- Natalie Banacos

On January 17th, the talented Lazaro Arbos, a 21-year-old from Florida, went viral on Youtube for his amazing performance during his American Idol audition. The most impressive part of his beautiful voice? The fact that it was stutter-free.

During normal speech, Arbos involuntarily makes long pauses and extended vowels, using his hands to trace the words he is trying to convey. However, as soon as he starts to sing, the difficulty disappears. His new Twitter fans are calling it a divine miracle, but the phenomenon is well-known to many stutter sufferers – industry legend has it that B.B.King and Carly Simon were among them!

What’s going on here? The disorder is highly varied in its presentation and severity, so science is far from a consensus about the etiology, though there have been some compelling findings. One 2003 study by Van Borsel et al. at the Ghent University Hospital in Belgium showed a marked increase in activation of the right hemisphere during speech in fMRI studies of patients with the speech disorder; more so than in normal speakers, leading to the idea that perhaps this over-activation is interfering with the fluent production of speech on the left. Specifically, a study of stutterers in Frankfurt, Germany found that activity in the right frontal operculum was negatively correlated with the severity of stuttering symptoms in patients, suggesting a compensational role. This area has been associated with timing tasks in speech in healthy controls, adding further possible significance to the specific dysfunction in verbal timing seen in stutterers.

So why was Arbos able to sing Simon and Garkfunkel without a hitch? David Ward, the author of “Stuttering and Cluttering: Frameworks for Understanding and Treatment,” suggests several general theories. Singing and other lyrical modes of linguistics tend to be the domain of the right hemisphere, therefore in stutterers the increased right hemisphere participation is in place to facilitate  fluent language production. Many therapies for language-center damage use music as a way to access communication. Another theory proposes that perhaps music’s rhythmic nature increases fluency by providing timing and changing (lengthening) the patterns of airflow during singing. Finally, from a more psychological perspective, Ward suggests that perhaps singing allows the stutterer to take on a different persona, leaving their speech deficit behind.

Whatever the cause (or the cure) of stuttering is, its seemingly magical disappearance during Arbos’ audition made for great TV, and surely will propel him to the final rounds of America’s favorite talent competition.

Sources:

Florida man with stutter Lazaro Arbos impresses on ‘American Idol’ – The Miami Herald
21-Year-Old With Stutter Wows ‘American Idol’ Judges – mashable.com
fMRI of developmental stuttering: A pilot study – Brain and Language
Stuttering: a view from neuroimaging – The Lancet
Stuttering and Cluttering: Frameworks for Understanding and Treatment - David Ward

Neuroscience researchers in China have created a method of transforming brainwaves into music by combining EEG and fMRI scans into sounds that are recognizable to human beings. The EEG adjusts the pitch and duration of a note, while the fMRI controls the intensity of the music.  According to Jing Lu and his associated colleagues from the University of Electronic Science and Technology in China,  this brain music, “embodies the workings of the brain as art, providing a platform for scientists and artists to work together to better understand the links between music and the human brain.”

Applying EEG and fMRI data to make better music represents the limitless opportunities of the brain, potentially leading to improvements useful for research, clinical diagnosis or biofeedback therapy. In fact, researchers at the Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate have already looked at a form of neuro-training called ‘Brain Music’, which uses music created from an individual’s brain waves to help the individual move from an anxious state to a relaxed state.

A sample of brain music of a patient at resting state is here:

Beats By Brain

Sources:

Remixed Brain Waves Reveal Soundtrack of the Human Brain – Science News

Brainwaves Translated Into Music for Cerebral Soundtrack – Wired

Listen to the sounds of the human mind: Remixed brain scans reveal our inner music – Daily Mail

This is in reference to a 2011 lecture entitled “Plato’s Philosophy of Art”, given by Dr. James Grant of the University of London, Birkbeck. An audio recording of the lecture can be found at the bottom.

Today, Plato is probably known best for his work Republic, an outline of a highly idealistic and just city-state. Many remember bits and pieces from their Intro to Philosophy classes, but a criticism that is generally brushed over in discussion of the Republic is Plato’s flat-out renunciation of art. A prerequisite in understanding Plato’s position is realizing the role that art, and specifically poetry, played in Greek culture.

Poetry in the time of Plato played a similar role to the Bible in early American culture. Sections were recited at schools, in homes, and children were expected to memorize various passages for later recitation. Much like the Bible, these poems formed early moral backbones in young Greeks and were very much responsible for the development of certain cultural norms. It wasn’t so much a problem for Plato that art had such a grip on the cultural norms and moral fibers of a society, but rather that the artists themselves had no understanding of what they were representing, and thus inspired corrupt and destructive morals. In the eyes of Plato, the artist or poet was typically not the ideal moral character in any society, and thus should not have been in charge of dictating moral grounds or developing cultural norms. A second complaint Plato had about the role of the artist was that even if they were generally a moral and civilized human being, they were falsely representing reality through their art, something which Plato very much opposed to and which undermined a central theory in Platonism.

A mainstay in Platonic thought is the idea of ideal forms. The Theory of Forms posits that beyond the world we see, touch and hear, there is a world of fundamental reality, of pure truth and form. In this school of thought, the form of a bed, for example, is not its color, material, unmade sheets or mattress, but the essence of “bed” itself. Plato claims that the problem herein is that artists know nothing of form, especially painters. He claims that the painter only knows visual cues and expresses his ideas only through visual representation. Plato says that painters use tricks to inspire error in their weak viewers, making them think that there is a real world inside of the canvas, when there really is not. Dr. Grant elaborates with an example about a painter of a flute versus a flutist. He says that in the eyes of Plato, the flutist has a much deeper understanding of the form of a flute than the artist who represents a flute in a painting. It was this discrepancy in sincerity and honesty of knowledge that disturbed Plato most.

A modern approach in defending Plato’s dislike of art has to do with cognitive biases and more specifically with what we call the Availability Heuristic. The Availability Heuristic is the tendency of people to overestimate the likelihood of an event happening if an example of that event easily comes to mind. Illustrations of this bias include general over-estimations of dying in a plane crash following the attacks on September 11^th, an increased worry about shark attacks after the release of the movie Jaws in 1975 and the general assumption that all celebrities must regularly use cocaine because we see a few cases of celebrity drug binges on television. Similarly, art can affect our perception or reality in a similar way. Dr. Grant claims that perhaps the standardization of “story arcs” in movies and books have given the public an altered and idealized version of how reality works. When life does not, and Dr. Grant notes that it rarely does, follow the standard structure of a Western novel or the story arc of a modern romance film, the cognitive dissonance that arises many times leads to disappointment and sadness.

Duchamp's Urinal

Another example pertaining to art’s stranglehold on modern cultural norms is the accusation that excessive tobacco use in popular films is what led to the wide use of tobacco in everyday life. Still today, public health experts are advocating for the reduction of cigarette use in movies, though efforts have continually come up short due to large bribes from the very informed and aware tobacco companies. This horrible truth highlights why now, more than ever, we may indeed want to question who is doing the teaching in modern culture.

Whether or not Plato was right about art’s destructiveness to the moral fabric of society, the fact is that it does have a large impact. We should then begin to ask, what is the role of art in society? And if that role is very important, who can we trust as an artist? And is art a valuable source of knowledge? For now, these questions will be left out in the open for contemplation and analysis at a later point.

References

Plato’s Philosophy of Art – James Grant Ph.D

We live in an era where the rapid advances in technology are constantly changing how we perceive and interact with the world around us. The question on everyone’s mind is always “what’s next?” The answer: brain-machine interfaces. For the average consumer, brain-computer interfaces are becoming increasingly available on the mass market and their current uses offer a wide range of fascinating opportunities.

A company that’s been in the news a lot lately is NeuroVigil. Their product known as the iBrain has been used to help world-renowned astrophysicist Steven Hawking communicate with a computer simply by thinking. Hawking, who suffers from Lou Gehrig’s disease, developed his own solution to allow him to speak by twitching his cheek to select words from a computer. In its current state, the iBrain is still slower than Hawking’s solution, but NeuroVigil’s founder MD Philip Low hopes that it will eventually be possible to read thoughts aloud. NeuroVigil also made the news by signing a contract with Roche, a major Swiss pharmaceutical company, to use the iBrain in clinical studies for evaluating drugs for neurological diseases.

Philip Low with the iBrain

So how does the iBrain actually work? The iBrain uses one sensor to measure brain signals by means of specialized algorithms. Surprisingly easy to use, NeuroVigil claims that its software makes up for using only one channel. A competing device, the EPOC, made by Emotiv uses a multitude of sensors. The EPOC is a neuro-headset that looks like headphones with sensors extending in all directions. These sensors pick up electrical signals that our brains produce while we are awake or asleep; essentially an EEG recorder. These measurements are not accurate enough to pick up what individual neurons in our brain are doing, but they can provide a rough idea of overall brain activity. Users of the headset learn to think specific thoughts for which the EPOC learns the related brain signals corresponding to a certain command, such as moving the mouse to the left. Emotive has an online store with dozens of applications for the headset and there is also a Mind Workstation for research purposes.

Emotiv's headset

The key strategy of another company, Zeo, is sleep research. Zeo offers a wireless headband to monitor sleep patterns that connect to smartphones using a Bluetooth link. Looking to enter the research scene with their innovative technology at a bargain price, Zeo hopes that it can satisfy the huge demand for a sleep aid product. In a similar manner, NeuroVigil wants to use a smartphone processor to map people’s mind while they sleep using the unique brain ‘signatures’ to diagnose neurological disorders such as Alzheimer’s, depression and autism, which again increases the number of potential users. An increasing number of people want to do their own health monitoring and new, inexpensive, wireless sensors and data processing by smartphone apps can help in this goal. Cheap brain-computer interfaces are the next step in this health-monitoring trend and will hopefully lead to newer and much cooler extensions of our mind.

Zeo headset and its app

Sources:

Emotiv

NeuroVigil

Zeo Sleep Manager

Sometimes it can be tough to explain the research work that I am involved in right now: I can’t just say “I study the interaction between the hippocampus and the pre-frontal cortex” because inevitably, I get blank stares. So instead, I say “Neuroscience–brain stuff!” But I find this unfortunate: I want to be able to explain my research interests to people – even though they might be unfamiliar with neuroscience – without having to go into a 15-minute neuroanatomy lesson. But this is no fault of theirs: they have just never been exposed to the anatomy of the brain.

In grade school and high school most people are exposed to the body in anatomy classes and text-book diagrams. This tends not be true for the brain – the first time I was exposed to its anatomy was in my first neuroscience course, at a university. However, I think it is a necessary foundation for children to understand their own brains, even at a simplistic level. This is why I was excited to find that Erica Warp and Jessica Voytek have created an inspirational and fascinating children’s storybook called Ned the Neuron. It’s great to know that there are indeed ways that children can learn accurate information about the brain. And although this is a children’s book, I would recommend it to adults, too! This is certainly a step in the right direction toward bringing knowledge of neuroscience to the general public. I’ve already bought my copy!

Sources:
Ned the Neuron – Erika Warp and Jessica Voytek
A Dynamic Neuron & His Dynamic Poster At Society for Neuroscience 2012 – CENtral Science

WHEW! Nothing like drawing inspiration from some late-night Youtube videos! Especially when my editor has to: 1) Make sure that this post is indeed relative to neuroscience 2) Verify that I’ve used proper grammar 3) Make media changes such as share links etc. 4) And have all of this done within a few hours during which I’ve procrastinated until the midnight hours of the new work week. Apologies to my editor…but man, am I pumped for what I’ve got in store with this post! Let’s get started shall we?

The cream of the awkward crop

Who doesn’t love awkward situations? Well, actually, most people probably don’t like awkward situations. But why…I tend to find it hilarious when there is so much discomfort in a room that it can be cut with a knife. In my opinion, that’s what makes “awkward” so exciting. It’s a moment where everyone is out of their comfort zone, nobody is safe, nobody can run and hide, and often nobody knows what to do. For example, consider the harmonious situation when the distraught, balling girlfriend confronts her cheating boyfriend.

Prior to the confrontation, everyone is trying to enjoy themselves, stirring up social conversation via the flow of cheap beer and mixed cocktails. The music is playing, the light machine is making a twenty dollar attempt at adding ambiance, and the owner of the apartment is wondering how their casual get together turned into “GET OUT, I don’t know you!” Suddenly, the cord connecting the Ipod to the speakers is ripped out, the lights are turned on, and the fun begins. The balling girlfriend confronts her cheating boyfriend in the middle of the dance floor, screeching “HOW COULD YOU DO THIS TO ME!” Flabbergasted, the seemingly soon to be ex-boyfriend pushes the girl he is currently talking to away, bracing himself for the wrath of a broken heart. Meanwhile, everyone in the room has now entered ‘awkward,’ that unknown gap in time where indecision meets emotional response. Should we feel bad for her? Shouldn’t we look at his side of the story? Flashback to reality, where all of this is going on in everyone’s heads, leaving a dance floor filled with blank stares and no sudden movements. Everyone at the beer pong table has now focused their attention on the dynamic duo, while the ping pong ball continues its final bounces, having rolled onto the floor. And then, there is me. I’m in the corner of the room, literally dying of laughter inside, desperately trying to hold back tears of utter joy for this moment of awkward has once again proved itself to be entertainment gold!

Now where were we? Ahhh yes, awkward and neuroscience. There is an emotional response that is tied to any situation, and in return, this response directly effects our decision-making processes. In the initial moment before making a choice, we consider the risk and rewards associated with both options. For example, if I decide to study for an exam, my reward will be a good grade. What is so beautiful about awkward situations is that they stress the internal conflict of risk and reward to a higher degree due to emotional responses. In coordination with the basic neural circuitry that is active when making a decision, awkward situations bring to light the competing emotional responses that are associated with both social norms and self-subjective response. Consider the brilliance of Andrew Hales in this video:

Genius, right? The scientific breakdown behind most of the responses seen within the video is simple. When Andrew approaches the individual, as if he is going to high-five them, basic social cues are signaling neural circuity to respond, thus they accept Andrew’s social behavior and attempt to high-five him back. However, Andrew adds the awkward element into the situation by having his friend (the individual he actually wants to interact with) approach at the last minute, and more importantly, out of the view of the ‘random’ person. The coolest part about this is the reaction of the random person after they’ve found out that they were not suppose to be involved at all. The application of the cognitive strategies seen during this awkward emotion generation process is known as emotion regulation, which results in an alteration in the affective experience of emotional stimuli. Broken down, the competing emotional responses: wanting to satisfy the salient cues of Andrew (by reciprocating the high five) vs. emotional indecision (attempting to play it off as a joke) demonstrate the risk and rewards of social behavior. Pretty cool huh?

If you’d like to see more videos, definitely check out Andrew’s Youtube channel where you can see more awkward scenarios, like cutting people in line to loudly complimenting people. A personal favorite of mine is the Almost Picking Up Chicks video.

Sources:

The Influence of Emotional Regulation and Decision Making – PMC

Luigi Anzivino speaks at the 2011 Technology Horizons Fall Research Exchange. Anzivino is a scientific content developer at the Exploratorium.

Other topics that took place at this conference included the idea of invisibility cloaks, quantum consciousness, designers lifeforms, etc. Anzivino’s presentation fit right in. Check out his presentation below.

Click here for the video.

http://www.vimeo.com/35534082

Luigi Anzivino: Science of Magic – Boingboing.net

Creative artists not only experience the world differently they also view the world differently. Picasso and Kandinsky, two of the well known creative geniuses of our time, both had disorders that forced them to perceive their world differently: could these disorders be one of the underlying factors that facilitated their genius?

Strabismus & Picasso
Stereopsis, the ability to have depth perception, is important for artists in order for them to paint the three-dimensional world realistically but new studies have shown that possibly many great artists did not have depth perception. Pablo Picasso, one of the many artists who had strabismus – abnormal alignment of the eyes – was able to create amazing pieces of art despite his inability to perceive depth. For him, this disorder made it easier for him to reproduce his two-dimensional representation of his subject matter. Margaret S. Livingstone and Bevil R. Conway state that “someone who cannot perceive depth from stereopsis may be more aware of—and therefore better able to capture—the other, monocular, cues to depth and distance, such as perspective, shading, and occlusion.” This can be seen in the painting on the left, Picasso’s The Old Guitarist where his shading skill and lack of depth perception is apparent. Picasso, is largely known for his cubist pieces, it is evident that going the route to cubism was ideal for his skill set due to his disorder.

Synesthesia & Kandinsky
Synesthesia is a neurological disorder where activation of one sensory areas instantly activates another sensory area. Wassily Kandinsky, for example, saw colors when he listened to music–when his auditory cortex was stimulated, his visual cortex was instantly stimulated. This cross wiring can make day to day activities hard–raindrops on an umbrella send flashes of color across ones visual field. But for artists, especially for Kandinsky, this disorder opened a wave of creativity. The piece reproduced below was made by Kandinsky while listening to a classical piece. It has been said that Kandinsky created a schema to represent the myriad tones and chords–yellow represented middle C on a trumpet, combinations of colors represented piano vibrational frequencies. The movement exhibited by his brushstrokes and the vivid color palette he uses make his pieces unbelievably beautiful. If it was not for his disorder this piece and all his other pieces would be drastically different.

Harvard Medicine: Neurobiology of the Arts

Wassily Kandinsky

Pablo Picasso

For years, scientists have investigated cases of human brain damage as a means of further understanding the function of specific neural regions, but neuroanatomist, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor, received the unique opportunity of experiencing this function-impeding damage firsthand. She awoke one morning to find herself having a stroke, and years later has recovered to share the event. Taylor’s unique experience sheds and interesting light on the underlying processes of our fascinating brains. Here is the video (via YouTube):

Sources:

Video Link – Ted.com

Background – DrJillTaylor.com