Your Brain... A Social Network?

SciWorks Radio is a production of 88.5 WFDD and SciWorks, the Science Center and Environmental Park of Forsyth County, located in Winston-Salem.  

Human made items tend to be engineered and built. We look at them from a reductionist point of view. For example, a car engine is made up of many parts, but if you remove one part the car isn't going to run. Traditionally we have looked at the human brain with the same point of view; each part has its own specific role and if you damage one part you lose that function. However, Dr. Paul Laurienti from the Wake Forest University School of Medicine, Department of Radiology and his team are using what's known as “Complexity Science” to take a different approach.

Complexity science is a different theory about how to study natural systems. So instead of trying to take everything apart complexity science tries to study the entire system all at once. Like a flock of starlings; you don't want to study each one because it's not the individual bird it's how the birds interact. And it's all about interactions. If you look at the brain from a complexity science point of view, it's not the parts themselves... It's how all those parts interact. So the brain is much more like an integrated network, and it's trying understand what that network does, not trying to understand what each individual piece of the brain does.

In many ways this understanding can be compared to a social network like Facebook or Twitter. In fact, according to Dr. Laurienti, the very same tools and methods used to study how information flows from brain cell to brain cell can also be used to study the complex viral reach of a funny Facebook post by George Takei, for example. Dr. Laurienti and his team recently published a paper in the Journal Nature: Scientific Reports. Using Complexity Science, they took a look at the effects of music on the network of the human brain.

What we found was that when people are listening to their favorite music the brain network tunes into the precuneus, this part of the brain is important for processing how you fit into the world, and who you are. Processing information about yourself. When people were listening to music they like but not necessarily their favorite, the precuneus was highly connected to other areas like the frontal part of the brain which is really important for higher order thinking. As soon as they were listening to music that they didn't like, that part of the brain basically flipped the switch and pulled its connections away from the rest of the brain and became isolated was a really fascinating finding.

The connection of music to the brain's sense of oneself also appears to have an effect on how a person processes memory.

The other finding of this music study was comparing the connections of the brain from the sound processing part of the brain to the memory processing part of the brain. And we found when people are listening to music that they like but not necessarily their favorite, there was a strong connection between sound processing and memory formation. But when people are listening to their favorite music the sound processing disengaged the memory processing. At first without this kind of curious but the more we thought about, it actually makes sense because When you're listening to your favorite music you're not forming new memories. You're most likely processing old memories and having emotional thoughts and feelings associated with why you love that song the first place.

So how can the information from this study be applied medically?

I think the study of networks in the brain will ultimately lead to new understanding of brain diseases, and hopefully new cures for brain diseases. The first step is going to be understanding how the brain is changed in a particular disease. Say like schizophrenia; how are their brain networks different than people without schizophrenia? And then once we understand that, we can start to target our interventions to change those networks.

I'm particularly interested in how music might be related to problems with Alzheimer's disease. And as I mentioned when you're listening to your favorite song the sound processing region disengages the memory formation region. So this work might help us tailor music therapy. So if you want to really exercise someone's hippocampus, the memory forming part of memory formation. You want to play something they like because it'll engage that, but you don't want to play their favorite music because that's not going to tap into new memory formation. There's a lot of work to do but we think we might be able to figure out ways to fine-tune a particular music intervention to a particular brain disorder.

This Time Round, the theme music for SciWorks Radio, appears as a generous contribution by the band Storyman and courtesy of UFOmusic.com.