The mind on music

(Original Link - http://www.chicagotribune.com/health/sc-health-1201-music-20101201,0,3647950.story)


On her last night at the hospital after undergoing a series of spine surgeries, Susan Mandel lay in bed listening to Pachelbel's Canon in D.

For days, Mandel's positive attitude had kept any anxiety at bay, so she was surprised when she noticed her face was wet, and then her pillow, which slowly soaked through. She sobbed silently, listening to the familiar violins, until the tears stopped coming. Then she felt peace.
"It wasn't a cry of anguish, it was a cry of relief," Mandel said, recalling the night more than 20 years ago. "It's very tender, evocative music, and I think it gave me permission to release the pent-up emotions."

Philosophers for millenniums have marveled at the power of music to speak to our souls, to inspire joy, melancholy, aggression or calm with visceral insight beyond the grasp of our rational minds. Thanks to advances in neuroscience, researchers are beginning to understand what it is about music that touches us so deeply, and how to harness that power to soothe, uplift, comfort and heal — to use music as medicine for emotional and physical health.

Mandel, a music therapist and research consultant at Lake Health Wellness Institute in Cleveland, this month released "Manage Your Stress and Pain Through Music," (Berklee Press Publications, $29.99), with co-author Suzanne Hanser, chairwoman of the music therapy department at Berklee College of Music in Boston. The book explains how to choose and use music to cope with challenges in your life.

Not what you'd guess

It can seem obvious which songs would bring you up and which might bring you down. And indeed, there are structural components to songs that are meant to communicate joy, such as a fast tempo in major mode, or sadness, such as a slower tempo in minor mode. But there's a difference between the emotion communicated through music and the emotion actually induced in the listener. Our memories, personal preferences and mood at the time can have a heavier influence than the intent of the musical structure in how music makes us feel.

"You could have a really positive emotional experience with a song that structurally communicates sadness," said Meagan Curtis, assistant professor of psychology at State University of New York at Purchase, who does research in music psychology.

What matters most in reaping the health benefits of music, from pain reduction to stress relief, is that you listen to music you enjoy, research shows. In a study on cardiac rehabilitation patients, Mandel found that the patients who liked a therapeutic music CD she put together experienced a reduction in blood pressure and reported feeling calmer, while patients who didn't like the music actually felt worse.

While there are structural components that convey soothing, such as consonant harmonies and a narrow pitch range, whatever music has the most positive associations to the individual will have the most positive emotional and physiological response. It activates the parasympathetic nervous system, which calms heart rate, lowers blood pressure and relaxes muscles.

"I have found people who love punk rock and find that it helps them to sleep," Hanser said. "It's likely that they have learned it truly speaks to them and expresses a part of who they are."

Music and pain

Music also has been found to help people tolerate pain longer and make the pain less painful.
Studies using a cold pressor task, which simulates chronic pain by submerging subjects' hands in a bucket of freezing cold water, found that people were able to leave their hands in the water longer when they were listening to music they enjoyed, Curtis said.

That could be because people take comfort in the familiar, or because it distracts them. Between recalling memories, tapping our fingers, conjuring up images and other tasks, our brain releases so many chemicals to process music that they interfere with our perception of pain.

How the brain processes

There's some evidence that we feel music viscerally because it goes straight to the amygdala, the part of the limbic system that manages our emotions, and the hippocampus, where long-term memories are stored, Hanser said.

Music that gives people chills or shivers up the spine has been found to activate the same reward areas of the brain stimulated by food, sex and certain types of recreational drugs, Curtis said. While different people get chills from different songs, often those shiver-producing songs have an unexpected tonal structure, like a chord that isn't part of the harmonic progression, she said.

Impact of lyrics

While structure is less important than personal experience in a song's ability to induce emotion, lyrics may be even less important than structure, Curtis said. We don't need to consciously attend to structure to process its emotion, but we do have to pay attention to lyrics, making the impact of structure stronger and less difficult to process.

People are usually very intuitive about what songs are useful to them and often choose music appropriate for the state they're in, Curtis said. That explains one of the great ironies of human behavior: that many people like to listen to sad music when they're sad.

We might like the affirmation, as we create a bond with the singer or composer because they, too, have felt what we feel, Curtis said. Another theory is that wallowing is a kind of emotional catharsis, helping us fully experience the sadness so that we go through the stages of grief more quickly.
And it can be a healthy thing. A central tenet of music therapy is to meet people where they are, called the ISO principal. So if people are very depressed and lonely, you would start them with music that matches their mood before introducing something more uplifting.

"You first affirm and allow the person to reflect, and then move on to more positive things and hopeful outlooks," Hanser said.

Some researchers hope to nail down the precise combination of pitch, tone, tempo, rhythm, timbre, melody and lyrics that makes a piece of music ideal for regulating people's moods or helping to reduce pain. A study under way at Glasgow Caledonian University aims to develop a "comprehensive mathematic model" that identifies how music communicates emotions, which eventually could help doctors prescribe music.

Hanser is skeptical that a sweeping formula exists, and if it does, "I hope we don't find it," she said. "I don't know anyone who is the mean, the normal. If we can recognize our own unique characteristics and what makes us each respond so differently, that I think is really fascinating and what humanity is all about."

aelejalderuiz@tribune.com

Emotional impact
While a person's emotional reaction to a song is based largely on his or her history with the song, the song's structure also can communicate emotions, mostly through mode (major or minor chords) and tempo, said Meagan Curtis, assistant professor of psychology at State University of New York at Purchase.

A fast tempo (up to 120 beats per minute) tends to heighten physiological arousal, while slower tempos (down to 60 beats per minute) tend to reduce arousal. Major chords tend to evoke positive emotions, such as joy and contentment, and minor chords negative emotions, like fear, anger or sadness.
Curtis offered some examples:

•Major mode, fast tempo Example: "Shiny Happy People," by R.E.M. Emotion conveyed: happy.

•Major mode, slow tempo Example: "Sitting on the Dock of the Bay," by Otis Redding. Emotion conveyed: soothing, tenderness.

•Minor mode, fast tempo Example: "Smells Like Teen Spirit," by Nirvana. Emotion conveyed: angst, anger.

•Minor mode, slow tempo Example: "Eleanor Rigby," by the Beatles. Emotion conveyed: sadness.

Both musicians and non-musicians can perceive bitonality

(Original Link - http://scienceblogs.com/cognitivedaily/2010/01/bitonality.php?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+scienceblogs%2Fcognitivedaily+%28Cognitive+Daily%29&utm_content=Google+Reader)

Take a listen to this brief audio clip of "Unforgettable." (original link)

Aside from the fact that it's a computer-generated MIDI performance, do you hear anything unusual?
If you're a non-musician like me, you might not have noticed anything. It sounds basically like the familiar song, even though the synthesized sax isn't nearly as pleasing as the familiar Nat King Cole version of the song. But most trained musicians can't listen to a song like this without cringing. Why? Because the music has been made "bitonal" by moving the accompanying piano part up two semitones (a semitone is the difference between a "natural" note and a sharp or flat). Here's the original, unaltered piece:

Can you tell the difference? A 2000 study led by R.S. Wolpert found that non-musicians couldn't distinguish between monotonal and bitonal music played side-by-side. Meanwhile musicians found artificially-created bitonal music to be almost unlistenable. For most non-musicians, if they heard anything wrong with the clips, they typically said they were being played too fast, or mentioned some other unrelated concept.

But Mayumi Hamamoto, Mauro Bothelo, and Margaret Munger (AKA Greta) wondered if years of musical training were really necessary for non-musicians to hear bitonal music. Bitonality is actually a bit controversial in the world of music, and it can be a little hard to define. In principle, there's a difference between bitonality and just playing or singing off-key, but in practice, the difference may not even exist. Advocates of bitonality like to point to the works of composers like Milhaud, Bartók, Prokofiev, and Strauss. These composers deliberately wrote in two different musical keys. But how is that different from occasionally or regularly writing dissonant chords? After all, all the same notes can be written using any musical key. To be truly bitonal, advocates say the two separate parts must unfold independently in different keys. This results in a distinctive "crunch" when the music is played. The separate question is, is this noticeable? Wolpert's work shows that it is, at least for trained musicians.
Hamamoto's team replicated Wolpert's study by playing altered and original clips of familiar songs like the above example to three groups of undergraduates: "Musicians" with more than 5 years of training, "Amateur Musicians" with 1 to 5 years of training, and "Non-Musicians" with less than a year of training. There were 14 students in each group. Musicians were significantly better at noticing that the modified clips were bitonal or "out of tune."

Next, everyone was given brief training session, where instead of modifying monotonal music to be bitonal, some of Milhaud's music originally intended to be bitonal was modified to be monotonal. Here's an example bitonal piece (Milhaud's "Botafogo"):

After hearing the clip and seeing it identified as bitonal, the students were told

Notice sometimes there is a "crunch" in the sound. This should sound somewhat unpleasant and feel like it shouldn't be that way.

Then they listened to a manipulated version of the same clip:

Again, they were told this clip was monotonal and directed to notice how the sound seems smoother and more pleasant (to my mind, it's not nearly as interesting as the original -- but that wasn't part of the study). Next they were trained with feedback, listening and identifying clips until they could accurately label four in a row. This took just a few minutes.

Finally, the respondents were tested on four new clips, all songs by Milhaud. This graph shows the results:

As you can see, for all the songs except "Ipanema," the students were quite accurate at identifying both bitonal and monotonal songs (error bars are 95 percent confidence intervals). More important, however, was that there was no significant difference in the results for Musicians, Amateur Musicians, and Non-Musicians. All three groups fared equally well.

The authors conclude the identifying bitonal music isn't a matter of years of musical instruction; it can be achieved with just a brief training session. In fact, the Non-Musicians took no longer than Musicians to complete the training session, so years of experience don't even help with learning about bitonality.

It also may suggest that the controversy about whether bitonality actually exists may not be warranted. If nearly everyone can hear the difference, then it's probably a genuine musical phenomenon.

Making beautiful music can strike a sour note

(Original Link - http://news.health.ufl.edu/2010/14721/multimedia/health-in-a-heartbeat/making-beautiful-music-can-strike-a-sour-note/)


Professional musicians are accomplished artists at the top of their field. And although their job is glamorous, health practitioners are tuning in to the fact that it can be stressful, too.
Consider the orchestra. It’s not unusual for members to sometimes be gripped by stage fright, or worry about becoming disabled and unable to perform. Their work can be physically demanding, and requires high levels of stamina.

Job frustration, a workplace hazard shared by many of less lofty vocation, is another source of a veritable symphony of stress. One reason? Musicians must deal with the frustrating combination of being highly skilled and accomplished while often having little authority about what and how to play. This can take its toll in various ways, but musicians must find ways to cope so they can keep making beautiful music.

A pain in the neck… or the back or the shoulders… is one way stress can strike. But in a new Norwegian study, orchestral musicians did not have higher levels of those complaints than others. That might be because people whose pain is debilitating would resign from the orchestra.
Members were more likely to complain about gastrointestinal problems, mood changes and fatigue. And those complaints were linked to higher stress, as evidenced by high saliva levels of the hormone cortisol.

It turns out that even coping mechanisms are linked with stress levels. Musicians who dealt with work-related problems by seeking social support or distractions had higher stress levels than those who tackled problems directly and tried to look for solutions.

Tuning in to maintaining good mental and physical health is important for handling daily stresses. And it certainly is key for musicians and music students who want to keep the music playing.

The sound (and sight and feel) of music for the deaf

(Original Link - http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/technology/science/the-sound-and-sight-and-feel-of-music-for-the-deaf/article1792763/)

Frank Russo helps make music for the deaf.

Working with a team of researchers, the Ryerson psychology professor invented a chair that allows deaf people to feel music through vibrations. He also works with both deaf and hearing musicians to compose music that focuses on vibrations and vision rather than sound.

Prof. Russo, a music cognition expert who also sings and plays guitar, will discuss music without sound at the TEDx Talks in Toronto Thursday. The conference’s tagline is “ideas worth spreading.”

Your talk will be on experiencing music without sound. Tell me more.
 
I plan to talk about the other modalities – or the other senses – and whether or not we can experience music through these other senses. This is interesting from a scientific perspective. It also has some interesting practical and artistic implications when we’re considering music experienced by the deaf.
Performers do things when they’re performing that convey emotion and these things can be seen. So, for example, when a performer is performing something that is melancholy, their movements are melancholy. By movements, I mean their facial expressions, the way that their body moves, the way that their hands move. There’s really a lot that can be seen that conveys important structural and emotional information about music. There’s [also] a long history of the deaf experiencing music through vibration.

Legend has it that in his later years, a deafened Beethoven cut the legs off his piano to feel the vibrations through the floorboards. How do deaf people experience music and how does this inform your work?
 
Deaf culture is extremely visual and it also involves the body, more prominently I would say than oral cultures. So their experience of music, maybe not surprisingly, is informed by what they see and what they feel. There’s this long history of feeling music. For example, there’s a famous percussionist, Evelyn Glennie. She’s deaf and she talks about experiencing music through her body. So she’ll perform without shoes so that she can feel the vibration through her body.

You and a team of researchers at Ryerson developed the emoti-chair. What is it and how does it work?
 
The emoti-chair is a sensory substitution technology that’s designed to take sound and present it to the body as vibration. You can put your hand on a speaker and you can feel the vibration because all sound emanates from some form of vibration. The challenge, though, with touching a speaker or even touching a musical instrument is what we call perceptual masking. Perceptual masking occurs in vibration when the lower frequency vibrations dominate the higher frequency vibrations. So all we feel is the thump, thump, thump. So what we’ve done in the emoti-chair is separate out the frequencies and present them to different parts of the body. We’ll take the high frequencies and we’ll present them to the upper part of the back. We’ll take the lower frequencies in the music signal and we’ll present them to the lower part of your back.

You’ve held a couple dozen concerts for deaf and hard-of-hearing people with the emoti-chair. What are the concerts like?
 
It’s really evolved. We’ve gone from taking prefabricated music that’s been constructed for hearing ears and have translated it into deaf music. We are now doing something entirely different, where from the conceptualization of the music we’re thinking about this as a vibe track or a piece of music that’s primarily for vibration and vision, not sound. So that opens up all sorts of interesting artistic possibilities for the deaf and hearing community.

It sounds like you’re almost creating a new art form of music without sound.
 
That’s what we like to think, yeah. And we actually are putting on a series of workshops across the country where we’re exploring this. We did one in Vancouver last June. We’re going to do the next one at the Banff Centre for the Arts next spring. At these workshops, we’re trying to bring together music performers or composers that want to work on this new art form, on developing something that’s music-like but has this reallocation of the sensory priorities so that vibration and vision are in the foreground.

Do people who experience music without sound also experience the emotion that is so much a part of music?
 
Absolutely. We have been doing some research in the lab along those lines. And yes, there’s a great deal of agreement between the emotion experienced by a deaf individual and a hearing individual.

Scientists Closer to Grasping How the Brain's 'Hearing Center' Spurs Responses to Sound

(Original Link - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/10/101018121404.htm)

Just as we visually map a room by spatially identifying the objects in it, we map our aural world based on the frequencies of sounds. The neurons within the brain's "hearing center" -- the auditory cortex -- are organized into modules that each respond to sounds within a specific frequency band. But how responses actually emanate from this complex network of neurons is still a mystery.

A team of scientists led by Anthony Zador, M.D., Ph.D., Professor and Chair of the Neuroscience program at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) has come a step closer to unraveling this puzzle. The scientists probed how the functional connectivity among neurons within the auditory cortex gives rise to a "map" of acoustic space.

"What we learned from this approach has put us in a position to investigate and understand how sound responsiveness arises from the underlying circuitry of the auditory cortex," says Zador. His team's findings appear online, ahead of print, on October 17th in Nature Neuroscience.

Neuronal organization within the auditory cortex fundamentally differs from the organization within brain regions that process sensory inputs such as sight and sensation. For instance, the relative spatial arrangement of sight receptors in the retina (the eyes' light-sensitive inner surface) is directly represented as a two-dimensional "retinotopic" map in the brain's visual cortex.

In the auditory system, however, the organization of sound receptors in the cochlea -- the snail-like structure in the ear -- is one-dimensional. Cochlear receptors near the outer edge recognize low-frequency sounds whereas those whereas those near the inside of the cochlea are tuned to higher frequencies. This low-to-high distribution, called 'tonotopy,' is preserved along one dimension in the auditory cortex, with neurons tuned to high and low frequencies arranged in a head-to-tail gradient.
"Because sound is intrinsically a one-dimensional signal, unlike signals for other senses such as sight and sensation which are intrinsically two-dimensional, the map of sound in the auditory cortex is also intrinsically one-dimensional," explains Zador. "This means that there is a functional difference in the cortical map between the low-to-high direction and the direction perpendicular to it. However, no one has been able understand how that difference arises from the underlying neuronal circuitry."

To address this question, Zador and postdoctoral fellow Hysell Oviedo compared neuronal activity in mouse brain slices that were cut to preserve the connectivity along the tonotopic axis vs. activity in slices that were cut perpendicular to it.

To precisely stimulate a single neuron within a slice and record from it, Oviedo and Zador, working in collaboration with former CSHL scientists Karel Svoboda and Ingrid Bureau, used a powerful tool called laser-scanning photostimulation. This method allows the construction of a detailed, high-resolution picture that reveals the position, strength and the number of inputs converging on a single neuron within a slice.

"If you did this experiment in the visual cortex, you would see that the connectivity is the same regardless of which way you cut the slice," explains Oviedo. "But in our experiments in the auditory cortex slices, we found that there was a qualitative difference in the connectivity between slices cut along the tonotopic axis vs. those cut perpendicular to it."

There was an even more striking divergence from the visual cortex -- and presumably the other cortical regions. As demonstrated by a Nobel Prize-winning discovery in 1962, in the visual cortex, the neurons that share the same input source (or respond to the same signal) are organized into columns. As Oviedo puts it, "all neurons within a column in the vertical cortex are tuned to the same position in space and are more likely to communicate with other neurons from within the same column."
Analogously, in the auditory cortex, neurons within a column are expected to be tuned to the same frequency. So the scientists were especially surprised to find that for a given neuron in this region, the dominant input signal didn't come from within its column but from outside it.

"It comes from neurons that we think are tuned to higher frequencies," elaborates Zador. "This is the first example of the neuronal organizing principle not following the columnar pattern, but rather an out-of-column pattern." Discovering this unexpected, out-of-column source of information for a neuron in the auditory complex adds a new twist to their research, which is focused on understanding auditory function in terms of the underlying circuitry and how this is altered in disorders such as autism.

"With this study, we've moved beyond having only a conceptual notion of the functional difference between the two axes by actually finding correlates for this difference at the level of the neuronal microcircuits in this region," he explains.

This work was supported by grants from the US National Institutes of Health, the Patterson Foundation, the Swartz Foundation and Autism Speaks.

Beethoven and Your Brain’: a synaptic symphony

(Original Link - http://www.thestar.com/entertainment/music/article/878228--beethoven-and-your-brain-a-synaptic-symphony?sms_ss=twitter&at_xt=4cbfbc74a4bd6c6b,0)

Think of a new piece of music you heard recently. Chances are you knew right away if you liked it, hated it, or didn’t care.

Now try to describe what caused that instant reaction. If you’re like most people, it isn’t easy translating a visceral impulse into words.

That made conductor Edwin Outwater think. “Everyone always talks or writes about music in terms of structure; no one ever describes it in terms of effect,” he says.

To help him make the point, the dynamic and inventive music director of the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony has teamed up with McGill University neuroscientist Daniel Levitin — author of This is Your Brain on Music and The World in Six Songs — to present a very different kind of concert at Koerner Hall next Wednesday night.

In “Beethoven and Your Brain,” Outwater, his orchestra and Levitin are going to take the audience through the infamous Symphony No. 5, focusing on what has kept this music so fresh and compelling over the two centuries since its premiere.

Rather than an old-fashioned show-and-tell, this concert is about an involved audience. Outwater says as many patrons as possible will be given electronic “clickers” to measure reactions throughout the symphony.

“We’re going to show the results of each poll on a big screen,” Outwater explains. “It’ll be a way for audience members to feel a sense of community with each other.”

Much of the focus will be on showing how “predictive” our brains are — that we expect the music we hear to do certain things. If those expectations are met, we are likely to enjoy the music; if the music keeps crashing into our expectations, we get upset.

Outwater, palpably energized by this project, talks about how Beethoven plays with expectations in his symphony, beginning with the strange pause at the end of the famous “ba-ba-ba-bam” opening.
“And how does that relate to the world around us?” Outwater asks. “Could it be like suddenly hearing a car alarm go off?”

The conductor and Levitin hit it off after an initial meeting two years ago, and co-wrote a big chunk of the evening’s script by trading emails during their busy schedules.

Toronto gets the premiere performance. They repeat their experiment on Oct. 28 and 29 at the Conrad Centre in Kitchener, and hope that there will be interest farther afield in the future.
“I’m really nervous about it,” Outwater admits, smiling. Conductors are expected to make music, not talk about it.

But the native Californian isn’t going in cold.

“I sang in an a cappella chorus in college,” Outwater recalls. The group linked its musical numbers with jokey introductions. “We learned timing really fast.”

The conductor admits he didn’t come to classical music until he was 14. “I had an epiphany,” he adds, wishing that more people would let go their inhibitions and give the genre a try.

“So many people are afraid of asking questions,” he says. “They’re afraid that they might not like it.”

Outwater says that finding out what he does for a living causes many people to wonder what that means. “Well, the music’s all there on paper, right?” is a common reaction.

The maestro has his answer ready: “How many ways are there to say, ‘To be, or not to be?’” he asks, launching into several very different versions. He’ll then tell that person that it’s the conductor’s job to choose which version is going to get heard from the stage.

“As soon as I’ve done that, people understand what interpretation means, right away,” Outwater says with a smile.

He hopes “Beethoven and Your Brain” will offer up more of those “aha” moments — along with some fine musicmaking.

Music and the Mind - Aniruddh Patel Ph.D. - VIDEO

Babies Are Born to Dance, New Research Shows

(Original Link - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/03/100315161925.htm)

Researchers have discovered that infants respond to the rhythm and tempo of music and find it more engaging than speech.

The findings, based on the study of infants aged between five months and two years old, suggest that babies may be born with a predisposition to move rhythmically in response to music.

The research was conducted by Dr Marcel Zentner, from the University of York's Department of Psychology, and Dr Tuomas Eerola, from the Finnish Centre of Excellence in Interdisciplinary Music Research at the University of Jyvaskyla.

Dr Zentner said: "Our research suggests that it is the beat rather than other features of the music, such as the melody, that produces the response in infants.

"We also found that the better the children were able to synchronize their movements with the music the more they smiled.

"It remains to be understood why humans have developed this particular predisposition. One possibility is that it was a target of natural selection for music or that it has evolved for some other function that just happens to be relevant for music processing."

Infants listened to a variety of audio stimuli including classical music, rhythmic beats and speech. Their spontaneous movements were recorded by video and 3D motion-capture technology and compared across the different stimuli.

Professional ballet dancers were also used to analyse the extent to which the babies matched their movement to the music.

The findings are published March 15 in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Online Early Edition.

The research was part-funded by a grant from the Swiss National Science Foundation.

For Your Brain to Work, it Helps to Have a Beat

 This is an illustration of how brain rhythms organize distributed groups of neurons into functional cell assemblies. The colors represent different cell assemblies. Neurons in widely separated brain areas often need to work together without interfering with other, spatially overlapping groups. Each assembly is sensitive to different frequencies, producing independent patterns of coordinated neural activity, depicted as color traces to the right of each network. (Credit: Ryan Canolty, UC Berkeley)


(Original Link - http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/09/100920151806.htm)

When it comes to conducting complex tasks, it turns out that the brain needs rhythm, according to researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

Specifically, cortical rhythms, or oscillations, can effectively rally groups of neurons in widely dispersed regions of the brain to engage in coordinated activity, much like a conductor will summon up various sections of an orchestra in a symphony.

Even the simple act of catching a ball necessitates an impressive coordination of multiple groups of neurons to perceive the object, judge its speed and trajectory, decide when it's time to catch it and then direct the muscles in the body to grasp it before it whizzes by or drops to the ground.

Until now, neuroscientists had not fully understood how these neuron groups in widely dispersed regions of the brain first get linked together so they can work in concert for such complex tasks.
The UC Berkeley findings are being published in the online early edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"One of the key problems in neuroscience right now is how you go from billions of diverse and independent neurons, on the one hand, to a unified brain able to act and survive in a complex world, on the other," said principal investigator Jose Carmena, UC Berkeley assistant professor at the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences, the Program in Cognitive Science, and the Helen Wills Neuroscience Institute. "Evidence from this study supports the idea that neuronal oscillations are a critical mechanism for organizing the activity of individual neurons into larger functional groups."

The idea behind anatomically dispersed but functionally related groups of neurons is credited to neuroscientist Donald Hebb, who put forward the concept in his 1949 book "The Organization of Behavior."

"Hebb basically said that single neurons weren't the most important unit of brain operation, and that it's really the cell assembly that matters," said study lead author Ryan Canolty, a UC Berkeley postdoctoral fellow in the Carmena lab.

It took decades after Hebb's book for scientists to start unraveling how groups of neurons dynamically assemble. Not only do neuron groups need to work together for the task of perception -- such as following the course of a baseball as it makes its way through the air -- but they then need to join forces with groups of neurons in other parts of the brain, such as in regions responsible for cognition and body control.

At UC Berkeley, neuroscientists examined existing data recorded over the past four years from four macaque monkeys. Half of the subjects were engaged in brain-machine interface tasks, and the other half were participating in working memory tasks. The researchers looked at how the timing of electrical spikes -- or action potentials -- emitted by nerve cells was related to rhythms occurring in multiple areas across the brain.

Among the squiggly lines, patterns emerged that give literal meaning to the phrase "tuned in." The timing of when individual neurons spiked was synchronized with brain rhythms occurring in distinct frequency bands in other regions of the brain. For example, the high-beta band -- 25 to 40 hertz (cycles per second) -- was especially important for brain areas involved in motor control and planning.

"Many neurons are thought to respond to a receptive field, so that if I look at one motor neuron as I move my hand to the left, I'll see it fire more often, but if I move my hand to the right, the neuron fires less often," said Carmena. "What we've shown here is that, in addition to these traditional 'external' receptive fields, many neurons also respond to 'internal' receptive fields. Those internal fields focus on large-scale patterns of synchronization involving distinct cortical areas within a larger functional network."

The researchers expressed surprise that this spike dependence was not restricted to the neuron's local environment. It turns out that this local-to-global connection is vital for organizing spatially distributed neuronal groups.

"If neurons only cared about what was happening in their local environment, then it would be difficult to get neurons to work together if they happened to be in different cortical areas," said Canolty. "But when multiple neurons spread all over the brain are tuned in to a specific pattern of electrical activity at a specific frequency, then whenever that global activity pattern occurs, those neurons can act as a coordinated assembly."

The researchers pointed out that this mechanism of cell assembly formation via oscillatory phase coupling is selective. Two neurons that are sensitive to different frequencies or to different spatial coupling patterns will exhibit independent activity, no matter how close they are spatially, and will not be part of the same assembly. Conversely, two neurons that prefer a similar pattern of coupling will exhibit similar spiking activity over time, even if they are widely separated or in different brain areas.
"It is like the radio communication between emergency first responders at an earthquake," Canolty said. "You have many people spread out over a large area, and the police need to be able to talk to each other on the radio to coordinate their action without interfering with the firefighters, and the firefighters need to be able to communicate without disrupting the EMTs. So each group tunes into and uses a different radio frequency, providing each group with an independent channel of communication despite the fact that they are spatially spread out and overlapping."

The authors noted that this local-to-global relationship in brain activity may prove useful for improving the performance of brain-machine interfaces, or lead to novel strategies for regulating dysfunctional brain networks through electrical stimulation. Treatment of movement disorders through deep brain stimulation, for example, usually targets a single area. This study suggests that gentler rhythmic stimulation in several areas at once may also prove effective, the authors said.

Other co-authors of the study are Jonathan Wallis, UC Berkeley associate professor of psychology; Dr. Karunesh Ganguly, UC Berkeley post-doctoral fellow in the Carmena lab and staff scientist at the San Francisco Veterans Affairs Medical Center; Steven Kennerley, now a senior lecturer at University College London's Institute of Neurology; Charles Cadieu, UC Berkeley post-doctoral researcher in neuroscience; and Kilian Koepsell, UC Berkeley assistant researcher in neuroscience.

The National Institutes of Health, National Science Foundation, U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, American Heart Association, Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and the Multiscale System Center helped support this research.

Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain

Ok. So you guys know how much I love reading about music and neurology, so I wanted to let you guys know about another great book Ive been deep into for the past few days. Its "Musicophilia" by Oliver Sacks. This is a lot different from the last book I was talking about "This is Your Brain on Music", in that, this one has some more extreme stories of people who have been effected by music at extreme degrees. There are stories of people becoming overnight prodigies due to head trauma, people having musical epilepsy, musical seizures, musical hallucinations, etc. It is a great read and highly recommended!!!!

MORE INFO - http://www.musicophilia.com/

Musicophilia, a New York Times bestseller, has been named one of the washington post's best books of 2007">Best Books of 2007 by the Washington Post and the editors of Amazon.com

Music can move us to the heights or depths of emotion. It can persuade us to buy something, or remind us of our first date. It can lift us out of depression when nothing else can. It can get us dancing to its beat. But the power of music goes much, much further. Indeed, music occupies more areas of our brain than language does--humans are a musical species.

Oliver Sacks's compassionate, compelling tales of people struggling to adapt to different neurological conditions have fundamentally changed the way we think of our own brains, and of the human experience. In Musicophilia, he examines the powers of music through the individual experiences of patients, musicians, and everyday people--from a man who is struck by lightning and suddenly inspired to become a pianist at the age of forty-two, to an entire group of children with Williams syndrome who are hypermusical from birth; from people with "amusia," to whom a symphony sounds like the clattering of pots and pans, to a man whose memory spans only seven seconds--for everything but music.

Our exquisite sensitivity to music can sometimes go wrong: Sacks explores how catchy tunes can subject us to hours of mental replay, and how a surprising number of people acquire nonstop musical hallucinations that assault them night and day. Yet far more frequently, music goes right: Sacks describes how music can animate people with Parkinson's disease who cannot otherwise move, give words to stroke patients who cannot otherwise speak, and calm and organize people whose memories are ravaged by Alzheimer's or amnesia.