The musical mind
October 16th 2011 16:05
Experiment looks inside the musical mind of David Robertson
David Robertson's musical mind has made him a celebrated conductor here and abroad, as music director of the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra and as a guest elsewhere. Now it could help some distinguished local neurologists to better understand just how the human brain works when it comes to music.
Three subjects — Robertson and two scientists — were tested, hooked up to brain imaging machinery and listening to the same music. The ways in which their brains reacted, as seen in color imaging, were very different: when the music was playing, Robertson's lit up like a Christmas tree, far more vividly than those of the others, both music lovers but nonmusicians.
"It's a way of illustrating where the science is going," says Al Wiman, the St. Louis Science Center's managing director for community engagement. The Science Center held a public event, "The Musical Brain of David Robertson," on Thursday night, to show just how different Robertson's brain looks from two others.
"The radiologists are very excited about," what they found, says Dr. Philip Needleman. The interim president and CEO of the St. Louis Science Center, he's a researcher whose work led to the development of the arthritis drug Celebrex. "They were frankly surprised by how much data they got from David."
It was Needleman's idea to check out Robertson's brain for the experiment. Along with Dr. Yvette Sheline, a Washington University psychiatrist, he also served as one of the two nonmusician controls in the ministudy. The three of them listened to 20-second snippets of the SLSO's recordings of John Adams' "Doctor Atomic" symphony and "Harmonielehre," as well as randomly generated music produced by a program using a synthetic piano and silence. At another point Robertson conducted the fourth movement of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony in his head while being scanned. The researchers also played the same movement for Sheline and Needleman and mapped their reactions.
Dr. Marcus Raichle is a professor of radiology, neurology, neurobiology and biomedical engineering at Washington University. A 41-year veteran at the university, he's also an amateur oboist, which added to his interest in the project. Raichle agreed to run the experiment on an MRI machine, and was surprised by the results. "When they're hearing the same sounds, (their brains) ought to look the same. Strikingly, they didn't."
Much of Raichle's research has to do with the brain's "dark energy," the mental activity that continues when a person is at rest. At one time that activity was thought to be mere "noise," but Raichle and his associates have proved otherwise.
It turns out that the brain is never really at rest; the supposed background activity — which takes place in the brain's default mode network, or DMN — may be a critical part of brain function, and in competition with the other systems of the brain. The DMN enables us to react instantly to stimuli without any warm-up time or pause, like swatting at a fly the moment it lands on an arm.
Robertson's DMN allowed his mind to react immediately the first time he heard one of his recordings, lighting up the images on the MRI machine. "He was on top of that thing," says Raichle. In contrast, Needleman and Sheline gradually came on board with it, responding in a Robertsonian fashion only after the fourth or fifth time they'd heard it.
"Our reactions to 'Doctor Atomic' were strikingly different," says Needleman. "To me, it was chaos." Not to Robertson, who didn't just listen to the music, but relived conducting it as well.
Sheline uses imaging technology with patients who suffer from depression. An SLSO subscriber, she had heard the Adams pieces before, and didn't particularly care for them. "I had to try very hard to tune in to the modern music," she says. "For David Robertson, (hearing and conducting) it was a joyful experience. I don't love it at all."
In her view, "it looked like there was a progressive ability to tune in to the music. Over time, our brains were tracking music better. Some aspects of what our brains were doing had more to do with learning and memory than with innate ability."
Another research scientist involved in the study, Dr. Avi Snyder, cautions, "A three-subject experiment is completely invalid scientifically. It's almost a stunt." Not quite, though. Snyder adds, "The contrast between the subjects was so stark that I'm convinced it's a real finding."
Other studies have shown the brains of musicians to be well-developed in the area that controls the planning of motor behavior: "It's the brain equivalent of your muscles getting bigger when you lift weights," Snyder says.
Snyder would like to continue the research with a scientifically rigorous experiment, using a larger subject pool. "The hypothesis is that the brains of musicians are different from the brains of nonmusicians."
Raichle says this line of research "is unlikely to be dropped. It does tap into things that go beyond 'How do I move my hand' to how music or art appeals to somebody. What's great about it? There's this curious, intuitive appeal that resonates beyond words. How does this come about?
"What we view as conscious awareness is actually a small window of what our brain is doing. We may ask ourselves, 'Why do I like this?' This work could help us understand the reason."
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