Cobbers on the Brain

Neurochemistry 475 has given me new skills, opportunities, and experiences, while contributing to my knowledge on a vast range of topics including: Anxiety, Mental Illness, Addiction, Concussion, Alzheimer’s Disease, Autism, Obesity, Endocannabinoids, and Music in the Brain. I will now reflect on the benefits of the Neurochemistry 475 experience. 

Benefits of the Experience

Neurochemistry 475 has allowed me to apply the skills and knowledge I have developed at Concordia. This is because I had learned about neuroanatomy, pathways, neurochemicals, signal transductions, as well as other components of the central nervous system in previous courses. But neurochemistry put all the puzzle pieces together to create a big picture. Neurochemistry also challenged previous information I had obtained over my college career and forced me to think critically about different topics. Not only did this course force me to think critically, I also had to practice reading, summarizing, and understanding literature on my own, since this course is largely discussion based. Having a deep understanding of the literature is extremely important in order to communicate effectively to peers and the public. The skill of communication is key to gaining an understanding of a wide range of information and having sophisticated conversations to create a bigger picture, as well as inform the public about a wide range of issues. The students would have discussions every class period in different formats and then create individual blog posts for the public to read.  When communicating with the public we are becoming responsibly engaged in the world (BREW), which will hopefully lead to the spread of knowledge and ideas to create a positive outcome.

Neurochemistry 475 is offered at Concordia College at Moorhead, which is a liberal arts institution. This means that they focus on instilling a love for learning, developing new foundational and intellectual capacities, understanding different perspectives and their connections, create a sense of overall self-understanding, and encourages people to become responsibly engaged in the world. These focuses can be shown through neurochemistry 475 because learning is encouraged not only in the classroom, but students are asked to practice skills that will help with learning after the college experience. This course emphasized the importance of understanding different disabilities so we as researchers might be able to help develop new therapeutics, be empathetic to others situations, and understand why people may behave in a certain manner. Also, as previously mentioned, during this course the students wrote blog posts to interact with and educate the community. But this course also offered a PEAK experience where students were further able to become responsibly engaged with the community through a community action project. For example, my community action group gathered data throughout the community about mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic, summarized the data, and sent out pamphlets to multiple facilities, so they could make adjustments that would benefit their population they work with.

Conclusion

Overall, this course has given me new opportunities and experiences, which strengthened my communication and critical thinking skills. Neurochemistry 475 has also enlightened me about neurochemicals and signal transduction that occurs in the central nervous system. As well as educate me about what happens when the mechanisms are disrupted in neurological and neuropsychiatric diseases. The course experience as a whole has helped me become responsibly engaged in the world, while becoming a more knowledgeable and well rounded individual, which will come in handy in any career path I might choose. 

Most people listen to music often. There are many types of music, for example it can be songs or noises, such as breathing. Most people know that music can provide feelings of intense pleasure or euphoria and reveal memories. Yet, it isn’t addictive like drugs. Nevertheless, music may be involved in the brain’s natural reward system. Research has been done to try to reveal what is going on in the brain when one listens and/or conducts music. Results have shown promising evidence that music can be beneficial to people, including premature babies.

In The Brain

First, it is important to understand what is going on in the brain. When listening to music the brain releases dopamine in places such as the VTA and NAc just like addictive drugs do. This dopamine being released can relieve stress and anxiety, as well as reduce pain. Music also improves social interactions. It provides a setting for people to get together and interact with one another, whether they are making or listening to the music. Not only does it improve one’s social life, but music reduces stress and anxiety by releasing oxytocin and vasopressin (neurochemicals that maintain positive feelings and reduce stress levels) creating an enhanced mood. Contentedness and enhanced mood creates a form of homeostasis, which is related to a decrease in inflammation, improved immune function, and overall leads to a healthier life.

Music leads to a healthier life because it decreases inflammation, stress and anxiety, and improves immune function. But it also modulates brainstem-mediated measures including: heart-rate, pulse, blood pressure, body temperature, skin conductance, and muscle tension. The effects are largely controlled by tempo and frequency. Lastly, music alone can also be used as a great distraction from physical and emotional feelings, as well as create an outlet for people to release their emotions.

Music Therapy in the NICU

There are two types of music therapy used with premature babies in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU): Recorded Music and Live Music. This music includes breathing sounds, heartbeat sounds, and lullaby’s. Research has shown music therapy has many benefits for premature babies including improved: sensory skills, communication skills, cognitive abilities, and overall health.

Sensory skills improve because, parents are holding their baby while listening to music/singing which provides time for skin-to-skin contact. During this process, the baby is building stimulation tolerance to noise. This is important because it allows for de-stress by blocking out noise and alarms from NUCI equipment. Second, communication skills form when parents are able to bond with their baby though holding them and soothing them while the music is playing. When music intervention includes parents, it helps build a physical attachment between the baby and parent, resulting in positive involvement.

Next, music therapy has been shown to improve cognitive abilities for babies later in life by increasing their attention span and allowing for self-regulation of emotions and behaviors. Lastly, premature babies overall health has been shown to improve due to music therapy because music therapy may improve feeding behavior, normalize heart-rate, normalize breathing and sleeping patterns, as well as decrease stress and pain levels.

Overall, more research needs to be done, because there is little research that has been conducted on music and the brain. Although, the little research we do have shows many benefits to music therapy. Music therapy should be conducted by a trained professional to prevent the baby from becoming overstimulated. If done correctly, due to all the benefits, babies are often able to be discharged from the hospital earlier than babies who did not receive the music therapy.

After spending the past fifteen weeks reading and discussing articles, creating a community outreach project, learning more about the brain, and deepening relationships with my friends, I find that I’m really sad for it to be over. So, if you’re a Concordia Student on the fence about taking this course, here are my top seven reasons why you should take this class.

1. Read & discuss cutting-edge academic articles. For students pursuing a career in science, the ability to read and understand scientific papers is critical. In Neurochemistry, you hone this ability every week by reading a recent, comprehensive review paper on a given subject. Through this, my ability to read, understand, and critique scientific papers grew so much. As a future researcher, this skill will be one I’ll use constantly throughout my career.
2. Course organization. Another key piece of what makes Neurochemistry unique is how the course is designed. Each unit is one week in length, with Monday holding a discussion of that week’s article where you have the chance to ask questions and seek clarification, Wednesday for ‘speed dating’ where you have 2 minutes to explain a topic people had questions about on Monday to the class, and Friday where you have a student-led discussion of topics relating to the paper. This layout removed the pressure of feeling like you had to completely understand the article for class on Monday and helped me deeply engage with the topic at hand.
3. No lab. While I love being in a lab and doing experiments, I found that I really enjoyed not having an accompanying lab for this class. This feature of the course allowed me to focus on understanding a broad range of topics and dive deeply into each topic each week. Additionally, since labs are often 4-8 hours per week, not having an accompanying lab time made ironing out my schedule for this semester much easier.
4. Deepen relationships with your cohort. People are so important. I cannot express how thankful I am for the people in my neuroscience cohort. Due to the discussion-based nature of the class, I got to know students in my major that I wasn’t close with before. Not only are the students in this class some of the most highly motivated individuals I’ve had the privilege to know. They’re also some of the kindest people as well. I’m excited to carry these professional and personal relationships into my future career.
5. Learn from the experiences of others. Since neuroscience is an intensely interdisciplinary major, students often also double major or minor in other disciplines like biology, chemistry, psychology, religion, and environmental studies. Due to my heavy biology & chemistry coursework, I hadn’t had the chance to develop strong relationships with students with more experience in psychology, environmental studies, and social work, until now. Their contributions helped broaden my perspectives and added important context to our class discussions.
6. PEAK-ing during Neurochemistry. While I think it likely that no adult would like to think of themselves as ‘peaking’ during college, yet I proudly did. At Concordia, PEAKs, or Pivotal Experiences in Applied Knowledge, are an opportunity to take the knowledge gained in the classroom and apply it to the broader world around us. In Neurochemistry, PEAK students are partnered with students in the Social Work department to create a community action project applying neurochemistry to benefit the community around us. My PEAK group examined the literature surrounding adverse childhood events, trauma-informed educational practices, and the neurobiology of PTSD and decided to create a video for education majors on understanding and identifying PTSD in children. Due to COVID, we recorded the video using Zoom and sent the video to the education club on campus, creating a resource that can be accessed by future students on demand.
7. Finally, this class is really, really fun. Most of the time, it didn’t even feel like a class, but more of a journal club or book club with my friends. After all, what could be more fun than talking and learning about science with your friends?

Conclusion

So, are you convinced that you should take Neurochemistry? Well, even if you weren’t convinced by this brief blog, it’s a required course for the Neuroscience major and an elective for the Chemistry major so it’s likely that taking it might even be required for you. Additionally, it’s a great way to get one of your two required PEAK requirements for graduation! If that’s the case, hopefully, this blog piques your interest.

The brief second of stillness immediately before the first downbeat is my favorite part of an orchestra concert, both as a cellist and as an audience member. So much goes into creating this single moment, even discounting the months of preparation of the orchestra and years of training of each member. The anticipation that hangs in the hall thick enough to cut, every musician breathing together, the eyes of every player on the conductor, the feeling of resistance as my bow grips the strings of my cello, and the silence of the audience’s anticipation for great music create a beautiful, liminal transitory tension that is, quite frankly, nothing short of addicting, even if it only lasts for a moment. I’ve played cello for the past ten years and I have yet to tire of that feeling. Yet, as interesting as that moment is, what goes on in the brain once the music starts is even more complex.

What listening to music does to the brain

Music is really cool. I freely admit that, as a music lover and musician, I’m biased and unable to objectively assess my own claim, but I think that my assertion is true and that I can convince you of that.

Did you know that music can reduce pain by activating the dopaminergic reward pathway (figure 1)? In fact, this reward pathway involves endogenous opiate signaling, which helps explain the pleasurable feeling you get from listening to your favorite Taylor Swift album on repeat and helps explain why we return to our musical favorites. While I doubt that this can fully explain why I’ve listened to the same Dear Evan Hansen song 59 times this year or why I spent over 27 hours listening to Vance Joy in 2019, I do think it’s clear that dopaminergic reward pathway signaling plays a role in bringing us back to our favorites.

Figure 1. Graphic showing that music causes increased dopamine release in the brain, leading to decreased pain sensation. (Strickland, Artstract #3).

Did you also know that music can help reduce stress and even help reduce the amount of anesthetic needed in surgery? This is probably the most interesting effect of listening to music that I’ve learned about to date. This impact is mediated by reducing stress hormones released along the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis. Research shows that listening to relaxing music helped lower cortisol levels more rapidly after exposure to stress and prevented stress-induced increases in blood pressure and heart rate.

Importantly, the experiences of listening to music and performing music are incredibly different in terms of their impacts on the brain. While listening to music has the effects discussed earlier, making that music is even more involved. As Barrett, Ashley, Strait & Kraus describe in their 2013 article Art and Science: How Musical Training Shapes the Brain, “To be a musician is to be a consummate multi-tasker. Music performance requires facility in sensory and cognitive domains, combining skills in auditory perception, kinesthetic control, visual perception, pattern recognition, and memory.”

So that begs the question: How does musical training change your brain?

Our brains are highly plastic. Not literally. What I mean by that is that our brains constantly change in response to our environment and choices and musical training, similar to how exercise builds muscle mass and endurance, creates a few very interesting functional and anatomical changes. Specifically, instrumental musicians have more gray matter in the somatosensory, premotor, superior parietal, and inferior temporal areas of the cortex that correlate with their level of skill. Additionally, musicians show increased corpus callosum volume. The corpus callosum functions as the bridge between the left and right hemispheres of the brain. This suggests that musicians may have increased connectivity between the left and right hemispheres. Interestingly these anatomical differences facilitate more advantages than mere musicality. Research has also demonstrated that musicians’ more efficient audio-motor learning ability enables them to more accurately pronounce foreign languages and improves their spatial tactile acuity.

So, what does this all mean?

First, taken together, these data indicate that music is incredibly powerful.

Second, because music can be learned and taught, it’s clear that the benefits of being a musician can be realized by all if people are given the opportunity to learn. This, of course, opens the much broader discussion of equity and access to music – especially at early ages in public education. I simply would not be the musician and human I am today without my music instructors.