Carolina Performing Arts, in collaboration with Carolina Center for Neurostimulation and the UNC School of Medicine, hosted “Natural Rhythms: The Brain, the Beat, and the Beauty of Neurological Electricity” on Feb. 18 at the Active Learning Theatre in Roper Hall. The joint effort fused the arts and sciences, an ongoing initiative of the arts organization, and was a representation of its mission to “spark curiosity.”
As audience members entered the theater, Athena Stein, a postdoctoral researcher at UNC, was preparing to conduct an electroencephalogram, or EEG, on Savannah Finger, a clinical study coordinator who volunteered for the experiment. The test measures electrical activity within the brain and how it responds to various stimuli — in this case, a violin.
Johnny Gandelsman, a musician and Curator-in-Residence at CPA, played two pieces at the event in front of a projection of waveforms that represented Finger’s brain activity. As Gandelsman played, the waveforms changed in response to different qualities of the music – tempo and dynamics, for example.
Flavio Frohlich, director of Carolina Center for Neurostimulation, told the audience that the change in frequencies they were seeing is an example of Finger’s brain dynamically adjusting itself to the outside world. When Gandelsman began the song, the screen displayed a slower frequency structure, Frohlich said. When the piece increased in tempo and volume, the signal also increased and the wavelength’s amplitude decreased — on the screen this was represented by the waves changing from tall and slow moving to short and fast moving — a result of the brain’s need to focus and stay in sync with its environment, he said.
Frohlich and his collaborators help develop new treatments for psychiatric disorders. He said the brain rhythms shown at the event are altered by different states of psychological distress.
“So we're studying non-pharmacological ways, how to reshape and restore those brain rhythms’ activity patterns,” Frohlich said. “Today we've seen how they reflect music and interact with music.”
Amanda Graham, associate director of engagement for CPA, said the organization has a history of collaborating with the sciences. It began working with David Binanay — the director of DooR to DooR, an organization that brings the arts to the UNC Health community — to arrange a music series that provided entertainment to the UNC School of Medicine campus. Graham said the idea for this event stemmed from that collaboration.
