What is so special about musical sounds that even babies start wiggling when they hear them?

That's what Jessica Grahn, PhD, is working to understand.

As Brain Awareness Week marks its 30^th anniversary, three Western University researchers share their passion for neuroscience, how the work has changed, and what they hope to achieve.

Human interest in music is different from other animals, and Grahn is trying to understand what connections might exist in the human brain that make us interested in music—and make us feel compelled to move to it.

Grahn, direct of the Western Centre for Brain and Mind (CBM) and a professor in the Department of Psychology, notes that babies are born already knowing something about their auditory world, since they can hear for weeks even before they are born.

That interest in music and auditory knowledge has real-world applications that you might not expect.

"I hope to understand how we can use music effectively to help people. For example, people with movement disorders," Grahn explains. "Some individuals with Parkinson's disease seem to find that their movement is much easier and more fluid when they are moving to music, and I'd love to harness that for more people."

As with many other areas of neuroscience, interdisciplinary collaboration is critical to her work now more than ever.

"I'm glad to see the value of teams and mentorship and inclusive culture being much more recognized. We're getting new perspectives in neuroscience as a result, and it's made the field that much more interesting."

In addition to sparking new ideas, Ryan Stevenson, PhD, says collaboration is required given the levels of expertise needed to conduct a significant study, from methodology to analysis and technological advancements.

"In the last few years, we've been doing a lot with more computer science folks with different machine learning analysis," he says. "We also have collaborations with physiology and pharmacology...we also work a lot with MDs and the education department."

Stevenson, Fellow with the Dorothy Killam Trust and assistant professor in the Department of Psychology, CBM and the Western Institute for Neuroscience, is focused on sensory processing, often in neurodiverse populations, with a lot of work in Autism and ADHD (Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder).

"Every bit of information you get about the world has to come through your senses. So if you hear and see something differently than I do, you're going to remember it differently," he says. "If all of the information that you're getting from the external world is slightly different than everybody else's, all those systems are going to develop differently because you're living in a different world."

The goal is to understand how sensory processing is contributing to behaviours in children, like social communication difficulties or acting out in a saturated environment, and to help educators react in a way that works best for the child.

He notes that it's important to recognize from the neurodiversity side that, "the differences between brains within each one of these groups is so much bigger than the differences between the groups."

Understanding cognitive development also applies to sensory decline as we age, and Stevenson's team is using everything from questionnaires to neuroimaging to clarify the link from sensory recognition to cognition.

And it is developments in areas like imaging technology that have really changed the way researchers are able to view the brain, allowing them to see more subtle differences in real-world situations.

Those changes have had a significant impact on Emily Nichols', PhD, work as well.

A reseach scientist in the Faculty of Education, Nichols looks at very early life development, starting with in utero imaging of pregnant women.

"It's such cutting-edge technology. Fetal imaging is just getting started and not many people are doing it. It's really difficult and there aren't any tools to do it," she says. "A lot of the work has been on the ground, development the tools to do it, developing the protocols, working with the moms."

The MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) technology being used is completely safe for both the mother and baby, and gives a high-resolution view of a child's development at different stages of a pregnancy, and in the first months of a baby's life.

She hopes to use the measures of material distress to help health care teams make decisions about delivery times on an individual basis to improve outcomes for both mothers and babies.

In addition to working with perinatal caregivers, Nichols is collaborating with dentistry and diabetes clinics, as well as biomedical engineers and computational neuroscientists—who each contribute to different aspects of the research process.

"I feel like now the field of neuroscience has moved to a slightly more holistic view of the brain," Nichols says. "You're looking at how the brain interacts as a whole, and I think that's really a big difference, in the work I'm doing at least, you're looking at connections and how the brain functions and how it correlates with other areas."

All three agree that the best way for organizations and the public to support ongoing research is to volunteer to participate in studies where you can, take an interest in what's happening, and share information about the work being done. You can find details about each of their work at developingbrain.ca, sensorylab.ca, and pearlresearch.ca.

Grahn, Stevenson, and Nichols have all had previous funding support from Western BrainsCAN.