I’ve been swamped lately with finishing up my master’s thesis and have been tweeting occasional gripes and self-created hashtags about the process. #thesisjams might not be inspiring to anyone besides me, but what if all my tweets about the process were unwittingly being turned into public music? The Listening Machine is a project by composer [...]

The first time I felt like a real scientist was when I started working in a neurobiology lab for the first time as an undergraduate. Running experiments, wearing a lab coat, and working with my hands to apply the things I’d learned about in my classes were all thrilling and novel experiences. So at the [...]

I think Tesla would be proud to see his eponymous coils being used to play the melodies of Thunderbolt. I’m just dropping a pointer toward this Bjork performance on Later with Jools Holland for a fun start to the weekend and for a heads up on her show in New York tonight. Bjork has been [...]

Adele’s song Someone Like You has won both a Grammy and lots of lively speculation as to why people feel moved to tears when they hear it. The Wall Street Journal recently ran an article that referenced a study by John Sloboda that found people experienced emotional reactions to music when it contained appoggiaturas, a [...]

We’re now two days into the year 2012. You’ve recovered from any New Year’s Eve indiscretions by now, your voice is back after belting out Auld Lang Syne, and you’re looking hopefully towards the future and contemplating the past. In order to keep up with the reflections theme of the season, here are a few [...]

Sometimes upon hearing a song, one feels an almost involuntary need to start to move to it. Is there something about a pulsing dance beat that transcends reason and makes you want to gyrate to the beat? Is this quality universal to humans everywhere, transcending not only reason but also cultures and language? My most [...]

Words, pitch, and rhythm. How do these three elements meld together in your brain when you listen to the sung lyrics of a song? Julia Groh of the Max Planck Institute Leipzig explored these questions during her poster session on the first day of the Society for Neuroscience conference. She explained that most studies on [...]

I’ve been running around Washington DC for the past couple of days, walking from poster to poster wrapping my brain around the latest research in neuroscience and music, then doing some of my own “field research” by checking out a couple of rock shows in DC. Below is a video of DC’s Medications, a band [...]

It’s no secret that Neil deGrasse Tyson is one of my favorite astrophysicists. So when I saw this morning that he was featured in the latest Symphony of Science video (along with Brian Cox and Carolyn Porco), I was overjoyed. But all the joys of symphonies aside, the real reason I’m posting this is to [...]

The time has finally come for the Society for Neuroscience annual meeting. Over 31,000 neuroscientists are going to descend on Washington DC starting this weekend, and your fearless blogger will be one of them! While I’m not an official SFN blogger like my colleague Scicurious, I’m planning to write up talks and presentations related to [...]