Since I discovered my passion and interest for neuroscience at a relatively young age (when I was a freshman in high school), I took every opportunity to pursue it, from attending research poster sessions (read this article to learn more) to attending conferences and symposiums. One such symposium I attended was the Music and the Brain symposium hosted by the Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics at Stanford University. If you want to learn about how to find such events, read this article.
As a mere freshman in high school, I signed up for the Music and the Brain Symposium, and I was absolutely fascinated about the variety of talks and people that I was introduced to. One of the most interesting talks I listened to was given by Dr. David Eagleman and Dr. Anthony Brandt called The Runaway Species. Their talk discussed how evolutionary tweaks shape our species’ imaginative gifts and explored the cognitive software that generates new ideas as well as the critical aspects of a creative mentality. The talk examined how all new ideas come from the old because the brain is constantly seeking novelty by repurposing old ideas. The thirst for novelty emerges from the brain being unable to tolerate too much repetition. Therefore, creativity lives in the space between novelty and familiarity — people shy away from too much novelty, but also become bored with too much familiarity. Drs. Brandt and Eagleman talked about the three key components of creativity: bending, the art of transforming or twisting an idea; breaking: refining an idea into smaller pieces; and, blending, the combination of several, existing ideas. Together, these three tasks are the source and foundation of creativity. Drs. Brandt and Eagleman proposed that creativity is ultimately propelled when the past is treasured but not untouchable. Furthermore, creativity requires straying from the path of least resistance and “easy” neural networks to generating several options and “be fearless in the face of error.” I thought the ideas they presented were extremely novel and interesting because I had never been introduced to such topics prior to this talk. I thought it was fascinating how interdisciplinary their ideas were, drawing concepts from neuroscience, philosophy, psychology, and many other fields.
Another talk I found particularly interesting was also given by Dr. David Eagleman. Dr. Eagleman talked about synesthesia which literally means a “joined feeling,” or a bleeding of the senses. Synesthesia is idiosyncratic, meaning that each person can experience a unique type of synesthesia. For example, some people can see sounds while others can taste shapes. For other people, different notes of a scale can evoke certain colors while others can see positions and motions of the body as they listen to music. Synesthesia takes place when there is increased cross talk between brain areas. This phenomenon is not classified as a disease because it is not disadvantageous. To tell if someone is a synesthete, a test for consistency is administered. The person is asked to match a certain letter with the color they hear, see, feel, etc. from an extremely versatile color palette. Often, notes of higher frequency are associated with lighter colors. In addition, Dr. Eaglemen has designed a neosensory sound vest that allows hearing impaired people to “hear” using vibrations from the vest. I had never heard of synesthesia prior to Dr. Eagleman’s talk and I was keen to learn more about synesthesia afterwards.
I listened to many more talks throughout the multi-day symposium and learned immensely from each one. After each talk, I even asked the speakers questions about their work and ideas, and I did further research on the topics myself. I highly recommend to anyone interested in science and research to explore such conferences, symposiums, talks, and poster sessions as it is incredible to listen to the most cutting-edge research going on in a field while also meeting extremely talented professionals from that field.