Is there a biological basis to a great sax solo?

Jonah Lehrer, a Wired editor and author of several populist-psychology books, recently recapped an intriguing new study by psychologists Darya Zabelina and Michael Robinson of North Dakota State University. The authors asked distinct groups of college students to imagine a day off from school or work, with one group’s day set in the present, and the other's set from the perspective of a 7-year-old, and then gave each some creative problem-solving tasks.

It turns out that the latter group displayed far more creative agility on the tests after envisioning a free day as a child without the strictures of adult expectations.

There’s a specific region of the brain -- the prefrontal cortex -- that grows as we mature and socialize, enabling more focused attention but also keeping more random or dissociated ideas in line. Lehrer speculates that this has particular ramifications for musicians who improvise -- skilled instrumentalists might actually have learned to ignore this part of the brain that self-edits creativity and spontaneity.

The history of music is full of people looking for ways to, well, alter their minds to become more inventive players. This research suggests they may have actually been onto something. But sorry, bands, you still can’t write off your cortex-killing bar tabs as a medical expense.

-- August Brown

Photo of Eric Dolphy by Francis Wolff / Mosaic Images / CORBIS

One of my favorite economic policy bloggers, Matt Yglesias, started a kerfuffle the other day with a frighteningly commonplace point about the vain fight of creative producers against free content online, especially vis-a-vis music file-trading. In short, he proposed that in a perfect marketplace for music, 

"The price of a song ought to be equal to the marginal cost of distributing a new copy of a song. Which is to say that the marginal cost ought to be $0."

In a followup post on Wednesday, however, Yglesias took this point a step further. He argues that the entire infrastructure of intellectual property law is designed to bring the cost of all creative products down, eventually to zero, where it's best able to serve the most possible consumers; he cites the expiration date on the copyright of creative work as clear legal intent for all intellectual property to become free. He compares this to the reasoning behind expiration dates on patents for pharmaceuticals, so as to allow for cheaper generic drugs that improve lives for much less money while still providing a financial incentive to pursue new research.

This is a perniciously populist approach to how your information-market sausage gets made.