Music and the Spark of Spontaneity

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Music. Improvisation. Spontaneous creativity. How does the brain do it? In the world of improvised music, eighteen-time Grammy award-winning jazz guitarist Pat Metheny is a legend. Take a live tour of his masterful musical mind at work as he performs and engages in discussion with leading scientists who are also all musicians--Jamshed Bharucha, whose research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience will identify and interpret the biological center of creativity; Charles Limb, an otolaryngologist, surgeon, and neuroscientist who uses fMRI to study musicians while they improvise; Gary Marcus, a developmental psychologist who taught himself to play guitar at age 40 in order to examine the process of learning music; and Aaron Berkowitz, author of The Improvising Mind: Cognition and Creativity in the Musical Moment. Through performance and conversation, the program will explore the neurological processes underlying improvisation and what they tell us about human creativity and the structure of the brain.