Music and the mind

Despite being a 30-year veteran teacher of what is referred to as a "core" discipline -- science -- I have always been vociferous in my support of increasing the emphasis on arts, music, and electives.  In fact, I find the use of the word "core" a little insulting to the teachers and students in these latter subjects.  It makes it sound like science, math, English, and social studies are central to a child's education, and everything else is just peripheral fluff.

In fact, for many of us, it's just the opposite.  Think about what classes you remember from your own trip through the school system as being the most inspiring.  For a lot of us, it's those "electives" -- the subjects that are the first ones on the chopping block when funding gets cut.  Further, think about your own life as an adult.  What activities or pursuits bring you the most joy now?  With no slight meant against the math teachers, I doubt very much that most of us look forward to our leisure time so we can sit and do algebra.

Now, I'm not saying that arts and music are more important than science, math, English, and social studies; but they are easily as important.  Which, unfortunately, is not how a lot of the people involved in educational oversight see things.  And what is the most short-sighted about this approach is that the benefits of education in creative disciplines spill over into the "core" courses.

Some experimental support for this contention appeared last week in the journal Neuron, in a paper by Sibylle C. Herholz and Robert J. Zatorre called "Musical Training as a Framework for Brain Plasticity: Behavior, Function, and Structure."  What they found is that studying music improves the ability of the brain to modify its own structure and function in response to new information, a capacity called neuroplasticity.

Most examples of neuroplasticity only are operative during a narrow critical period in an individual's life.  In imprinting in ducklings, for example, their ability to learn who their mother is, and follow her around, only lasts for a few days after hatching.  In humans, language learning works in a similar fashion; our ability to learn language peaks in our early years, declining rapidly after age ten or so.

Which is why another appallingly stupid thing about our educational system is how we teach foreign language -- usually starting in middle school, i.e., when we first start to get really bad at learning a new language.  If we took first-year foreign language courses out of middle and high school, and started a program for preschoolers to be in bilingual classes, they'd come out fluent, without ever memorizing a vocabulary list or verb conjugation pattern.

But I digress.

Anyhow, Herholz and Zatorre looked at the effects of musical training on a lot of different modalities in the brain -- auditory, tactile, motor, and cognitive.  The authors write:

Music requires fine-grained perception and motor control that is unlike other everyday activities, thereby reducing confounding influences of other types of experience.  Also, the framework of musical training allows the study of both short- and long-term training effects...  An important higher-level phenomenon in the context of learning and plasticity is that long-term training can result not only in specific learning, but also creates greater potential for short-term changes to occur quickly.  Musical training not only changes the structural and functional properties of the brain, but it also seems to affect the potential for new short-term learning and plasticity.  Such interaction effects of long- and short-term training have been demonstrated in the auditory, in the motor, and in the tactile domain.

They also consider the role of music in developing social skills and teamwork:

Music also has some reward value beyond the pleasurable sounds and direct feedback—it also has an important role in social interactions, both in contexts of group listening and music making.  While the effects of such interactions during music making have not been investigated to our knowledge, the role of social influences and well-being on brain plasticity has been shown in other contexts.  Important aspects in the context of music and learning could include pupil-teacher interactions and imitation learning, social reward and influences on self-perception, but also negative influences like stress in professional situations and performance anxiety.

All of which makes it that much more wrong-headed to cut music programs -- and by extension, art programs and other areas where students are challenged to be creative, to work collaboratively, to express themselves, and simply to enjoy the aesthetic experience that such experiences provide.

[image courtesy of photographer Nickolai Kashirin and the Wikimedia Commons]

One can only hope that studies like this one will underscore the fact that electives and "core" subjects need to be on equal footing, especially with regards to support and funding by school districts.  Cutting program to the bone to focus exclusively on math, science, English, and social studies is completely contrary to what we know about how children learn -- and what activities enrich their lives and broaden their minds.

Now, I think I'll wrap this up -- I just got the sheet music for a piano transcription of Rameau's "Rondeau des Indes Galantes," and I can't let it just sit there unplayed any longer. 

Anxiety shrinkage

I think one of the reasons I'm so interested in neuroscience is because there is still so much to be explored.  In my Intro Neuroscience class, I frequently have to answer questions students ask with the frustrating statement "That's unknown at this time."  Even such simple things as how memories are stored and recalled are poorly understood, although we are making significant progress in finding out how they work.

My friend and mentor Rita Calvo, Professor Emeritus of Human Genetics at Cornell University, once told me that we are currently at the point in understanding the brain that we were in understanding genetics in 1915.  We have some knowledge of what's happening, a lot of descriptive information, and little in the way of comprehension of the underlying mechanisms.  I still recall her telling me that if she were a college student in biology now, she'd go into neuroscience.

"The 20th century was the century of the gene," she said.  "The 21st will be the century of the brain."

So any time there's an advance, I'm pretty keen on finding out about it.  Which is why the article my wife sent me yesterday was such an eye-opener.  Entitled "Neuroplasticity in Response to Cognitive Behavior Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder," this study (published this week in Translational Psychiatry) has found that social anxiety might be due to a hyperactive part of the brain called the amygdala, which has been known to be involved in fear, anxiety, and the fight-or-flight response.  More interesting still, they found that cognitive behavioral therapy can literally cause this hyperactive bit to shrink.

K. N. T. Månsson of Linköping University in Sweden, who led the group that did the study, writes:

[W]e demonstrate interrelated structural plasticity and altered neural responsivity, within the amygdala, after CBT for social anxiety.  Both GM volume and neural responsivity in the bilateral amygdala diminished after effective treatment.  Left amygdala GM volume was positively associated with symptom severity before treatment, and amygdala volume decreased significantly with CBT, correlating positively with symptom improvement in both hemispheres...  [O]ur results reinforce the notion that structural neuroplasticity in the amygdala is an important target for psychosocial treatments of anxiety, as previously suggested for pharmacological treatments of post-traumatic stress disorder.

Did you get that?  Cognitive behavioral therapy -- essentially, a kind of talk therapy -- actually had an equivalent result to anti-anxiety medication, and caused the part of the brain that was hyperactive to become physically smaller.

Are you amazed as I was at this result?  Because I read this with my mouth hanging agape.  The idea that cognitive behavioral therapy actually has a measurable result in the form of an anatomical change is absolutely mind-blowing.

Pun (lame though it is) intended.

I have another reason to find this result fascinating.  I have suffered for years from serious social anxiety, starting when I was in my mid-twenties and becoming progressively worse for the following thirty years.  Those of you who read Skeptophilia but don't know me personally might have a hard time picturing someone who is as verbose as I am being a social-phobe, but you'll have to take my word for it; in most social situations, I get myself a glass of wine and then hope like hell that the hosts have a dog I can interact with.  I have gone entire evenings at friends' houses, listening politely, laughing at the right times, and not saying a word.

Michelangelo Buonarroti, The Last Judgment (1541) [image courtesy of the Wikimedia Commons]

I've also been in cognitive behavioral therapy for about a year to try and deal with some of this, with guardedly positive results.  I'm not expecting such a deep-seated and pervasive problem to go away quickly; Rome, as they say, wasn't built in a day.  But the idea that by participating in CBT I am not only working toward alleviating my anxiety, but am causing long-lasting anatomical alterations in my brain -- that is amazing.

Because I have to say that living with an anxiety disorder is not particularly enjoyable.  Anything I can do to shrink that overactive left amygdala is fine by me.

Memory boost

There's one incorrect claim I find coming up in my classes more than any other, and that's the old idea that "humans only use 10% of their brain."  Or 5%.  Or 2%.  Often bolstered by the additional claim that Einstein is the one who said it.  Or Stephen Hawking.  Or Nikola Tesla.

Or maybe all three of 'em at once, I dunno.

The problem is, there's no truth to any of it, and no evidence that the claim originated with anyone remotely famous.  That at present we understand only 10% of the brain is doing -- that I can believe.  That we're using less than 100% of our brain at any given time -- of course.

But the idea that evolution has provided us with these gigantic processing units, which (according to a 2002 study by Marcus Raichle and Debra Gusnard) consume 20% of our oxygen and caloric intake, and then we only ever access 10% of its power -- nope, not buying that.  Such a waste of resources would be a significant evolutionary disadvantage, and would have weeded out the low-brain-use individuals long ago.  (Which gives me hope that we might actually escape ending up with a human population straight out of the movie Idiocracy.)

And speaking of movies, the 2014 cinematic flop Lucy didn't help matters, as it features a woman who gets poisoned with a synthetic drug that ramps up her brain from its former 10% usage rate to... *gasp*... 100%.  Leading to her becoming able to do telekinesis and the ability to "disappear within the space/time continuum."

Whatever the fuck that means.

All urban legends and goofy movies aside, the actual memory capacity of the brain is still the subject of contention in the field of neuroscience.  And for us dilettante science geeks, it's a matter of considerable curiosity.  I know I have often wondered how I can manage to remember the scientific names of obscure plants, the names of distant ancestors, and melodies I heard fifteen years ago, but I routinely have to return to rooms two or three times because I keep forgetting what I went there for.

So I found it exciting to read about a study published last week in eLife, by Terry Sejnowski (of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies), Kristen Harris (of the University of Texas/Austin), et al., entitled "Nanoconnectomic Upper Bound on the Variability of Synaptic Plasticity."  Put more simply, what the team found was that human memory capacity is ten times greater than previously estimated.

In computer terms, our storage ability amounts to one petabyte.  And put even more simply for non-computer types, this translates roughly into "a shitload of storage."

"This is a real bombshell in the field of neuroscience," Sejnowski said. "We discovered the key to unlocking the design principle for how hippocampal neurons function with low energy but high computation power.  Our new measurements of the brain's memory capacity increase conservative estimates by a factor of 10 to at least a petabyte, in the same ballpark as the World Wide Web."

The discovery hinges on the fact that there is a hierarchy of size in our synapses.  The brain ramps up or down the size scale as needed, resulting in a dramatic increase in our neuroplasticity -- our ability to learn.

"We had often wondered how the remarkable precision of the brain can come out of such unreliable synapses," said team member Tom Bartol.  "One answer is in the constant adjustment of synapses, averaging out their success and failure rates over time... For the smallest synapses, about 1,500 events cause a change in their size/ability and for the largest synapses, only a couple hundred signaling events cause a change.  This means that every 2 or 20 minutes, your synapses are going up or down to the next size.  The synapses are adjusting themselves according to the signals they receive."

"The implications of what we found are far-reaching," Sejnowski added. "Hidden under the apparent chaos and messiness of the brain is an underlying precision to the size and shapes of synapses that was hidden from us."

And the most mind-blowing thing of all is that all of this precision and storage capacity runs on a power of about 20 watts -- less than most light bulbs.

Consider the possibility of applying what scientists have learned about the brain to modeling neural nets in computers.  It brings us one step closer to something neuroscientists have speculated about for years -- the possibility of emulating the human mind in a machine.

"This trick of the brain absolutely points to a way to design better computers," Sejnowski said.  "Using probabilistic transmission turns out to be as accurate and require much less energy for both computers and brains."

Which is thrilling and a little scary, considering what happened when HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey basically went batshit crazy halfway through the movie.

That's a risk that I, for one, am willing to take, even if it means that I might end up getting turned into a Giant Space Baby.

But I digress.

In any case, the whole thing is pretty exciting, and it's reassuring to know that the memory capacity of my brain is way bigger than I thought it was.  Although it still leaves open the question of why, with a petabyte of storage, I still can't remember where I put my cellphone.