anatomically distinct dopamine release… during peak emotion in music

“Music, an abstract stimulus, can arouse feelings of euphoria and craving, similar to tangible rewards that involve the striatal dopaminergic system.”

“…’chills’ or ‘musical frisson’… a well-established marker of peak emotional responses to music. Chills involve a clear and discrete pattern of autonomic nervous system arousal.”

“… the intense pleasure experienced when listening to music is associated with dopamine activity in the mesolimbic reward system… This phylogenetically ancient circuitry has evolved to reinforce basic biological behaviors… that is, musical stimuli, similar to other aesthetic stimuli, are perceived as being rewarding by the listener.”

“Thus, through complex cognitive mechanisms, humans are able to obtain pleasure from music, a highly abstract reward system consisting of just a sequence of tones unfolding over time, which is comparable to the pleasure experienced from more basic biological stimuli.”

Salimpoor et al., 2011. Anatomically distinct dopamine release during anticipation and experience of peak emotion to music. Nat Neurosci. 2011 Feb;14(2):257-62.

darkness in the ancient valley

Attended the first night of the world (and Nashville) premiere of American composer Richard Danielpour’s piece, eponymous with the title. Described as “visceral, romantic and distinctly American.”

(One day, this blog will be about science again.)

Reminds me of another less arcane piece, actually —

Somethin’ filled up
my heart with nothin’,
someone told me not to cry.

But now that I’m older,
my heart’s colder,
and I can see that it’s a lie.

Children wake up,
hold your mistake up,
before they turn the summer into dust.

If the children don’t grow up,
our bodies get bigger but our hearts get torn up.
We’re just a million little gods causin rain storms turnin’ every good thing to rust.

I guess we’ll just have to adjust.

verdi girls

Saw the Nashville Opera’s production of La Traviata with my friend Jane this weekend. Didn’t take any photos of note, but it did remind me of all the illicit pictures of concert halls I’ve taken in the past:

American Ballet Theater @ The Met, New York City, July 2010

Main Staircase, Opera Garnier, Paris, France, July 2008

View from Box Center, Vienna State Opera, Vienna, Austria, July 2008

Main Stage, Vienna State Opera, Vienna, Austria, July 2008

 

Then again, “illicit” is subjective, isn’t it?

And oh yeah, I moved to Nashville. #OverdueNotifications

the september issue

I’m no style trendsetter – that’s my friend Ashleigh – but sometimes the times call for a good ol Southern vintage photoshoot.

The Enlightenment “I”

“The average person tends to fall back on the Enlightenment notion of the self — one mind, with privacy of thought and sensory experience — as a key characteristic of identity…

… That very impermeability is part of what makes the concept of the mind so challenging to researchers studying how it works, the neuroscientist and philosopher Antonio Damasio says in his book, ‘Self Comes to Mind.’

‘The fact that no one sees the minds of others, conscious or not, is especially mysterious,’ he writes.

We may be capable of guessing what others think, ‘but we cannot observe their minds, and only we ourselves can observe ours, from the inside, and through a rather narrow window.'”

Excerpted from “Could Conjoined Twins Share a Mind?” Susan Dominus, The New York Times. Published May 25, 2011

Fascinating article on how Krista and Tatiana, adorable 4 year old girls joined at the head, could possibly be sharing thalamic nuclei, which are in part responsible for the body’s perceptions and sensations. Thus, anecdotal evidence exists that a touch on one girl’s foot leads to the other girl’s giggles. Their shared sensations transfers across haptic (touch) and visual domains (so far also suggested anecdotally). No one knows for sure at this point, but the concept is fascinating to think about. What if you personally felt the external events experienced by another person? What if everything you experienced was brought upon someone else? Would you then be so sure of your preserved identity? I would highly recommend a full read of the article.

The most fitting photos from my collection that illustrate this philosophical ‘sense of self’ comes from my travels in Tibet two years ago. The beautiful people there – from monks in a rural monastery to Buddhist practitioners in the streets of Lhasa – seemed to be in touch with their inner serenity. A lot of implications for brain, mind, and behavior. More discussion to come, and suggestions as to future posts on this topic welcome.

“May your boulders be your blessings”

A rare post from my real “life” life… I graduated from Carnegie Mellon!

Can anyone say 7 am ceremony?

My brother tries on my cap

Figuring out logistically difficult things...

Mounting the Fence

Gesling stadium

Mom purchasing flowers

This is typical...

This is also typical

"May your boulders be your blessings"

My amazing advisor!

"I can't believe it's not butter!"

"No really, are you sure about this?"

some jumping pictures just don't work out...

Seven Ages of the PhD

I read a really interesting and introspective article in Nature recently – “Seven Ages of the PhD” – documenting individual scientists’ experiences and insights as PhD students in the past 7 decades.

Generally, each decade has an overarching tone in one’s approach to research, a pervading mindset towards science and discovery, if you will. The contributors ranged from a British biologist who worked with Rosalind Franklin to a Chinese glaciologist working after the Cultural Revolution crushed Chinese academia to a Nigerian chemist whose home university did not have the necessary equipment to conduct her research.

It was wholly inspirational and I cannot wait to start my PhD 🙂

~*~

1950s: the age of formality

1960s: the age of independence

1970s: the age of innocence

1980s: the age of internationalism

1990s: the age of revolution

2000s: the age of perseverance

2010s: the age of communication

“A good PhD often raises more questions than it solves.”
— Raymond Gosling

“the unfolding of something beautiful or dramatic over time”

“Scientists whose specialty is cosmology tell us that time and space are inextricably linked…

“You can’t have one without the other.  They say that if you could go back far enough, nearer the Big Bang, time and space would merge…”

“…They wouldn’t be separate dimensions…”

“Being on the same continuum, they are relative, not independently fixed…”

“Musicians are especially sensitive to time, since their art form manipulates its sonic materials within time…”

“…as a sculptor does her marble within space…”

“Of course, music happens in space, too—it happens someplace…”

“But, the primary attention is given to unfolding something beautiful or dramatic over time…”

“…You can’t take in music without taking time.”

— Paul Johnston, Artist-lecturer, Carnegie Mellon University

stranger in a strange land

portraits of genius

In a recent Wired magazine post, neuroscientist/journalist Jonah Lehrer asks, “Where have all the geniuses gone?” Lehrer, a Columbia University grad and a Rhodes Scholar, posits that perhaps we have become less talented.

“Oh no!” you think. “Not in the grand era of American ingenuity!”

It turns out that the idea stemmed from Gideon Rachmann’s column in the Financial Times. If you look at the dominating list of great thinkers in history, it appears to trump those of today. In 1939, for example, Einstein, Keynes, TS Eliot, Picasso, Freud, Gandhi, Orwell, Churchill, Hayek, and Sartre were in their prime. Can you think of their modern-day contemporaries?

Rachmann and Lehrer acknowledge that it is unfair to judge without the perspective of historical distance. Moreover, many fields – science especially – are increasingly collaborative and interdisciplinary, thus why the most prominent studies published in the top journals are by a cohort of authors, and not single ideas championed by individual thinkers, as in the case of Freud’s theories or Darwin’s On the Origins of Species, etc.

Moreover, the “complexity of our 21st century problems” requires a thinker to master the field – which takes years upon years and is ongoing – before he or she can create new knowledge. Thus, while it was the case that da Vinci was most prolific in his 20s, nowadays, the average age for a Principal Investigator to receive his or her first grant is hovering around 40.

The era of the “lone genius” is coming to an end, Lehrer concludes. Lincoln, being hounded here by the paparazzi here circa summer 2009, is becoming an anomaly.

Shakespeare, sitting here outside of the Carnegie Museums, watches hundreds of bright young minds rush past him on Forbes Avenue…

As individuals, we find small moments of introspection…

… and cherish the opportunity to learn from mentors…

… to learn an art, which may be regarded as “virtuosic” …

… or encounter beautiful situations that challenge our traditional notion of “genius” and “virtuoso” …

“I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.”
— Oscar Wilde