Through collaboration with the KV265 foundation, a pilot project to investigate the influence of music on the mind was launched. We studied two expert Harpists from Beyond Pluck using EEG and fMRI methods. The movie composed by Jose Francisco Salgado (from KV265 and the Adler Planetarium) documents the beauty of the brain and the tools used to explore it.
The initial portion of the movie demonstrates the real-time electrical fluctuations of the brain while one musician plays and the other listens. Later in the movie, the fMRI experiment is captured. In this case, the musician was asked to imagine themselves playing the piece they were listening to while the scanner collected data. A map of active regions during this process relative to the scanner noise is shown. Then through the use of new resting state analysis it was possible to display (in real-time) regions of the brain that were active while listening. This was made possible by the efforts of Xue Wang, PhD in the Neuroimaging lab. Go to http://vimeo.com/49609672 to see video.