Science & SF Tidbits: Brain Music

Music from the brain and the brain on music:

• Scale-Free Brain-Wave Music from Simultaneously EEG and fMRI Recordings - PLoS One

Neuroscience + art = the music of our minds

A team of Chinese scientists has proposed a new method of translating the signals from EEG-fMRI brain scans into music. We'll have to wait and see if the music eventually is an aid to diagnosis or medical treatment as the authors hope, or if this turns out to be an off-beat art project:

"The brain music, as one of the human brain's intelligence product, embodies the secret of brain in an artistic style, provides the platform for scientist and artist to work together to understand ourselves, and it is also a new interactive link between the human brain and music. We hope the on-going progresses of the brain signals based music will properly unravel part of the truth in the brain, and then to be used for clinical diagnosis and bio-feedback therapy in the future."

Listen to the EEG music

Image: Illustration of the score of EEG-fMRI music from Lu J, Wu D, Yang H, Luo C, Li C, et al. (2012) Scale-Free Brain-Wave Music from Simultaneously EEG and fMRI Recordings. PLoS ONE 7(11): e49773. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0049773 Shared under a CC-BY-2.5 license.

• Brain scans of rappers shed light on creativity » Nature News

What does a rapper's brain look like while he's freestyling? Neuroscientists at the National Institutes of Health had 12 rappers improvise while in an MRI machine. What they found was that brain activity in the medial prefrontal cortex increased, and activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex decreased. What that may mean is that the parts of the brain involved in cognitive "executive functions" like planning, problem solving, attention and verbal reasoning might be relaxed during the creative process.

This could explain why the creation of music can seem to flow during improvisation without any conscious thought. As study co-author and alternative hip-hop artist Open Mike Eagle puts it:

“That’s kind of the nature of that type of improvisation. Even as people who do it, we’re not 100% sure of where we’re getting improvisation from.”

• Notes & Neurons: In Search of the Common Chorus

Performer Bobby McFerrin and cognitive neuroscientist Daniel Levitin teamed up at the 2009 World Science Festival to demonstrate how our brains are wired for music.

In this clip McFerrin "plays" the audience with the pentatonic scale:

Science and SF Tidbits: October 18, 2012: Hard SF, Silky Electronics, and Exoplanets

Recent interesting science fiction and bioscience bits:

• Locus Online Perspectives » Stanley Schmidt: Art of Speculation »
How would you define "hard" science fiction? Analog editor and SF author Stanley Schmidt thinks most fans are getting it all wrong. From his interview with Locus:

‘‘ What I mean by ‘hard science fiction’ is actually pretty simple: there’s some element of speculative science or technology in it, which is so integral to the story that you can’t take it out without making the whole story collapse. [...] The second requirement is that there should be some attempt to make the science or technology speculation plausible.”

I agree with him. The focus on engineering and technology often causes stories with solid speculative biology and chemistry to be overlooked as "hard" SF.

• A musical interlude for Battlestar Galactica fans: Sound of Cylons

Hello Gaius my old friend ....



• Excellent Idea of the Day: Sci-Fi in Class : Discovery News »
Do you think high school level science textbooks should include science fiction references or examples? A recent study suggests that science fiction can stimulate students' interest in science.
Join the discussion on Google+.

• Jumping DNA rides aboard a virus, which targets a giant virus, which infects an amoeba, which infected a woman’s eye | Not Exactly Rocket Science | Discover Magazine »
Examination of the microbes in an infected eye turned up a zoo:

"It was carrying two species of bacteria, and a giant virus that no one had seen before—they called it Lentille virus. Inside that, they found a virophage—an virus that can only reproduce in cells infected by other viruses—which they called Sputnik 2. And in both Lentille virus and Sputnik 2, they found even smaller genetic parasites – tiny chunks of DNA that can hop around the genomes of the virus, and stow away inside the virophage. They called these transpovirons."

• ALPHA CENTAURI HAS A PLANET! | Bad Astronomy | Discover Magazine »
Exciting discovery: The Alpha Centauri star system has at least one Earth-sized planet! As the nearest star system to our own, it's a frequent destination for SF space travelers, from Lost in Space to Avatar.  The bad news: it's so close to it's star, it's definitely not another Earth:

"... the planet is baking hot, far too hot to sustain any kind of life as we know it, or even liquid water."

• Spider Silk Could Weave Biodegradable Computer Chips | Wired Science | Wired.com »
Materials science turns to nature: Spider silk is very thin, stronger than steel, extremely flexible and can transmit light almost as well as glass fiber optic cables. Even better, the human body doesn't have a problem with implanted fibers and the components are biodegradable.  That means that there is the potential to use silk produced by spiders or silkworms to develop implantable biomonitoring devices that do not need to be surgically removed. And perhaps far in the future there will be electronic devices that can be composed, rather than producing toxic waste.

Top Image: Artist’s impression of the planet around Alpha Centauri B. Credit: ESO/L. Calçada/Nick Risinger (skysurvey.org) Released by ESO under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported license. More artist's images and diagrams can be found at ESO.gov.

It’s cool ‘cause we’re not lonely

Singer-songwriter Nellie McKay performs "Clonie" at TED:


The lyrics.

Tags:Nellie McKay, Clonie