Your Brain Can Make Music
Who knew your brain was musical?
Yes, Beethoven, Bach and Brahms all used their brains to make music, but a local college professor is flipping things around -- where brains make music.
Trinity College's Dan Lloyd is making music out of brains just to prove it.
Two years ago, Lloyd, who is a philosophy professor at Trinity, developed a software program that assigns pitches to different regions of the brain. Patients undergo an MRI brain scan, then the software reads activity in their brain regions and actually makes tones. If a few brain regions are active at once, a chord is produced. The notes can be loud or soft, based on the level of brain activity.
"I'm interested in brains and consciousness and the lack of scientific knowledge to account for it," Lloyd told the Hartford Courant.
Lloyd has posted some of the results on YouTube.
The research is not just fun and games. The software might also have a practical use by helping doctors identify brain disorders. An example, the brains of patients with schizophrenia sound different than patients with healthy brains.
"One of the things we found with schizophrenia was that in one particular brain, there was more rapid fluctuation in the way that different brain areas are communicating with one another," Vincent Calhoun, the Chief Technology Officer for the Mind Research Network, told the newspaper.
He says there is no way to know who will develop schizophrenia but the audio clues might someday help doctors predict the onset of the disorder.
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