Sting's brain scans provide window to his musical mind

Scientists have studied the brain scans of English singer and songwriter Sting in an unusual research that provides a window into the mind of the masterful musician and recipient of 16 Grammy Awards.
The study represents an approach that could offer insights into how gifted individuals find connections between seemingly disparate thoughts or sounds, in fields ranging from arts to politics or science.
Sixty four-year-old Gordon Matthew Thomas Sumner, known professionally by his stage name Sting, is the former lead singer of musical band The Police. He has won 16 Grammy Awards, including one in 1982 for the hit single "Don't Stand So Close To Me."

"These state-of the-art techniques really allowed us to make maps of how Sting's brain organises music," said lead author Daniel Levitin from McGill University in Canada.
"That's important because at the heart of great musicianship is the ability to manipulate in one's mind rich representations of the desired soundscape," Levitin said.
The research stemmed from a serendipitous encounter several years ago, researchers said.

Sting had read Levitin's book "This Is Your Brain on Music". His representatives contacted Levitin and asked if he might take a tour of the lab at McGill. Levitin agreed and asked if Sting also wanted to have his brain scanned.

Both functional and structural scans were conducted at the McGill's Montreal Neurological Institute.
Levitin then teamed up with Scott Grafton, from the University of California at Santa Barbara, to use two novel techniques to analyse the scans.
The techniques, known as multivoxel pattern analysis and representational dissimilarity analysis, showed which songs Sting found similar to one another and which ones are dissimilar - based on activations of brain regions.
"At the heart of these methods is the ability to test if patterns of brain activity are more alike for two similar styles of music compared to different styles," said Grafton.

"This approach has never before been considered in brain imaging experiments of music," he said.
"Sting's brain scan pointed us to several connections between pieces of music that I know well but had never seen as related before," Levitin said.
Astor Piazolla's evocative tango composition "Libertango" and the 1960s Beatles hit "Girl" proved to be two of the most similar. Both are in minor keys and include similar melodic motifs, researchers said.
Another such example was Sting's "Moon over Bourbon Street" and Booker T and the MG's "Green Onions," both of which are in the key of F minor, have the same tempo (132 beats per minute) and a swing rhythm, they said.

The methods used in the research can be used to study how athletes organise their thoughts about body movements; how writers organise their thoughts about characters; how painters think about colour, form and space, Levitin said.
The research was published in the journal Neurocase.