Our Research Updates in Archways give a snapshot of the Rice ARCHES Initiative researchers’ current work, research progress, and future directions.
Art & Science at the MOH Conference
This month Dr. Melia Bonomo from the Department of Bioengineering talks about art and science at the Mechanics of Hearing conference.
In July, I attended the 2022 Mechanics of Hearing (MOH) Workshop in Helsingør, Denmark. The weeklong conference covered a variety of theoretical and experimental research areas under the umbrella of hearing mechanics, including: imaging techniques, computational modeling, physiology from molecules to systems level, otoacoustic emissions, and developments in translational research.
Sculpture on the grounds of Konventum.
MOH presentation in the auditorium at Koventum.
The conference was held at Konventum, which contained several auditoriums, communal eating areas, and hotel rooms in a village-like design that promoted networking and discussion. The venue grounds had beautiful sculpture, woodland trails, and views of Sweden across the water to admire during coffee breaks.
MOH was the perfect setting to present my research and get useful feedback from leading researchers in hearing mechanics. I presented a project I’ve been working on with Dr. Robert Raphael and Dr. Santiago Segarra on a new graph model of sound encoding in the cochlea.
In the middle of the week there was an excursion, which was a fun break from the scientific programming. We visited Kronborg Castle to learn about some Danish history, and we explored the Louisiana, an internationally renowned art museum.
During one evening of the conference, there was a really interesting talk from a Danish sound artist, Jacob Kirkegaard. He records and remixes a variety of natural and manmade sounds for listeners to reflect on, including from radioactivity in Chernobyl, melting Arctic ice, the US southern border wall, agriculture and food production, and waste management. The artwork he presented that was most relevant to our conference was on otoacoustic emissions, which are sounds generated by the ear.
Overall it was a great conference! I’m grateful for a travel scholarship provided by MOH, and supplemental funding from the Gulf Coast Consortia and Rice University grants, that made it possible for me to travel and participate.
Posted in Blog Posts | Comments Off on Research Update: December 2022
Our Mini Review series in Archways does a brief dive into research topics at the intersection of the arts and health.
Research on Music Therapy
This month, Amara Anyanwu, a Research Assistant in the BMEDLab working on Project CHROMA, tells us about the emerging research on therapeutic music engagement.
Rice University’s Project CHROMA studies the effects of music creativity on brain health and well-being in older adults and individuals with mild cognitive impairment. According to the American Music Therapy Association, music therapy can be used to help decrease anxiety and stress, decrease the perception of pain, increase confidence, and improve memory making [1].
Image from Leiden University [2]
Playing musical instruments has been shown to significantly improve frontal lobe function in patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment. In Shimizu et al.’s multitask movement music therapy study, patients with Mild Cognitive Impairment were asked to create repetitive rhythms with a Naruko clapper instrument. After the task, the researchers found increased cerebral blood flow in the prefrontal cortex, indicating increased stimulation. The patients also showed improved scores on the Frontal Assessment Battery, a cognitive test for frontal lobe function [3].
Music is very much about connecting with people, connecting with the external world.
Dr. Orii McDermott
Patients with moderate or advanced dementia may not be able to clearly communicate how they feel. In The importance of music therapy for people with dementia, Dr. Orii McDermott introduces the MiDAS scale (Music in Dementia Assessment Scales). Previous research in music therapy was often qualitative. Dr. McDermott developed a way to quantitatively assess how patients with dementia engage with music, using five key scales: interest, response, initiation, involvement, and enjoyment [4]. The MiDAS scale is now used in over twelve countries by music therapists, researchers, and clinicians to improve the quality of life of patients with dementia. Dr. McDermott explains that “music is very much about connecting with people, connecting with the external world”.
In Project CHROMA, participants learn, compose, and create their own music in group music classes. Many of the instruments that the participants use are household items, so the classes are accessible and can be replicated all over the world and with individuals across socioeconomic groups. As a research assistant, I have had the opportunity to observe many of the music classes, and it is amazing to see the participants become more confident in their musical skills as the class progresses. There is always so much joy and life in the classroom. The participants support and encourage each other throughout the class, giving each other feedback and helping each other make their ideas come to life. This creative environment hopes to improve the brain health and wellbeing of our participants.
[3] Shimizu, N., Umemura, T., Matsunaga, M., & Hirai, T. (2017). Effects of movement music therapy with a percussion instrument on physical and frontal lobe function in older adults with mild cognitive impairment: A randomized controlled trial. Aging & Mental Health, 22(12), 1614–1626. https://doi.org/10.1080/13607863.2017.1379048
[4] Regehr, K. (Host). (2019, May 6). Dr Orii McDermott: The importance of music therapy for dementia patients (No. 1) [Audio podcast episode]. In How Researchers Changed the World. Taylor & Francis. https://www.howresearchers.com/podcasts/episode-1/
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Our “Tools of the Trade” series in Archways highlights the research technology and methodologies used by the Rice ARCHES Initiative.
Why are we interested in modularity?
This week Dr. Melia Bonomo from the Department of Bioengineering tells us about the interesting theoretical grounding for studying brain modularity in Project CHROMA.
In Project CHROMA, we’d like to understand how creative music engagement during a 6-week class impacts brain activity and leads to changes in cognitive health, quality of life, and social and emotional well-being. One of the methods we’re using to study this is brain modularity.
In a previous Archways post, Dr. Fengdan Ye provided a great introduction to the way that brain modularity is calculated from neuroimaging data. This provides us with a way to quantify brain activity for a variety of reasons, such as to determine biomarkers for neurological disease and trauma, to look for individual differences in how people’s brains work to determine the best course of treatment, or to develop a metric to follow how therapeutic interventions impact the brain.
Image: Project CHROMA researchers collect neuroimaging data at the Houston Methodist Research Institute’s Magnetic Resonance Imaging Facility.
But there are many ways to quantify brain activity, so why are we interested in modularity?
I like to use an analogy of blending up smoothies — Let’s say you want to make a strawberry smoothie. It’d be really inefficient if you had to put your blender together from scratch every time you wanted to make one…
Fortunately, your blender is highly modular! There’s the base module with all of the electronics in place, the module where you blend up your fruit, and the module you drink from.
But what if you’re having a party and everyone wants a different type of complex smoothie? Here, it’s more efficient to have a blender with lower modularity where there’s some cross-talk between the modules, such as being able to use the container for drinking and to switch out different tops and blades as needed.
Image: A KitchenAid blender with high modularity (left), and a Magic Bullet blender with low modularity (right).
So as you can see, Modularity in general describes how the components of any complex system are grouped into modules [1]. Higher modularity is beneficial at short timescales for simple tasks, and lower modularity is more advantageous over longer timescales for complex tasks. This relationship has previously been tested for brain activity in theory [2] and in experiments [3], and now we’re interested in seeing how this plays out in Project CHROMA!
For more in-depth reading:
[1] H.A. Simon, Proc Am Philos Soc, 106(6): 467–482, 1962 [2] M. Chen & M.W. Deem, Phys Bio 12(1):016009, 2015. [3] Q. Yue et al., J Cognitive Neurosci, 29(9):1532-1546, 2017.
You can hear Dr. Bonomo speak about this and more in her recent interview about modularity of brain activity on Ryan’s Science!
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Our “Wellness Resources” series in Archways highlights outside initiatives supported by Rice ARCHES researchers.
Inside the Chrysalis
This month Dr. Michelle Quist is invited by Dr. Angie LeRoy, a post-doctoral Research Fellow on our team in the Department of Psychological Sciences, to discuss the mental wellness podcast that they are working on together.Dr. Quist is an Assistant Teaching Professor in the Department of Psychology at Penn State University and Founder of the Inside the Chrysalis podcast.
Have you ever felt the urge to fundamentally change in
positive ways? To outgrow bad habits and establish positive ones? We all have
at one level or another, but we always run up against the same problem – growth
is hard.
We learn in elementary school about the metamorphosis of the
caterpillar; the ravenous insect that cocoons itself inside a chrysalis before
eventually emerging as a beautiful butterfly. For us, this process becomes the
symbol of the growth and transformation for which we all strive. The aspect we
never discuss, however, is the magnitude of what is happening inside the
chrysalis. The caterpillar has to break itself down to its most basic elements
before reforming as an entirely new creature. That messy, chaotic process is
the inspiration for our podcast, Inside
the Chrysalis.
The creators of Inside
the Chrysalis are four social psychologists, people who study humans and
how they relate to each other. Our goal is to use our expertise to shed some
light on the transformation process and to help people connect with each other
in the context of shared experiences. Throughout our first season, we will
discuss common issues such as achieving an important milestone and then feeling
unexpected dissatisfaction or persistent imposter syndrome, or the anxiety that
can arise from comparing yourselves to other people. We invite people from a
variety of expertise and industry to candidly discuss what research has to say
about our collective experience, establishing a place for pause, growth,
reflection, and connection.
Playing unfamiliar music to patients could improve music therapy outcomes.
Music can promote brain healing, but scientists are still trying to understand which types of music work best for each patient.
Ajwad Creative/DigitalVision Vectors/Getty Images
When Melia Bonomo wants to kick back and relax, she turns to music and the gentle melodies of pop star Ed Sheeran. Like many people, the physicist feels her mood lift with certain tunes, a change doctors exploit to improve the health of patients with cognitive impairments. But some patients are unresponsive to music therapy. And it remains unclear exactly what restorative changes music actually induces in the brain. New results from Bonomo, a graduate student at Rice University, Texas, and her colleagues suggest that clues to both of these problems lie in how the brain responds to a listener’s favorite tune. Bonomo was set to share her findings in a session on the physics of the brain at the March Meeting of the American Physical Society earlier last month. (The meeting was canceled due to concerns about the new coronavirus disease, COVID-19, but Physics is reporting on some of the results that would have been presented.)
“Music therapy doesn’t work for everybody,” says Bonomo, who collaborated with researchers at Houston Methodist Hospital’s Center for Performing Arts Medicine. “We wanted to see if we could better understand why that is from how a person’s brain processes music.”
In the study, Bonomo and her colleagues used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to monitor the neuronal activity of 25 people as they listened to six audio excerpts. Each person’s set list included their favorite song, a Bach concerto, and an old newscast by Walter Cronkite. The team then translated the resulting fMRI images into network-like maps, with one map for each excerpt per person. To make these maps, the researchers divided the brain into 84 regions and drew a connecting line between two regions if they had similar patterns of activity during an audio excerpt.
Bonomo looked first at the brain maps of participants listening to their favorite songs. Within these networks, she noticed that some regions were more strongly connected with each other than others, forming a “community.” She then found that the networks fell into two categories: those where there were many connections between different communities and those where there were fewer. And interestingly, the category for a participant’s map was predictive of how they would respond to the other five sound clips.
She and her colleagues found that when a participant’s “favorite-song” network had many intercommunity connections but few intracommunity ones, the distribution of connections changed significantly for each of the other excerpts. But when the opposite was true, these connections tended to stay in place, unless the participant was listening to the most unfamiliar sound clips. (For the people in the study, the least known excerpts were a melody from a Japanese opera and a passage of foreign language speech.)
Bonomo and colleagues made network-like representations of brain activity in response to music. The maps indicate that the brain’s response to a favorite song (left)—specifically, the types of connections between regions of activity—predicts how it will respond to other music (center and right).
The fact that networks with more isolated communities are harder to disrupt is well known in network theory, explains Bonomo. Seeing this effect in the brain’s response to music tells us that, for some, forming new neuronal connections—something the brain needs to do to compensate for an injury, for example—may require a bigger auditory stimulus. That could have implications for music therapy, where clinicians select music to foster neuronal connections and help the brain heal. Typically, therapists select popular melodies, such as the classical music of Bach or Beethoven, to stimulate a recovery. But the new study suggests that those pieces might not be the right ones to play for everyone, says Bonomo. Instead, unfamiliar music might be the best bet. Bonomo and her colleagues are currently testing this hypothesis in a study of people with mild cognitive impairment.
Although Bonomo’s work went unpresented at the March Meeting, she did share it on Twitter. Inspired by fellow physicist Douglas Holmes of Boston University, she condensed her planned talk into ten slides that she tweeted out under the hashtag #APS10slides10tweets. She hopes that the tweets will scroll across the screens of others studying how music impacts the brain. While she doesn’t know yet if that has happened, she said that sending the tweets “was a cool way to publicly share a snapshot of my research.”
Our Research Updates in Archways give a snapshot of the Rice ARCHES Initiative’s current work, research progress, and future directions.
Art & Science at the ARO Conference
This month, Melia Bonomo from the Department of Physics & Astronomy tells us about some unique art exhibits at the Association for Research in Otolaryngology conference.
Recently, I had the opportunity to attend the Association for Research in Otolaryngology (ARO)’s 2020 midwinter meeting in San Jose, California with the Raphael Lab. It was a really great opportunity to learn about current research in auditory neuroscience, especially for work relevant to Project CHROMA that is looking at how the ear and brain perceive and process music. An important aspect of doing scientific research is interacting with other scientists to share your results, discuss progress, learn about other work going on in your field, spark new ideas and research directions, and initiate new collaborations — communication really is key to scientific advancements.
In addition to research presentations and posters, there were several neat exhibits at ARO that combined the arts and sciences!
(1) Outside the San Jose McEnery Convention Center, there was a large-scale interactive sculpture (pictured above) called Idea Tree by artist Soo-in Yang, fabricated and installed by Demiurge, and engineered by ARUP. Demiurge give a great description of the connection between art and technology: “The sculpture accepts audio inputs – speech, song, ambient noise – and by interacting with and learning from participants using advanced AI and speech recognition software, these sounds are used to create a dynamic audio composition. Idea Tree is the embodiment of the idea that a convention center is a place where people gather to share ideas and concepts, forming the seeds for these ideas to grow and evolve.”
(2) Inside the Convention Center’s prefunction area, there was a multisensory art exhibit called “Your Eyes On My Ears,” in which visitors listened to accompanying audio while contemplating portraits of individuals wearing hearing aids or cochlear implants. This exhibit was put together by the Droit Pluriel and Foundation Pour l’Audition to provide a unique perspective on hearing loss.
“Your Eyes on My Ears” multisensory exhibit at the ARO conference in San Jose.
(3) One night of the conference there was a public outreach event at the San Jose Montgomery Theater, “Musae on the Brain: Women in Voice and Science,” which featured a performance by a local women’s vocal ensemble Musae followed by presentations by Sarah Schneider, a speech-language pathologist from UCSF who specializes in understanding and caring for the professional voice, and Dana Boebinger, an auditory neuroscientist from Harvard who studies how humans perceive complex sounds. There was a q&a period afterwards for discussion on how music arises from a combination of human voices, ears, and brains.
Also at ARO, I met Dr. Charles Limb and Dr. Karen Barrett of the The Sound and Music Perception Lab (University of California, San Francisco) who have a National Endowment for the Arts-funded Research Lab like us! Limb and Barrett are studying the cognitive and social processes of arts-based creativity, and how these processes affect learning-related outcomes. Check out their website for more information about their work: https://ohns.ucsf.edu/limb-lab.
Overall, the conference and the associated art exhibits made for a great experience — a big thank you to the Raphael group for supporting me to attend!
Posted in Blog Posts | Comments Off on Research Update: January 2020
Our “Tools of the Trade” series in Archways highlights the research technology and methodologies used by the Rice ARCHES Initiative.
Modularity of the Brain
This month Fengdan Ye from the Department of Physics & Astronomy discusses an analysis method being used to study brain activity in Project CHROMA.
In recent years of neuroscience research, it has become more and more popular to view the whole human brain as a functional network. The structure of the human brain network has been studied in relation to cognitive performance, as well as disease progression. Modularity is one of the many ways to quantify the structure of a human brain network, and it’s a concept I have been working with throughout my PhD.
What is modularity? To understand that, we first need a clear picture of what a whole-brain network looks like. A network consists of nodes and links. In our case, the nodes are different brain regions. These regions are usually defined from existing divisions of the human brain, which can be based on either anatomical or functional features of the brain. For example, Brodmann areas are brain regions defined based on the microscopic cellular composition of the brain. The links between these regions can be defined in many different ways. One popular way is to derive the links from functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data. Specifically, the Blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) imaging method in fMRI gives information on the level of activity of any brain regions at any given time. A link exists between two brain regions, if they show synchronized activity across a period of time. A link is absent if the activity of two brain regions is not coordinated.
Modularity quantifies how modular the brain network is. The higher the modularity, the more modular the network is. For example, let’s assume we have six brain regions A through F. If brain regions A, B, and C are all linked to each other, and D, E and F are all linked to each other, but there is no link between the first group (ABC) and the second group (DEF), then the network is very modular. Under the context of BOLD imaging, this means the brain has two distinct functional modules: one consists of ABC and the other DEF. The regions within each module always activate together, but regions across modules do not communicate functionally. On the other hand, if there are links between all six regions, then the network is less modular because it is harder to define which regions work more closely with each other. Below is another example of low- and high-modularity networks:
Image: Comparison of networks that have the same number of nodes (circles) and links (connecting lines) but different modularity (M) because of the network organizations.
In research, people not only look at the modularity value of a brain network, but also the compositions of the identified modules. This method has shed light on human cognitive and behavioral function, as well as prognosis and progression of diseases, such as stroke and Alzheimer’s disease.
For more in-depth reading:
O Sporns and RF Betzel (2016), Modular Brain Networks. Annu Rev Psychol, 67:614-640.
G Chen, HY Zhang, C Xie, G Chen, ZJ Zhang, GJ Teng, and SJ Li (2013), Modular reorganization of brain resting state networks and its independent validation in Alzheimer’s disease patients. Front Hum Neurosci, 7:456.
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Our “Tools of the Trade” series in Archways highlights the research technology and methodologies used by the Rice ARCHES Initiative.
Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
This month, Melia Bonomo from the Department of Physics & Astronomy introduces us to neuroimaging in Project CHROMA.
In Project CHROMA, we’re interested in understanding how a music intervention can affect cognition. To study this, we need to be able to image the brain and quantify changes that occur as a result of participating in the creative arts.
There are numerous potential neuroimaging methods — the decision about which one to use depends on the required length and time scales of the application (see image below from Sejnowski et al., 2014). Magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) is a non-invasive method that has been widely used to study patients with mild cognitive impairment, in order to both characterize brain changes and predict clinical outcomes.
Image: Comparison of neuroimaging methods from T Sejnowski, P Churchland, and J Movshon (2014), Putting big data to good use in neuroscience. Nat Neurosci 17, 1440–1441 doi:10.1038/nn.3839
For our project, we are utilizing functional MRI (fMRI) to measure changes in blood-oxygen levels across the brain, which is a proxy for functional brain activity. It is important to note that neurovascular coupling (the relationship between local neural activity and changes in blood flow) is an ongoing area of research — we recommend this post from Nature Education that explores the signal that fMRI is measuring in more detail.
During Project CHROMA, neuroimaging is carried out at the Houston Methodist Translational Imaging Center on a Philips Ingenia 3T scanner. There are three parts to the imaging: (1) a high-resolution structural MRI scan for anatomical reference, (2) an fMRI scan while the participants are completing a cognitive task, and (3) an fMRI scan while participants are resting awake. We will then compare each subject’s functional brain activity data obtained from fMRI before and after the music intervention.
Check back in the coming weeks to learn more about the in-scanner task, why we’re interested in resting state imaging, and how we analyze the data!
For more in-depth reading:
ML Ries, CM Carlsson, HA Rowley, MA Sager, CE Gleason, S Asthana, and SC Johnson (2008), Magnetic resonance imaging characterization of brain structure and function in mild cognitive impairment: a review. Journal of the American Geriatrics Society, 56(5): 920-934.
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