Charles Limb

Dr. Charles Limb is a surgeon, neuroscientist, and musician at the University of California, San Francisco, specializing in auditory neuroscience, music cognition, and neurotology. Limb conducts research on the neural basis of musical creativity and the impact of cochlear implants on music perception in individuals with hearing impairment. He is a skull base surgeon, composer, and jazz saxophone player.

Limb earned his undergraduate degree from Harvard University and completed his medical training at Yale University School of Medicine. He pursued surgical residency and fellowship in Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery at Johns Hopkins Hospital, followed by postdoctoral research fellowships at the Center for Hearing Sciences at Johns Hopkins and the National Institutes of Health, where he studied neural mechanisms of musical improvisation.

Limb holds the Francis A. Sooy Professorship of Otolaryngology–Head and Neck Surgery and serves as Chief of the Division of Otology, Neurotology and Skull Base Surgery at UCSF. He is Director of the Douglas Grant Cochlear Implant Center and Medical Director of Cochlear Implantation at UCSF Benioff Children's Hospital, Oakland. Limb also holds a joint appointment in the Department of Neurosurgery. He is the immediate past president of the American Auditory Society and co-director of the Sound Health Network, sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts in collaboration with the National Institutes of Health. Limb has authored more than 100 peer-reviewed publications.

Limb's research focuses on brain activity during musical creation, particularly improvisation. Using fMRI, he and his team have studied jazz musicians and rappers to understand the neural processes underlying creativity, revealing activation of the medial prefrontal cortex and deactivation of the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex during improvisation. His paper, "Neural Substrates of Spontaneous Musical Performance: An fMRI Study of Jazz Improvisation," co-authored with Allen R. Braun, brought significant attention to this area of study.

At UCSF's Sound and Music Perception Lab, Limb leads research aimed at improving pitch perception for cochlear implant users. The lab utilizes brain imaging to create personalized pitch maps and develops auditory and musical training programs to enhance music and sound perception for individuals with hearing loss.

Limb's work has been featured in The New York Times and Scientific American, and he has delivered presentations at institutions such as the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Kennedy Center. His TED Talk, "Your Brain on Improv," presents his research on the neuroscience of creativity to a broad audience.