Exploring Your Creative Genius: Episode 113
Last week’s show was about your brain on music, specifically how listening to music impacts our creative growth and performance. One of the topics I shared is our brain’s tonotopic mapping of the auditory cortex, a topic best treated here in this column with detail you can refer to again.
The auditory cortex is the portion of the brain that processes sound. Neuroscientists have learned that it is organized tonotopically. That means different frequencies, or notes, active specific regions in an order that is very similar to a piano keyboard mapped onto the brain.
Low frequency sounds like a bass note will activate one end and high frequency sounds like a piccolo activate the other.
The brain doesn’t encode pitch precisely, more relatively. And timber matters. A middle C played on a piano and a middle C played by a violin will overlap, but not precisely.
No wonder music has such a profound impact on us, not just our creativity.
I also shared research that showed how sad music boosts our creativity. I love melancholic music, I have my entire life, and Neil Young’s ‘Out on the Weekend’ always makes me cry.
“Exploring Your Creative Genius” takes an expansive view on what it means to be creative and entrepreneurial in an ongoing conversation led by Carl Nordgren — entrepreneur, novelist, and lifelong student with decades of experience growing his own creative capacity and assisting others to do the same in exciting new ways!
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