Music of the Mind

Trinity College professor, Dan Lloyd, has created a program that utilizes an MRI to scan brainwaves, enabling him to choose different frequencies of sound to correlate with different parts of the brain. Volunteers to test the program were asked to watch scenery, to play a driving video game or to just relax. During this time, the active parts of the brain were converted into different frequencies, thus creating a musical sound. These “normal” brainwaves were then compared to brainwaves from subjects with dementia and schizophrenia, who produced rhythms that were “unsteady” and with “cadences.” The discovery may help pinpoint brain injuries that don't typically appear on a normal brain scan. Besides lending innovation in the neuroscience field, the results were “bizarrely beautiful” and unique to each person.  You can listen to the sounds here.

Image "brain-music"courtesy x-journals.com via creativecommons.org.