrowsmith Young’s discovery that learning disabilities can be mitigated by training the weaker areas of the brain to be stronger.
Part 3 – Brain Training Software — Doidge explores the incredible contributions of Michael Merzenich (the founder of Posit Science).
This from the Adler Institute: “Certain Conversations in the Workplace Grow Your Brain”
The gist of the piece is that engaged discussion in the workplace generates new neural pathways.
Collaborative, contingent conversations are “dialogues in which people are fully present. That means they’re not only listening to the speaker’s words, they’re also attuned to their tone, physical expression and energy. “Engaging in these kinds of conversations stimulates neural connections in the brain’s prefrontal cortex, which is associated with better social interaction,” says Dr. Linda Page, founder of the Adler International Learning and co-author of the book Coaching with the Brain in Mind.
Dentate Gyrus
Brain activity and neural response in the region of the brain known as the dentate gyrus has been tied to the symptoms and experience of depression. The dentate gyrus is also one of the few areas of the brain thought to be able to generate significant numbers of new brain cells in a process known as neurogenesis. This has led to research into the process of depression and the ways that we can combat persistent depression.
ScienceDaily reports on new research that Antidepressants Need New Nerve Cells To Be Effective. The study by researchers from UT Southwestern Medical Center showed that the effectiveness of anti-depressants in mice depended upon the growth of new nerves in the part of the brain called the dentate gyrus.
The next question of course becomes how to stimulate new nerve cell generation.
Dr. Luis Parada. (Credit: Image courtesy of UT Southwestern Medical Center)
There are two: aerobic exercise and working-memory activation.
The dentate gyrus plays a key role in memory formation. Research has shown that stimulation of working-memory activates the dentate gyrus.
(Research subjects in working-memory training and users of Mind Sparke Brain Fitness Pro report greater levels of satisfaction and well-being; an intriguing link and another great reason to be brain-training.)
PLoS ONE reports that more evidence of brain plasticity has been found by researchers in Germany:
After three months of training, learning three-ball cascade juggling, the researchers observed a transient and highly selective increase in brain gray matter in the “occipito-temporal cortex” — the brain’s motion sensitive area (hMT/V5 bilaterally).
Studying 20 healthy adult volunteers researchers from Hamburg and Jana showed that learning to juggle can alter gray matter as early as after 7 days of training. Neither performance nor exercise alone could explain these changes.
Read the abstract…
Joenna Driemeyer1, Janina Boyke1, Christian Gaser2, Christian Büchel1, Arne May1*
1 Department of Systems Neuroscience, University of Hamburg (UKE), Hamburg, Germany2 Department of Psychiatry, University of Jena, Jena, Germany
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