Ep.40 Jazz, Creativity And The Brain With Dr. Charles Limb, Chief of the Division of Otology, Neurotology and Skull Base Surgery, UC San Francisco

ABOUT DR. CHARLES LIMB:

USSF Health: 

https://www.ucsfhealth.org/providers/dr-charles-limb

https://ohns.ucsf.edu/charles-limb 

https://profiles.ucsf.edu/charles.limbWikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Limb

TED Profile: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Limb

TED Talk: https://www.ted.com/talks/charles_limb_your_brain_on_improv

Kennedy Center:

https://www.kennedy-center.org/artists/l/la-ln/charles-limb/

https://www.kennedy-center.org/video/center/discussionspoken-word/2017/jazz-creativity-and-the-brainsound-health-music-and-the-mind/

https://www.kennedy-center.org/video/digital-stage/discussionspoken-word/2019/music-and-the-voice-brain-mechanisms-of-vocal-mastery-and-creativity--sound-health/

https://www.kennedy-center.org/video/center/discussionspoken-word/2019/sound-health-inside-esperanza-spaldings-brain--the-kennedy-center/

https://www.kennedy-center.org/video/center/classical-music/2018/music-and-the-mind-with-piano-prodigy-matthew-whitaker/

The Art of The Spark: Musical Creativity Explored with Dr. Charles Limb: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PQmGOVr8aJ0

Articles: 

https://www.artsandmindlab.org/charles-limb-md-mapping-the-creative-minds-of-musicians/

On Creativity: mihaly csikszentmihalyi

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mihaly_Csikszentmihalyi

DR.CHARLES LIMB Bio:

Dr. Charles Limb is the Francis A. Sooy Professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and the Chief of the Division of Otology, Neurotology and Skull Base Surgery at UC San Francisco. He is the Director of the Douglas Grant Cochlear Implant Center at UCSF and holds a joint appointment in the Department of Neurosurgery. 

Dr. Limb received his undergraduate degree at Harvard University, medical training at Yale University School of Medicine, and surgical residency and fellowship training at Johns Hopkins Hospital. He completed a postdoctoral fellowship in functional neuroimaging at the National Institutes of Health. He was a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Peabody Conservatory of Music and the School of Education between 1996 and 2015. 

Dr. Limb joined the UCSF Department of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery in 2015.

Dr. Limb is the 2021-22 President of the American Auditory Society and the Co-Director of the Sound Health Network sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, NIH and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He is the PI of an NEA Research Lab and Co-PI of an NIH R61/R33 grant. 

He is the past Editor-in-Chief of Trends in Amplification (now Trends in Hearing), and an Editorial Board member of Otology and Neurotology. Dr. Limb was selected as the 2022 NIH Clinical Center Distinguished Clinical Research Scholar and Educator in Residence. He was also named in 2022 as one of the Kennedy Center’s Next 50, a group of fifty national cultural leaders who are “moving us toward a more inspired, inclusive, and compassionate world”.

His current areas of research focus on the study of the neural basis of musical creativity and the study of music perception in deaf individuals with cochlear implants. 

His work has received international attention and has been featured by National Public Radio, TED, 60 Minutes, National Geographic, the New York Times, PBS, CNN, Scientific American, the British Broadcasting Company, the Smithsonian Institute, the Library of Congress, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sundance Film Festival, Canadian Broadcasting Company, the Kennedy Center, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Discovery Channel, CBS Sunday Morning, and the American Museum of Natural History.

SHOW INTRODUCTION:

A number of years ago I attended a series of lectures at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC that focus on music and the brain and as I sat and watched and listened to these presentations, I was absolutely amazed with the interrelationship between brain activity, spontaneous creativity, music, language meaning and all these things that we share as human beings.

For years I've been fascinated with the creative process. 

It seems natural I suppose given that I'm an architect, an artist, an author and occasionally I might even consider myself a novice musician because I can bang out five chords of a James Taylor song on my guitar. I do however have the extraordinarily good fortune of living with three musicianS. MY sons who are jazz musician,  a pianist and a drummer, and a wife who is also a pianist and composer/songwriter and have been surrounded by music and love it for years.

In fact, when I paint, and I happen to be focusing on a series of portraits of famous jazz musicians and other musical artists, I only listen to their music as I'm creating. Somehow I think I'm channeling John Coltrane or Miles Davis or Keith Richards or Janis Joplin or Prince.

But it helps, it really does. It gets me into a flow state and the world outside me just disappears.  

For a long time now I have held that creativity is part of who we are. We are equally Homo Faber man the maker as we are Homo Sapiens man the wise.

I deeply believe that the creative process is something that is intrinsic to building community and connections with other people for years. We have danced around fires and stamped out meaning with our feet and sang songs and beat on drums and created extraordinary symphonies or rock concerts and in doing so we come together and better understand ourselves our community culture and, in some strange cosmological sense, our relation to the larger whole of humanity.

It seems to me that vocal utterances (not speech as we now know it) or producing melodic or rhythmic sounds, beating on drums etc., predated organized or syntactic speech. 

Since adapting to changing circumstances in the environment around you required some degree of creativity, it seems that there would be a natural connection between the development of creative thinking processes as a matter of survival and what we now know as music as a way to exchange these ideas. 

Music and music with language, lyrics, are extremely powerful mechanisms to evoke and share emotion and communicate with each other. 

Building strong social groups and the use of communication tools like language and certainly music has been part of our evolutionary process. Our brains have evolved into these immensely complex systems of functional areas that provide us with the magic of music and art and creative invention. We humans have survived at the top of the food chain not because we have bigger brains than other creatures on the planet, but as I understand it, because our brains are wired differently. 

And how all of this relates to creativity is particularly interesting. 

When you see jazz improvisation happening, what has always amazed me is the speed with which the brain is making decisions and the amount of information it is processing:

…what note to hit next? – how does it related to the last? – where is the improv going? - is there a structure of any kind? – how the brain makes those decisions and then send signals to motor areas and then electrical impulses to muscle groups that produce fine motor movements in hands and /or other body parts to create sounds… 

this is all happening with electricity and chemicals moving between cells…this is a bit overwhelming to figure out! 

It’s like the brain is out ahead of the body in its thinking…

When I sat in the audience of those early Kennedy Center music and the brain sessions, there was one that was particularly interesting to me. Dr. Charles Limb had intriguing conversations with musicians including Jason Moran - the Artistic Director for Jazz at the Kennedy Center - and he described some of the work he was doing with trying to understand the neural correlates of creativity.

How was he doing that? 

Well, he was taking some of the best jazz musicians on the planet and putting them into fMRI machines and observing their brain activity while they were in moments of spontaneous creation - jazz improvisation. 

And what he's begun to discover is something pretty remarkable.

Certain areas of the brain are deactivated in these moments of spontaneous improvised creation while others are lit up.

From Dr. Limb studies, it seems that conscious self-monitoring, a function of the Prefrontal Cortex, is deactivated opening a gateway for spontaneous creation unencumbered by self-monitoring or concerns about inappropriate or maladaptive performances and areas that are connected to autobiographical narratives are more active.

“In jazz music, improvisation is considered to be a highly individual expression of an artist's own musical viewpoint. The association of the MPFC activity with the production of auto biographical narrative is germane in this context, and as such, one could argue that the improvisation is a way of expressing one's own musical voice or story.”

Dr. Limb’s own story is nothing less than remarkable. 

From his early years as a young musician, to his study of medicine, he has become one of the preeminent scientists looking into music, the brain and the neural correlates of creativity.

His list of professional accomplishments and appointments to various medical institutions is extensive and include:

Being the Francis A. Sooy Professor of Otolaryngology-Head and Neck Surgery and the Chief of the Division of Otology, Neurotology and Skull Base Surgery at UC San Francisco. 

The Director of the Douglas Grant Cochlear Implant Center at UCSF and he holds a joint appointment in the Department of Neurosurgery. 

Dr. Limb received his undergraduate degree at Harvard University, medical training at Yale University School of Medicine, and surgical residency and fellowship training at Johns Hopkins Hospital. 

He was a faculty member at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine, Peabody Conservatory of Music and the School of Education between 1996 and 2015. 

Dr. Limb is the 2021-22 President of the American Auditory Society and the Co-Director of the Sound Health Network sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, NIH and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. 

He was also named in 2022 as one of the Kennedy Center’s Next 50, a group of fifty national cultural leaders who are “moving us toward a more inspired, inclusive, and compassionate world”.

His current areas of research focus on the study of the neural basis of musical creativity and the study of music perception in deaf individuals with cochlear implants. 

His work has received international attention and has been featured by TED, 60 Minutes, National Geographic, the. New York Times, PBS, CNN, Scientific American, the Smithsonian Institute, the National Endowment for the Arts, the Sundance Film Festival, the Kennedy Center, Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, the Discovery Channel, CBS Sunday Morning, and more.

It is my distinct honor to be able to talk with Dr. Limb about music, creativity and the brain. 

ABOUT DAVID KEPRON:

LinkedIn Profile: linkedin.com/in/david-kepron-9a1582b

Websites: 

https://www.davidkepron.com    (personal website)

vmsd.com/taxonomy/term/8645  (Blog)

Email: david.kepron@NXTLVLexperiencedesign.com

Twitter: DavidKepron

Personal Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/davidkepron/

NXTLVL Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/nxtlvl_experience_design/

Bio:

David Kepron is a multifaceted creative professional with a deep curiosity to understand ‘why’, ‘what’s now’ and ‘what’s next’. He brings together his background as an architect, artist, educator, author, podcast host and builder to the making of meaningful and empathically-focused, community-centric customer connections at brand experience places around the globe. 

David is a former VP - Global Design Strategies at Marriott International. While at Marriott, his focus was on the creation of compelling customer experiences within Marriott’s “Premium Distinctive” segment which included: Westin, Renaissance, Le Meridien, Autograph Collection, Tribute Portfolio, Design Hotels and Gaylord hotels. 

In 2020 Kepron founded NXTLVL Experience Design, a strategy and design consultancy, where he combines his multidisciplinary approach to the creation of relevant brand engagements with his passion for social and cultural anthropology, neuroscience and emerging digital technologies. 

As a frequently requested international speaker at corporate events and international conferences focusing on CX, digital transformation, retail, hospitality, emerging technology, David shares his expertise on subjects ranging from consumer behaviors and trends, brain science and buying behavior, store design and visual merchandising, hotel design and strategy as well as creativity and innovation. In his talks, David shares visionary ideas on how brand strategy, brain science and emerging technologies are changing guest expectations about relationships they want to have with brands and how companies can remain relevant in a digitally enabled marketplace. 

David currently shares his experience and insight on various industry boards including: VMSD magazine’s Editorial Advisory Board, the Interactive Customer Experience Association, Sign Research Foundation’s Program Committee as well as the Center For Retail Transformation at George Mason University.

He has held teaching positions at New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology (F.I.T.), the Department of Architecture & Interior Design of Drexel University in Philadelphia, the Laboratory Institute of Merchandising (L.I.M.) in New York, the International Academy of Merchandising and Design in Montreal and he served as the Director of the Visual Merchandising Department at LaSalle International Fashion School (L.I.F.S.) in Singapore.  

In 2014 Kepron published his first book titled: “Retail (r)Evolution: Why Creating Right-Brain Stores Will Shape the Future of Shopping in a Digitally Driven World” and he is currently working on his second book to be published soon. David also writes a popular blog called “Brain Food” which is published monthly on vmsd.com. 

The NXTLVL Experience Design podcast is presented by VMSD magazine and Smartwork Media. It is hosted and executive produced by David Kepron. Our original music and audio production is by Kano Sound. 

The content of this podcast is copywrite to David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design. Any publication or rebroadcast of the content is prohibited without the expressed written consent of David Kepron and NXTLVL Experience Design.

Make sure to tune in for more NXTLVL “Dialogues on DATA: Design Architecture Technology and the Arts” wherever you find your favorite podcasts and make sure to visit vmsd.com and look for the tab for the NXTLVL Experience Design podcast there too.