Introduction to Neuroscience Research
This third trimester I will be in San Francisco working on my Senior Research Project (SRP). While I was at UCSF's children hospital, with an electrode grid on my left temporal and parietal lobe, multiple music and language tests were performed to ensure removing the impaired tissue didn't limit me playing piano or speaking English, Spanish, and French.
For my SRP, I will be helping finish the research on the experiment that searched for piano cognition. The experiment for this had me playing relatively simple pieces that I knew well. At random points during me playing the doctors would shock certain parts of my brain to see if the shock would make me make a mistake.
We started this research in the Summer of 2015. My work on this experiment was labelling what type of mistake was made and then looking at where in my brain was shocked at the time. We'll continue this research for my SRP and hopefully have a paper written, maybe published by the time my project is done.
If time allows, I think it would be cool to compare foreign languages to music. There were several tests done on me that were just listening to music or phrases in English, French, and Spanish. I think it would be interesting to compare the two. Whether or not the music and languages overlap much would be interesting. I think it would be particularly cool if foreign languages overlapped with music in our brains.
Excited to get out there and start researching in two weeks!
Dylan
Are you going to be looking into how your brain reacts to shocks while reading music or just playing it from memory?
ReplyDeleteIn that experiment I was reading music pretty much the whole time. There were two or three pieces I played from memory but a lot of the data is based on me playing Bach's C major prelude with music.
ReplyDeleteDo you think that affected the results at all? After all, it's different parts of the brain communicating to each other when you read versus when you play from memory.
DeleteDo you think that affected the results at all? After all, it's different parts of the brain communicating to each other when you read versus when you play from memory.
DeleteThat is a good idea, but our data isn't quite good enough for that. In order to do a comparison between from memory and from music I'd have to compare me playing one piece from memory and from music. Unfortunately there wasn't a piece that I played with and without music so I won't be able to compare.
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