104 | David Rosen and Scott Miles on the Neuroscience of Music and Creativity

Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas

Sean Carroll | Wondery

Society & Culture, Physics, Philosophy, Science, Ideas, Society

4.8 • 4.4K Ratings

🗓️ 6 July 2020

⏱️ 86 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Creativity is one of those things that we all admire but struggle to define or make concrete. Music provides a useful laboratory in which to examine what creativity is all about — how do people become creative, what is happening in their brains during the creative process, and what kinds of creativity does the audience actually enjoy? David Rosen and Scott Miles are both neuroscientists and musicians who have been investigating this question from the perspective of both listeners and performers. They have been performing neuroscientific experiments to understand how the brain becomes creative, and founded Secret Chord Laboratories to develop software that will predict what kinds of music people will like.

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David S. Rosen received his Ph.D. in cognitive psychology from Drexel University. He is currently a co-founder and the chief operations officer at Secret Chord Laboratories, a music-tech startup company. His interdisciplinary research program covers an array of topics: creative cognition, peak experiences, the neuroscience of music production and perception, psychedelics and STEAM education. David began playing the piano at the age of 8 and bass at age 15. He is the co-creator and bassist of sci-fi transmedia band, Chronicles of Sound, and instrumental progressive rock band, NAKAMA.

Scott Miles received his Ph.D. in neuroscience from Georgetown University. He is currently the CEO and innovation leader of Secret Chord Laboratories. He has been performing and producing music since the age of 10. In his doctoral work he investigated how music preference is formed in the brain. He secured funding through the National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship to support this work. With David Rosen, Ph.D., he found support for two hypotheses about how the structure of music leads to purchase decisions. Miles then coded an algorithm to generate new music, and in a behavioral experiment, music featuring these properties was indeed preferred. He formed and has overseen the development of Secret Chord laboratories since it was incorporated in June 2018.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello everybody, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.
0:03.5	I'm your host Sean Carroll.
0:05.3	And today we're going to be talking about creativity, what it means and where it comes
0:09.4	from.
0:10.4	So I thought it would be, well, it worked out anyway, that this would be a fun time to
0:14.4	actually be creative in the format of the podcast.
0:18.2	This is one of the very rare times when we're going to have not two people on the podcast,
0:23.2	me and somebody else, not even one person as I do in the solo podcasts, but three people
0:29.0	on the podcast, me and two other people.
0:31.2	We've done this only once before when we had Matthew Lutzie on the program to talk about
0:35.7	the pleasures of wine and Jennifer Willett joined us as a guest commentator there.
0:41.1	But now we're going to have two people who are experts in their field and I will be talking
0:44.6	to them and that field is music and creativity.
0:49.0	In some sense, creativity is mysterious for a lot of us.
0:52.2	We know it when we see it, but we don't know how to conjure it up.
0:56.0	Music is a nice kind of laboratory to explore how creativity works, not just how we recognize
1:02.0	creativity, but what is going on in our brains.
1:05.6	So both David Rosen and Scott Miles are neuroscientists and they are also both working musicians.
1:12.5	So they're interested in doing neuroscientific experiments to understand what's going on
1:16.9	in your brain when you're being creative.
1:19.6	They recently published a study of jazz musicians improvising on guitar and they show that
1:25.3	certain parts of the brain light up when you are improvising and guess what?
	...

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