14-Aug-2009 04:42 PM
HARTFORD, Conn., July 10 (AScribe Newswire) -- Dan Lloyd, Brownell Professor of Philosophy at Trinity College, is making waves with his research on the brain - sound waves, that is.
When Lloyd took fMRI data from scans of the brain and assigned different musical notes to different regions of the brain, he didn't realize that the result would be a musical composition.
"The sounds work in unison and create melodies," he said. "Different parts harmonize with each other to make not just sounds, but music."
Lloyd created software which translates data from a brain scan to a Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI), which is a communication tool between music and computers. This enabled him to apply the information to a mainstream synthesizer, which in turn produced melodies composed by nothing more than data from the brain - technology that may give new insights into the differences and similarities between normal and dysfunctional brains.
Lloyd used this technology to compare brain scans from people with dementia and schizophrenia to healthy subjects and found a noticeable difference in the music they created. When listening to the sonifications, he was able to identify the differences before testing the results on his wife, Cheryl Greenberg, Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of History at Trinity, and their two children, Rianna and Morgan, 10 and 13 at the time. His family was able to correctly distinguish the sounds and attribute them to the brain of a healthy subject, versus one with a dysfunction.
"This is an early and speculative stage, but it's inspirational in that this could help yield some insight [into understanding brain patterns]," he said.
Lloyd said it was "exciting" as he didn't think there would be an audible difference between the subjects before realizing the distinctions between the changing brain music. He said it was equally satisfying when he tested the same results on a large group of people, who he said could correctly identify the sounds with an estimated 90 percent accuracy rate. The test is included in a lecture he gave at Trinity which is posted on his YouTube channel at: http://www.youtube.com/user/dlloyd1984.
"Dan had crossed yet another academic boundary," Greenberg said of her husband's discovery. "Not only was he a philosopher doing neuroscientific brain research, he was now also a composer. He has the kind of intellectual and creative breadth most of us can only dream of. It's incredibly exciting for those of us who get to be, in some small way, part of it."
Lloyd has long been fascinated with the complexity of the brain, and has a fondness for music, particularly 20th century classical. He and his students look at brain scans regularly in their work, and after discovering a way to convert the data to music, they now listen as well. Many of the students have the music files on their iPods.
"Something as complicated as the brain is very difficult to look at," he said. "It could be that music is a good way to learn more about the brain. We're very good at listening to music - we've been trained by our culture. The ear is very sensitive to changes in temporal dimensions, and can direct our attention to features in the data we might not notice otherwise," he said.
Lloyd is working on this project and many others this summer with a research apprentice from Trinity's Interdisciplinary Science Program, Brian Castelluccio '12. All the projects involve looking in the brain for corallites of consciousness.
Castelluccio, who is studying neuroscience and plays brass instruments, is a student who gets to hear plenty of this music, as he has been working with Lloyd to fine tune the findings by taking the data and applying it to different variations of instruments in a synthesizer to help distinguish particular sounds in relation to different functions or activity in the brain. They have found the piano to be the most adaptable instrument. Castellucio, who is also a member of the swimming and diving team at Trinity, was inspired by Lloyd's work and his multi-dimensional background.
"I saw Professor Lloyd give this lecture and signed up for his lab because it just seemed like the right combination of lots of different things."
Lloyd, a member of the Philosophy department and the Program in Neuroscience at Trinity, is a nationally recognized scholar in the contemporary study of mind and brain. He is the winner of the first "New Perspectives in Functional MRI Research Award" given by the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, and the author of numerous articles and books, including "Simple Minds" (MIT, 1989) and "Radiant Cool: A Novel Theory of Consciousness" (MIT, 2004). During Spring 2008, he held a Fulbright Fellowship at the Helsinki Collegium for Advanced Studies in Finland, where he studied narrative models of brain activity and worked on his current book project, a philosophical dialogue entitled "Ghosts in the Machine." Lloyd, who earned his Ph.D. and M.A. at Columbia University, and his B.A. at Oberlin College, said he became interested in the brain as the key to the mind as a student himself.
"I am interested in complexity," he said. "And the brain is wonderfully complex."
Founded in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1823, Trinity College (http://www.trincoll.edu) is an independent, nonsectarian liberal arts college with over 2,200 students from 44 states and 28 countries. It is home to the eighth-oldest chapter of Phi Beta Kappa in the United States. The faculty and alumni include recipients of the Pulitzer Prize, the MacArthur award, Guggenheims, Rockefellers and other national academic awards. Trinity students integrate meaningful academic and leadership experience at all levels on the College's celebrated campus, in the Capital City of Hartford, and in communities all over the world.
Source: http://newswire.ascribe.org/