A fine example of this emerged in January of this year, with release of a study by University of Western Ontario neuroscientist Daniel Ansari and Harvard’s Aaron Berkowitz, who studies music cognition. They put Dartmouth music majors and nonmusicians in an fMRI scanner, giving participants a one-handed fiber-optic keyboard to play melodies on. Sometimes melodies were rehearsed; other times they were creatively improvised. During improvisation, the highly trained music majors used their brains in a way the nonmusicians could not: they deactivated their right-temporoparietal junction. Normally, the r-TPJ reads incoming stimuli, sorting the stream for relevance. By turning that off, the musicians blocked out all distraction. They hit an extra gear of concentration, allowing them to work with the notes and create music spontaneously.
Charles Limb of Johns Hopkins has found a similar pattern with jazz musicians, and Austrian researchers observed it with professional dancers visualizing an improvised dance. Ansari and Berkowitz now believe the same is true for orators, comedians, and athletes improvising in games.
Martin Burrett on 29 Dec 16"Italian psychologist Geatano Kanizsa first described this optical illusion in 1955 as a subjective or illusory contour illusion. The study of such optical illusions has led to an understanding of how the brain and eyes perceive optical information and has been used considerably by artists and designers alike. They show the power of human imagination in filling in the gaps to make implied constructions in our own minds. Kanizsa figures and similar illusions are a really useful way to encourage learners to 'say what they see' and to explain how they see it. It offers a chance for others to become aware of the different views available in a diagram and share their own thoughts without the 'danger' of being wrong; many people see different things."
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