November 14, 2011

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SwM meets #SfN11!

I’ve been running around Washington DC for the past couple of days, walking from poster to poster wrapping my brain around the latest research in neuroscience and music, then doing some of my own “field research” by checking out a couple of rock shows in DC.

By Princess Ojiaku

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This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

I've been running around Washington DC for the past couple of days, walking from poster to poster wrapping my brain around the latest research in neuroscience and music, then doing some of my own "field research" by checking out a couple of rock shows in DC. Below is a video of DC's Medications, a band I saw Saturday night. They play a kind of dissonant rock that I absolutely adore. But as my colleague Jason Goldman points out, chicks (or you, dear reader) may not exactly dig my complex musical tastes.

All Dischord aside, I have seen some extremely interesting things at SfN11. I'm going to list a few of the presentations I've seen below and get back to more involved posts on the research later.

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Groh et al. "Patterns in song and speech" Max Planck Institute Leipzig, 92.14/VV25

Cameron et al. "Modulation of ankle-driving MEPs by metric Strength in tone sequences and music" Goldsmiths (University of London), 171.07/JJ9

Dodel et al. "Emotional responses in music listening are associated with brain-scale functional connectivity modulations" Florida Atlantic University, 171.03/JJ5

Uhlig et al. "What aspects of music grab our attention more? An investigation of the effects of musical structure and performance asynchrony on the perception of leader-follower relations and quality during selective attention to a piano duet" Max Planck Institute Leipzig, 224.11

Esfahani et al. "Player with a single string - Preserved semantic musical memory in an amnesic professional cellist" Charité - Universitätsmedizin Berlin, 287.17/TT1

About Princess Ojiaku

Hey there! I'm a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin Madison in the Neuroscience and Public Policy program. I'm also a musician who played in two bands in North Carolina, one called Pink Flag and another called Deals. My personal passions are science, music, and cycling as transportation.

I got into science as a kid while tagging along and watching my mom do experiments in her lab. I found that while I loved science, I didn't want to be alone in an ivory tower, crunching data that few others would understand. I also noticed that many other people thought science was this scary and incomprehensible entity of obscurity. When I realized that there were people working to make science fun and accessible to everyone, I knew that this was exactly what I wanted to do. The two things I find the most immensely interesting and continually impressing are music and neuroscience, so these are the topics that I'll focus on in my blog. Philosophy and politics are my second loves, so I might pop in an occasional post on these topics as well. Ultimately I am here to share things that give me wonder. I hope that reading Science with Moxie gives you a bit of that wonder too.

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