Posts tagged brainwaves
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Spinal cord injury victims may be able to look forward to life beyond a wheelchair via a robotic leg prosthesis controlled by brain waves. Individuals with paraplegia due to spinal cord injury who are wheelchair-bound face serious health problems, or in medical terminology, comorbidities, such as metabolic derangement, heart disease, osteoporosis, and pressure ulcers. New research efforts are being directed toward restoring brain-controlled ambulation for those who suffer from spinal cord injuries.
Neuroscientist David Sulzer Turns Brain Waves Into Music
Columbia neurophysiologist David Sulzer took his first piano lessons at the age of 11 and was playing his violin and guitar in bars by age 15. Later he gained a national following as a founder of the Soldier String Quartet and the Thai Elephant Orchestra—an actual orchestra of elephants in northern Thailand—and for playing with the likes of Bo Diddley, the Velvet Underground’s John Cale and the jazz great Tony Williams.
From left, Brad Garton and David Sulzer discuss turning brain waves into music on WHYY/PBS in Philadelphia.
It was only after arriving at Columbia, however, that the musician-turned-research-scientist embarked on perhaps his most exotic musical venture—using a computer to translate the spontaneous patterns of his brain waves into music.
With the help of Brad Garton, director of Columbia’s Computer Music Center, Sulzer has performed his avant-garde brain wave music in solo recitals and with musical ensembles.
Last spring, Sulzer presented a piece entitled Reading Stephen Colbert at a conference in New York City sponsored by Columbia and the Paris-based IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique), a global center of musical research.
Sulzer, a professor in the departments of Psychiatry, Neurology and Pharmacology, wore electrodes attached to his scalp to measure voltage fluctuations in his brain as he sat in a chair reading a book by the comedian. Those fluctuations were fed into a computer program created by Garton, which transformed them into musical notes.
Like a melody that keeps playing in your head even after the music stops, researchers at the University of Illinois’s Beckman Institute have shown that the beat goes on when it comes to the human visual system.
In an experiment designed to test their theory about a brain mechanism involved in visual processing, the researchers used periodic visual stimuli and electroencephalogram (EEG) recordings and found, one, that they could precisely time the brain’s natural oscillations to future repetitions of the event, and, two, that the effect occurred even after the prompting stimuli was discontinued. These rhythmic oscillations lead to a heightened visual awareness of the next event, meaning controlling them could lead to better visual processing when it matters most, such as in environments like air traffic control towers.