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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)
(Score: 2) by RamiK on Wednesday August 17 2016, @09:49AM
In response to
Next on the list... Taylor Swift, Kanye West, and Kim Kardashian.
.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z3VLxepEBfg [youtube.com]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VOmUw6Y_z6I [youtube.com]
compiling...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2016, @10:28AM
Kim Kardashian? Thought that one was already done, and even modeled with an AI algorithm: 10: A = RND(0); GOTO 10
(Score: 2) by Jeremiah Cornelius on Wednesday August 17 2016, @02:29PM
Sting? The methodology is attention getting, but this isn't science!
Sting's alright, you know. But I'm personal friends with many musicians who are of a creative and technical calibre that easily dwarf the fellow. Actually, if you want pop musicians? Elvis Costello dwarfs Sting is these areas. Were he still alive, Prince would have been off-the-chart.
But that's not really the argument.
A sample size of one tells you nothing.
You're betting on the pantomime horse...
(Score: 2, Funny) by Ethanol-fueled on Wednesday August 17 2016, @07:13PM
Not only that, but there are plenty of commonalities in the driving force of the song that even a subhuman retard could determine.
The backbone of both songs are the jazzy (probably various forms of sevenths) descending minor chord progressions played by the rhythm instrument, with all other instrumentation (including backing vocals) serving as mere accents.
And that's just from a few seconds of listening.
Sting, with his "genius" also believes that this [youtube.com] sounds like this [youtube.com] and that this [youtube.com] sounds like this [youtube.com].
Far out! Is he some kind of John Nash genius motherfucker?!
p.s. Sting's ego is already large enough, it does not need any further inflating.
(Score: 2) by wonkey_monkey on Wednesday August 17 2016, @10:25AM
Researchers Get Paid to Scan Popular Musician's Brain
Any particular reason why money's getting mentioned?
We've all got bills to pay.
systemd is Roko's Basilisk
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2016, @01:11PM
I don't know if it is implying that it would be "fun" to analyse the fMRI or that the study is not worth paying for and, therefore, the scientists do not need to be compensated. This isn't lifesaving work, so it is not the same as when people say that scientists who want to get money for developing treatments are evil.
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday August 17 2016, @02:30PM
A little ambiguity for your complicated brain.
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(Score: 2) by AthanasiusKircher on Wednesday August 17 2016, @01:44PM
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.)
(Score: 2) by takyon on Wednesday August 17 2016, @02:29PM
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
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 takyon on Saturday August 20 2016, @09:25PM
That's information people would like to know. It's so important that Crossref [wikipedia.org] displays that information prominently for all research papers:
http://search.crossref.org/?q=10.1080%2F13554794.2016.1216572 [crossref.org]
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(Score: 2) by Thexalon on Wednesday August 17 2016, @03:12PM
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!
The only thing that stops a bad guy with a compiler is a good guy with a compiler.
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2016, @05:22PM
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.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2016, @12:45PM
You don't have to put on that red light.
Just think, you can read this study and learn where that work falls in 12 dimensional space.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 17 2016, @02:23PM
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:
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?
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Wednesday August 17 2016, @04:08PM
Sting, then "Next on the list... Taylor Swift, Kanye West, and Kim Kardashian."
Isn't that order completely reversed? Why wouldn't you start with the simplest one and work up?
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.