Thank you

Thank you for following my blog posts throughout these 11 weeks!

My final presentation will be on Saturday, May 6th, at 12 pm in the BASIS Phoenix multi-purpose room. Anyone interested is welcome! The pdf version of my keynote presentation is below.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bz0vd0nsJE_CR19XeHYtdlBLcDA/view?usp=sharing

A Music Therapy Observation

There is another man in music therapy who really seems to benefit from it. We'll call him Ralph. Ralph possibly suffers from Parkinson's, or some other movement disorder. What exactly it is we are not privileged to know, however we can see very clearly he has much difficulty coordinating his movements and they are often delayed, reluctant, and slow.

Yesterday during music therapy the therapist was asking members of the group to tap a personal tone bar (essentially one component of a xylophone that is handheld) with a stick.

Ralph really struggled with this. He would hold the the bar up and then move his arm to hit it with the stick, but he could not make contact. It seemed the stick was almost repelled from the bar as if by magnets. It would waver back and forth, always close to the bar, but never actually touching it, and one could see Ralph was truly trying very hard to make contact. But he couldn't. After ten or so seconds of struggle and concentration, he would slouch forward with a frown, giving up. Then the music therapist gave him a beat, snapping her fingers and conducting his movements. "One two three FOUR, one two three FOUR." And on four he would move the stick to meet the tone bar, and from it would sound a bright C. It truly was amazing to see how music therapy, literally from one moment to the next, could make such a difference in the abilities of someone with a limiting neurological condition.

Why Should You Care?

Alzheimer's disease is extremely prevalent in the population today, especially the United States. Currently, 5.5 million people are formally diagnosed with the disease, one in nine people aged 65 or over. Right now that population over 65 amounts to about 40 million Americans. With the first members of the baby boom turning 70 last year, by 2050, this population will be more like 90 million.

It is expensive to care for all these people. It costs the United States roughly $200 billion annually, and an expected $1.1 trillion by 2050. It is in our best interest to find a solution for this disease that will only become more prevalent every year; if you do the math, it's a new case every 69 seconds.

As shown below, diseases like cancer, heart disease, and HIV have been causing less deaths in the population since 2000. All of them have decreased in the amounts of deaths caused... except for Alzheimer's disease, which has caused 71% more. Further funds and research is needed to find a solution to this problem.

Wrapping Up

So unfortunately with two weeks left and due to some other complications, I will not be able to complete that psychology experiment. Luckily, it is and experiment that has been done many times before, so for those who are curious about the outcome, here's a summary.

It's still not clear. While music, especially classical, is known to decrease heart and respiratory rates and make you calm and focused, no credible studies have been able to show that certain types of music affect memory recall-- short or long term. So while it makes sense that certain forms of music that promote focus and attention would improve memory, it has not been proven scientifically. Another hypothesis for why music should help memory is that because music we find pleasurable releases dopamine, the "feel-good" chemical in the brain, learning while listening to music becomes a reward response, promoting memorization and learning. It is even hypothesized that listening to music we associate with positive emotions also encourages learning by enhancing memories.

There is one hotly debated subject called "the Mozart Effect." It is a phenomenon where a person's spatial-temporal reasoning is enhanced for a short time (10-15 min) after listening to Mozart's music. Spatial-temporal reasoning exercises include navigating a maze on paper, and paper cutting/folding, or aligning blocks to achieve a certain shape. While some scientists have "proved" this effect to be real, many attribute its apparent presence to chance or faulty experimental design. Again, the subject is disputed and very hard to prove.

All this debate over whether music actually affects memory and even intelligence does prove one thing though; music undeniably impacts us in significant ways. Maybe we can't always prove it, but we can feel it.

Final Preparations

I cannot believe we are heading into week ten! The final senior project presentations have been scheduled for Saturday, May 6. Mine is at 12:00 p.m. in the BASIS Phoenix gym, and I would love for anyone interested to attend.

I plan to conduct two more surveys this week: the one for classical music and the one for pop music. I hope everyone enjoys Eine Kleine Nachtmusik and 24K Magic.

In the lab I have been learning a different technique: the Western Blot. It is much trickier than the immuno. It's purpose is to visualize certain target proteins that have been separated by means of gel electrophoresis (separating particles based on their size and charge). To break it down simply (I hope), the first step is to perform the gel electrophoresis. In this step, the liquid samples-- in this case brain tissue samples-- are "loaded" into the wells using a pipette. They are often dyed a dark color so they can be seen. Then, using electricity, the different sized particle fragments separate out through the gel, where smaller fragments travel further.

Then the proteins that ran in the gel must be transferred to a membrane. To do this, you must prepare a stack as shown below and then run electricity through it.

Lastly, you do the antibody staining, much like an immuno, to visualize your target proteins. Here is what a final Western Blot might look like. This one used chemiluminescence and was visualized using fluorescence, where the protein of interest was tagged with a molecule that fluoresces under a certain light.

Thanks!

Some Bumps in the Road

Planning an experiment is hard...

As I explained previously, each participant is to play the memory game with or without music, and then report their score on the survey. I capped that score at 12,000, with the final highest score report option being ">12,000." I clearly failed to account for some of BASIS' most forgotten geniuses: the teachers. Thanks Mr. McCorkle for pointing out your score was well above 12,000. We get it. You're brilliant.

To account for this lack of information above 12,000, I have adjusted the rest of the surveys to extend to 18,000 (I really hope that's enough), which will allow me to collect better, more precise data, and ultimately calculate a more accurate measurement of how participants score on the following surveys. I unfortunately cannot re-do that first survey, however I do not think the lack of information at the high levels will ultimately affect the overview of the results, because the vast majority of participants scored below that initial cap, so the number of scores affected was very few. Even still, the following surveys are now better designed. Research and experience entail learning from your mistakes.

With the teacher responses, I have 81 total for the first survey! The next round will likely take place on Thursday.

First Survey

I conducted survey number one on Friday for the a.m. and p.m. AP Psychology classes. That's fifty responses!

I do not want to speak too soon about the results of the survey because I still need the responses from the teachers (hopefully on Monday) and I do not want to in any way impact the results for psychology students who may read this blog. That said, I can say that between both classes, 40% of the students are male, and 60% are female, 74% of the students are an age between 13 and 15, and 26% between 16 and 18.

The scores range across the board, but no, there is no score that is "good" or "bad." I was asked that question a lot, especially by the students of the p.m. class (they seem a bit more competitive). The a.m. class did great; they were very quiet throughout the process, and quick to submit their results. The p.m. class had more issues. The students were more noisy, and it took about twice as long for all of them to submit their surveys, about twenty minutes instead of the ten from the morning class. Because of this, I do have concerns that some of the students of the p.m. class may have cheated and played the game multiple times to improve their score despite having been asked not to and informed as to how this skews and invalidates data. Because my sample size will be fairly large, especially with the teachers, I am not worried that the results of a few students will impact the experiment overall.

I am excited to introduce the music... that should be interesting.