Music to My Brain

Anyone that knows me also knows that I am absolutely obsessed with music. I cannot walk anywhere without my huge headphones clamped on my head, so 99% of the time, I will not hear you if you try to call my name (something I am trying to work on!). Naturally, I found a very interesting fMRI study regarding brain activity in pianists; a study that not only did I deeply appreciate because I've been playing piano since I was six, but because one can see from the research just how complex an instrument it is. 12 students were asked to play the right hand of a piece of music, and the fMRI scan showed primary activation of the frontoparietal cortical region. The truly incredible part of the study was the fact that the researchers acknowledged the importance of mental rehearsal for a pianist and implicated brain regions in this as well, which were similar to the the music performance task, with the addition of the bilateral activation of the extrastriate cortex. Music is so wonderfully complex that I found it amazing that they were able to even quantify the expression of music in the brain, especially the rehearsal aspect. Many times before I performed I ran the piece over and over in my mind, something that I always felt was a personal habit. To see this quantified in a study was amazing.

It's Not 1984!

Despite the numerous fascinating techniques that have been developed to examine the mechanics of the brain, I believe it would be even more interesting to have a mind-reading device, simply because it would be amazing to see if something as immeasurable as human thoughts being converted into a format that we could understand through a machine. It would be very frightening to think of the government to use this as a device to invade the privacy of our own minds! The development of any new exciting technology always comes with the risk of it falling into the wrong hands and ultimately becoming a weapon. However, if this technology was carefully researched, harnessed and most of all, protected to be used for certain purposes only, it could mean exciting things for the future. Nothing terrifies me more than a world as described in George Orwell's 1984, which in my opinion would be the kind of world we would risk living in if we let this technology run away from us. If I were to invent this machine, I would recommend its use for scientific and research purposes, not political. We could use this to perhaps tweak social neuroscience experiments to understand what kinds of thoughts accompany the activation of certain brain regions. Emotion is so nuanced and complex that it would be more interesting to discover just what kinds of thoughts are running through someone's head instead of just attributing a vague emotion like "anger" or "fear" to a brain region. Let's not let our thirst for knowledge run away with us though! If I had developed this technology I would sell it only to scientists and keep it out of the realm of politics because that is where the most abuse would occur, plus as much as I love George Orwell, I don't want to live in his world.

Silence of the Lambs- Spoiler Alert!

One of my all-time favorite movies is Silence of the Lambs for two reasons: 1. I am fascinated by serial killers. This may seem odd, but I find the motives and personal histories of serial killers intriguing because in my opinion, these killers are shaped by their environments and it is important to understand the neurological and environmental aspects of psychopathy to find a way to perhaps "cure" it. 2. Anthony Hopkins is one of the greatest actors who ever lived. In the film, Hopkins portrays a brilliant psychiatrist turned cannibalistic serial killer, Hannibal Lecter whose character simultaneously made me loathe and love him. He possesses qualities of a textbook psychopath- high level of intelligence, charm, and lack of remorse or moral qualms about killing. His manipulations of the people around him are astonishing, for instance in the beginning of the film when he convinces the man in the cell next to him to kill himself. He calmly recounts one of his murders: "I ate his liver with some fava beans, and a nice Chianti." His role in the film was to help detective Clarice Starling catch another serial killer, Buffalo Bill, who kidnaps overweight women and starves, kills, and skins them. He then, like the real serial killer he was based on, Ed Gein, wears their skins because he actually wants to be a woman. Lecter provides valuable insight into the mind of Buffalo Bill and ultimately helps Starling track him. The chillingly calm and twisted manner in which Hopkins portrays Lecter is astonishing- Oscar well deserved. He portrays down to every last detail, the charm, menacing calm, and twisted sense of morality of a psychopath.

What is confusing about statistics, experimentation or journal articles?

I have always found that the language of empirical journal articles confuses me the most. In certain articles, the language can be clear, concise, and easy to interpret, but for the majority of the papers I've read, the experimenters seem to try to find the most long-winding method of describing their work. Often, I read a paragraph, then have to pause and think, "Wait...what?" Even after several retries, I still may not completely grasp what the point of the paragraph was. Furthermore, in the "methods" section of each paper, there are so many types of protocols and names of experimentation methods that I struggle to keep track of which method produced which conclusion. When I hear about science in the media, for example, a news article that generalizes a statistic to the general public, I become skeptical of where these results came from and wonder if such generalizations lead to misconceptions about the issue in question. I believe that it is crucial to identify to the readers the caution that must be taken when  analyzing such statistics.