In addition, he holds a joint faculty appointment in the Department of Neurological Surgery and is the Director of the Douglas Grant Cochlear Implant Center.

He also completed one postdoctoral research fellowship at the Center for Hearing Sciences at Johns Hopkins with Dr. David Ryugo, where he investigated the development of the auditory brainstem, and a second at the National Institutes of Health, where he used fMRI devices to image brain activity when jazz musicians improvise music.

During this time, he was also a Faculty Member at the Peabody Conservatory of Music and the Johns Hopkins University School of Education, as well as Scientific Advisor to the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra.

In another experiment, he and his team demonstrated that when two jazz musicians are “trading fours,” that is, having an interactive musical conversation, they utilize brain areas important in linguistic grammar and syntax.

He asked jazz musicians in the fMRI to improvise music they felt corresponded to the emotions in photos of a sad, neutral, and happy woman.

As a temporal bone surgeon, he places these devices in patients, and the implants let them hear speech well, but they have trouble perceiving elements of music such as harmony and timbre, as well as performing higher integration.

Limb has also examined the creativity of composers such as Beethoven and Smetana, who became deaf as adults yet continued to write great music, and he has written about the fact that Thomas Edison invented the phonograph despite his loss of hearing.