The World Science Festival, held in New York earlier this summer, has produced a couple of enjoyable videos that illustrate the power of music.

Here, Bobby McFerrin illustrates how deeply embedded the pentatonic scale is in the human mind and harnesses an audience’s instinctive awareness of it to generate a bit of a cappella music. His comment at the end about how audiences around the world seem to share this grasp of the pentatonic scale is particularly interesting.

But music reaches even further, occasionally binding disparate species. This video of a dancing cockatoo is a lot of fun, particularly the sight of a panel of distinguished neuroscientists getting up (or getting down) and dancing with the bird. One of the most touching parts of the movie The Wild Parrots of Telegraph Hill was a quiet moment when Mark Bittner was playing the blues and a bird called Mingus bobbed his head along with the music. This is similar, but bigger.

If you have time to view the entire “Avian Einsteins” panel discussion about avian and human brains and the links between language and movement, I highly recommend it.

So here I am back on the blog again. To jump back in with both feet, how about I write about climate change?

Recently I ran across this press release about the work of a couple of scientists who have suggested that human influence on global climate might go back much further than the Industrial Revolution. The press release covers a recent paper that follows up on earlier work suggesting that early agriculture was so much more land-intensive than current agriculture that its slash-and-burn practices might well have had an impact on the global climate. Today’s farming methods are much more efficient, so the amount of land under cultivation has dropped, allowing some reforestation (on the other hand, of course, Big Agriculture is also a big user of fossil fuels). Bottom line is that we may have been tweaking the atmosphere long before we started burning coal and so forth.

Our general effect on the environment, in fact, probably goes back even further. This story from Weekend Edition on NPR covers some of the intended and unintended consequences of the activities of groups of early hunter-gatherers. Although part of the message is that we’ve been ingenious enough to make our lives easier and help ourselves survive and thrive in ever greater numbers, the other part is that we sometimes caused big messes even back then.

Finally, an editorial from Cosmos Magazine recently discussed whether certain aspects of human nature work against vigorous action to address climate change. The argument is that our evolutionary history and culturally based beliefs and practices combine to make it difficult for us to work together to solve a large, complex long-term problem. I am a little leery of any argument that involves a set view of human nature based on evolution, for a number of reasons, but however we got to be this way, it certainly is common (although certainly not universal) for us to put self-interest ahead of the greater good and to ignore the long term in favor of right now. The author offers some suggestions for how to work around these problems in addressing climate change. Some of them seem like good ideas to me, and I’m all for using rationality over instinct and tradition, but I’m not sure how much time we have to learn about “our genetic makeup and why we feel powerless to act” before we have to somehow just gather up our ingenuity and actually take strong, concerted, collective action.

If you could translate your brain waves into music, what would it sound like? Would the sounds indicate anything meaningful to you? Some recent work published in PLoS One explores the characteristics of brain songs based on EEGs, and suggests that these songs do, in some circumstances, provide audible clues to brain activity.

Researchers in China translated data from EEGs into sequences of musical notes played on the piano. (Very roughly speaking, the amplitude of the brain waves was translated to pitch, the period to duration of the notes, and the average power to the intensity of the sound.) They processed EEGs taken during REM sleep (a sleep phase characterized by rapid eye movements and loss of muscle tone during which most vivid dreams occur) and during slow-wave or deep sleep. They found that volunteers who didn’t know which was which consistently attributed appropriate moods to the resulting musical sequences. The article (linked below) includes sound clips so you can listen for yourself.

I don’t grasp all the details of the conversion process, but thought it was fascinating to be able to listen to brain waves translated into piano music of a sort. The suggestion that such translated brain waves might someday be the basis of neurofeedback therapy was intriguing. (It seems like it would be wonderful to hear what my brain was doing and also hear how that activity changed according to my efforts. Could hearing brain waves really make it any easier to change your brain’s music from one song to another?) This bit of speculation toward the end is also quite interesting:

“We focus in particular on scale-free phenomena, which exist widely in nature and include those of neural activity, EEG, and human behavior. Therefore, the scale-free or equivalent power-law phenomenon may be an essential mechanism of the brain. In addition, this study also addresses an old question: why do people like music? A possible answer is that the brain and music both follow the same dynamic principle, the power-law, which may provide the most efficient method for humans to interact with the environment.

Scale-free music of the brain, Dan Wu, Chao-Yi Li, and De-Zhong Yao. PLoS ONE 4(6): e5915. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0005915 (Published June 15, 2009)

It’s been awhile since I read it, but I seem to remember that Tolstoy’s novel Anna Karenina includes two strikingly different descriptions of journeys: an exuberant Levin going someplace just after Kitty has accepted his proposal of marriage, and a distraught Anna’s trip somewhere, perhaps to the train station where she killed herself. The details are hazy, but I remember clearly appreciating how well Tolstoy portrayed the world as seen, very differently, through the eyes of the ecstatic Levin and the despairing Anna.

Some recent research has examined the ways people’s view of the world changes, quite literally, depending on the mood they’re in. People who were primed with a happy-making image took a more expansive view of a second image, processing more of the details surrounding the image’s focal point, whereas those who were primed with a downer of an image focused more tightly on the central element of the second image and didn’t attend to the details in the background. This article from PhysOrg has more information, and points out that each level of attention—the broad and the narrow—has its uses, depending on circumstances.

The full citation is: Opposing Influences of Affective State Valence on Visual Cortical Encoding, by Taylor W. Schmitz, Eve De Rosa, and Adam K. Anderson. Journal of Neuroscience, June 3, 2009, 29(22):7199–7207.

The very idea of a mind wandering suggests that the wandering mind is off course, aimless, or somehow gone astray. However, it might be more accurate to suppose that the mind is looking the other way while loosening the reins to allow more productive interaction between areas typically seen as having opposing actions. Recent research has shown that when the brain shifts its attention from a routine task and wanders, or daydreams, the so-called executive network, which is important for complex higher-level processing and problem solving, is activated. Earlier research had shown activity in the default network during daydreaming; the default mode seems to be what our brain slips into when it’s not attending to anything in particular.

The recent study suggests that when the mind wanders, these two networks, hitherto seen as opposed, are able to work together, perhaps allowing the solution of knotty problems. The study used fMRI to examine the brains of people who were carrying out a rote task; their level of attention was evaluated based on their performance on the task, their own reports of how attentive they were, and their brain activity. This press release on EurekAlert has more details.

This might explain some of the mysterious workings by which the mind can come up with an answer by going at a problem sideways, while ostensibly working on something else. For example, every Sunday morning I listen to the Sunday puzzle with Will Shortz on NPR. Shortz leaves listeners with a puzzle to solve during the week; the solution often comes to me later in the day when I’m in the shower or folding laundry. And one reason that I enjoy jigsaw puzzles, long walks, and cross-stitch is that these seemingly mindless activities can give me a break from considering some troublesome situation and, at least sometimes, allow me to come up with an answer or an approach to try. (Try as I might, though, I still can’t justify having a bad Freecell habit.)

The paper will be in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences: Experience sampling during fMRI reveals default network and executive system contributions to mind wandering, by Kalina Christoff, Alan M. Gordon, Jonathan Smallwood, Rachelle Smith, and Jonathan W. Schooler. Published online before print May 11, 2009, doi: 10.1073/pnas.0900234106.

I’ve been thinking a lot about creativity lately, in particular about how it works and what it feels like to create something. A couple of recent news articles, while not directly about creativity, do seem to shed some light.

An article from the Boston Globe discusses some of the capabilities of the infant mind and how they differ from those of the adult mind. The skills our brains are born with are useful in gaining mastery over the world; as we grow and use this initial tool kit, the result is a greater capacity for focused consciousness and time-saving familiarity with the world we live in. As in so many things, though, it’s not all gain. Some of those early-life attributes, such as greater flexibility and the capacity for noticing many more details of a situation or scene, would be kind of handy to regain from time to time. The article gives some interesting tidbits about how the brain develops from its early state into something more sophisticated but in some ways narrower and less rich.

Creativity comes into the story, it seems to me, because part of what it means to be creative is to be able to see things freshly, not only appreciating the familiar as if it were new but being able to present stories, colors, shapes, or sounds in new ways, as if seeing them from a new angle. I wonder if creativity is enhanced in any way by spending time with very young people and borrowing their sense of wonder and their capacity for absorbing situations (not knowing what they should pay attention to, the idea is that they try to pay attention to it all). One thing I’ve run across several times in advice about how to keep your brain fit and healthy as you age is to try new things: learn a new language or a new physical skill, read up on some subject or place that’s foreign to you. Maybe what’s going on there is that by immersing yourself in a world that you don’t know, you have to re-acquire some of that ability to notice everything and put it all together. It certainly seems like that might also be a boon to those who want to create; I’ve always had the feeling that doing new things, even if they weren’t related to the writing I wanted to do, was helpful somehow.

An article from The Economist, on the other hand, covers some new research into subconscious thought. A new study has used EEGs to examine brain activity while people were solving a particular type of problem; it turns out that brain activity can be used to predict, by up to 8 seconds, whether someone is going to get the answer to a puzzle. In other words, subconscious brain activity (specifically, an increase in high-frequency gamma waves in the right frontal cortex) reliably signals a forthcoming conscious moment of insight.

It’s always been fascinating to read about the many ways our subconscious minds seem to go on about their business without letting our conscious minds in on what’s going on until necessary. It’s like there’s some committee in the back room discussing the options unbeknownst to me (although “me” is a slippery pronoun in this context) until suddenly my conscious mind is announcing some decision to myself and to the world, just as confidently as if it had thought of it by itself. I’m sure this behind-the-scenes activity makes my cognitive processing much more efficient, but sometimes I’d really like to know what’s going on in there. The whole thing is even more peculiar when you’re coming up with ideas for some creative project or another, and you suddenly see a way to put together the pieces you’ve been mentally pushing around but you’re not sure where the insight came from, or you think you know what road you’re going to take in your writing that day but wind up finding yourself far from home with not much of an idea how you got there. Funny old things, brains.

A recent EurekAlert article describes some work that examined the effect of positive and negative emotions on a person’s level of adherence to typical cultural values. The study looked at Asians and Europeans; each culture, broadly speaking, has a different attitude toward individuality versus fitting into the group, and these attitudes were examined in individual participants. Then the researchers manipulated the moods of the participants, cheering some up and lowering others slightly into the dumps. The jazzed or bummed participants then were given some things to do that were designed to reveal the degree to which they acted in accordance with their attitudes. The happier ones were more likely to behave in ways that were off their own personal beaten path (Europeans taking more of a group view, Asians acting more independently), indicating that being in a more cheerful frame of mind might predispose people to be more exploratory and open to different ways of being. Mild misery had the opposite effect, reinforcing existing attitudes and behaviors.

It’s a fascinating look into how fluctuations in mood can change something that on the face of it might seem fairly set. Identity is not a static thing. (Incidentally, it’s also a nice story for those of us who like to answer questions about personality—or other topics—with “It depends.”)

(The full article is in the March 2009 issue of Psychological Science: Who I Am Depends on How I Feel: The Role of Affect in the Expression of Culture, Claire E. Ashton-James, William W. Maddux, Adam D. Galinsky, and Tanya L. Chartrand. Psychological Science 20:3, 340–346.)

Of course, the down side of the contingent nature of our behavior is that, as we already know, anxious, fearful people are not always at their best. Maybe that’s why it’s important to keep finding something to laugh at or otherwise feel good about even in trying circumstances. Coincidentally, I also happened across this article from the Association for Psychological Science about the value of positive emotions. The article describes the “broaden and build” model of psychologist Barbara Fredrickson, who has a new book out on the benefits of positivity. The idea is that contentment, playfulness, and serenity appear to help open up the mind to novel ideas (as with the recent experiment into cultural stereotypes), and over time, such moments of broadening add up to a greater sense of purpose, better social connections, and other beneficial outcomes. The article opens with a wonderful anecdote about patas monkeys, who in their youth chase each other around and, in the process, throw themselves onto flexible young trees, which bend and then fling them off in another direction. The monkeys drop this kind of horseplay as they get older, except when they’re being chased by a predator, when they will use a sapling as a slingshot to try to escape death. Evidently those monkeys look like they’re goofing off while they’re actually learning a survival skill.

One of the most endearing things about humans and other animals, it seems to me, is the sense of play, of spontaneous joy in some goofy activity or another, preferably shared. If there’s some cumulative long-term benefit, so much the better. I’m glad psychologists are looking into this kind of thing, and I’m also glad that thinkers before this have examined the question. Edward Abbey, for example, in Desert Solitaire, had this to say about the croaking of frogs in a brief wet spell in the desert:

“Why do they sing? What do they have to sing about? Somewhat apart from one another, separated by roughly equal distances, facing outward from the water, they clank and croak all through the night with tireless perseverance. To human ears their music has a bleak, dismal, tragic quality, dirgelike rather than jubilant. It may nevertheless be the case that these small beings are singing not only to claim their stake in the pond, not only to attract a mate, but also out of spontaneous love and joy, a contrapuntal choral celebration of the coolness and wetness after weeks of desert fire, for love of their own existence, however brief it may be, and for joy in the common life.

Has joy any survival value in the operations of evolution? I suspect that it does; I suspect that the morose and fearful are doomed to quick extinction. Where there is no joy there can be no courage; and without courage all other virtues are useless.”

I can’t do much better than leave you with the words of Cactus Ed. Right now I’m going out on my back patio to joyfully celebrate warmth and sunshine after weeks of midwest ice. (I won’t sing, though, because despite my best efforts I might sound remarkably like the frogs.)

A recent experiment at Ohio State, described in this story from Science Daily, looked at how depressed and nondepressed people view positive and negative things in their environment. To examine how people form positive or negative attitudes, researchers used a computer game that neatly sidesteps any possible confusion from pre-existing attitudes about particular topics. The game introduces players to a variety of beans with different appearances. They can accept or reject each bean as it appears on the screen; some beans are good beans, adding points to a player’s score, while others are bad beans, resulting in points being lost. The goodness or badness of a bean is reliably indicated by its appearance, and players have to learn to identify beans based on their experience with the game.

In this particular experiment with the bean game, depressed and nondepressed people were equally good at identifying the bad beans. However, depressed people didn’t do as well as the non-depressed at identifying the good beans. This seems to me to present an interesting chicken-and-egg question: Are people slower to spot the good things because they are depressed, or are they depressed because they’re slower to spot the good things? (I suspect the answer might be “Yes”; i.e., both are true.) The Science Daily article seems to come down on the latter side; it concludes by suggesting that therapists who are treating depressed people might try to make them more aware of the good things in their lives. This is probably excellent advice, but I think there’s more to it than that.

It seems to me—based only on my own experiences with depression—that maybe the crucial missing piece in a depressed person’s experience of the game is that to a depressed person, good things don’t reliably feel good. The word “anhedonia” describes the lack of pleasure in normally enjoyable activities that forms, for me, the core experience of depression, and I think it may be what’s at work in the depressed people’s poorer performance in recognizing the good beans. They just don’t always feel whatever it is that identifies experiences as being positive, pleasurable, or worthwhile. Reminding myself of the many blessings in my life is always a good thing to do, but sometimes it seems like an intellectual exercise that doesn’t really do much to bring back the normal feeling of enjoying those blessings. I wish I knew better what it is that brings that feeling of enjoyment back, or makes it go away, but I’d bet that its absence is at the heart of the difference in performance on the bean game.

The paper is Attitude Formation in Depression: Evidence for Deficits in Forming Positive Attitudes, by Laren R. Conklin, Daniel R. Strunk, and Russell H. Fazio (Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, 40(1) 120—126, 2009).