How are brain waves like choral music?

Oxford neuroscientists and the Westminster Choir demonstrate on YouTube how some of the rhythms and synchronized behavior in the brain are similar to choral music -- with participation from a long time Steemizen.

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Last summer, as you may recall, @cmp2020 went to Oxford University with the Westminster Choir from Westminster Choir College because the Westminster Choir was the choir in residence for The Choral Institute at Oxford. (*^{Note, the pixabay photo to the right is not the Westminster Choir.})

Unfortunately, his laptop got broken during the flight over, so @cmp2020 wasn't able to blog about the full trip, but he did make - a - few - entries from his cell phone. You might even remember this excerpt from his second entry,

Right before lunch, we had a brief session with some neuroscientists from Oxford University. They explained to us how the brain works and some more information about an experiment/demonstration they needed us for in the afternoon. I was fascinated by this considering what I've been learning about neural networks.

I'm not allowed to go into further detail about what they discussed with us or what the experiment was because it is coming out on their YouTube channel soon and we were asked not to. I will say that I literally talked about this idea with @remlaps a few months ago based on my experience with choir and neural networks so I was so excited to share it, but I must wait to respect the team and their work.

Last week, the YouTube video that he mentioned was published here, The Symphony of the Brain. If you look carefully, you can find him in the choir.

The video explores some of the same concepts that we saw in Elon Musk's Neuralink Demo, but from a different perspective. Here's a summary of the ~14 minute video.

After about a minute of introductory choral music, the narration opens with Demi Brizee saying,

We can think of singers in a choir as neurons in the brain. Like these singers, neurons have to work together to create harmony, and once they do - the results are magnificent.

After a choral interlude, Brizee continues by discussing the many ways that we encounter rhythms in life, including the rhythms that neurons in the brain generate in order to understand and control our environments and surroundings. She and her colleague, Shenghong He, then demonstrate how the rhythms of brain neurons can be read out as brain waves, showing the difference between brain activity when Shenghong's eyes are opened and when they are closed.

With eyes closed, the signal that emerges is known as the "alpha activity," which is the dominant function in the brain (perhaps this could be analogized as a conductor or a metronome?). The distinction is easily visible in the video at around 3 minutes. This ability to read and display the brain waves in real time can be useful to understand the brain's functioning, both when healthy and when impaired.

Brizee then goes on to note that in addition to perceiving and navigating our surroundings, brain waves are also important for creating and storing memories. This leads into a description by Natalie Doig of how they have studied brain waves in mice to study the formation and storage of memories. By recording a mouse's brain waves during an activity and again during sleep, they have observed that the active brain waves get replayed while the mice sleep, which they believe is "key to the formation and storage of long term memories".

After this, at about 5:00, the video cuts back to the Westminster Choir again in order to demonstrate how things can get confused if the vocalists (i.e. neurons) get out of synch. It's not clearly described in the video, but during this demonstration, the choir was separated into two groups, each following a different conductor with out-of-synch tempos. Beyond the obvious disconnect that we hear in the video, @cmp2020 also commented on how difficult it had been to follow one conductor while listening to vocalists who were following another one.

In the next segment, the video discusses the team's work with Parkinson's disease. Specifically, Ashwini Oswal describes his work with a Parkinson's Disease patient and Deep Brain Stimulation. The patient reports that as a result of this stimulation, although he's not cured, he does feel as if he's almost cured. (This reminded me of the Terry Donovan character in the Showtime series, Ray Donovan.)

A following section is introduced by Brizee again, where she notes that the ability to read brain waves can be used as a tool. She and Shenghong next demonstrate the use of a Brain Computer Interface (BCI) for communication between the two. As a very cool demo, Shenghong uses the BCI to perform a countdown that introduces a final choral segment, conducted by James Jordan. This segment symbolizes the beauty of the brain when it is synchronized properly. In a closing voice-over, Brizee says,

By studying the brain, we're studying - I think - the thing that makes us human.

If you're interested in science videos, you may wish to subscribe to the OxfordSparks YouTube channel. In addition to this video, it looks like they have many others that might also be interesting.

As I noted above, many of the concepts here were reminiscent of the Neuralink video, which also mentioned a focus on diseases like Parkinson's disease, and described their device as a "a high bandwidth i/o interface for the human brain".

Beyond the obvious distinctions between wired and wireless technologies with surgical vs. wearable devices, another possible difference that jumps out at me between Oxford's work and Neuralink's is the inclusion of deep brain stimulation. I'm not sure about how similar that is to the work that Musk's team described with the Neuralink implants and things like limb stimulation. Another apparent difference is Musk's long term goal for alignment with general artificial intelligence. I didn't pick up on anything of that nature with the Oxford team's work.

A final difference is that I don't recall the Neuralink team having much to say about memory formation and storage, which the Oxford team covered in the above video.

A 25% beneficiary setting has been applied to this post for @cmp2020.

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Thank you for your time and attention.

As a general rule, I up-vote comments that demonstrate "proof of reading".

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Steve Palmer is an IT professional with three decades of professional experience in data communications and information systems. He holds a bachelor's degree in mathematics, a master's degree in computer science, and a master's degree in information systems and technology management. He has been awarded 3 US patents.

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^{Pixabay license, source}

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