Author Interviews, Health Care Systems, Sleep Disorders / 16.02.2023

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Michael R. Schutz, Ph.D. Professor of Music Cognition/Percussion at McMaster University Founding director of the MAPLE Lab and Core member of the McMaster Institute for Music and the Mind. Prof. Schutz is also a professional musician and directs McMaster’s percussion ensemble.   MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Hospitals around the world are filled with devices generating aconstant stream of tones conveying information to medical staff.overburdened healthcare professionals, and contributes to burnout inmedical staff.  The Emergency Care Research Institute (ECRI) regularlyincludes problems with auditory alarms in their list of "Top 10 HealthTechnology Hazards" and they  are so problematic an FDA surveyimplicated them in hundreds of patient deaths.While there is currently a lot of interest in how to improve alarmmanagement protocols, this study is different in that it looks atimproving the quality of the alarm sounds themselves.  For historicalreasons many default to simplistic "beeps" which are generallyannoying.  While annoying is useful for critical alarms requiringimmediate action, the vast majority of these messages are merelyintended to update medical staff of changes (i.e. blood pressure isrising) or indicate other situations that do not require immediateaction. Unfortunately, many machines use the same simplistic andannoying "beeps" regardless of whether the messages are urgent ornon-urgent.  This constant flood of annoying beeps negatively affectsboth patients (extending recovery time due to interrupted rest) andstaff (who can develop "alarm fatigue" from the constant cacophony). (more…)
Author Interviews, Exercise - Fitness / 15.07.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Matthew J. Stork, PhD Michael Smith Foundation for Health Research Postdoctoral Fellow The University of British Columbia School of Health & Exercise Sciences MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: High-intensity interval training (HIIT) involves multiple brief, high-intensity efforts, separated by periods of recovery. Research shows that several weeks of HIIT can elicit meaningful physical health benefits that are similar to those of traditional, long-duration aerobic exercise. While HIIT is time-efficient and can induce important health benefits, one major drawback is that people may find it to be unpleasant – especially those who are insufficiently active and not meeting recommended physical activity guidelines. The potentially unpleasant nature of HIIT may deter people from beginning or adhering to a HIIT program. Consequently, researchers have begun to investigate the use of music as a potential strategy to enhance people’s pleasure during HIIT. However, the current research evidence is quite limited and, in particular, insufficiently active individuals have been understudied. (more…)
Author Interviews, McGill, PNAS / 20.02.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Ben Gold, a PhD candidate Lab of Robert Zatorre The Neuro (Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital) McGill University MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?  Response: Music is just sound in air, but it carries considerable power. It captivates our brain’s reward system, we devote an enormous amount of time and money to it, and we're just beginning to tap its therapeutic potential. We wanted to explore how something so abstract could have such an impact, and since music is so well suited to establishing and manipulating patterns of sound as it unfolds, we focused on how it manipulates expectations. Previous research has shown that surprises are often the most emotional and pleasurable moments in music listening, but whether and how this engaged the brain's reward system was unclear. So we adapted an experimental protocol designed for studying learning and surprise about more concrete rewards like food or money, and applied it to a musical context during brain imaging. This protocol relies on participants making decisions from which we could infer their expectations, allowing us to estimate how surprised they were by each outcome whenever it occurred. In our case, we asked participants to make choices about colors and directions that were associated with different musical outcomes, but we didn't tell them what those associations were so that they they started with no expectations and learned as they went. We found that our participants could learn about music just like they would learn about how to find food or win money, and that the same neural process was involved. Specifically, we saw that the activity of the nucleus accumbens -- a central hub of the reward system -- reflected both how pleasant and how surprising each musical outcome was: a computation known as a reward prediction error. Across individuals, those who better represented these reward prediction errors in their nucleus accumbens also learned better about the music in the experiment, making more decisions over time to find the music they preferred.  (more…)
Author Interviews, Hearing Loss / 12.02.2019

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Keith Schneider PhD Director, Center for Biomedical and Brain Imaging Associate Professor Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences University of Delaware MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings?  Response: Absolute pitch is the ability to name a musical note in isolation.  It is rare in the population, approximately 1/10,000 people have it.  The neural mechanisms of this ability have not been clear.  It is not known whether people with absolute pitch encode auditory frequencies differently, or whether absolute pitch derives from the same sensory encoding but different memory connections. We tested 20 people with absolute pitch, 20 matched musicians with the same number of years of musical training, age of onset of musical training, and number of hours of practice per week, as well as 20 controls with minimal musical training. The main findings are that people with absolute pitch have larger early auditory cortex—primary auditory cortex was enlarged about 50% relative to the other two groups, which did not differ significantly from each other.  We also found that the tuning bandwidth of the individual voxels in the early auditory cortical areas was broader in people with absolute pitch. That is, these small bits of the brain responded to a wide range of frequencies than those in the other two groups.  This suggested to us that people with absolute pitch might imply what is known as “ensemble encoding”.  That is, they use a larger network of neurons to encode sounds.   (more…)
Author Interviews, Columbia, Neurology / 09.07.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Andrew Goldman PhD Laboratory for Intelligent Imaging and Neural Computing Department of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience, Columbia University Andrew Goldman PhD Laboratory for Intelligent Imaging and Neural Computing Department of Biomedical Engineering, Columbia University Presidential Scholar in Society and Neuroscience, Columbia University  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Many Western musicians have difficulty improvising, despite having extensive training and experience. These musicians learn about and use similar musical structures in their playing (like chords, scales, rhythmic patterns, etc.) as experienced improvisers, but they may know about them in different ways. In other words, different musicians have different ways of knowing and learning about similar musical structures. To understand which ways of knowing facilitate the ability to improvise contributes to an understanding of how people are able to use knowledge creatively. Western music provides an important opportunity to compare these different ways of knowing because in other improvisatory domains of behavior (like speaking), it is difficult to find people who know how to do it but cannot improvise with it (e.g., if you know a language, you can very likely improvise with that language). In order to advance our understanding of these improvisatory ways of knowing, we compared musicians with varying degrees of improvisation experience in a task that tested how they categorized musical chords. In Western music, different chords are theorized to have similar “functions.” For example, on a guitar, there are different ways to play a C chord, and you could often substitute one for the other. You might even play another chord in place of the C chord and have it sound similar, or lead to a similar subsequent harmony. Improvisers often use notation that specifies classes of chords rather than specific realizations (versions) of a chord whereas those who do not typically improvise use notation that specifies the full realization of the chord. By analogy, one chef might use a recipe that calls for “citrus” (in music, a class of musical chord) while another chef’s recipe might specifically call for “lemon” (in music, a specific realization of a functional class of chords). We tested whether improvisers categorize similar-functioning harmonies as more similar to each other than different-functioning harmonies, and compared how less experienced improvisers categorize the same harmonies. Our task required the musicians to listen to a series of repeating harmonies (the “standard” stimuli) and pick out occasional chords that were different in any way (the “deviant” stimuli). Some deviant stimuli were different versions of the standard chord (like limes in place of lemons) and some deviant stimuli were chords with different musical functions (like bananas instead of lemons). The more experienced improvisers were better at detecting the function deviants than the exemplar deviants whereas the less experienced improvisers showed little difference in their ability to detect the two types of deviants. In other words, because improvisers categorize the different versions of the same chord as similar, they have a relatively harder time picking out the similarly functioning harmonies. This was measured using behavioral data, and electroencephalography (EEG), which can be used to provide a neural measure of how different stimuli are perceived to be from each other. (more…)
Author Interviews, Mental Health Research, Psychological Science / 13.06.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: “Divine Piano” by François Philipp is licensed under CC BY 2.0Zachary Wallmark, Ph.D Assistant Professor of Musicology Directo MuSci Lab SMU Meadows School of the Art Music Division Dallas, TX 75275 MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: Music making and listening is an intensely social behavior. Individual differences in trait empathy are associated with preferential engagement of social cognitive neural circuitry, including regions of the medial prefrontal cortex, cingulate, and insula, during the perception of socially relevant information. In our study, we used fMRI to explore the degree to which differences in trait empathy modulate music processing in the brain. We found that higher empathy people experience greater activation of social circuitry as well as the reward system while listening to familiar music, compared to lower empathy people.  (more…)
Addiction, Race/Ethnic Diversity, Social Issues / 28.02.2018

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Khary Rigg, Ph.D. Assistant Professor Department of Mental Health Law & Policy University of South Florida  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? Response: Over the past two decades, the demographic profile of MDMA (ecstasy/molly) users has changed. In particular, African American MDMA use has risen in some cities. One possible explanation of this new trend is the drug’s recent popularity (as molly) in hip-hop/rap (HHR) music. Several top rappers endorse the drug as a way to have fun or get women “loose.” There are currently no studies, however, that investigate the extent to which African American MDMA users listen to. hip-hop/rap music or the influence that these pro-MDMA messages have on their use of the drug. This study used survey and interview data to identify the extent to which hip-hop/rap music is listened to by African American MDMA users and assess the perceived influence of HHR music on their decision to begin using. (more…)
Author Interviews, Neurological Disorders / 06.06.2017

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Bernhard Ross, Ph.D. Rotman Research Institute Baycrest Centre ON, Toronto  MedicalResearch.com: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: We know from previous research that brain function for hearing is more strongly developed in musicians. The effect of a musician’s long-term training leads to a neuroplastic effect where their brain has more neurons involved in auditory processing. These neurons show stronger activity during listening to sound than in non-musicians and these findings strongly encouraged us to study neuroplasticity of the adult brain. We were interested in understanding why the neuroplastic effects of training and learning are so clearly expressed in professional musicians. The study’s main finding was that actively making sound, by playing a musical instrument, changed brain responses for listening and perception. Most importantly, neuroplastic brain changes occurred very quickly, within one hour of listening and making sound. In contrast, brain changes were observed after days in previous studies that only had participants listening to sounds. Another finding was that brain responses to hearing a sound are different when a person produces the sound themselves compared to listening to a recorded sound or a sound made by another person. This difference demonstrates that brain networks of intention, movement planning, movement execution, and expectation are involved when making a sound. We compared playing a real instrument with pressing a button for hearing a sound and found larger changes in the brain’s response to actively playing a musical instrument than pressing a button to elicit the same sound. (more…)
Author Interviews, Lancet, Pain Research, Surgical Research / 14.08.2015

Dr Martin Hirsch Clinical Research Fellow Women’s Health Research Unit Queen Mary University of LondoMedicalResearch.com Interview with: Dr Martin Hirsch Clinical Research Fellow Women’s Health Research Unit Queen Mary University of London and Dr Jenny Hole Foundation Year 1 Doctor Kettering University Hospital Dr Jenny Hole Foundation Year 1 Doctor Kettering University Hospital   MedicalResearch: What is the background for this study? What are the main findings? Response: As doctors we see medicines being prescribed on a daily basis and the benefit but also harm that they can cause. We wanted to assess the role of non pharmaceutical interventions which can benefit patients with a low or minimal potential for harm. We all have an interest in music of different genres and we agreed that we didn’t know anybody who did not like music of one sort or another. On the basis that we all have gained pleasure from music, we wanted to see if this pleasurable experience at the time of a difficult and painful stimulus could reduce the problems encountered as people recover from surgery. We searched all published medical literature and found 73 of the highest quality studies (randomised controlled trials) to compare and combine their findings in a meta-analysis. This technique aims to strengthen the validity by producing a combined result. We found that using music before during or after surgery reduced pain, reduced the requirement for pain killers, reduced anxiety, and improved satisfaction. (more…)