The sound of neurons firing
Looking through a microscope, doctoral candidate Simon(e) Sun takes a tiny glass pipette and gently attaches it to a neuron in a petri dish. She's taking recordings of synaptic activity, the electrochemical signals neurons use to communicate with each other. The data Sun gathers will be used to understand microprocesses in the brain.
It will also be turned into music.
Bridging science and art, Sun wrote a computer program that takes her data and converts it into song. And the ethereal MIDI sounds aren't just nice to listen to - they can actually teach us a lot about how the brain works.
Sun is studying something called homeostatic plasticity," which is how neurons regulate their activity. Her research has broad implications for the...