How Improvisation Affects The Brain

For this midterm we had to choose a topic that had some relation to music. The topic I finally decided on was how improvisation effects the brain. I believe that this topic relates to me as a musician, but in a different way than others topics may relate to them. Most people probably looked up things that they like or things about their instrument of study. I researched something that I am not good at and am actually scared of but I have always wanted to do it. I have never been able to have the confidence to think on my feet or solo in front of a crowd of people. For me, it is like public speaking except I’m speaking through my saxophone. I don’t know how to form sentences and I don’t know what words to even say.
This was not the first thing that I had decided on. My first choice was very vague and general, it was jazz. I then decided to pick something out of jazz that was even more specific and that lead me to improvisation. So, then I searched improvisation in the EBSCOhost database through the Washburn libraries. I came across a scholarly article that talked about how improvisation has effects on the brain and I immediately became interested. I knew that being a musician challenged your brain more versus people who are not musicians. When I thought about it, I realized that …show more content…
The title of the internet source was The Improvisation Brain and it was written by Amanda Rose Martinez. I chose this source because after reading this article I realized that it is exactly the information I was looking for. She wrote about a man that was in a predicament where he had to improvise and then it talked about theories researchers made about improvisation. She talks to Aaron Berkowitz and he tells us that he has a theory and this theory is that improvising is like learning a second language. This internet source relates to my topic because it is exactly about what is happening in the brain while improvising and how people accomplish