Jazz, Basketball, and Teacher Decision-making
When top jazz musicians select notes from a chord to improvise a melody, stellar basketball players drive toward the basket on a pick-and-roll, and effective teachers ask questions of students, the cascade of instantaneous micro-decisions that occurs in the heads of trumpet player Wynton Marsalis, the Dallas Mavericks’ Jason Kidd, and kindergarten teacher Vivian Paley would stun most non-musicians, non-basketball players, and non-teachers.
Consider jazz and the swift decisions a Wynton Marsalis makes as he improvises. Jonah Lehrer describes a neuroscientist who used MRIs to study brain activity of jazz musicians improvising. one center that showed much activity was during improvisation had been identified for its function in language and speech. The neuroscientist argued that creating new melodies depends on that part of the brain where sentences are invented, where every musical note is like a word. Lehrer continues:
“Of course, the development of these patterns requires years of practice, which is why [the neuroscientist]