10 Search Results for "music and neuroscience"
Celebrating the Fourth with Neuroscience Fireworks
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
There’s so much to celebrate about our country this Fourth of July. That includes giving thanks to all those healthcare providers who have put themselves in harm’s way to staff the ERs, hospital wards, and ICUs to care for those afflicted with COVID-19, and also for everyone who worked so diligently to develop, test, and distribute COVID-19 vaccines.
These “shots of hope,” created with rigorous science and in record time, are making it possible for a great many Americans to gather safely once again with family and friends. So, if you’re vaccinated (and I really hope you are—because these vaccines have been proven safe and highly effective), fire up the grill, crank up the music, and get ready to show your true red, white, and blue colors. My wife and I—both fully vaccinated—intend to do just that!
To help get the celebration rolling, I’d like to share a couple minutes of some pretty amazing biological fireworks. While the track of a John Philip Sousa march is added just for fun, what you see in the video above is the result of some very serious neuroscience research that is scientifically, as well as visually, breath taking. Credit for this work goes to an NIH-supported team that includes Ricardo Azevedo and Sunil Gandhi, at the Center for the Neurobiology of Learning and Memory, University of California, Irvine, and their collaborator Damian Wheeler, Translucence Biosystems, Irvine, CA. Azevedo is also an NIH National Research Service Award fellow and a Medical Scientist Training Program trainee with Gandhi.
The team’s video starts off with 3D, colorized renderings of a mouse brain at cellular resolution. About 25 seconds in, the video flashes to a bundle of nerve fibers called the fornix. Thanks to the wonders of fluorescent labeling combined with “tissue-clearing” and other innovative technologies, you can clearly see the round cell bodies of individual neurons, along with the long, arm-like axons that they use to send out signals and connect with other neurons to form signaling circuits. The human brain has nearly 100 trillion of these circuits and, when activated, they process incoming sensory information and provide outputs that lead to our thoughts, words, feelings, and actions.
As shown in the video, the nerve fibers of the fornix provide a major output pathway from the hippocampus, a region of the brain involved in memory. Next, we travel to the brain’s neocortex, the outermost part of the brain that’s responsible for complex behaviors, and then move on to explore an intricate structure called the corticospinal tract, which carries motor commands to the spinal cord. The final stop is the olfactory tubercle —towards the base of the frontal lobe—a key player in odor processing and motivated behaviors.
Azevedo and his colleagues imaged the brain in this video in about 40 minutes using their imaging platform called the Translucence Biosystems’ Mesoscale Imaging System™. This process starts with a tissue-clearing method that eliminates light-scattering lipids, leaving the mouse brain transparent. From there, advanced light-sheet microscopy makes thin optical sections of the tissue, and 3D data processing algorithms reconstruct the image to high resolution.
Using this platform, researchers can take brain-wide snapshots of neuronal activity linked to a specific behavior. They can also use it to trace neural circuits that span various regions of the brain, allowing them to form new hypotheses about the brain’s connectivity and how such connectivity contributes to memory and behavior.
The video that you see here is a special, extended version of the team’s first-place video from the NIH-supported BRAIN Initiative’s 2020 “Show Us Your BRAINS!” imaging contest. Because of the great potential of this next-generation technology, Translucence Biosystems has received Small Business Innovation Research grants from NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health to disseminate its “brain-clearing” imaging technology to the neuroscience community.
As more researchers try out this innovative approach, one can only imagine how much more data will be generated to enhance our understanding of how the brain functions in health and disease. That is what will be truly spectacular for everyone working on new and better ways to help people suffering from Alzheimer’s disease, Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia, autism, epilepsy, traumatic brain injury, depression, and so many other neurological and psychiatric disorders.
Wishing all of you a happy and healthy July Fourth!
Links:
Brain Research Through Advancing Innovative Neurotechnologies® (BRAIN) Initiative (NIH)
NIH National Research Service Award
Medical Scientist Training Program (National Institute of General Medical Sciences/NIH)
Small Business Innovation Research and Small Business Technology Transfer (NIH)
Translucence Biosystems (Irvine, CA)
Sunil Gandhi (University of California, Irvine)
Ricardo Azevedo (University of California, Irvine)
Video: iDISCO-cleared whole brain from a Thy1-GFP mouse (Translucence Biosystems)
Show Us Your BRAINs! Photo & Video Contest (Brain Initiative/NIH)
NIH Support: National Institute of Mental Health; National Eye Institute
New Grants Explore Benefits of Music on Health
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
It’s not every day you get to perform with one of the finest voices on the planet. What an honor it was to join renowned opera singer Renée Fleming back in May for a rendition of “How Can I Keep from Singing?” at the NIH’s J. Edward Rall Cultural Lecture. Yet our duet was so much more. Between the song’s timeless message and Renée’s matchless soprano, the music filled me with a profound sense of joy, like being briefly lifted outside myself into a place of beauty and well-being. How does that happen?
Indeed, the benefits of music for human health and well-being have long been recognized. But biomedical science still has a quite limited understanding of music’s mechanisms of action in the brain, as well as its potential to ease symptoms of an array of disorders including Parkinson’s disease, stroke, and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In a major step toward using rigorous science to realize music’s potential for improving human health, NIH has just awarded $20 million over five years to support the first research projects of the Sound Health initiative. Launched a couple of years ago, Sound Health is a partnership between NIH and the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, in association with the National Endowment for the Arts.
With support from 10 NIH institutes and centers, the Sound Health awardees will, among other things, study how music might improve the motor skills of people with Parkinson’s disease. Previous research has shown that the beat of a metronome can steady the gait of someone with Parkinson’s disease, but more research is needed to determine exactly why that happens.
Other fascinating areas to be explored by the Sound Health awardees include:
• Assessing how active music interventions, often called music therapies, affect multiple biomarkers that correlate with improvement in health status. The aim is to provide a more holistic understanding of how such interventions serve to ease cancer-related stress and possibly even improve immune function.
• Investigating the effects of music on the developing brain of infants as they learn to talk. Such work may be especially helpful for youngsters at high risk for speech and language disorders.
• Studying synchronization of musical rhythm as part of social development. This research will look at how this process is disrupted in children with autism spectrum disorder, possibly suggesting ways of developing music-based interventions to improve communication.
• Examining the memory-related impacts of repeated exposures to a certain song or musical phrase, including those “earworms” that get “stuck” in our heads. This work might tell us more about how music sometimes serves as a cue for retrieving associated memories, even in people whose memory skills are impaired by Alzheimer’s disease or other cognitive disorders.
• Tracing the developmental timeline—from childhood to adulthood—of how music shapes the brain. This will include studying how musical training at different points on that timeline may influence attention span, executive function, social/emotional functioning, and language skills.
We are fortunate to live in an exceptional time of discovery in neuroscience, as well as an extraordinary era of creativity in music. These Sound Health grants represent just the beginning of what I hope will be a long and productive partnership that brings these creative fields together. I am convinced that the power of science holds tremendous promise for improving the effectiveness of music-based interventions, and expanding their reach to improve the health and well-being of people suffering from a wide variety of conditions.
Links:
The Soprano and the Scientist: A Conversation About Music and Medicine, (National Public Radio, June 2, 2017)
NIH Workshop on Music and Health, January 2017
Sound Health (NIH)
NIH Support: National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health; National Eye Institute; National Institute on Aging; National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism; National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders; National Institute of Mental Health; National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke; National Institute of Nursing Research; Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research; Office of the Director
Talking Music and Science with Yo-Yo Ma
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
It’s not every day that an amateur guitar picker gets to play a duet with an internationally renowned classical cellist. But that was my thrill this week as I joined Yo-Yo Ma in a creative interpretation of the traditional song, “How Can I Keep from Singing?” Our short jam session capped off Mr. Ma’s appearance as this year’s J. Edward Rall Cultural Lecture.
The event, which counts The Dalai Lama, Maya Angelou, and Atul Gawande among its distinguished alumni, this year took the form of a conversation on the intersection of music and science—and earned a standing ovation from a packed house of researchers, patients, and staff here on the National Institutes of Health (NIH) campus in Bethesda, MD.
Sound Advice: High School Music Training Sharpens Language Skills
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
When children enter the first grade, their brains are primed for learning experiences, significantly more so, in fact, than adult brains. For instance, scientists have documented that musical training during grade school produces a signature set of benefits for the brain and for behavior—benefits that can last a lifetime, whether or not people continue to play music.
Now, researchers at Northwestern University, Evanston, IL, have some good news for teenagers who missed out on learning to play musical instruments as young kids. Even when musical training isn’t started until high school, it produces meaningful changes in how the brain processes sound. And those changes have positive benefits not only for a teen’s musical abilities, but also for skills related to reading and writing.
Exploring the Universality of Human Song
Posted on by Dr. Francis Collins
It’s often said that music is a universal language. But is it really universal? Some argue that humans are just too culturally complex and their music is far too varied to expect any foundational similarity. Yet some NIH-funded researchers recently decided to take on the challenge, using the tools of computational social science to analyze recordings of human songs and other types of data gathered from more than 300 societies around the globe.
In a study published in the journal Science [1], the researchers conclude that music is indeed universal. Their analyses showed that all of the cultures studied used song in four similar behavioral contexts: dance, love, healing, and infant care. What’s more, no matter where in the world one goes, songs used in each of those ways were found to share certain musical features, including tone, pitch, and rhythm.
As exciting as the new findings may be for those who love music (like me), the implications may extend far beyond music itself. The work may help to shed new light on the complexities of the human brain, as well as inform efforts to enhance the role of music in improving human health. The healing power of music is a major focus of the NIH-supported Sound Health Initiative.
Samuel Mehr, a researcher at Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, led this latest study, funded in part by an NIH Director’s Early Independence Award. His multi-disciplinary team included anthropologists Manvir Singh, Harvard, and Luke Glowacki, Penn State University, State College; computational linguist Timothy O’Donnell, McGill University, Montreal, Canada; and political scientists Dean Knox, Princeton University, Princeton, NJ, and Christopher Lucas, Washington University, St. Louis.
In work published last year [2], Mehr’s team found that untrained listeners in 60 countries could on average discern the human behavior associated with culturally unfamiliar musical forms. These behaviors included dancing, soothing a baby, seeking to heal illness, or expressing love to another person.
In the latest study, the team took these initial insights and applied them more broadly to the universality of music. They started with the basic question: Do all human societies make music?
To find the answer, the team accessed Yale University’s Human Relations Area Files, an internationally recognized database for cultural anthropologists. This rich resource contains high-quality data for 319 mostly tribal societies across the planet, allowing the researchers to search archival information for mentions of music. Their search pulled up music tags for 309 societies. Digging deeper in other historical records not in the database, the team confirmed that the remaining six societies did indeed make music.
The researchers propose that these 319 societies provide a representative cross section of humanity. They thus conclude that it is statistically probable that music is in fact found in all human societies.
What exactly is so universal about music? To begin answering this complex question, the researchers tapped into more than a century of musicology to build a vast, multi-faceted database that they call the Natural History of Song (NHS).
Drawing from the NHS database, the researchers focused on nearly 5,000 vocally performed songs from 60 carefully selected human societies on all continents. By statistically analyzing those musical descriptions, they found that the behaviors associated with songs vary along three dimensions, which the researchers refer to as formality, arousal, and religiosity.
When the researchers mapped the four types of songs from their earlier study—love, dance, lullaby, and healing—onto these dimensions, they found that songs used in similar behavioral contexts around the world clustered together. For instance, across human societies, dance songs tend to appear in more formal contexts with large numbers of people. They also tend to be upbeat and energetic and don’t usually appear as part of religious ceremonies. In contrast, love songs tend to be more informal and less energetic.
Interestingly, the team also replicated its previous study in a citizen-science experiment with nearly 30,000 participants living in over 100 countries worldwide. They found again that listeners could tell what kinds of songs they were listening to, even when those songs came from faraway places. They went on to show that certain acoustic features of songs, like tempo, melody, and pitch, help to predict a song’s primary behavioral function across societies.
In many musical styles, melodies are composed of a fixed set of distinct tones organized around a tonal center (sometimes called the “tonic,” it’s the “do” in “do-re-mi”). For instance, the researchers explain, the tonal center of “Row Your Boat” is found in each “row” as well as the last “merrily,” and the final “dream.”
Their analyses show that songs with such basic tonal melodies are widespread and perhaps even universal. This suggests that tonality could be a means to delve even deeper into the natural history of world music and other associated behaviors, such as play, mourning, and fighting.
While some aspects of music may be universal, others are quite diverse. That’s particularly true within societies, where people may express different psychological states in song to capture their views of their culture. In fact, Mehr’s team found that the musical variation within a typical society is six times greater for that reason than the musical diversity across societies.
Following up on this work, Mehr’s team is now recruiting families with young infants for a study to understand how they respond to their varied collection of songs. Meanwhile, through the Sound Health Initiative, other research teams around the country are exploring many other ways in which listening to and creating music may influence and improve our health. As a scientist and amateur musician, I couldn’t be more excited to take part in this exceptional time of discovery at the intersection of health, neuroscience, and music.
References:
[1] Universality and diversity in human song. Mehr SA, Singh M, Knox D, Ketter DM, Pickens-Jones D, Atwood S, Lucas C, Jacoby N, Egner AA, Hopkins EJ, Howard RM, Hartshorne JK, Jennings MV, Simson J, Bainbridge CM, Pinker S, O’Donnell TJ, Krasnow MM, Glowacki L. Science. 2019 Nov 22;366(6468).
[2] Form and function in human song. Mehr SA, Singh M, York H, Glowacki L, Krasnow MM. Curr Biol. 2018 Feb 5;28(3):356-368.e5.
Links:
Sound Health Initiative (NIH)
Video: Music and the Mind—A Q & A with Renée Fleming & Francis Collins (YouTube)
The Music Lab (Harvard University, Cambridge, MA)
Samuel Mehr (Harvard)
NIH Director’s Early Independence Award (Common Fund)
NIH Support: Common Fund
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