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posted by cmn32480 on Wednesday August 17 2016, @09:37AM   Printer-friendly
from the note-able-differences dept.

Researchers have performed brain scans on Sting (aka Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner CBE) in order to "make maps of how Sting's brain organizes music":

What does the 1960s Beatles hit "Girl" have in common with Astor Piazzolla's evocative tango composition "Libertango"? Probably not much, to the casual listener. But in the mind of one famously eclectic singer-songwriter, the two songs are highly similar. That's one of the surprising findings of an unusual neuroscience study based on brain scans of the musician Sting.

The paper, published in the journal Neurocase, uses recently developed imaging-analysis techniques to provide a window into the mind of a masterful musician. It also represents an approach that could offer insights into how gifted individuals find connections between seemingly disparate thoughts or sounds, in fields ranging from arts to politics or science.

"These state-of the-art techniques really allowed us to make maps of how Sting's brain organizes music," says lead author Daniel Levitin, a cognitive psychologist at McGill University. "That's important because at the heart of great musicianship is the ability to manipulate in one's mind rich representations of the desired soundscape."

[...] This research was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada.

The real trick involves imprinting Sting's brain patterns on a computer used to conquer Earth. Next on the list... Taylor Swift, Kanye West, and Kim Kardashian.

Measuring the representational space of music with fMRI: a case study with Sting (DOI: 10.1080/13554794.2016.1216572)


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday August 17 2016, @01:44PM

    by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Wednesday August 17 2016, @01:44PM (#389101) Journal

    Also, frankly, I'd like to see a citation that the "researchers got paid."

    Dan Levitin is a leading neuroscientist and one of the most well-known music cognition researchers in the world. I'm pretty sure he's getting his salary whether or not he ran this study. And all the summary says is that the research was "supported" by X Research Council of Canada. That does NOT imply that the money from X went into the pockets of researchers. I imagine they might have paid Sting to do this (perhaps a large amount of money), maybe had to provide travel and lodging, (which generally is NOT cheap for a celebrity, who generally expects a lot of perks), etc. And then there's the money one needs to pay for lab equipment, etc. (running fMRI studies generally isn't cheap, particularly for humanities research which generally can't afford its own machine so has to "rent" it at a hospital or something).

    So unless Sting was really excited to do this for some reason and essentially was paid and reimbursed for very little, this could have been a rather expensive study to run. The title and summary seems to put particular emphasis on the the fact that money was involved and it came from X research council. Why? Does someone think this is misappropriation of science funds? If so, don't be so passive aggressive about it -- just come out and say what you're thinking.

    (Frankly, my issue with this study isn't so much the idea of the research -- figuring out how our brains process music could have all sorts of interesting implications and applications, as well as relevance to connections with linguistic research, psychoacoustics, perception of time, etc. It's just that this particular study is obviously a bit of a stunt, which will have very little broader relevance unless it is corroborated by scans of other similar brains. Dan Levitin tries to cultivate a bit of "rock star" persona for his research, and this is obviously meant to gain attention, which will draw more funding for his lab in the future. That's likely what this is about, but that's the reality of a world where it's hard to get grants to study things that are considered "humanities" or "arts," and you get snide headlines commenting about how the researcher "got paid" to do his job.)

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  • (Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday August 17 2016, @02:29PM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Wednesday August 17 2016, @02:29PM (#389127) Journal

    Did I say anywhere in the headline or summary that researchers should not get paid to scan Sting's brain?

    Nope!

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    • (Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Saturday August 20 2016, @08:53PM

      by AthanasiusKircher (5291) on Saturday August 20 2016, @08:53PM (#390706) Journal

      Did I say anywhere in the headline or summary that researchers should not get paid to scan Sting's brain?

      No, you didn't. But the headline draws attention to that fact. If I write a headline saying, "Brand X of children's applesauce found to contain lead," the implication is that it is notable that Brand X contains lead and that the lead content is notable. If, however, it turns out that Brand X's lead levels are actually much lower than the average for applesauce (lead, after all, is a naturally occurring substance), and Brand X turns out to be safer than normal for children, we might say, "The headline drew attention to Brand X in a misleading way." Now, you might counter, "Did the headline say anywhere that the lead levels were high or dangerous?" No, the headline didn't say that. But why mention it?

      As I said, the headline mentions the fact that "researchers get paid" to... do research. That's a weird way to put it. Would you write a headline like, "Researchers get paid to find cure for cancer"? And then there was the mention of the funding source after an ellipsis at the end. Again, why?

      I'm not trying to attack you or be argumentative here, but the coupling of those two things draws attention to the fact that there was funding for the project. Why? Most research has funding that comes from somewhere, and we don't feel the need to draw attention to it. Perhaps you didn't mean to draw attention to it. Fine. Then I think you might ask yourself why you worded things the way you did. Again, I'm not claiming anything nefarious is going on here, only that that submission was reported in an unusual way compared to how people might generally report more "mainstream" research. If you can't see that, I'm not sure what else to say.

  • (Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 17 2016, @03:12PM

    by Thexalon (636) on Wednesday August 17 2016, @03:12PM (#389141)

    So unless Sting was really excited to do this for some reason

    To be fair, String might well have done this project just for the heck of it: By all impressions he's a kind enough guy, he has enough money to do pretty much whatever he wants, and it's something cool he could do FOR SCIENCE!

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  • (Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2016, @05:22PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2016, @05:22PM (#389198)

    Not the the researchers got paid, but the cleaning guys, the taxi driver and the lab manager. When will Trump stop this madness? China is eating our lunch.