| Title | Researchers Get Paid to Scan Popular Musician's Brain | |
| Date | Wednesday August 17 2016, @09:37AM | |
| Author | cmn32480 | |
| Topic | ||
| 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)
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