Location

MIT Media Lab, E14-240

Description

Music is a fundamentally human activity that is celebrated worldwide, but why we know and love our music has remained a mystery. Epic successes and failures in the human musical ability, from Mozart to Hillary Clinton, are informative of how music processing occurs in the brain. Psyche Loui will describe some current and future projects that use music as a model to understand and to capitalize on the interaction of perception, action, cognition, and emotion in the human nervous system. Results paint an optimistic picture for human open-mindedness, for the use of Brainstruments–novel brain computer interfaces for music–in enabling creativity as well as brain plasticity and repair, and for the role of the sonic arts in encouraging human collaboration, affective communication, and prosocial behavior.

Biographies

Psyche Loui is a neuroscientist, musician, and instructor in neurology at the Harvard Medical School, where her research aims to find out why humans make music, and how music can develop and repair the brain. She obtained her BS from Duke University and her PhD from University of California at Berkeley, where her work investigated the human ability to learn new musical systems. Her work has been featured in the BBC, WGBH, Boston Globe, The New York Times, Science Daily, MSNBC, and other news sources. Dr. Loui currently holds grants from the Grammy Foundation, Templeton Foundation, and National Institute of Deafness and Communication Disorders. She presented her work at TEDxCambridge in 2011.

Host/Chair: Tod Machover