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In Brief
By Bjorn Carey
Art By Linda Cicero
A few years ago on a whim, neurologist Josef Parvizi, MD, PhD, and composer Chris Chafe, DMA, began investigating whether it would be possible to turn the electrical activity recorded from an epilepsy patient’s brain into music. Now, the two Stanford faculty members believe their work could lead to the development of a powerful clinical tool.
This tool, which they have called a “brain stethoscope,” records the brain’s electrical activity through a band of electrodes on the patient’s scalp, then converts the signals to music by assigning a “voice” to each electrode. As the brain fires, the electrodes produce different notes, creating a musical representation of the brain activity. In patients with a seizure disorder, the device can be used literally as a stethoscope to check if the brain is having seizure activity. (This is useful because sometimes seizures have no obvious symptoms.)
Before the seizure begins, the peeps and pops from each electrode almost fall into a clear rhythm. In the moments leading up to the seizure event, though, the notes become progressively frequent and disorganized. Then, after the complete chaos during the full seizure, the music calms as the neurons trail off, with single electrodes peeping every so often, like the final few kernels popping in a bag of popcorn. After such furious activity, the brain sounds fatigued. The work by Parvizi, an associate professor of neurology, and Chafe, a professor of music, was supported by a seed grant from Stanford’s Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initiatives Program.
Now the pair are in the final stages of developing a noninvasive, electrode-laden headset that anyone could put on. They hope to take this brain stethoscope setup into clinical trials to test how effectively physicians and epilepsy patients can interpret the precursor sounds to a seizure.
Parvizi and Chafe also have hopes for the device as a neurofeedback tool for everyone. They think people managing anxiety or chronic pain might find comfort in listening to how their coping mechanisms can bring relative peace to their brain activity.
“We’ve really just stuck our finger in there,” Chafe says. “We know that the music is fascinating and that we can hear important dynamics, but there are still wonderful revelations to be made.”
Hear the sound of a seizure at http://stan.md/1k3gnF2
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