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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, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2016, @02:23PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2016, @02:23PM (#389121)

    Published online before print June 28, 2016
    [...]
    we found that the most common software packages for fMRI analysis (SPM, FSL, AFNI) can result in false-positive rates of up to 70%.

    http://www.pnas.org/content/113/28/7900.full [pnas.org]

    I don't know enough about fMRI analysis to tell if this bug would come into play for this paper. It looks like they do use SPM, however the paper wasn't accepted for publication until after the bug report was published:

    ARTICLE HISTORY
    Received 18 April 2016
    Accepted 19 July 2016
    [...]
    DICOM images were converted to NIFTI format and then preprocessed using SPM12 (http://www.fil.ion.ucl.ac.uk/spm/)

    http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13554794.2016.1216572 [tandfonline.com]

    Actually... from scrolling down on the SPM page it looks like the most recent version was released half a year earlier than the bug report, on "15-Jan-2016". So the bug is not fixed for anyone yet? Shouldn't there be a moratorium on fMRI papers until that issue is resolved?

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