Science thomsonreuters.com

I decided to pursue work in science mostly because I was always good at it. It's just something that I excelled in. I especially like biology and I really enjoy learning about neuroscience. I like the chemistry of the brain, the structure of the brain, and how different parts of the brain can have different specified functions or not. It's so complicated but really fascinating. Brain injury studies can be really informative - people can be left with the weirdest problems after a brain injury, such as what's called hemi-spatial neglect, where the patient loses the ability to pay attention to half of his visual field. There was one individual with this condition who painted a piece of art once and only used one half of the  canvas. Also, a lot of what we know about language and the  brain has come out of brain injury studies.

As lab manager for Dr. Daniel Levitin, the experiments we've been working on recently are mostly to do with expressivity in music.  Using altered sound files we are investigating what components, and the degree of these components lead to the perception of differences in the perceived emotional expressivity of the performance. Basically we'll take a sound file and make varying levels of expressivity by altering certain aspects of each note based on a formula that we had. We play these files to people to people to see if they can tell the difference between two different levels of expressivity. We also hope to extend that study to find out if individuals with autism can tell the difference. The interesting thing about people with autism is they generally have a hard time understanding and interpreting the emotions of people who are talking to them or are around them, but perhaps they have a preserved ability to detect emotion in music.

A lot of music research has been done using pieces of music created in the lab for a particular experiment, but Dr. Levitin was more interested in using music that already exists for his experiments, so that's what we use. We use a lot of pop music and classical music, which makes sense if we want to apply the results more generally.

We've also done some work studying individuals who have Williams Syndrome who have general cognitive impairments, they are unable to tie their shoes, or understand the concept of time, but they love to play music and have the ability to do so at a level inconsistent with the rest of their cognitive skills. They also have a preserved ability for language, they like to talk a lot, and especially like unusual words. Finding islands of musical ability where other deficits exist can teach us a lot about music and the brain. Another example of this would be among people who stutter, when they sing, they might stop stuttering and there's been research which shows this. So it seems like there might be a different pathway for music than just language on its own.

To be clear, in the Levitin lab, we're not working on a therapy; we're just looking into how the mind processes music. Music therapy is already used with children with disabilities; our studies look into the whys and hows of music's impact.

The thing about science is there are options. You can go into research or you can go into industry or med school. I want to work with people so I'm thinking of doing a speech pathology program. I've done work with severely handicapped people, and I like working with them, it's kind of cool to see them progress, so I was thinking that would be interesting. I also like the idea of working one on one with various people and also going to different environments, which this profession would allow.