Music and the Brain

Stan Strickland and Aniruddh Patel

Monday, March 23, 2015, 7:00 - 8:00 pm

MIT, Bartos Theatre, List Visual Arts Center, 20 Ames St E15, Cambridge, MA 02139

Music has a unique ability to reach into our deepest self. Ever since Plato made this observation some 2,300 years ago we've been wondering about music's effect on us. Over the past decade scientists have increasingly turned their attention to the quest to understand music's course in the body, starting at the top-the brain.

After a snowy two month hiatus Catalyst was very excited to have musician and performer extraordinaire, Stan Strickland and renowned neuroscientist Ani Patel engage each other about the connections made when experiencing music, both as maker/performer and receiver/listener. They discussed their mutual interest in the facets of rhythm and healing and how those aspects are "played out" for each of them as performer and researcher, respectively. 

Singer, saxophonist, flutist, actor Stan Strickland has performed throughout the US, Europe, Scandinavia, the Caribbean, New Zealand and the former Soviet Union. In addition to numerous radio and television appearances, Stan has performed in many clubs and concert halls, including Jordan and Symphony Halls in Boston, Carnegie Recital Hall and Town Hall in New York, and at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. He has performed with jazz greats Yusef Lateef, Pharoah Sanders, Herbie Mann, Danilo Perez, Shirley Scott and Marlena Shaw. Love & Beauty, Stan's jazz vocal CD, featuring new arrangements of great jazz classics as well as original material, was released by Hawkline Records in 2005. 

Strickland has a MA from Lesley University in Expressive Arts Therapy where he is an adjunct professor. He also teaches at Berklee College of Music, Tufts University and Longy School of Music. He is Co-Executive Director of Express Yourself, a multidisciplinary team of professional artists, working in partnership with adolescents in public mental health residential facilities to produce multimedia performances that celebrate the restorative powers of serious art making.

 Aniruddh (Ani) Patel is an Associate Professor of Psychology at Tufts University. He received his BA from the University of Virginia (1987) and his AM (1990) and Ph.D. (1996) from Harvard University. He then joined The Neurosciences Institute in San Diego, CA, where he was a Senior Fellow from 2005-2012. He has served as President for the Society for Music Perception and Cognition and received the 2009 Music has Power Award from the Institute for Music and Neurologic Function in New York City.

 Dr. Patel's work focuses on music cognition: the mental processes involved in making, perceiving, and responding to music. Two areas of special interest are the relationship between music and language (the topic of his 2008 book, Music, Language, and the Brain, Oxford Univ. Press) and the processing of musical rhythm. A wide variety of methods are used in this research, including brain imaging, behavioral experiments, theoretical analyses, acoustic research, and comparative studies with nonhuman animals.