Featured Scientist: John Iversen
Institute of Neural Computation, UC San Diego
Email: jiversen@ucsd.edu
Website: http://www.nsi.edu/~iversen/

John Iversen is interested in the use of music perception and production as a tool for the study of complex brain processes, including those that may underlie language. We asked him "How can music be used as a tool to understand the brain?"

Music has a powerful, nearly universal influence on human culture as well as on the individual. Listening to or making music is a cognitively demanding and rich activity that involves many fundamental brain processes, making the study of music an attractive way to understand not only music, where it came from and what it does for us, but more general aspects of brain function such as the perceptual organization of complex temporal inputs, sensorimotor integration, skill learning, memory, emotion, and social interaction to name a few. Music is also attractively decomposable as a stimulus--one can study e.g. melody, or timing separately, but at the same time is also richly hierarchical in structure, as is language, making it a potent tool for the study of the brain.

One of my main interests is in the perception and production of rhythm, a topic that addresses how we structure events in time, and also has implications for medicine and education. Rhythm is central to how we perceive structure and meaning in music and language, and shapes how we move our bodies. This strong link between rhythm in perception and action underlies spoken language and dance, but is also of growing interest for the treatment of movement disorders due to Parkinson's or stroke. Because musical rhythm in (most!) healthy people can powerfully organize our movements, it holds promise for reorganizing the movements of people who may have lost the ability to do so themselves. We are studying the brain mechanisms of rhythm perception and production to understand this link, how it might be compromised by disease, and how music could intervene. This is one example of ways in which the field is trying to use music not only for emotional and social support, but also more target neural interventions.

Our goal is to understand not only how music moves us, but how it might change our brains. Several TDLC projects are studying how music might play a role in eduction by influencing the developing brain. We know that the brains of musicians differ in interesting ways from non-musicians, but only now are we conducting the necessary interventional and longitudinal studies to test if these changes are due to music training, and not just innate individual differences. As part of the PLING (Pediatric Longitudinal Imaging, Neurocognition, and Genetics) project run by TDLC member Dr. Terry Jernigan of UCSD's Center for Human Development, the SIMPHONY project is one attempt to define the impact of music on cognitive and brain development, with the aim of testing if music accelerates aspects of normal development. We are studying a cohort of children learning to play a musical interest and comparing them to children learning a martial art and to other children learning neither using a large battery of behavioral and brain structural and functional measures. One link we will test, which has been increasingly supported by evidence, is the impact of music training on language learning. Music and language share many neural mechanisms, and it may be that the intense demands on the auditory system required by music can have benefits to the perception of language sounds as well. Our interest in music as a tool to shape brain development falls within a larger trend to look again at the proper role of the arts in education.

What causes people to itch?

Scientists have recently discovered "itch nerves" that sit inside the spine, near the spinal cord. Neuroscientists at Johns Hopkins University (Xinzhong Dong and colleagues) have found that certain nerve cells are specialized to detect itchy sensations, and those receptors don't detect painful sensations.

This finding, published in the journal Nature Neuroscience in Dec. 2013, could potentially help scientists develop better anti-itch treatments. While these newly discovered nerves don't explain all itchiness (other nerves probably exist that can sense both itch and pain), treatments that target these "itch nerves" could be a huge improvement over current treatments such as steroids and antihistamines. More ...

(reference:
LiveScience)