I was just re-reading my last post on this blog and was again intriqued by the story of “Snowball” the dancing bird. So I went to YouTube and looked it up and sure enough, there it was! You may not like “The Backstreet Boys” that much but I think you’ll agree that it definitely demonstrates that animals too, have a powerful rhythmic sense. Of course we knew that, right?
Neuroscientist studies Music and the Brain
June 1st, 2010 · how the brain works, music and the brain, Uncategorized
A version of this article appeared in print on June 1, 2010, on page D2 of the New York edition.
Q. YOU DESCRIBE YOURSELF AS A NEUROSCIENTIST OF MUSIC. THIS HAS TO BE A NEW PROFESSION. HOW DID YOU COME TO IT?
A. I’ve been passionate about two things since childhood — science and music. At graduate school, Harvard, I hoped to combine the two.
But studying with E.O. Wilson, I quite naturally got caught up with ants. In 1990, I found myself in Australia doing fieldwork on ants for a Ph.D. thesis. And there, I had this epiphany: the only thing I really wanted to do was study the biology of how humans make and process music.
I wondered if the drive to make it was innate, a product of our evolution, as Darwin had speculated. Did we have a special neurobiological capacity for music, as we do for language and grammar? So from Australia, I wrote Wilson that there was no way I could continue with ants. Amazingly, he wrote: “You must follow your passion. Come back to Harvard, and we’ll give it a shot.”
Wilson and Evan Balaban, a birdsong biologist who taught me about the neurobiology of auditory communication, mentored me through my thesis, which was called “A Biological Study of the Relationship Between Language and Music.” When I defended it in 1996, this was unusual scholarship. The neurobiology of music wasn’t yet a recognized field.
Q. WHEN DID IT GO MAINSTREAM?
A. Not too long after that. By the late 1990s, all of neuroscience was being transformed by the widespread use of imaging technologies.
Because it became possible to learn how the brain was affected when people engaged in certain activities, it became acceptable to study things previously considered fringy. Today you have the neuroscience of economics, of music, of everything.
I published a paper in 1998 that really surprised people. It was the first imaging study showing what happens when the brain processes musical grammar as compared with what happens when it processes language. From what we learned, this was occurring in an overlapping way within the brain. And this was a clue that the neurobiology of music could give us a new path to access and perhaps even heal some language disabilities.
Q. HOW WOULD THAT WORK?
A. One example. There’s a neurologist in Boston, Gottfried Schlaug, who uses music therapy to return some language to stroke victims. He has them learn simple phrases by singing them. This has proved more effective than having them repeat spoken phrases, the traditional therapy. Schlaug’s work suggests that when the language part of the brain has been damaged, you can sometimes recruit the part that processes music to take over.
Music neuroscience is also helping us understand Alzheimer’s. There are Alzheimer’s patients who cannot remember their spouse. But they can remember every word of a song they learned as a kid. By studying this, we’re learning about how memory works.
Q. RECENTLY, YOU’VE BEEN WORKING WITH A SULFUR-CRESTED COCKATOO NAMED SNOWBALL. WHAT PROMPTED THE COLLABORATION?
A. Before I encountered Snowball, I wondered whether human music had been shaped for our brains by evolution — meaning, it helped us survive at some point. Well, in 2008, a colleague asked me to view a YouTube video of a cockatoo who appeared to be dancing to the beat of “Everybody” by the Backstreet Boys!
My jaw hit the floor. If you saw a video of a dog reading a newspaper out loud, you’d be pretty impressed, right? To people in the music community, a cockatoo dancing to a beat was like that. This was supposed to be, some said, a uniquely human behavior! If this was real, it meant that the bird might have circuits in its brain for processing beat similar to ours.
Q. WHAT DID YOU DO WITH THIS INSIGHT?
A. I phoned up the bird shelter in Indiana where Snowball lived and talked to the director who told me his story. A man had dropped him off with a CD and the comment, “Snowball likes to dance to this.” One day, Irena Schulz, the proprietor, played “Everybody” to amuse the abandoned creature. And Snowball began to move. Irena then made the YouTube video, which immediately went viral. Millions saw it.
“Let’s design an experiment to see if this is real,” I proposed to Irena, who had a science background herself. We took the Backstreet Boys song, sped it up and slowed it down at 11 different tempos, then videoed what Snowball did to each. For 9 out of the 11 variations, the bird moved to the beat, which meant that he’d processed the music in his brain and his muscles had responded. So now we had the first documented case of a nonhuman animal who, without training, could sense a beat out of music and move to it.
Q. YOU SAY THAT SNOWBALL CHANGED YOUR THINKING. HOW?
A. Before Snowball, I wondered if moving to a musical beat was uniquely human. Snowball doesn’t need to dance to survive, and yet, he did. Perhaps, this was true of humans, too?
Since working with Snowball, I’ve come to think we could learn more music neuroscience by studying the behaviors of not just parrots, but perhaps dolphins, seals, songbirds — also vocal learners.
We eventually published the Snowball research in Current Biology. A group at Harvard published a paper right alongside ours in which they surveyed thousands of YouTube videos to see if there were other animals spontaneously moving to a beat. They found about 12 or 13 parrots. No dogs. No cats. No horses.
What do humans have in common with parrots? Both species are vocal learners, with the ability to imitate sounds. We share that rare skill with parrots. In that one respect, our brains are more like those of parrots than chimpanzees. Since vocal learning creates links between the hearing and movement centers of the brain, I hypothesized that this is what you need to be able to move to beat of music.
Q. IS IT DIFFICULT TO FIND MONEY FOR THIS TYPE OF RESEARCH?
A. It easier than it used to be. One of the founders of this field, Dr. Robert Zatorre, before 2000, he never used the word music in a grant application. He knew it would get turned down automatically because people thought this was not scientific. Instead, he used terms like “complex nonlinguistic auditory processing.”
But in recent years, it’s become O.K. to say: I study music and the brain.
A Recommendation: “This is Your Brain on Music”
May 24th, 2010 · music and the brain
A lot of books cross my desk in the course of a week. Many just keep passing along after I read the title, look at the art, and peruse the contents and maybe the index. This book is NOT one that kept moving.
I’m going to start with just one review, but I think it will entice you to look further and perhaps hop over to Amazon and purchase! I’ll be saying more about this later!
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“
 Think of a song that resonates deep down in your being. Now imagine sitting down with someone who was there when the song was recorded and can tell you how that series of sounds was committed to tape, and who can also explain why that particular combination of rhythms, timbres and pitches has lodged in your memory, making your pulse race and your heart swell every time you hear it. Remarkably, Levitin does all this and more, interrogating the basic nature of hearing and of music making (this is likely the only book whose jacket sports blurbs from both Oliver Sacks and Stevie Wonder), without losing an affectionate appreciation for the songs he’s reducing to neural impulses. Levitin is the ideal guide to this material: he enjoyed a successful career as a rock musician and studio producer before turning to cognitive neuroscience, earning a Ph.D. and becoming a top researcher into how our brains interpret music. Though the book starts off a little dryly (the first chapter is a crash course in music theory), Levitin’s snappy prose and relaxed style quickly win one over and will leave readers thinking about the contents of their iPods in an entirely new way.” |
Here’s your brain on music!
April 18th, 2010 · how the brain works, music and the brain
By STUART ISACOFF
Sometimes, the longer you journey toward a goal, the more it appears to recede into the distance. The experience is common to both alpine mountaineers and scientific researchers—especially, it seems, to those involved in neuroscience. It’s a burgeoning field, with new discoveries at every turn. Lately much of its focus has been on the arts, and a spate of best-selling books has hit the marketplace with the promise of unraveling the secret of music’s enduring power.
However, an abundance of brain scans, experimental studies and case histories has, in the end, failed to answer certain vital questions: What is music? Where can we find it in the brain? Why does it do what it does to us?
The brain is, in essence, a musical instrument—taking bits of material from a world of chaos, then shaping and modulating them into one graceful, lyrical stream. Yet, despite some scientific success in mapping its discrete compartments, it is an organ that resists efforts to render its workings in black and white. Cognition involves processes that are simply too wide-ranging and complex to be assigned to a single anatomical location.
Scientists have had to grapple with this, as well as with what is known as “plasticity.” At a recent conference on “Emotion, Music & the Brain”—held at the State University of New York’s Purchase College Conservatory of Music in Westchester in collaboration with the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function at the Bronx’s Beth Abraham Hospital—Concetta Tomaino, Beth Abraham’s vice president of music therapy, explained the phenomenon: “Simply put, the brain changes as it experiences and learns.” In effect, those attempting to pin down its internal circuitry are chasing a moving target.
Yet, the plasticity that reshapes the brain as we grow is also a blessing. “The challenge is in knowing how it can change when there is damage,” says Dr. Tomaino, “and then working with the neural networks that are still available.” This is an area with remarkable success. Steven Sparr, professor of clinical neurology at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in the Bronx, demonstrated at the conference that “emotions can utilize alternative pathways when the primary ones are damaged—allowing a patient with facial paralysis, for example, to regain a symmetrical smile in response to humor.” Emotions, Dr. Sparr says—and thus music—are integral to human intelligence. “A mind without either is impoverished.”
Inspired by the work of these doctors, I signed up to become a subject myself in an experimental study at New York’s Mount Sinai Hospital, under the supervision of Preeti Raghavan, assistant professor of rehabilitation medicine and director of the Motor Recovery Laboratory. Dr. Raghavan has done a great deal of work with victims of stroke. But the nature of the new study was especially intriguing to me: How do injured pianists and those without injury differ in their muscular and neural reactions when playing?
Although I don’t have any performance-related problems, I have been suffering from a slight shoulder tear, which placed me in the injured group. So one afternoon in October, I sat at a keyboard as Dr. Raghavan’s team—graduate students Errold Reid Jr. and Akshay Bhatt, along with Dr. Sravani Mudumbi—placed electrodes on my arms and torso, asked me to slip on a special glove to measure my hand movements, and put me through a lengthy protocol. I followed their instructions, though much of the time I had no idea why I was being asked to do so.
“Listen for the octaves,” said Mr. Reid before playing a tape, “and then try to duplicate them exactly.” I assumed it was a test of my ability to mimic what I heard with all the subtle nuances of a professional artist. I was wrong. “Play the notes of the scale singly and slowly.” “Perform a challenging piece that lasts 10 minutes.” “Now listen to the octaves and again repeat them.” “Squeeze your shoulder blades together.”
A video camera caught it all, for the purpose of observing the way I moved my arm. I was asked to use biofeedback as a relaxation method while holding my hands in a playing posture, and then while playing. Finally, I was shocked with electrical pulses—more than once! I survived.
I met with the team again last week to hear the results. “These are all preliminary,” Dr. Raghavan warned me. “The study is still ongoing, and I can only give you a very general picture.” The octaves, it turns out, were simply used to check on how I held up the three fingers between my thumb and pinky, since they have to be raised above the keys when the motion is performed. Meanwhile, the other electrodes relayed measurements of stretching, contracting, levels of tension and relaxation, and the transmission of information in my body. The glove tracked finger “wobble.” The shocks stimulated a nerve while the team watched their effects on distant back muscles.
“We want to know if there are any predisposing factors that might lead some individuals to injury,” Dr. Raghavan said. Because my shoulder injury was on my left side, that was the hand and arm the team focused on. The results? My finger muscle activity was good, and my wrists relaxed. But . . . “Your upper trapezius and lower trapezius [muscles] are not behaving the way they do in pianists without injury,” she reported. “When certain reciprocal relationships are disturbed, the resulting instability causes other muscles to strain in an attempt to restore balance.” My results were a warning sign.
Dr. Raghavan is clearly on to something. Part of her research will involve righting the problems. One of her colleagues, Dr. Richard Frieden, developed insights into the training of back muscles in injured musicians using physical therapy. But as the biofeedback portion of the test showed, another solution may rest in the brain itself, perhaps through visualization and meditative techniques. The research is still young, but it could well confirm truths as ancient as the hills.
—Mr. Isacoff is on the faculty of the Purchase College Conservatory of Music (SUNY) and author of “Temperament: How Music Became a Battleground for the Great Minds of Western Civilization” (Knopf/Vintage).
This is your brain on music!
Can Music Heal the Brain After a Stroke?
March 13th, 2010 · Uncategorized
This is so important for the public to know about! Yes, music can heal the brain and it is free!!
For more information on my surgery headphones (www.surgicalheadphones.com) programmed for stroke recovery, please contact me at chantdoc (at) healingmusicenterprises.com.
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