An interesting thing in the research report is that the improvisation shows similarities with how people communicate in ordinary language. Which suggests that there is some kind of exchange going on that leads the discussion forward. But it also suggests that there are probably several musicians improvising together, which is not the case in this study.
"When musicians improvise, they exchange phrases and cue certain replies from the other musicians, and this interaction can be shown to mimic the functions found in language communication [12]."
https://nyaspubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/nyas.70042
Thanks, thanks for the link to the full study.
Well, music *is* a form of language, so musicians improvising together are speaking a common language.
I suspect the study in this thread only covered individual musicians because using fMRI on groups of people is real tough! But it might be interesting to do the fMRI study with each member of a group of jazz musicians improvising. That might pick up synchronizations across the different brains involved. For instance, if one musician puts a phrase or melody line out there, how do the others receive, react, and respond to it - before they actually play their musical response?
Or maybe within every musician there are actually multiple "musicians", like one mode focused on rhythm, another on melody, another on expressiveness, another integrating it all and taking into account external sources such as other musicians also improvising?
Yes, I do somewhat agree with the multimind idea of consciousness. The brain is extremely complex, with multiple layers of networks, powered by neurons that make and break connections. So I wouldn't be surprised if multiple minds actually underlay our top-level consciousness. I also wouldn't be surprised if music taps into those multiple layers of mind just as it taps into multiple brain networks to do it's work.
Ideas?
-- David W. Jones gnome@hawaii.rr.com authenticity, honesty, community http://dancingtreefrog.com "My password is the last 8 digits of π."