Article: Why Music Makes our Brain Sing

Published June 7, 2013 in the NY Times JThe New York Times
By ROBERT J. ZATORRE and VALORIE N. SALIMPOOR

MUSIC is not tangible. You can’t eat it, drink it or mate with it. It doesn’t protect against the rain, wind or cold. It doesn’t vanquish predators or mend broken bones. And yet humans have always prized music — or well beyond prized, loved it.

In the modern age we spend great sums of money to attend concerts, download music files, play instruments and listen to our favorite artists whether we’re in a subway or salon. But even in Paleolithic times, people invested significant time and effort to create music, as the discovery of flutes carved from animal bones would suggest.

So why does this thingless “thing” — at its core, a mere sequence of sounds — hold such potentially enormous intrinsic value?

The quick and easy explanation is that music brings a unique pleasure to humans. Of course, that still leaves the question of why. But for that, neuroscience is starting to provide some answers.

More than a decade ago, our research team used brain imaging to show that music that people described as highly emotional engaged the reward system deep in their brains — activating subcortical nuclei known to be important in reward, motivation and emotion. Subsequently we found that listening to what might be called “peak emotional moments” in music — that moment when you feel a “chill” of pleasure to a musical passage — causes the release of the neurotransmitter dopamine, an essential signaling molecule in the brain.

When pleasurable music is heard, dopamine is released in the striatum — an ancient part of the brain found in other vertebrates as well — which is known to respond to naturally rewarding stimuli like food and sex and which is artificially targeted by drugs like cocaine and amphetamine.

The idea that reward is partly related to anticipation (or the prediction of a desired outcome) has a long history in neuroscience. Making good predictions about the outcome of one’s actions would seem to be essential in the context of survival, after all. And dopamine neurons, both in humans and other animals, play a role in recording which of our predictions turn out to be correct. Read full article here.

Field Trip to Copley Symphony Hall

With the support of the San Diego Symphony and Capita Foundation, 200 students and families from Maryland Avenue Elementary School in La Mesa were given tickets and transportation to the world famous Romero Royal Family of Guitars along with the Orchestra on May 16, 2013.

Article: Imaginary Prizes Take Aim at Real Problems

By J. PEDER ZANE
Published: November 8, 2012 New York Times

IMAGINE putting up a prize of $20 million to inspire others to solve a particular problem. What would your challenge be?

Some of the world’s leading companies, including Google, Qualcomm and Nokia, have sponsored big-money contests challenging competitors around the world to design a host of wonders, including robots that can explore the moon, superefficient electric vehiclesand more accurate methods for sequencing the human genome. The online movie streaming company Netflix awarded $1 million to a winning team of outsiders that helped it develop better ways to predict which films its customers would like.

Carol Padden, 2010 Fellow

CHALLENGE Use crowdsourcing to help the hearing-impaired
The paradox of America’s economy is that while it is hard for many people to find one paying job, almost everybody has several they do free. We are bank tellers when we use the A.T.M., airline employees when we check ourselves in for flights and cashiers when we scan our items at the supermarket.

And we work on the cutting edge of technology, helping Google and Apple refine their voice recognition software each time we ask our phones to name the capital of Burkina Faso (it’s Ouagadougou) and follow up by asking, “How the heck do you pronounce that?”

Carol Padden, who is deaf and teaches communication at the University of California, San Diego, said she wanted to enlist volunteers to crowdsource a labor-intensive service: captioning video for the deaf and hard of hearing. Her $20 million prize would reward the person or team who devised an effective method to tap the power of the Internet to caption videos. She said this could involve “breaking down a video segment into very short one-minute clips which are sent out in the universe to be captioned by anyone. The short clips would be recombined to produce a captioned version of the original segment.”

Like many efforts initially aimed at helping those with disabilities, Ms. Padden noted that the project would almost certainly have broader benefits. Parents pushing strollers, she noted, are grateful for the curb cuts created for people in wheelchairs, just as patrons watching “Monday Night Football” in noisy bars count on closed captions to see what the announcers are saying.

Article: Road Traffic Noise and Diabetes: Long-Term Exposure May Increase Disease Risk

Noise from honking cars and police sirens can disrupt sleep, but it also may increase the chance of developing diabetes, according to a large study from Denmark.

The researchers compared noise levels from road traffic to the incidence of diabetes in 57,000 people. As the noise levels increased so did the risk for developing the disease. The risk increased by 8 - 11 percent for every 10-decibel (dB) increase in road noise. A decibel is a measure of loudness and intensity of sound.

The results suggest that living near heavily traveled roads may increase the risk of developing diabetes. To make sure they were measuring effects from noise, the researchers adjusted for several other variables associated with diabetes, including body mass index, education, lifestyle characteristics and nitrogen oxides, which are formed from vehicle exhaust and are known to increase the risk of the disease.

The results have important implications for urban planning. As major cities attempt to increase urban density, more people may live closer to heavier traffic and noisier roads. Further, people with low incomes typically live closer to major roads and highways, putting them at greater risk.

More here.

UPDATE FROM 2011 CAPITA FOUNDATION AUDITORY RESEARCH GRANT RECIPIENT

Dr. Carol Lee De Filippo
Professor at National Technical
Institute for the Deaf, Rochester, NY

Improving Speech Perception in Prelingually Deaf Adult Listeners: Exploring a Novel Training Concept

Audiologists at the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) located at Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT), have designed a novel audiovisual speech training strategy for adults born deaf (prelingually deaf adults) who obtained cochlear implants (CI) beyond the critical period for auditory stimulation. The rehabilitative program examines the hypothesis that fading dominant visual speech cues will trigger neuroplasticity by fostering useful sensory integration of the visual and acoustic components of spoken language. Initial findings have implications for the efficacy of the strategy for use with prelingually deaf adults who have not benefitted from traditional auditory training. 

Current CIs can produce dramatic speech perception benefits by restoring hearing and reorganizing audiovisual pathways developed in adults who have lost all or most of their hearing later in life and capitalizing on developmental plasticity in early implanted children. In contrast, prelingually deaf adult CI recipients typically have limited speech recognition skills and continue to be visually dominant, both behaviorally and neurologically.

 “Life-long dependence on lipreading prior to implant may be one reason for the continued use of visual cortex for processing of speech, even post-implant. Thus, typical auditory training (listening only) is often frustrating, resulting in slow progress and highly varied outcomes, although exceptional cases of open-set speech recognition suggest that learning-dependent plasticity is possible”, says Dr. Carol DeFilippo, NTID/RIT professor, PI for the study.

For the study, Dr. De Filippo and colleague Dr. Catherine Clark recruited prelingually deaf adults who perceived inadequate benefit from their CIs and were interested in a new rehabilitative strategy. One older adult and 7 young adults participated. Subjects completed 4-9 blocks of training (3240 -7920 trials) over 3 weeks.  On each trial, they viewed a head-only audiovisual clip of one of 6 talkers speaking a vowel-consonant-vowel syllable (b, d, or g; with ah, ee, or oo) in one of 5 conditions, including the original (no added effects) and 4 edited clips that progressively obscured lipreading cues. Training used a three-alternative forced-choice task (“B”, “D”, or “G”) with feedback. As expected, performance decreased in degraded conditions, indicating that the training materials were effective in requiring attention to auditory cues.  As training increased, all subjects obtained better scores by the last block in the most degraded condition (auditory-only) for at least 2 of the 3 consonants. As a group, they also demonstrated a greater listening advantage on one or all of the consonants, ranging up to a 31% improvement in the clear audiovisual condition by the end of the study. These levels of gain are typically unheard of for prelingually deaf adult listeners, particularly in a short period of time (3 weeks). The ultimate goal of this work is to develop a unique clinical intervention that can evoke beneficial change in prelingually-deaf adult CI users.

Robert Capita on USA Network

Be sure to check out all the sailing excitement and drama with Capita Foundation's President at the helm in "Americas Cup Sailor," the episode that aired this spring on USA Network's new TV series "THE MOMENT." 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7LlMFqlweQg

Enjoy.

Robert E. Capita, President/CEO
Capita Foundation

TED Talk: The way we think about charity is dead wrong

Activist and fundraiser Dan Pallotta calls out the double standard that drives our broken relationship to charities. Too many nonprofits, he says, are rewarded for how little they spend -- not for what they get done. Instead of equating frugality with morality, he asks us to start rewarding charities for their big goals and big accomplishments (even if that comes with big expenses). In this bold talk, he says: Let's change the way we think about changing the world.

Everything the donating public has been taught about giving is dysfunctional, says AIDS Ride founder Dan Pallotta. He aims to transform the way society thinks about charity and giving and change.