My attention was recently drawn to a link to the Science Codex, which begins:

It don’t mean a thing if the brain ain’t got that swing

Like Duke Ellington’s 1931 jazz standard, the human brain improvises while its rhythm section keeps up a steady beat. But when it comes to taking on intellectually challenging tasks, groups of neurons tune in to one another for a fraction of a second and harmonize, then go back to improvising, according to new research led by UC Berkeley.

These findings, reported today in the journal Nature Neuroscience, could pave the way for more targeted treatments for people with brain disorders marked by fast, slow or chaotic brain waves, also known as neural oscillations.

Tracking the changing rhythms of the healthy human brain at work advances our understanding of such disorders as Parkinson’s disease, schizophrenia and even autism, which are characterized in part by offbeat brain rhythms. In jazz lingo, for example, bands of neurons in certain mental illnesses may be malfunctioning because they’re tuning in to blue notes, or playing double time or half time.

I looked to the original paper: Oscillatory dynamics coordinating human frontal networks in support of goal maintenance, by Voytek et al, but did not find a single reference to jazz.  Nevertheless, this struck a chord with me.

When I was young, in 1960 or before, the music scene in Britain was briefly visited by a Calypso craze, which got hold of me and took root.  By and large, though, in me it went dormant until about a month ago, when a radio item brought to my knowledge RASPO, the Reading All Steel Percussion Orchestra.  Obtaining their CD, I not only found among the tracks some long-time favourites, but it also opened up the world of contemporary Caribbean music.  Perhaps my favourite track is Pump Me Up, composed by Edwin Yearwood.  And that was just the instrumental version: so like a ferret I hunted down the original.

Now I have always found it difficult to stay awake at conferences.  This is not down to boredom — something about the way my brain works causes it to white out when the information is coming thick and fast, so paradoxically it can make matters worse when the material is something I really want to take on board.  I have read that nicotine puts the brain on a war footing, but regarding smoking, I never have, don’t now and never will.  Maybe e-cigarettes were what I needed, but they have arrived on the scene far too late to be of any use to me.

But the lyrics of this song!  Boiled down to basics, one could regard them as a plaintive protest that he hasn’t taken MDMA, it is simply the music that keeps him going all night at the party.  Here is the focal point of the song:



though for me it is rather a case of “Start me whole brain a-pumpin”.  This gets me wondering; do brain rhythms and musical rhythms interact?  There is quite a lot of ongoing research in this field: for example Exploring how musical rhythm entrains brain activity with electroencephalogram frequency-tagging is a recent example published by the Royal Society.  But for now, let us enjoy the song with lyrics, performed by Edwin Yearwood and the Barbadian band Krosfyah (Crossfire).  Now try telling me that’s not good for the brain!