Every single day, all across the globe, extraordinarily creative and talented students sit in our classrooms bored out of their minds. These budding innovators may differ drastically in what particular domain captivates their attention, whether it’s science and engineering, architecture and design, arts, music and entertainment, business and finance, law, or health care. Nevertheless, as Richard Florida [...]

By now, our overwhelming tendency to look for what confirms our beliefs and ignore what contradicts our beliefs is well documented. Psychologists refer to this as confirmation bias, and its ubiquity is observed in both academia and in our everyday lives: Republicans watch Fox while Democrats watch MSNB; creationists see fossils as evidence of God, [...]

While you’re humming along to the Talking Heads, I’d like to consider another group who can listen to the Talking Heads without really hearing them. For a person with a cochlear implant, a surgically implanted device that restores hearing in someone who is profoundly deaf, listening to music isn’t the rich, sensory experience that a [...]

You might be surprised if you knew just how many scientists out there play in rock bands. When the sun goes down, garages, basements and living rooms throughout the land are filled with guys and gals who have shed their lab coats and strapped on their guitars. Take me, for instance—a mild mannered, middle-aged neuroscientist [...]

Remember Snowball, the cockatoo who won the internet with his dancing skills? Well, now there’s a new animal keeping the beat alive. Meet Ronan, the California sea lion who bops her head in time to Boogie Wonderland and other tunes (see video below). Few species apart from humans have demonstrated a sense of rhythm, and [...]

The MTV Video Music Awards are being broadcast tonight. Since 1984, these awards have recognized the top popular musicians, videos, and songs each year. Young musicians who dream of one day having their very own “Moonman” statue might be interested in getting the best guitar for their money. Luckily, science is here to help. Kazutaka [...]

Music just ain’t what it used to be. At least, that’s the stereotypical lament of each receding generation of music listeners. It’s also one way to read a new study on the evolution of pop music in the past half-century. A group of researchers undertook a quantitative analysis of nearly half a million songs to [...]

Michael Hearst seems to enjoy making music with a purpose. About five years ago the Brooklyn, N.Y., musician made headlines with a pretty self-explanatory record called Songs for Ice Cream Trucks. Since then, he and his band One Ring Zero have released an album-long ode to the planets (including Pluto), as well as a record [...]

WASHINGTON, D.C.— Wandering through what seems like miles of presentations, posters, and excited scientists at the Society for Neuroscience (SfN) meeting, I can’t help but overhear a lot. Conversations about everything from the ventral medial prefrontal cortex to fMRI; social rewards to serotonin. There is something about the buzzing hum of thousands of voices and [...]

We solicited readers’ nominations for the most annoying earworms yesterday via Facebook. We winnowed the list and now are presenting the poll below to ask readers to vote for the worst, most tiresome earworm plaguing us, thanks to supermarket music, radio and TV jingles, waiting room speakers and so on. Vote now to see the [...]

They go by many names: Brain worms, sticky music (thanks Oliver Sacks), cognitive itch, stuck song syndrome. But the most common (if also the most repugnant) is earworms, a literal translation from Ohrwurm, a term used to describe the phenomenon (and perhaps bring to mind an immediate association with corn earworms). If you’re an academic, [...]

The search for beauty has spurred great works of art and music, lengthy philosophical treatises and decades of dense cultural criticism. So, is beauty in the object? The eye of the beholder? Somewhere in between? The time has come "for neurobiology to tackle these fundamental questions," Semir Zeki, a neurobiologist at University College London, said [...]

What does a supernova sound like? Hopefully we will never find out directly—getting within earshot of an exploding star is probably a bad idea. But a pair of researchers has nonetheless devised a way to represent supernovae in an auditory way, and the result is a rather interesting piece of abstract music. University of Victoria [...]

There is no question that HIV is an ugly virus in terms of human health. Each year, it infects some 2.7 million additional people and leads to some two million deaths from AIDS. But a new album manages to locate some sonic beauty deep in its genome. Sounds of HIV (Azica Records) by composer Alexandra [...]

A while ago, I wrote about a science version of the popular Epic Rap Battles of History about a showdown between Einstein and Hawking. It was amusing and a great way to use popular culture to highlight science. Capitalizing on the successful genre of Epic Rap Battles of History, Life Technologies has created a video [...]

If you have kids, or teach, or were observant when you were a kid yourself, you know that kids learn in all different ways. Some are happy to sit quietly and read a book, some need the visual input from photo and video and some want to sing and dance their way to learning the [...]

What a reddit find! Physics student Tim Blais has begun an odyssey of creating harmonically enjoyable science-packed song videos! On his Facebook page, he describes it as “An educational and utterly nerdy online video project.” I’m all for that! On his about page, we read: “A Capella Science is an online video project by Tim [...]

If you gave an infinite number of (or six) monkeys (and related, which I think means mammals) an infinite (also six) number of synthesizers, will they eventually produce Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, or ACDC’s Back in Black or, well, anything? Someone thought they’d give it a go as an advertisement for Voltfestivalen — The place [...]

What do you do when your lab results are perplexing and contradict or add a new element to a finding you thought you already had sewn up? Today’s video shares (and maybe celebrates) that frustration of those who’ve experienced this! Perhaps you recall a very catchy tune and animated video about life in the lab [...]

Today’s Monday Music Video is not a music video per se, but instead features three songs from a soundtrack to an excellent movie about the Apollo missions. Evoking a sense of weightlessness and other-worldliness is an intuitive goal for most music on videos, movies, and TV programs featuring space and space travel. No one has [...]

In the vein of great science music videos created for biotech companies (see my post here and here, with more to come in future posts), a new video, with a very enjoyable tune and extreme familiarity with biotech lab work has emerged from Life Technologies. This video follows new biotech PhD candidate, Arnold Young (aka [...]

Even though I’m a biologist, my years of working in a bioengineering department has given me a special place in my heart for what engineers do and how they are different than scientists. You can count on me to find us an engineering video every now and again. Today, for our Monday Music Video, I [...]

Practice makes progress, if not perfection, for most things in life. Generally, practicing a skill—be it basketball, chess or the tuba—mostly makes you better at whatever it was you practiced. Even related areas do not benefit much. Doing intensive basketball drills does not usually make a person particularly good at football. Chess experts are not [...]

Two weeks ago, I wrote about a new study by Peter Cook and colleagues from the Pinniped Lab at the University of California, Santa Cruz. In their study, Cook claimed that Ronan the California sea lion was the first non-human mammal to show evidence of “rhythmic entrainment,” or the ability to synchronize the movements of [...]

Ronan is the name of a the California sea lion (Zalophus californianus) who can bob her head in time to music. She apparently dances to Boogie Wonderland, and the Backstreet Boys song Everybody. She can move her head in rhythm with the beats of a metronome. She’s in the news this week because a new [...]

One of the most influential voices of my childhood, and the childhoods of countless others raised alongside that omnipresent mouse, has died at the age of 86. Robert B. Sherman was a songwriter who, with his brother Richard, wrote some of the most beloved and memorable Disney songs. The Sherman brothers were perhaps best known [...]

Neuroscience Can’t Explain Wagner (or B.B. King) writes Christopher Shea on the Ideas Market blog at the Wall Street Journal, arguing against the claims that are made in my post from last week about day-old chickens preferring consonant music. I find two problems with his argument: the first concerning methodology, and the second concerning what [...]

You might have more in common with the chicken on your plate than you realize. Sure, you’ve also got two thighs, two legs, two breasts, and two wings (sort of). But new research suggests that chickens might like to rock out to the same tunes you’ve got on your iPod. The kinds of sounds that [...]

The Quiet Ensemble sees music everywhere in nature. Quintetto promo from Quiet ensemble on Vimeo. “Quintetto” is an installation based on the study of casual movement of objects or living creatures used as input for the production of sounds. The basic concept is to reveal what we call “invisible concerts” of everyday life. The vertical [...]