Activate Prefrontal Cortex with Music - seat of genius. .
* Pre frontal cortex or "fourth brain" is the seat of genius, intuition, heightened creativity and energized focus
* Musetude uses music as a tool to activate the powers of the prefrontal cortex
"I found the perfect teachers for my son. They have such a novel approach to teaching music. They encouraged him - an absolute beginner to aim straight for the highest international music exam. Passing the exam with Merit was really a great achievement, as it requires a very high degree of musicality and technical skills." ~ Priya Kumar (Kaustubh’s mother)
PFC – CEO of the Brain
“[The prefrontal cortex] is particularly interesting to scientists because it acts as the CEO of the brain, controlling planning, working memory, organization, and modulating mood. As the prefrontal cortex matures, teenagers can reason better, develop more control over impulses and make judgments better." - researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health and McGill University.
Advanced problem-solving and decision-making take place in the prefrontal cortex - Richmond Parenting & Education - http://www.examiner.com/parenting-education-in-richmond/advanced-problem-solving-and-decision-making-take-place-the-prefrontal-cortex#ixzz1KmnD757y The Prefrontal Cortex is the seat of all our higher cognitive processes briefly described below: a. Intense focus and concentration: Cells in the PFC are very different from the rest of the brain. While other brain cells are easily distracted by any distracting stimuli, PFC cells have the ability to hold on and focus at the task at hand – a must for any creative activity. Creative geniuses Albert Einstein and Sir Isaac Newton were famed for their intense powers of concentration. b. Working memory This higher cognitive processing of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPCF) helps us choose a course of behavior by letting us assess the various alternatives mentally. Activity in the DLPFC is higher with positive emotions and is decreased with negative mental affect. c. Long term reward in lieu of short term goals: The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) lets us defer certain immediate gratifications and suppress certain emotions in order to obtain greater long-term benefits - an essential pre-requisite of the creative process. d. Semantic encoding and processing Left inferior PFC is responsible for verbal and semantic encoding of information and retrieval of such information – its response is greater for novel stimuli. Right Inferior PFC encodes non verbal semantic cues in a literal fashion. e. Emotional experience The Ventromedial cortex is thought to be one of the sites in the brain where we experience emotions and the meanings of things. The affective appreciation of humor also involves this brain region. Humor is a form of creativity, because it requires seeing familiar situations from a novel vantage point – which is the basis of every creative act. f. Spatial processing: The working memory function of the lateral PFC is also capable of complex spatial processing, receiving inputs from the parietal spatial regions. This allows spatial manipulation of data being processed in working memory, contributing to the highly complex imagery that is an indispensible ingredient of the creative process. Musetude activates the 4th brain Musetude helps students using Music activate their prefrontal cortex which helps them perform incredible feats at unbelievable speeds, with intense focus and concentration which defies logic. Musetude educators have spent years perfecting the art of creative genius. Nature has gifted us with a marvelous tool of high speed learning – mirror neurons. These are cells in our brain that exactly copy the physical movements as well as mental attitudes of those they observe. Musetude Educators are aware of their own unlimited potential. They are enthusiastic, brilliant and celebrate teaching - they respect the unlimited nature of their students. With exposure to the PFC mode of creative functioning exuding from their educator, students naturally imbibe and utilize these higher cognitive processing skills themselves. Free of fears, struggles, unlimited by logic, these children are free to explore the genius they truly are. “My initial reaction was that this was a hoax. How can anyone teach someone to play music in 3 days when it takes at least a year to play a tune. This was my initial reaction. What changed my mind was the meeting which we had with the Examiner. Here the examiner actually commented on the very high level of composition which he was taking back with him. I still wasn't convinced that it would work, except for the fact that my son-in-law also happened to do that course, and he knew nothing about music. In three days he produced a 12-bar composition all by himself, in the space of 45 minutes, and when I analyzed that music, it fell into all the rules of music that we try to teach our pupils. And that floored me. Because I knew he didn't know a note of music before he joined this course how could he produce this composition! So that started me thinking.” ~ Myrna Fernandes, a leading Piano Teacher in Mumbai Playing Music activates the 4th brain (Research) Creative jazz improvisation switches on the 4th brain (VMPFC), giving you joy, creativity, fabulous emotional control. - Limb, Braun 2008 The DLPFC is activated when imagining how to play complex musical score The researchers found that much of the change between improvisation and memorization occurred in the prefrontal cortex, the region of the frontal lobe of the brainthat helps us think and problem-solve and that provides a sense of self. Interestingly, the large portion responsible for monitoring one’s performance (dorsolateral prefrontal cortex) shuts down completely during improvisation, while the much smaller, centrally located region at the foremost part of the brain (medial prefrontal cortex) increases in activity. The medial prefrontal cortex is involved in self-initiated thoughts and behaviors, and is very active when a person describes an event that has happened to him or makes up a story. - Based on NIDCD’s Division of Intramural Research. "We were interested in how individuals who are naturally creative look at problems that are best solved by thinking 'out of the box'," Folley said. "We studied musicians because creative thinking is part of their daily experience, and we found that there were qualitative differences in the types of answers they gave to problems and in their associated brain activity." "When we measured subjects' prefrontal cortical activity while completing the alternate uses task, we found that trained musicians had greater activity in both sides of their frontal lobes. Because we equated musicians and non-musicians in terms of their performance, this finding was not simply due to the musicians inventing more uses; there seems to be a qualitative difference in how they think about this information," Folley said. The research by Crystal Gibson, Bradley Folley and Sohee Park is currently in press at the journal Brain and Cognition. Prefontal Cortex and Artistic appreciation - Activation of the prefrontal cortex in the human visual aesthetic perception http://www.pnas.org/content/101/16/6321.full |
  DLPFC - Dorso-lateral Prefrontal Cortex
Higher cognitive skills – abstract thinking, metacognition, deductive reasoning  Ventro-medial Prefrontal Cortex - Higher emotional control over lower brains, spontaneous creative inspirations
altruism, empathy  OFC – Orbito-frontal Cortex, higher motivation center, chooses long term goal v/s short term rewards  |
