In the intervening time, North Carolina Central University deemed me a Master of Biology, I traveled to see friends and family, and I moved to Madison, Wisconsin to start school in the Neuroscience and Public Policy program (NPP) at the University of Wisconsin – Madison. Being a student in the NPP means that I am enrolled in both the La Follette School of Public Affairs and the Neuroscience Training Program, culminating in two degrees: a Masters of International Public Affairs and a Ph.D. in Neuroscience.

Apart from (but somewhat related to) the unique combination of my graduate program, one factor that impressed me about the University of Wisconsin was the fact that the university seemed to be on the cutting edge of using social media, utilizing several active twitter feeds and otherwise having a very firm commitment to public outreach in science. I started my programs in both Neuroscience and Public Policy about a month ago, and the one theme that resonated through both was something called the Wisconsin Idea. The phrase that sums up this idea is “the boundaries of the university are the boundaries of the state.” As I’ve witnessed so far, this quote means that the university has a far reaching history of educating local citizens through public outreach. The Wisconsin Idea points back to the namesake of the public policy school, Robert M. La Follette. As governor and senator of Wisconsin in the early 20th century, La Follette teamed up with the University of Wisconsin’s president Charles Van Hise in an attempt to make sure that the university’s activities also informed and benefited the people living in the state of Wisconsin. In these early days of the Wisconsin Idea, faculty from UW Madison would consult with politicians to draft some of the early forms of progressive legislation, upholding the belief that intellectuals had an obligation to inform and participate in public life. In 2012, the Wisconsin Idea is still going strong into its 100th year, with a dedicated university website detailing all of its current outreach programs and events.

I’m impressed with the philosophy of the Wisconsin Idea and am delighted to discover all the ways that this history informs the present reality, from my current graduate program to the firm commitment to public outreach and involvement of the entire University of Wisconsin system. What does all of this mean for the future of Science with Moxie? Well, one thing is that since I am starting this graduate program as an attempt to grow into a neuroscientist with a hand in public affairs and policy, it means that matters of science and policy might flavor some of the posts I make here (but it might just mean that I rant more on twitter). However, I plan to keep the focus of this blog on matters of science and music, but also on the ways that all these topics intersect, locally or otherwise. It also means that since my home base is now Madison, I’m in a good position to cover events, scientists, and musicians in the Midwest. I have a few old interviews in the works, but if anyone local in both science and music wants to be interviewed for the blog, please feel free to contact me. I’m excited about this new step and I hope that this move also serves to make this blog more interesting. Thank you for coming along for the ride!

1) Tell me about you. Who are you? Do you have a background in science? If so, what draws you here as opposed to meatier, more academic fare? And if not, what brought you here and why have you stayed? Let loose with those comments.

2) Tell someone else about this blog and in particular, try and choose someone who’s not a scientist but who you think might be interested in the type of stuff found in this blog. Ever had family members or groups of friends who’ve been giving you strange, pitying looks when you try to wax scientific on them? Send ‘em here and let’s see what they say.

3) I’m interested in whether you found us, or regularly follow us, through Twitter, Facebook and/or other beyond-RSS mechanisms that you may use to corral your information stream.

Like the authors of yore featured in the opening video, all the members of the evening’s panel discussion were both sufferers of mental illnesses and highly accomplished individuals. Neuroscientist James Fallon, psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison, and mental health law professor Elyn Saks all told tales of their personal struggles and discoveries relating to mental illnesses, and also taught the audience about the link between creativity, intelligence, and mental illness.

Kay Redfield Jamison and Elyn Saks are both accomplished academics and MacArthur Genius award recipients who suffer from bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, respectively. James Fallon is an internationally renowned neuroscientist who accidentally discovered that his own brain had characteristics in common with murders and sociopaths. Cynthia McFadden of Nightline news anchor fame asked the three panelists about the topic at hand and moderated the session.

Not all mental disorders have an equal correlation with creativity. Despite the trope of the depressed artist, Jamison said that clinical depression isn’t really linked to creativity. Instead, the mental disorders with the highest incidences of enhanced creativity were bipolar disorder and schizophrenia. The reason that the depressed artist myth persists is that most creatives thought to be “depressed” are actually bipolar and going through cyclical depressed phases. She explained that the manic phases of bipolar disorder allow for the generation of many creative ideas, and the depressed phases are the time when these ideas are either edited or discarded. However, the editing process only occurs if the individual can bring herself to function in a depressed period at all. Fallon lended his support to this by showing some of his research that found that bipolar individuals had the highest amount of visual artistic talent. He also highlighted the fact that other neuroscience research has showed that frontotemporal dementia or damage to the frontotemporal lobe of the brain sometimes causes people to become more creative.

Fallon also shared how he realized he had sociopathic tendencies through participating in a study with his family. He realized that a scan of his brain looked eerily similar to the patterns of activity in the brains of the serial killers that he studied. He also possesses gene variants that correlate with the personality traits of low empathy and high aggression. Although he is not out murdering people or eating their faces, he realizes that he possesses a competitive streak with less regard for others’ feelings and can be manipulative and charming. Fallon pointed out that CEOs are about four times as likely to share these sociopathic traits.

Despite the fact that mental illnesses may come with increased creativity and success, both Jamison and Saks urged that it was important not to romanticize madness. Some artists might worry that getting treatment for their illnesses might cut their productivity, but Jamison stated that three-fourths of bipolar creatives on lithium report that they are just as creative as before. Saks added that before treatment, someone might be using all their energy in an attempt to hold themselves together, but with treatment that energy is freed up for more productivity and creativity.

I really enjoyed the program and thought it was one of the most interesting of the festival. I also admired the strength of the panelists in using their personal lives as examples of mental illness, despite the persistent stigma surrounding mental disorders and their treatment. Irish musician Susan McKoewen closed out the evening with her songs comprised of poems about mental illness. If you’re interested in seeing Madness Redefined for yourself, you can check out the replay here.

Image courtesy of World Science Festival

The structure of the evening was a great example of such uncharted territory. The event included the Orchestra of St. Luke’s performing a score composed by Philip Glass, an adaptation of Green’s book created by filmmakers Al and Al, and live narration by LeVar Burton. Tracy Day, the co-founder of the festival, told me the goal of the evening was to present enough options to bring in people who hold different interests. Perhaps someone wouldn’t go to see a science fiction film, but they would love to hear a live orchestral performance, or they wouldn’t be interested in a story about a boy who flies to a black hole, but they would be excited about the narration from LeVar Burton. The different aspects of the performance drew me to attend, as I was curious about the kind of science fiction to which Philip Glass would feel driven to compose a score. The multifaceted approach proven to be completely successful, as the theater was sold out and the audience seemed to be enjoying every aspect of the performance.

LeVar Burton later told me that he came to this project because, as a storyteller and educator, he couldn’t turn it down. He relished “the opportunity to tell a story this good, with an orchestra that great, with music that’s that phenomenal.” Burton comes from a family of teachers which has given him a passion for efforts to “close the gap” in math and science education. “The kicker is that it’s part of an educational outreach to get kids interested in science and math. It’s a win all around. I can’t afford to sit on the sidelines given an opportunity to lend my voice to an event like this.”

Filmmakers Al and Al said similar things about their reasons for getting involved in the project. Al and Al, Brian Greene, and Philip Glass formed a transatlantic team, sending ideas back and forth to each other over the internet. Al and Al got the script from Greene, started to make parts of the film, which they would then send to Glass. Glass would then compose the score to the film pieces, and would send it to Greene for editing and tweaking. Al and Al spoke highly of working with both parties to create the final project. “It was just a beautiful process between the three of us.”

Some of the visuals in Icarus at the Edge of Time were generated via a program that creates images from fractals and mathematical equations, lending an extra dimension to the film. When envisioning the space vehicle that Icarus used to approach the black hole, the British duo Al and Al decided to lend an American touch to the film by fashioning the ship with eagle’s wings. “Because we were doing this Icarus myth, which is really about man trying to fly, we really wanted to make a spaceship that looks a little bit like an eagle. Because we’re English, we could be a bit more patriotic about it for you Americans.”

All of the nights’ performances melded together in a very complementary way, and were a great way to kick of the World Science Festival with its attempts to blend science, art, and general excitement together. Perhaps seeing Icarus in his tiny, eagle-winged spaceship hurtling towards a black hole will indeed inspire the next generation of scientific adventurers and innovators.

Images courtesy of World Science Festival

Last night I got the chance to attend Icarus at the Edge of Time, a film that featured a score composed by Philip Glass and performed live by Orchestra of St. Luke’s. I also got to briefly chat with narrator LeVar Burton, filmmakers Al + Al, and the co-founder of the festival, Tracy Day. I’ll write more about that experience in a forthcoming post.

This morning I got up bright and early to attend the announcement of the 2012 Kavli Prizes, streamed live from Oslo, Norway. I did some excited tweeting about attending the event, especially when one of the Kavli Prize winners in Neuroscience, Cornelia Bargmann, was present at the announcement of her award.

Tonight, I’ll head to Madness Redefined: Creativity, Intelligence and the Dark Side of the Mind to hear about the links between creativity, madness, and intelligence. This is a topic I’ve always wondered a little about myself, as the stereotypes of musicians, writers, and scientists usually fits within those descriptive nouns.

Tomorrow, I’ll be at the event Reawakening the Brain through Music. As you might guess, I am EXTREMELY excited about getting to hear Oliver Sacks speak, and Petr Janata at UC Davis was one professor I seriously considered working with for doctorate research. The speakers at the event also include musician Stanley Jordan and music therapist Concetta Tomaino. It’s safe to say I can’t wait to attend.

The final World Science Festival event I’ll attend, Cool Jobs, is on Saturday afternoon. This event highlights scientists with cool jobs, and scientifically-themed rapper Baba Brinkman is one of those featured. I’m hoping that he will bust out a few rhymes during the event!

There are a few more events on Sunday the 3rd, but I’ll be heading back home to Durham then. I’m excited to be writing about these events and hope that you get a chance to check out some of the World Science Festival too!

#thesisjams might not be inspiring to anyone besides me, but what if all my tweets about the process were unwittingly being turned into public music?

The Listening Machine is a project by composer and cellist Peter Gregson and doctoral researcher and artistic programmer Daniel Jones. They’ve taken the twitter feeds of 500 unidentified people and turned them into a constant stream of music.

From the website’s FAQ:

What exactly is being translated into sound?

Music and human language have very different properties, so it’s impossible to directly translate one into the other. Instead, The Listening Machine extract various pieces of information and uses them to control different parameters of the piece.

• The overall rate of tweeting is linked to the rate and speed of music triggered
• Emotional trends govern the piece’s musical mode: positive, negative or neutral
• Phrases and sentences that make up tweets are used to generate sequences of musical notes
• Other keywords and topics are used to trigger larger movements within the piece

To find out more about how the Listening Machine works, check out their in-depth explanation here.

I’m probably not one of the 500 twitter users fueling the machine, but it definitely qualifies as one of my #thesisjams.

So at the end of my first semester, I responded to all the gushy emotions by making everyone in my lab a science-themed mix CD. Yes, I even nerdy enough to print out the tracklisting in a dot matrix font.

This post last month on “The Best Pop Science Song of All Time,” contains a couple of these gems, but for the weekend, I’ll leave you with a modern version of my mix CD culled from Youtube videos.

1. The Dandy Warhols – I am a Scientist

2. Blackalicious – Chemical Calisthenics

3. Freezepop – Science Genius Girl

4. The Aquabats – The Cat with Two Heads

5. The North Atlantic – Scientist Girl

6. Atom and his Package – Lord It’s Hard to be Happy When You’re Not Using the Metric System

7. Tom Lehrer – The Elements

“This might seem useful to some of you someday in a bizarre set of circumstances.”

8. The Avalanches – Frontier Psychiatrist

9. Robots in Disguise – She’s a Color Scientist

10. Oingo Boingo – Weird Science

11. The Ex Models – She Blinded Me with Science
I couldn’t find a online link for this song, but trust me when I say this noise cover of the proceeding Dolby hit is INTENSE.

12. Thomas Dolby – She Blinded Me with Science

13. The Zanies – The Mad Scientist

This one is well worth the listen.

14. MC Hawking – Entropy

15. Ladytron – True Mathematics

16. Mirwais – Disco Science

17. Professor Pez – Rocket Science
Another song that I sadly could not locate online.

18. Rilo Kiley – Science vs. Romance

19. The Hacker – Scientist

Again, couldn’t find this song online, but here’s another from the same artist that serves a similar purpose.

I hope you enjoy listening to and watching these as much as I did reliving my science-music nerdery from long ago.

I’m just dropping a pointer toward this Bjork performance on Later with Jools Holland for a fun start to the weekend and for a heads up on her show in New York tonight. Bjork has been touring behind her scientifically-inspired album Biophilia for the past month, with stops at the New York Hall of Science and the Roseland Ballroom in New York City.

Tonight at the Roseland Ballroom, you have a chance to see a 24-piece Icelandic choir, instrumental Tesla coils, and Bjork, live and direct. If you miss tonight’s Biophilia performance, the last one is this Monday March 5th. Go to one of them for me, dear readers, since I’ll be laboring over my Master’s thesis on both of those dates.

The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article that referenced a study by John Sloboda that found people experienced emotional reactions to music when it contained appoggiaturas, a musical device whose definition seems to be as hotly debated as the science and rationale behind the article itself. The WSJ article describes an appoggiatura as “a type of ornamental note that clashes with the melody just enough to create a dissonant sound.” Despite being a songwriter, I’m not a music theory buff.  So for a short auditory definition of the appoggiatura and a taste of the controversy surrounding its application to Adele, I’ll refer you to this piece from NPR entitled, “Another take on the ‘Appoggiatura.‘”

But the definition of the appoggiatura isn’t the only thing that is currently being debated. A number of articles have popped up recently protesting the reduction of tear-jerker songs to a simple formula. Of course, not everyone finds the same songs emotionally compelling, and as Isaac Schankler points out on NewMusicBox, the reasons for this can range from cultural to personal. Below is one quote I’d like to pull from his essay (though you should read the whole thing):

There’s one final piece of the puzzle missing. Experiments like Sloboda’s are effective when identifying structural features that are typical, that is, features that are commonly found in a large variety of musical examples. What they are not capable of is locating unusual features: that is, what makes a piece of music unique or special. But great songs, songs that we love, are by definition exceptional—there’s something about them that other songs don’t have. Otherwise every song with the same basic features would evoke the same exact reaction, which is clearly not the case.

In a study I covered on feeling chills in response to music, the researchers requested that the study participants select their own music that reliably gave them chills. Of course, the types of music and songs brought into the lab varied widely, as do the responses to Adele’s Someone Like You. Science can attempt to determine how a similar response (chills) occurs upon exposure to different stimuli (songs), and it can attempt to figure out why a common response (tears) is produced by one particular stimulus (an Adele song), but it will have a much harder time developing a formula that produces both sides of the equation reliably in all subjects (a formula for songs that produce chills or tears in everyone). We as humans are just too different from each other, and our individual reactions to pieces of music are informed by much more just than the formula and structure of them.

While scientific studies will probably never produce a formula for a song that elicits an emotional response in everyone who hears it, the beauty in studies like this is the “wondering why” coupled with the attempt to get a little closer to figuring it all out.

Besides, if science did come up with a proven formula to produce universal teary-eyed listening, the formula would be churned out so often that many people would become inoculated to its effects. The beauty of music lies in its unexpected twists and turns — the shape-shifting that is the basis of what Sloboda says exists in the appoggiaturas in Adele’s song. These constant and slight musical innovations is what will keep new songs constantly surprising us, and yes, bringing us to tears.

Images

“Cry Me a River” by Flickr user sk8geek under Creative Common licensing.

In order to keep up with the reflections theme of the season, here are a few of my favorite posts that I’ve shared since joining the SciAm blog network in July.

Please pay attention to the notes was my first post on Science with Moxie on research from the Kraus lab on musicians’ enhanced ability to hear speech in noise.

My gushy review of Bjork’s Biophilia album and app suite which got tweeted about by Oliver Sacks!

Research I saw at the 2011 Society for Neuroscience conference about the brain’s perception of words, pitch, and rhythm.

For Ada Lovelace Day, I wrote about my undergraduate research advisor and how she inspired me to pursue a research career.

I covered Guerilla Science’s first exciting stateside venture at the music festival, Escape2NY.

And I got up Eva Amsen’s interview on being a scientist and a musician.

For 2012, I’m looking forward to doing more interviews and profiles of scientists and musicians (email or tweet at me if you’d like to be interviewed), finding more interesting events and videos to share, and covering more new research on science, music, and everything in between. I’ve been honored with the opportunity to write for you, and I hope to do more and better things in this fresh new year.

So now that you’re started to move to that beat, what does science have to say about this? Daniel Cameron, a Ph.D. student at the University of Western Ontario who performed this research for his Master’s degree at Goldsmiths University of London, explained to me how his research relates to the question of how a beat seems to make us move. He started with the fact that people all over the world seem to universally move to the beat of music, whether in complex ways like dancing, or simple forms like clapping or tapping their feet. But how can you break this behavior down into something you can study scientifically?

Enter a technique called transcranial magnetic stimulation or TMS. This technique uses an electromagnetic field to induce an electric current through a person’s skull that can activate a targeted area of the brain. In the case of a previous study by Wilson and Davey in 2002, TMS was used to stimulate the ankle muscle-controlling part of the motor cortex in the brain. So when the electric current from TMS activated the part of the motor cortex that controlled the ankle muscles, the subjects in the study tapped their feet involuntarily. While stimulating the motor cortex, it is possible to measure the motor evoked potential or MEP, which, put simply, serves as an electrical recording measuring how much a muscle is moving. In this Wilson and Davey study, playing music with a strong beat while stimulating the brains of the research subjects to move their ankles and thus their feet to the beat effected the MEP, or muscle response to the electrical stimulation of the TMS.

Cameron wanted to build on this link between the beat of music and ankle-tapping MEP in his study, so he selected a few different pieces to play for his subjects while recording their ankle-tap MEP and stimulating their brains to the beat via TMS. The simplest pieces played were just tones that had either a strong beat or a weak beat. The more complex pieces played were snippets from actual popular songs like the Beatles “A Day in the Life” and the Beach Boys “Wouldn’t it Be Nice.” Cameron took parts from the song with a strong beat and different parts of the same song with a weak beat in order to compare the ankle response to the pieces of music. He pulsed the TMS stimulation to the subjects’ brains in time to the beat of the songs or the beat of the tone sequences while measuring the MEP response of their resulting ankle-taps.

The preliminary results of this study found that the tone sequences with a strong beat invoked a greater ankle-tap MEP response than the tone sequences with a weak beat in three out of the four subjects. This might indicate that a strong beat in music creates a bigger “innate” muscle response to music, but there was a puzzling finding of the part of the study that involved snippets from songs. Even though the tone sequences with a strong beat produced a larger ankle-tap MEP response, the song snippets failed to create a similar significant response to the beat. Cameron explained that this lack of effect could be due to subject familiarity with the songs or other issues that arise when someone hears a complex musical stimulus like a piece of music. Future studies could try to determine what went wrong with the song stimulus by breaking the songs down into pieces of stimuli that more closely mirror the tone sequences. By classifying the differences between the songs and the tone sequences, we could gain a greater understanding of what drives that foot-tapping response to a crazy (or in Swahili, kichaa) beat.

Cameron et al. “Modulation of ankle-driving MEPs by metric Strength in tone sequences and music” Goldsmiths (University of London), 171.07/JJ9

Images:

“TMS” from University of Colorado Denver Department of Psychiatry.

Julia Groh of the Max Planck Institute Leipzig explored these questions during her poster session on the first day of the Society for Neuroscience conference. She explained that most studies on this topic compare the brain’s response to spoken speech to its response to singing. The flaw in those types of comparisons lies in the fact that there are many elements of musical song that can exist in varying degrees in speech. Is speaking in a rhythmic monotone more similar to singing or to speaking? Is varying the pitch of a sentence more like regular speaking or more like singing? How can the brain tell when something is being spoken versus when it is being sung?

One great example of the grey area between speech and song exists in Diana Deutsch’s “Sometimes behave so strangely.” Check out how when the phrase is repeated, it begins to sound like it is being sung (hat tip to this 2007 episode of Radiolab), in an effect that even 5th graders can perceive.

To address the issue of how the brain responds to voices in the grey area between speaking and singing, Groh designed a few different pieces of stimuli to play for the subjects of her study.

She took a short song and created three levels to test how the brain reacted differently to each:

1. Song versus speech that included words, pitch, and rhythm (A recording of the lyrics of the song being sung vs. a recording of the song’s lyrics spoken in a natural speaking pitch with the same musical rhythm, kind of like if you were to rap the words of a song like “Happy Birthday”)

2. Song versus speech that included pitch and rhythm but no words. (A recording of the song’s melody being hummed without words vs. a recording of the song being “hummed” in a natural speaking pitch with the same musical rhythm, kind of like rapping “Happy Birthday”, but without the words)

3. Song versus speech that included just rhythm (a recording of the song’s musical rhythm being “hummed” in a wordless monotone vs. a recording of the song being “hummed” or “spoken” without the musical rhythm in a wordless monotone, kind of like you were the worst rapper in the world because you used no words, never varied the tone of your voice, and had a rhythm [or colloquially, a "flow"] that was just like regular talking)

The idea behind making these different kinds of recordings of the same song was to separate the three elements of singing and speech from each other. This way Groh would be able to tell which particular element activated the subjects’ brains, either on its own or in combination with another element of sound. After creating all six of these recordings herself, she stuck her subjects in an fMRI brain scanner, played them the songs and speech at each level, and took a look at the effects of removing either words, pitch, or both from each recording. She suspected that the different types of song and speech recordings might cause different patterns of brain activity. Her suspicions were confirmed by results that showed different patterns of brain activation for spoken words than for words in song.

The two parts of the brain that showed differential activation were the intraparietal sulcus (IPS) and the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG). Groh found that the IPS was more activated when the subjects listened to the singing pitch of words than to the speaking pitch of words. In the IFG, the left side of the brain was more responsive to words when they were spoken rather than when they were sung, and more responsive to pitch changes in natural speech than to pitch changes in sung speech. The IFG on the right side of the brain reacted in just the opposite way. It was more responsive to sung words and to the pitch of a musical voice rather than spoken words and the pitch of a speaking voice. So in general, the IFG on the left side of the brain seemed to specialize in processing pitch in speech, while the IFG on the right side of the brain was more activated when processing pitch in music.

These findings align with previous studies that have suggested that structures on the left side of the brain deal with language processing while structures found on the right side of the brain deal with processing musical pitch. Even though Groh found these differences in the activation of the IFG and IPS, she still found that both speech and singing activated both brain regions. The difference here is in the degree of activation for each region. The fact that the left and right IFG have different degrees of activation to speech and song suggests that one side is more attuned to processing one type of auditory stimulus over the other. The study also suggested the IPS as a brain region that processes singing pitch better than speaking pitch. This brings us just a little bit closer to understanding what happens when your brain hears the words of a song and the sound of a sentence.

Poster Session, Saturday November 12, 2011 Society for Neuroscience conference: Groh et al. “Patterns in song and speech” Max Planck Institute Leipzig, 92.14/VV25

Images:

“Inferior Frontal Gyrus” from Wikimedia Commons.

All Dischord aside, I have seen some extremely interesting things at SfN11. I’m going to list a few of the presentations I’ve seen below and get back to more involved posts on the research later.

Groh et al. “Patterns in song and speech” Max Planck Institute Leipzig, 92.14/VV25

Cameron et al. “Modulation of ankle-driving MEPs by metric Strength in tone sequences and music” Goldsmiths (University of London), 171.07/JJ9

Dodel et al. “Emotional responses in music listening are associated with brain-scale functional connectivity modulations” Florida Atlantic University, 171.03/JJ5

Uhlig et al. “What aspects of music grab our attention more? An investigation of the effects of musical structure and performance asynchrony on the perception of leader-follower relations and quality during selective attention to a piano duet” Max Planck Institute Leipzig, 224.11

Esfahani et al. “Player with a single string – Preserved semantic musical memory in an amnesic professional cellist” Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 287.17/TT1

It’s no secret that Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of my favorite astrophysicists. So when I saw this morning that he was featured in the latest Symphony of Science video (along with Brian Cox and Carolyn Porco), I was overjoyed. But all the joys of symphonies aside, the real reason I’m posting this is to point you toward this piece Tyson did for NOVA scienceNOW explaining how autotune works. In a little less than seven minutes, we’re shown the history of autotune, how it works its magic (with a good explanation of pitch and sound sprinkled in), and end on Tyson’s singing corrected to a better note. I can’t imbed the video, so check it out here.

If you love Tyson as much as I do and want to know when he tweets things like this, follow him on twitter!

If you’re presenting something that you think would be good for me to feature here, make sure to shoot me an email at princesso at gmail.com. I’ll be at the conference from Saturday November 12 – Wednesday November 16th.

Carolyn McGettigan is a researcher at University College London who studies the neural mechanisms of speech and production. So it was only natural that she teamed up with UK Beatbox champion Reeps One to uncover the mysteries behind his skill at producing percussion sounds with his mouth. She created a short film for the “Brains on Film” contest that details the results of comparing the beatboxing brain scans of Reeps One to those of a novice. I thought the film was a great description of both the technique of fMRI and the results of the study. Check it out here, or above.

This week I returned to those past times of devoted attention to an album as foreground instead of experiencing it like a scented candle floating in the background. But Bjork’s Biophilia has more than just music and static liner notes to absorb. All the stunning visuals of Bjork’s Biophilia app suite accompanied the musical experience as I huddled under the covers cradling my iPod touch in the dark, impressed with these songs and the apps. This is not a music review blog and I’m not a real music critic, so perhaps then I am allowed to gush.

I. absolutely. love. this. album.

The first word that came to mind after taking in all the apps and their songs was “synesthesia,” the neurological condition that blends the separated senses. In the case of Biophilia, the experience of sound and music is effortlessly blended with bright and enchanting visuals through the medium of the iPad/iPhone. The project is born out of a love of music, wonder, sounds, and creativity in a way that’s innovative enough for a device conceived by the late Steve Jobs. You can definitely tell that Oliver Sacks’ Musicophilia was a great inspiration for the design and conception of the album as an interactive visual entity.

There are little science and music nerd-friendly gems in many of the apps and song structures. Musicologist Nikki Dibben details Bjork’s songwriting rationale and methods in essays for each song. Tesla coils were used to play the arpreggiated bassline in the song Thunderbolt while Bjork croons the lyrics, “my romantic gene is dominant.”

In the song “Dark Matter” I wondered what the recent Nobel Laureate Perlmutter would think of Bjork singing about the largely unknown entity of dark matter in her equally mysterious self-created language.

A few times I actually found myself gasping out loud from the surprises. In the self-replicating melody Virus, the term “lovesick” is taken to a new level when the nuclei of the cells surrounding an infected cell spontaneously burst into a lipsticked singing chorus. Besides the cell nuclei chorus of pink lips, I was most taken with the animation for the song Hollow. The details in the animation rival those of XVIVO’s Inner Life of the Cell and accurately reflect most things I’ve painstakingly learned in upper-level and graduate cell biology courses. I found myself shouting “beads on a string!” at the nucleosomes and feeling like I was on a roller coaster ride, jumping through the nucleopore of the cell in order to follow a dancing major groove binding protein as it twirled around a strand of DNA to the beat of the song. You can even select from two types of info on the bottom of the screen as you watch the animation: one to display the descriptions of the cell biology visuals and the other to display the the beats per minute, time signature, and beat/measure of the song.

In many of the songs, Bjork took a personal topic that related to science to use as inspiration. I love her attempt to integrate different aspects of being human into one. Our vulnerability to infection at the whims of viruses and disease melds with our vulnerability to destruction at the forces of romantic love and attraction in the song Virus. In the song Moon, the cycles of the moon and its influence on the tides merge with our personal life cycles of failing and starting over again. The result of all the iPad programming, years of planning, and attention to detail is that you really get the full experience of the music and the rationale behind its conception and creation. Biophilia is a marriage of the rational and the emotional, of modern technology and art, and of music and innovation that works extremely well.

Six years ago, I walked down the hall of the Life Sciences Building on LSU’s campus, leaving a neuroscience professor’s office. I was wearing a tan TV on the Radio tee depicting a man playing a flute that gave rise to a wiggly “TVOTR” that I’d freshly procured from the band’s recent show in New Orleans. I was smiling because I was leaving my first meeting with Dr. Evanna Gleason, she’d accepted me into her lab, and she’d also said that she liked my shirt.

Dr. Gleason’s lab was my introduction to neuroscience research and laboratory life. Although growing up with a science professor for a mother meant that I had basically been born into a laboratory environment, my first real taste of a lab apart from that of my mother’s came from the Gleason Lab. In her lab, I learned how to get retinal neurons out of chick eyes and onto their new home on a Petri plate. I cut my teeth in neuroscience by working on an independent research project involving these cells. I even got to travel to a conference with the lab to present the portion of the research I’d worked on.

But the real benefits of working in the lab came not so much from the research and work component as it did from the relationships I formed with my labmates, the graduate students and postdocs in the biology department, and with Dr. Gleason herself. Gleason was always encouraging and supportive of my efforts and aspirations, providing another perspective on a career in research. As young undergraduate, it was sometimes a bit harder to take advice from a parent, so I benefited a lot from Gleason’s additional perspective on the career of a female science professor.

In addition to sharing my love of the band Yo la Tengo and having an adorable little house at which she occasionally had parties for the department, Gleason provided an excellent example and role model of a woman who managed to balance being a academic researcher and professor with a rich family and personal life. Seeing her successfully juggle so many roles in her life inspired me and showed me that it was possible to dedicate myself to both research and a personal life.

While at times I struggle with the fact that I may be trying to do too much, it was Gleason who first showed me the possibility of balancing many different roles with a research career. I thought of her when I started graduate school while continuing to play music with my band, and I thank her for her influence and guidance as I gear up to apply for Ph.D programs in neuroscience. Without that experience in her lab back in 2005, I don’t know if I would have continued in research, or discovered my love for neuroscience, or be making the decision to dedicate my life to its study by applying to Ph.D. programs this Fall. I’m honored to have the opportunity to write about her for Ada Lovelace Day 2011.

Saul Perlmutter is one of three scientists awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics this morning. This news is exciting enough, but Perlmutter is no ordinary Nobel Laureate. I learned from Eva Amsen that Perlmutter is also a violinist and teaches a course at UC Berkeley titled Physics and Music. From the course description:

Does the Campanile sound out of tune to you? What does this have to do with our understanding of the Big Bang? And how would thinking about this help me to write a better English essay, defend an innocent person accused of murder, save the world from the next plague, or at least understand why my friend can’t carry a tune?

Physics and Music is a course designed to help students think about how to approach the world with the eyes, ears, and mind of a scientist. We will use the domain of music and sound to ask what we can learn about the nature of reality and the methods that we humans have developed to discover how the world works.

Glad to see a musician, educator, and scientist becoming a Nobel Laureate. Congratulations to Perlmuttter!

What first got you interested in science? In music?

I used to read a kids magazine when I was about 6 or 7. It was called Bamse, and was all about a bunch of anthropomorphic animals. (it’s a Swedish kids’ magazine, and I read the Dutch translation.) It had a huge impact on my life back then: all my pets were named after characters in the comics. I also vividly remember there being a one-page feature about DNA, showing the characters opening a huuuuge filing cabinet that contained all the information of our bodies, and strands of DNA flying out of the cabinet’s drawers. That was probably my first exposure to Biochemistry, and it just stuck with me.

Music came a little later. I liked listening to it, and played around with some home-made music instruments, but I didn’t seriously consider the idea of myself making music until I took my first after school music lessons at age ten. I started violin lessons the year after that.

Can you describe these homemade instruments? What instruments do you play today? Do you still play violin in a professional (or semi-professional) context today?

I vaguely remember, as a little kid, trying to make “guitars” out of cardboard boxes and rubber bands. No, they did not work. The instrument these kids made is very much like the toy instruments I used to make, but much bigger, and theirs is actually tuned and well thought out…

I mainly play violin these days, and currently play with the City of Cambridge Symphony Orchestra here in the UK. Before that I was in various other regional amateur and student orchestras in Canada and Holland. Classical orchestras are everywhere where science is done, so wherever I moved to I was able to bring my instrument along and find a place to play. Violin is the only instrument I play well, but I can also still play recorder if needed, and I’ve taught myself a tiny bit of piano and guitar. (I know where the notes are, I can find some basic chords, and work my way through simple pieces, but nothing more than that on those last two instruments!)

What role do science and music each play in your life?

I think science and music are two separate things to me. During my PhD, I absolutely could not live without my weekly orchestra rehearsals: I needed those few hours completely away from the bench, counting beats rather than cells. If there is a common ground, for me, it would be that both offer both short term and long term goals that I could work at to reach: getting data from an experiment, playing one piece well at a concert, working on my thesis, working on improving skills on violin. In the end, I didn’t like scientific research enough to make a career out of it, but I do still like to play violin, so I’m not sure what to make of that!

What type of research did you do for your Ph.D. project and how does that affect what you do today (scientifically, musically, life-affirmingly, etc.)?

I did my PhD in Biochemistry, but the project drifted more toward cell biology. I studied proteins that were involved in pigmentation pathways in mouse skin cells, and looked at how they affected cell shape, expression of other proteins, or the actual amount of pigment the cells produced. The project was incredibly frustrating because pigmentation is such a robust process that detecting any changes is extremely difficult. But that did make me more certain that I didn’t want to continue working in the lab and focus more on connecting scientists and communicating science.
Musically, my violin-playing improved a lot during the years I did my PhD, because that was something I had more control over. I could spend weeks troubleshooting experiments until finding the one parameter I had to change to get results, and often even that was completely serendipitous, like getting an exceptionally strong batch of antibody from the supplier by chance and suddenly seeing clear differences in protein levels that weren’t visible before. But practicing violin was more reliable: I could practice more, and improve! In the lab, on the other hand, I could go weeks without progress even though I worked super-hard.

You said you didn’t want to make a career out of science research, but now you blog about it. What do you do for a career now?

I’m Online Editor for the journal Development, and Community Manager for the Node, which is a website where developmental biologists can share news. It’s set up as a blog, but we invite any developmental biologist to join and write for it. I do a lot of the writing there myself as well. Before that I spent some time as freelance science writer, both during and after my PhD, and I’m really interested in the concept of “the scientific community” – how people interact with each other, both online and offline, and how the whole system works (or doesn’t…)

How’d you get into blogging?

In 2000 I did a four-month internship in Quebec City, and I hand-coded a website to update my friends and family back home. I made it so that each entry linked to the one before and after it, and there was a page with a list of all the entries, and a guestbook to respond. A few months after I returned from that trip, I discovered blog software, and just *had* to play around with this system that was exactly what I needed half a year earlier! Between then and now, I must have had about 5 or 6 different blogs. My first science-only blog lasted for about five years, from 2005 to 2010 (I consider it pretty much dead now), and I still have a blog at Nature Network since 2007, and then the Scientists and Musicians blog which I started specifically to keep track of my interviews with scientists and musicians. Oh, and I blog for work as well. That takes up most of my blogging energy these days…

Edit from Eva in the comments: The only thing that changed [from last year] is that I don’t do as much blogging for work anymore because we’ve attracted a lot of other talented writers for the Node in the mean time.

Thanks so much to Eva for doing this interview. You can also follow her on Twitter @easternblot. If you are involved in both science and music and want to be featured in my SciMuses series of interviews, shoot me an email!

Anyone who ever chances to ask me to recommend  a podcast or even something to listen to on a long drive always gets to hear a long monologue on my love for Radiolab. Tucked in between the parade of famous and fascinating scientists that Jad Abumrad and Robert Krulwich* bring onto the show on a regular basis and the wonder you feel infused into every second of random sound effects and deftly Jad-composed music, the show seems to fulfill a basic human desire to take big questions and try to find real answers, all the while reminding you that in many cases the journey to the answer is more than half the fun.

To celebrate, I want to share with you one of the program’s “shorts,” a twenty minute long story of a man called Bob Milne, a ragitme pianist whose uncanny ability to…well, I don’t want to completely spoil the program. But I will say that testing the validity of his strange ability involves a neuroscientist and a fMRI scanner. Listen below, or go to the Radiolab site to download for later.

*Lame claim to fame: I got to meet and talk to Robert Krulwich early this year at ScienceOnline 2011. Obviously it was a total fangirl moment.